Robin (solri) wrote,
2004-09-20 02:34:00

Dreaming of tigers

A fairly stressful day found me starting to doze off in front of the TV at 10 p.m., which prompted Nalan to tell me to go to bed. I protested that whenever I go to bed before midnight, I wake up in the small hours, but went to bed anyway. Naturally I woke up at 2 a.m. (self-fulfilling prophecies and all that). I was having a nightmare about the end of the world being triggered by an essay competition, which seemed really terrifying until a minute had elapsed, and pretty funny after that, even though the underlying sense of dread remained. This lends support to the idea (from Coleridge?) that we do not feel scared because we dream of a tiger; we dream of a tiger because we feel scared.

I also had a rather amusing dream involving looking at my mother's old photo album, which revealed that during the sixties she had organised love-ins in our garden and was friends with Timothy Leary.

I am still not sure how much the odd state of my brain is due to its attempts to rebalance neurotransmitters after giving up smoking. It's not a very strong hypothesis, since two months seems rather a long time to be still having withdrawal symptoms, especially since I had few if any of the normal physical withdrawal symptoms (constipation, shaking hands, cold sweats etc.). However, th alternative hypothesis - that I am by nature irritable and depressed but had masked it by using nicotine to up my dopamine levels - is even less encouraging. Fortunately, this is equally unlikely, since if this were the case, I should have been like that during the 1980s, which actually made up the happiest period of my life. Time to fish around for a new hypothesis.

William Godwin, in his mammoth tome An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, considered various theories about the causes of a person's nature. Showing fairly advanced thinking for 1793, he considered heredity, pre-natal events and early childhood experiences, and concluded that whatever influences these factors might have, they paled into insignificance beside the influence of a person's current circumstances. To return to our tiger analogy, in waking life rather than dreams, if a person who sees a tiger is scared, it is not because he has a timorous nature or had a bad experience with a tiger as a child; it is because he is looking at a tiger.
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