Earlier this year, I began interviewing senior citizens living on Oahu about their sleep and dreams as part of the "Dreams of Hawaii’s Elders Project," which I am conducting in partnership with Dr. Shari Kogan, director of Geriatrics at The Queen’s Medical Center.
I meet with my interviewees in a comfortable setting, usually in their homes or a quiet public place, and record them on my laptop.
I follow a standard set of questions: How often do they dream? What do they dream about? What do they think their dreams mean? But each interview is unique and proceeds in a different direction.
Consider the following:
The first gentleman I interviewed — an 86-year-old draftsman, artist and massage therapist — told me about two of his dreams. In the first, he saw himself as an infant being adored by his mother and father. In the second, he was the student of a wise old man dressed entirely in green.
My interviewee explained both dreams in terms of his growing up during the Great Depression. His family was close-knit but focused on survival; little energy remained to attend to the emotional needs of the children.
Both of these dreams, he said, represent him, in a sense, becoming his own father in that he had finally learned as an old man to give himself the emotional support he needed but didn’t get when younger.
This initial interview was, in my view, a dream-based celebration of spiritual triumph in the twilight years of a man’s life.
Other lives are, however, marked by tragedy and, indeed, the second interview was far darker in tone.
The interviewee had moved to Hawaii to escape a lifetime of domestic violence. Her dreams were terrifying; precisely the opposite of the celebratory dreams related above.
In one of her dreams, she was tied up and forced to watch as an abusive ex-partner disemboweled her, ate her organs, and killed her. As I listened, I was astounded by the horrors she had faced, both in reality and in her dreams, but also by the resilience she had shown in her commitment to her son and in her unabated religious devotion.
Sometimes, how a dream is rationalized, rather than its contents, is the most interesting aspect of an interview.
One 90-year-old woman related how, in the most unforgettable dream of her life, she saw a terrible train accident and tried to help. The dream was so vivid that, upon waking, she rushed to get the newspaper and read that a train had indeed crashed several hundred miles away in Kentucky.
She explained her dream by stating her belief that the brain can transmit and receive information in the form of waves. It is not surprising, of course, that someone who, during her formative years, saw the proliferation of radio and television, not to mention the launch of Sputnik, might understand her brain and dreams in such terms.
The Dreams of Hawaii’s Elders Project is not therapy, nor is it a scientific study. Instead, it is an oral history project with compassion at its core. Simply by listening, we hope to learn more about the inner lives of senior citizens and to discover what their dream-lives can tell us about Hawaii’s rich and diverse culture. We also want to encourage others to ask the seniors they know about their dreams.
As the dreams described above richly attest, senior citizens have much to tell and we should give them an opportunity to share their experience with us.
