Nocturne
There the otter was- sailing a boat on the night on an endless sea. This was not a large boat; no it was a canoe, an infinitely-small structure on an endless sea that stretched on forever. There was no way that he could swim back to the shore (and there was no shore in that murky, endless ocean) and it seemed that the otter was destined to float endlessly as small and insignificant as a leaf in the grand blue sea. Any experienced boater would have brought with him a larger craft for the size of water this otter was exploring but the otter, even with his affinity for water, simply had no memory of what had been going up to this moment, staring out at the featureless dark ocean, beneath the stars and the moon. There was no compass by which to mark the directions, no sextant to show his path amongst the distant stars, no map to tell him where exactly he was, just an island of life among an endless blue desert of water.
'I'll have to jump in. This is no way to die, not an otter like me.' His footpads now were standing on the canoe's edge as he prepared himself for the jump into the ocean. It was either this- drown in the ocean or wander the oceans searching in vain for shore forever 1... 2... 3 and in he went.
SPLASH!
All of a sudden, things had changed. Gone was the ocean, replaced by the trappings of a seaside bungalow with furniture made almost entirely of bamboo. The morning sun was rising, its beams shooting through the window; the sound which ended his previous adventure was the sound of the ocean buffeting the shoreline in its endless drumbeat. The otter soon realized even as his senses and logic were only slowly returning that he had experienced a dream. But what a frightening and disturbingly-realistic dream. What if he never decided to leave that boat?
'Dreams are very common, happen each time someone falls asleep' he thought to himself as he put a pair of khaki pants and a button-up shirt over his boxers. A quick glance at his wallet revealed his vitals and a touch of his whiskers, giving his mind something tangible, something real for the first time in a long time. The otter was Stan Whittaker, a clinical psychologist specializing in the study of dreams who lived in Miami, Florida. In his mind, the otter fashioned himself a modern Karl Jung, looking into the depths of the sub-conscious to find deep-seated fears and hopes, the signatures on people's minds their waking selves were not aware of. And yet there was still much left to discover and obviously, Mr. Whittaker would never know all there was to know about the irrationality and bizarreness of dreams.
What Mr. Whittaker knew was fascinating nonetheless, even with all the blank spaces. Dreams are universal, that is all creatures who sleep experience dreams was the first major discovery of his research- and this was a most important discovery. Since time immemorial, all the sentient species had wondered what the dreams meant- premonitions, prophecies, religious revelation, and not a single SANE creature was immune from dreaming. Mr. Whittaker had heard the stories of a young wealthy vixen that had recurring dreams, each time dealing with a car accident that killed her that she would only travel in buses. He had heard of a young wolf from France who became a millionaire when his expired father's spirit would mark down on a chalkboard all the stocks that would work in the European stock markets- all during his sleep. He had heard about the business-leopard who cancelled a New York-to- LA flight because of a dream and the plane crash landed in Utah, few survivors. Mr. Whittaker had heard them and denied them.
Psychology was not a discipline not easily given to supernatural explanations- everything in the world had some mundane reason for being that way and this "magical thinking" that some supernatural force was protecting us or harming us was simply the traces of an immature childish mind that did not grasp the workings of the universe. A little maturity and all the irrational superstitions of the world would go away, the otter thought- fear of the number "13", belief in miracles, and the annoyingly-persistent belief in creator gods and demons. Mr. Whittaker was familiar with George James Fraser's "Golden Bough"- the otter knew that early tribes dressed up their lack of knowledge as gods and demons and from there civilization took root. And yet, for all his knowledge of the universe, unexplained things still happened. The universe was irrational and did that ever irk him. For example, the dream.
What was the importance of the irrational world of our dreams, the absurdist plays that began when the curtains of our eyelids went down and we became psychonauts? Why were they there, throughout the species? These thoughts blindsided the otter, just as a car very nearly did as he drove to his office, a few minutes ago, making the otter all the more thankful when he finally reached there, safely. Everything that took place in a dream was a hallucination, nothing is in a dream that actually exists- however, a dreamer might thrash in bed and pretend that the mattress or a stuffed animal was real, even walk out of bed, dream-eat (dangerous scenarios if stairs, or chemicals were involved), even dream-copulate with their spouses. And from the otter's own dreams, he could confirm the distant voices of people he knew- his father, most of all, fellow psychologists, all kinds of people. And the signal fires and flickering lights in his mind, the sub-conscious memories that came to light during dreamtime still lit up his brain, as did the memories of species during that special time.
"We don't have dreams, dreams have us." Those seven words had become the mantra for Mr. Whittaker as he opened his case files. Those were words of wisdom- why did people still study their dreams if they signified nothing? In every species, based on brain-wave observation, the brain's frontal lobes reduce their function which gave rise to illogical objects and situations in the dream as the parietal lobes, which was the sensory center and the C-shaped hippocampus, the emotion center takes center stage. This meant that a heightened sense of the (fictional) world around the dreamer and the ability to probe the emotions in the sub-conscious. No one really knew what the brain stem and the pons were there for but there was reason to believe that the amygdala, the fear center, played a role in nightmares. And the otter wanted to fill in blanks about dreams, only to be frustrated at every single turn.
The drams were paradoxically the temporary moments of madness that prevented permanent insanity- the mentally-insane do not have dreams, and insomniacs will go mentally insane after a few days without sleep. They were the wild voices that cried out for the otter and he could not give a response because he did not know how. They were the unconscious revelations- of what the otter, along with the rest of psychology was unsure but they were perfectly loud in expressing- whatever. And when the morning came and the dream ended, the answer would come.
Very soon, buried in his case studies, marking down observations and hypotheses, the otter grew tired and sleepy and buried his head into the papers he was writing. The bureau became as inviting as the softest pillow, the fan a wonderful paradise breeze and once again Mr. Whittaker fell into the mysterious world of dreams once more...
In this one, he was flying through a world of darkened glass, each surface reflecting a perfect image of himself. And yet each one was different, though the meanings escaped him, each one was a deep reflection of his very soul at different emotions as the otter experienced what only the birds know, flight. The otter's fear of heights disappeared but so did the realization that this was actually a new thing- he flew and hovered as though he had been doing it his entire life. The mirrors gave way to other motifs, a Star of David there, a cross elsewhere, a swastika beyond that, the Stars and Stripes in the distance, all beneath the curtain of sleeping and heavy eyelids.
SLAM! A door opened and the world of waking rudely came to him.
"If someone other than myself finds you doing this, our APA funding will be cut," came the fox supervisor who was in charge of earning more money for the groundbreaking procedures. And it was at that moment, knowledge and revelation came to the otter that grabbed his friend by the arms and told him.
"I've got it! The world of our dreams, a world of images and abstract symbols disappears preparing us for the waking world, reinforcing our knowledge of what we learned consciously. But in the waking world, we accumulate the raw material of our dreams that allows our waking knowledge to become abstract."
The fox looked absolutely perplexed.
"It's a never-ending cycle, we dream, we wake up pondering our dreams, we dream pondering our waking knowledge. It's a walk in the wilderness, it's our subconscious having a joke at our expense. And when the morning comes- the answer is yes."
"Yes, to what? And what was the question to start with?" was the fox's response
"You'll have to find it out yourself, just as I will. 'Til then, keep dreaming."