In my last post on hagioptasia, I touched on how this tendency to project an aura of specialness onto things manifests itself in dreams. It is hagioptasia that makes dream scenarios, on the one hand, carry an atmosphere of magic and sentimentalism, but it also, on the other hand, makes them somewhat painful. Assuming one can remember the details and feelings attached to the dream scenarios, and these scenarios were positive or exciting, waking from the dream and having that ‘reality’ vanish can make one feel a bit melancholic.
I feel this bittersweet feeling is especially acute when it comes to the experience of falling in love or meeting one’s ‘dream partner’ in a dream. On more than one occasion, I can recall this happening – living out an idealised romance with an idealised partner; I experienced all the intense feelings that went along with that. It felt like a genuinely real and fulfilling relationship with an actual person who had their own personality, virtues, and quirks. Waking up from that kind of experience is painful because you realise, firstly, it never happened – the relationship and the person aren’t real, and all the ‘time’ spent together in the relationship is being erased from one’s memory. The second (connected) reason it can be painful is if it means returning to waking life without that kind of relationship present. We can call this the ‘pain of oneiric love’. I think it’s an underappreciated and underdiscussed form of sorrow. It seems to be an unfortunate side effect of the wish-fulfilling nature of some dreams.
But the disappointment or painful ‘coming back to reality’ feeling you get after oneiric love vanishes applies to other positive dreams as well. Dreams can be full of adventure, excitement, idealism, impossibilities, beautiful vistas, and the kinds of places and situations you might find described in fantasy and magical realism novels. (Most of the ‘adventure’ dreams I can remember having lately – at least the positive ones – have been based around being in awe-inspiring natural surroundings or far-flung places: towns and cities that are like a mish-mash of ones I know about, which sometimes also look like something imagined up by Italo Calvino.)
But independent of how extraordinary dreams are in comparison to everyday waking life, the reason they can feel extraordinary in the first place is because of hagioptasia. The places one visits, the people one meets, and the events taking place become suffused with a deep sense of importance. Even the most ordinary things in dreams can feel exciting, leaving one in a state of excitement and longing when one awakes. In the dream state, one feels fully engaged with what’s happening; ironically, one may feel more fully alive in the dream state than when awake.
Again, assuming one can remember parts of dreams and the feelings associated with them, the hagioptasia they evoke contributes to the ensuing bittersweet feeling that occurs when one wakes up. It’s easy to reflect fondly on dreams, but they also arouse pain and sadness because they come to an end, they were fabricated, it’s hard to remember most of what happened, and what happened will likely never be repeated (unless it becomes a recurring dream).
It is interesting to note how much of our lives hagioptasia influences. Dreams in adulthood can be like a return to childhood, in which places, things, and interactions gain a quality of specialness, thereby enabling the feeling of nostalgia. And like nostalgia, waking from dreams – or looking back on them – can be bittersweet. One longs for the reality of the dream, or at least how one felt in the dream state. This longing – for a dream, daydream, or period in childhood or adolescence – can make everyday life seem insufficient. When waking from a particularly hagioptasic dream, this longing may be felt as a kind of insecurity – losing something that made one feel secure and satisfied in an unprecedented way. For me, this has been the loss of adventure, awe, and romance.
This bittersweet aspect of dreams, however, doesn’t have to keep one in a state of insufficiency or despondency. If dreams sometimes genuinely reveal conscious and unconscious wishes, then the strong emotions associated with them may serve as guides to work on what’s missing from waking life. Let’s not forget that the hagioptasia present in dreams, daydreams, and nostalgia can manifest in waking present-day scenarios as well. Crucially, the specific type of event in a dream that evokes hagioptasia can, likewise, be found in waking life – in real-life travels and relationships. In this way, the bittersweet aspect of dreams may act as a positive motivating force.
