Ambiguity, Uncertainty, Transformation and Dreams

“Night Light” from the Night Neighborhood gallery

As I get older, I’m more and more fascinated by uncertainty and its effect on people. Exploring ambiguity to find meaning may be the main reason behind all art, but in 20th Century American Expressionism, for example, creating ambiguity is the point. “What exactly am I looking at?” might be the most important question in the world, for people who can see. 

For what it’s worth, I believe the modern world embraced ambiguity in many things as travel became more common and people got exposed to other cultures, which are different ways to react to reality. Things went a step further as Einstein, Bohr and Planck ripped the cover off of a box that no one had ever thought to open. And that happened only a few decades after Darwin published the recipe to a stew that naturalists had been trying to determine for centuries, the taste of which many people cannot tolerate because, I suppose, they are allergic to uncertainty. (Some of those same people actually rewrote The Bible because they couldn’t find an edition that took the ambiguity out of the scriptures, as if translation of languages two thousand years old can reliably account for the vernacular of the time in which it was written.)

In the 20th century, American art underwent a renaissance based on ambiguity and its child, transformation. The best example of this multifaceted art movement, for me, is performance improv, where transforming situations on stage into other, unrelated, situations is the result of structured play. Play itself involves transformation, and is considered to be one of the ways in which minds gain flexibility and resourcefulness. I’ll never forget reading a description of bison sliding down an icy hill, then gleefully running back up it from a less-icy direction in order to slide down again. Do all mammals play? All animals? All creatures? Is play integral to consciousness? Is consciousness integral to life?  It’s only fair to speculate, since no one has been able to determine what consciousness is or whether thought — rational or not — is actually a part of it.

Unlike many other people, I find comfort in discovering things about which I’ll never be certain. In a related way, I find it soothing to contemplate the fact that the world and the universe are too big to ever be known by the human mind. I also very much like the idea that everything in nature serves more than one purpose and that we can’t know all the purposes because many of them would be unknowable. Dreams, for example, have been dismissed by some as random images created by the cleaning cycle of a sleeping brain, and contextualized by that organ’s tendency to nest whatever it encounters within the boundaries of the familiar. Dreams are universal and, if my dog’s sleeping motions and sounds are any indication, pan-species. But why would we remember them, discuss them, or try to figure out what they mean? And if the maxim is true that everything in nature serves more than one purpose, what other purposes do dreams serve? 

Here’s a thought that sometimes keeps my head spinning: What if we’re here to dream? If, as quantum mechanics suggest, there are other realities, then dreaming might somehow be an event that allows our participation across more than one reality. So, what if dreams — remembered or not — are the most important element of our short, frenetic lives?