So last night... or, more accurately, between 4-9 this morning, I had a flurry of weird nightmares in a total of 12 hours of sleep.
One narrative includes looking down from structures on top of high cliffs. Even though I'm scared of heights in real life, this instilled no fear in me.
Another bizarre scenario involved some small uncanny valley humanoid child with white hair and a creature that looked like a small, white monkey with a fuzzy muzzle breaking into the attic of the house I was in somehow. A guy (my mom's fat dumb boyfriend, ugh) climbed up a ladder, and, deciding to do nothing, yelled that he would call authorities or something. I told the child, "I have a hunch you can talk."
"Yes," he said.
Then I talked to the monkey, "and I suspect you can talk, too. It's just easier for you to get away with it because of how you look."
The monkey-like thing didn't say anything, but the other child (his big brother?) said "this is true." And I'm guessing the next thing he would say would be along the lines of "and now you have to die!" but the fear and adrenaline made me wake up and move on to the next dream.
I was in a cafeteria, or somewhere, and someone was holding a drawing I made and said "how did you know Monique loves the cute anime style?" I didn't know that, and Monique is a real person I knew from college, but I don't know what she has to do with anything. But for some reason, this really creeped me out and terrified me in the moment, inexplicably. I became aware I was in a "nightmare" and so woke up, and a creepy guy was in the bed next to me staring at me and smiling. A fake out wake up. That thing that happens in the "it was all a dream" trope actually happens sometimes. Then I "woke up" again and wandered around the hallway in the dark, in the upper floor of a house that was like my dad's house, and heard scratching noises coming from the front door below.
Then I finally, really woke up.
I read that the purpose of nightmares might be to train and prepare us for life and death situations in real life. Okay, seems legit, but the part of the brain that thinks through decisions is turned off during these REM modes, leading me to do dumb things like walk up to an obvious criminal unarmed and blatantly tell him I'm onto him. Which is the kind of stuff I'd never do in real life because I wouldn't have the balls. The rational brain might be turned off, but the instinctive brain is still on, and one thing I learned from karate is "in a fight, he who thinks is dead." Karate teaches you how to migrate fighting technique from the rational mind to the instinctive mind, so you'll do it in a kneejerk reaction when the time calls. It seems I'm not far enough in my training yet and my non-rational, gut reactions are incredibly stupid. If the situation gets too intense for me to handle, the fear response in my brain activity will be strong enough to wake me up, "failing" that timeline.
All of this, in tl;dr, is to say how accurate the electric sheep terminals are to real dreams. In a recent interview, Greg Kirkpatrick gave the unsatisfying answer that the dream terminals don't have a big, unified meaning. This is a big let down for the theorists, but there's a quiet part of us that says, "well, duh." It's a dream. It might not have a grand meaning that makes any sense at all. But dreams do involve little bits and pieces from real life randomly cobbled together, because the brain has to get this stuff from somewhere. The durability knife = durandal is an apt interpretation, even though we don't get any direct confirmation, it's an obvious metaphor. But when I think about how easily I wake up from nightmares, and then look at what goes down in the durability story, I think it says a lot about our protagonist's instincts and fear response/inhibition. He killed a guy. He keeps going on his journey with no clear destination while the men in suits are stalking him. Even though the cyborg is not human, these dreams might reveal there's still some humanity leftover in his mental processes.
I had a dream where I stomped on my best friend's face and smeared his brains across the pavement and I don't know why. This is the last person I would want to hurt. Yet among all those failed timeline nightmares where action didn't happen, the one where I got violent was to my best friend and I felt no fear in the moment.
It's all illogical nonsense with random pieces of autobiographical data. So who are all those hanging corpses he killed, but could have prevented? Some theorize these narratives aren't even coming from the protagonist or some unknown origin, but Durandal. The dream levels seem to be a hodge-podge of Lh'owon and Marathon-like areas that don't really make sense, with monsters from his recent past wandering around them.
There might not be a Grand Holistic Meaning to it all, but it is comprised of parts. The meaning might be the sum of those parts, or each part has a meaning that is disconnected from all the other parts.
