The First Week

The image shown above is popular in mind tricks, posing the question "How many prongs does this fork have?"  During our class discussions of dreams and recursive structures, this image continued to spring into my mind.  Even though it does not have obvious continuous layers, it does have various pieces and interpretations that, depending on where you start looking, can vary how one perceives the whole.

The varying interpretations struck me as how we look at and discover meaning in dreams and even literature, art, music, and media.  Oftentimes, our idea on a certain key detail or technique influences how we accept and view the work as a whole.  For example, with this questionably pronged fork, depending on where the eye starts looking, we see either two or three prongs.

Looking back to the dreams we all shared in class, and I enjoyed that we all shared out dreams and left them open to our own interpretations rather than "assign" them meaning, even though we did discuss them.  Through allowing us to each view the dream through our individual lenses, we could discover our own meaning to it - contributing to the power of dream by permitting it to speak to each of us.

I think of it as a bit of an anti-puzzle.  With a puzzle, the pieces as individuals often times don't make sense, but when put together in the right way a beautiful, clear scene is created.  It seems to me that the opposite of this is true with dreams.  As Howard Nemerov said, "The interpretation of a dream is the next room of the dream."  When we look at a piece of a dream the image created might seem obvious, but upon further analysis it proves to only lead to another piece.  I find that it is easy to comprehend and appreciate the individual details of a dream, but when I try to piece the various aspects together, I am only led to another level of analysis (or more frequently, confusion) without an overarching idea or meaning ever becoming clear.

However, I think this is the beauty of dreaming.  In my waking conscious, I like to label and sort things, but with a dream I am forced to slow down and ponder and accept that I cannot quickly assign meaning to and store the idea in the back of my mind.  I have to instead wrestle around with the many points and thoughts and accept that the power of the subconscious mind is greater than a label.  This is difficult for me, and it often feels like I have failed in assigning meaning, but I believe the many thoughts the dream provokes is far more valuable than simply taking the dream at face value and storing it away.

I have thus far thoroughly enjoyed this class and can only hope it continues to foster discussion and ideas, as I believe it will.