Issue 71, July 2004
Please Take a Seat
©Jane Teresa Anderson, July 2004
It must have been funny at the time because I laughed so loud I woke myself up. “What’s the joke?” asked Michael, surprisingly awake for such a dark unearthly hour. “A dream,” I giggled. “Someone said, ‘Please take a seat’ …” my voice trailed off. “It seemed funny at the time,” I mused lamely.
“Funny peculiar,” Michael replied. “That was my dream!”
It turned out that Michael had been dreaming he was queuing to see a doctor when the receptionist looked directly at him and said, “Please take a seat”.
Now, our dreams frequently overlap. We often dream about the same person, or the same animal, or a similar situation, for example, but this phrase was extremely precise. The scientist in me was now fully alert. “Perhaps you talked in your sleep and I heard you in mine,” I suggested. “But I’ve been awake for several minutes,” Michael countered, “thinking about my dream”.
So what happened? Did Michael sleep talk “Please take a seat” in his dream leaving me to incorporate the phrase into my dream at a time lag of at least several minutes? Or did I pick up on Michael’s waking thoughts as he contemplated his dream while I slept? And why, oh why, did it make me laugh?”
It’s very common for partners’ to share parts of their dreams on the same night. A shared life results in shared experiences or issues that you each process in your dreams, often encountering similar symbols or themes. Our ‘please take a seat’ may have been a shared theme. In Michael’s dream he was waiting to see a doctor, so he was a patient. He was asked to take a seat: to wait, to be patient perhaps. Michael’s dream was exploring issues of patience and waiting.
My research over the years has led me to believe that when your dream overlaps in specific detail with someone else’s, the content is also symbolically relevant to you. I’ve drawn this conclusion from examining these paired dreams and noting that, once interpreted, the dream is meaningful for both dreamers. Your dreams process all your conscious and unconscious experiences of the last 48 hours, looking for a best-fit picture to make sense of the world and your place in it. Those experiences that trigger deeper issues or question your current beliefs are emphasised in your dream. I believe that when we sense other people’s thoughts (and dreams) some of these – the ones that resonate with us by triggering those deeper issues – are commonly incorporated into our dreams.
Commonly? Well, how often do you talk about your dreams in detail with your partner or those close to you? Add to that the fact that most of us recall only a fraction of our nightly dream dramas so just how much overlap of content could we be missing?
When Michael and I have shared dreams before we’ve always wondered who dreamed the original dream and who tuned into it. In the ‘Please take a seat’ case, as Michael’s dream came first, it seems I was the receiver, whether or not he spoke in his sleep. I was also exploring issues of patience and waiting and seeing the funny side of it all.
Patience and waiting, it’s all in the timing. Or is it? Let’s look again at ‘Please take a seat’ from several different angles:
If Michael slept-talked, ‘Please take a seat’, could my dream have waited by a lag of a few minutes before working the phrase into its story?
Most experiments suggest that dreams happen in real time, so when you take three seconds in a dream to climb over a fence, three seconds of sleep time elapse. You may dream in movie effects, seeing a year of your life pass in fast forward, but just as you may sit in a cinema seat for one minute watching a year in fast forward, so, it is believed, one minute passes while your dream runs a similar effect.
A famous dream on record to the contrary is that of Alfred Maury, a French scholar who, in 1861, dreamed that he was about to be guillotined during the French Revolution. As the guillotine came down and hit the back of his neck, Maury woke up abruptly because his bed-head had fallen onto the back of his neck. He concluded that the bed-head fell first and that the pain created the whole dream in an instant to ‘explain’ the sensation. He saw all dreams as occurring instantaneously even though we experience them, when we recall them, in ‘normal’ clock time.
But if Michael spoke, his words were not instantly relayed into my dream. The time factor was out. Which brings me to another angle:
In 1996 I dreamed in detail of a murder which I experienced from the point of view of the murdered man as he lay dying, accused of a specific crime by his killers. As with all my dreams, I wrote it down and dated it. A month later I received a floppy disc from Michael who was travelling in Central America with a warning that the disc contained distressing news. It revealed that Michael had been present at a murder-robbery and had held the dying man until his death. According to local culture, it was Michael’s job to carry the spirit to the young man’s family, inform them of his death and continue to carry the spirit for ten days. Michael’s account seemed very familiar to me. I checked with my dream. It had occurred within the 24 hours following the murder. The details matched.
Now that seems to be a similar lag effect, doesn’t it? The tragic event occurred, Michael experienced it and I dreamed about it at a lag. But next I looked up all my dreams of Michael since he had left Australia, and each one included an element of the event, documenting the run up to the murder and the events following the murder BEFORE it occurred. My time theory was blown totally out of the water and a new theory was born.
You read the whole story, freely accessible online, here.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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