Dreaming can often offer us a wonderful escape from our daily life. Indeed it is well known that we can be so enamored with our dream-state that our mind can integrate external distractions in order to prolong it. Taking sounds and feelings that would otherwise wake us and finding a way of embedding them into the dream itself. In this way, we are able to fight off the inevitable moment when we have to enter reality and face the myriad of issues that present themselves to us.

However, this morning I was reminded of another experience. One that is more interesting and unnerving. This morning I had a dream that so disturbed me I woke myself up. This dream did not help me escape my mundane reality, but rather was of such an intensity that I needed to escape the dream itself by entering back into reality.

Why? Simply because the dream itself was more real than my daily reality, the dream brought me face to face with the Real of my life, and I did not want to cope with it, I could not bare to stand in its presence. Hence I had to escape the Real of the dream into the fiction of my everyday life.

Lacan provides an insightful example of this escape into reality when he describes a dream recorded by Freud. The dream takes place when a man falls asleep while keeping guard over his sons coffin in an adjacent room. In the dream this man is confronted by his son, who proclaims, in an anguished voice, ‘Father, can’t you see that I am burning?’ At this point the man wakes up and notices the smell of smoke. He discovers that a candle has fallen over in the room next door and set the coffin alight.

The dream itself was no doubt set in a type of hell because the smell of smoke was integrated into the dream. The question we must ask is why he awoke. The standard explanation, of course, is that the smell of the smoke could not be fully integrated into the dream-State and so woke the man up to the reality of what was taking place. However Lacan posits another possibility, namely that the dream itself was so horrific that the Father sought to escape it. Commenting on this Zizek writes,

So it was not the intrusion of the signal from external reality that awakened the unfortunate father, but the unbearably traumatic character of what he encountered in the dream – insofar as ‘dreaming’ means fantasizing in order to avoid confronting the Real, the father literally awakened so that he could go on dreaming. The scenario was the following one: when his sleep was disturbed by the smoke, the father quickly constructed a dream which incorporated the disturbing element (smoke-fire) in order to prolong his sleep; however, what he confronted in the dream was a trauma (of his responsibility for the son’s death) much stronger than reality, so he awakened into reality in order to avoid the Real.

Hence ‘reality’, however dissatisfied with it we are, can act as a screen which protects us from a direct encounter with the horrific Real. In short, reality is structured as a fantasy.

Sadly, there are some who find it difficult to sleep because, in their dreams, they encounter this Real all too often. Here obsessive late night partying, drinking, drug taking and socialising are not to be thought of as attempts to make mundane reality more interesting and exciting (a common misunderstanding). Rather they can often be futile attempts to ward off the real that awaits them in their dreams (an idea that may well explain the unnerving power of Freddy Kruger).

Does this line of thought not help us understand the depth and insight of Freud’s claim,

What we repress by day will haunt us by night