Some believe the dream comes from the gods. Some believe that the dream comes from the ancestors. Some believe that dreams come from a part of the dreamer’s self usually remote or removed from consciousness. Some believe that dreams are scraps of memory and fantasy, remnants of the day. All of these beliefs are probably true enough in their ways, and certainly all have been productive of creative and analytic results. Scriptures and assassinations, benzene rings and orphic odes arise from dreams.

What if the dream is something else as well? Not individual, not a message from God or from the archetypes or from the soul. We hear Freudians speak of the language of dream, but what if dream is language, is language the way language is language: systematic, intentional, focused on saying something. What if dream is above all, exactly as language is, social. This is the aspect of the dream that is seldom considered, dream as arising from the speaking back into a community, a community of native dreamers (so to say).

It was to examine the idea that a dream seeks an intended audience outside the dreamer, that the Annandale Dream Gazette was founded years ago. The dreamer dreams towards someone—and that someone is within the community. Thus two goals are achieved by harvesting the night’s dreams and publishing them: the dream may find its intended hearer, and we may gradually come to learn the nature and shape of the community itself, the community into which one dreams.

So: the dream is public. The dream is social. The dream is communication. The dream intends to speak to you. These are the notions to investigate.


—Robert Kelly