FinishMySong Blog

While in Whitby enjoying a weekend away with friends a couple of weeks ago, I read an article in The Guardian that I haven't been able to get out of my head since I casually picked up the paper that morning. It was an extract from Michael Fryan's book The Human Touch that the paper reported was going to be about what happens to us while we are sleeping. In actual fact, Fryan I think gets to addressing some much more pertinent ideas in this article about the nature of how we experience our own lives within our minds and in the wider physical world, and how this translates to conscious thought processes. In it he has this to say about difficult passages in dreams :

The different players in the game often battle with each other for control over the game's content and conventions. The author, too, sometimes finds himself struggling to regain control of his own story. Some stories fight back at the author; some games defeat all their participants. The same sort of struggle occasionally goes on between the dreamer and the dream he is participating in.

...

In the case of the story I still know I'm the author, even if I'm losing the fight. I still - regrettably - have all the labour of invention and writing to perform, however much the character is jogging my elbow. Dreamer and author alike, however, have become entangled in their own creations. Although the author began by telling the story, and the dreamer by dreaming the dream, the story has ended up by telling the teller, the dream by dreaming the dreamer.

I think the point Fryan is making here is one about control. We often consider our own ideas and thoughts as self-penned - each of the scenes we dream and all of our waking thoughts, whether they be lists of the shopping we need to buy later or a great idea for a new invention - but what Fryan seems to be getting at is that, by means of the incredibly complex biological and social environment we live within, these, along with all our other mental constructs, to some degree think themselves; are arbitrarily created beyond any conscious choice or control by ourselves, out there then to be described by our lingual conventions. The suggestion is, then, that feelings, ideas, perceptions - everything infact - present themselves to us for interpretation. The only question remains who's doing the presenting and who's doing the interpreting? I guess this is where my peers would cite the possibility of the existence of soul.