I consider myself to be a pretty verbal person. I like words and reading and writing. If I had to explain something I’d probably try to explain it in words as opposed to drawing a picture or making a video or doing an interpretive dance.
I have a voice in my head and it seems mostly to communicate using language. It’s more complicated than that but mostly when I’m consciously thinking to myself I seem to be thinking using English.
It’s profoundly fascinating to me that my subconscious mind gets its messages across through visual imagery. The whole point of dreams seems to be about thoughts being translated into a series of images. Like in a movie. Like the most elemental and private way that my thoughts can expressed is through images rather than words.
When I was in grad school (in writing) I worked with a Dr. Lee Odell on some projects about teaching students in writing classes how to communicate visually — like not just linear text but using typography, layout, and imagery to get their ideas across. He got religion on the subject late in his career and seemed to always be arguing with himself about whether students would be better served learning straight-up essay writing or whether we should teach these newfangled visual techniques. I remember walking in Troy with him one day and he turned to me and said:
In the Bible it says "In the beginning was the Word." It doesn’t say "In the beginning was the Picture."
Exploring dreams further makes me wonder if "in the beginning" my thoughts are actually more visual and pictorial than they are linguistic or verbal.
I actively resisted the notion of writing my dreams down for a long time. People would say to me "write them down! keep a notebook by your bedside!" What I didn’t like was the idea of having to translate everything that happened in the dream into words, and thus lose so much of the detail and the essence of the emotion. It’s like if you went and saw a movie and then had to write down for someone else the plot summary. You might be able to communicate the main points of the characters and what happened, but you would lose the richness of the scenery, the non-verbal communication, the costuming, the lighting, the blocking of the scenes… For a long time it seemed really gut-wrenching to me to write text down that didn’t capture any of that.
But, what the hell. I’m happy to be able to remember more clearly the dreams I have written down, and it’s fun to map the patterns and relationships among them. But it is most definitely a translation exercise in trying to capture the essence of visual thinking in words.
One Comment
I love this blog, keep it up! The written word will never capture the visual dream, but it becomes something else quite valuable.
This post relates to something I’ve always wondered about: how are the visuals stored and produced by the brain? (warning: computer science). There just isn’t enough storage in the mind to store full motion video of all our memories, but is anything visual stored?
Do we actually see our childhood house, or just think we’re seeing it, like a verbal description of the visual. “the old yellow telephone on the green wall” Perhaps we then recreate the scene when we remember the dream each individual item. But is there ever an actual scene to “look at” or just sort of meta data descriptions? Do you see rich details of the things you see in your dreams?
As an example, In the film “waking life” they mention not being able to read what time it is on clocks.
So is the dream actually more visual than your verbal description?