RMST 202

This week’s reading The Society of Reluctant Dreamers by José Eduardo Agualusa revolved around dreams. Dreams have always fascinated me, as it probably should for any psychology major. The lecture mentioned how dreams are often considered to be opposed to practicality, and while I believe that can be true at times (with all of its surrealism), I think it also has some authenticity to it. Similar to how life imitates art, I think that our dreams reflect our reality. What is the purpose of dreams? Perhaps it is a way for our minds to further explore our thoughts without limits, though we ultimately have no control over them – hence the phenomena of nightmares. However, the way we interpret life and what we are exposed to can greatly influence what we dream of, so perhaps there is a way for the government to influence our dreams by censorship, false narrative, and so on. I found this quote quite interesting concerning the topic: “The war isn’t over, my friend. It’s only sleeping.” (131). For me, this statement can be taken in one of two ways. First, the war is on a temporary pause. Second, the war is still prominent in our sleep, signifying how we dream of the war even when it is not active.

I think we also discussed memories, in particular, false memories, earlier this term. However, I am currently unable to recall which text we were discussing. Nonetheless, I think that false memories and dreams are also related to each other, in that they both alter our perception of reality and cause us to think differently. Moreover, we may mistake our dreams for reality because they are that realistic to us, we feel that we have truly experienced them. Similarly, dreams are also fleeting. Though I dream almost every night, I can only remember a handful of my dreams. My question is, what do you make of your dreams? Do you try to interpret them and find a deeper meaning or are they just completely random to you?

Overall, I had a difficult time following this text because of my lack of knowledge of the historical setting. Like many of the texts throughout this course, I felt like I was missing out on context. Though I can usually still make it through, and I found the theme of dreams really intriguing, it was still a challenge for me. However, that may also just be because we are nearing the end of the term.