What would you do if you could control not only your own dreams, but other people’s dreams, too? What if you could enter other people’s dreams without their knowing it? How would you use those powers? Do the same ethical principles that guide our waking lives also apply in dreaming?
The new television series “Falling Water” has created a fascinating narrative world in which various characters explore these very questions, trying to make sense of amazing dream experiences that seem both radically anomalous and strangely natural.
The latest episode, titled “Three Half Blind Mice,” fills out several story lines that illuminate the many possibilities available to those who can enter into the realm of shared dreaming.
Without giving away specific plot twists, the motives that drive people in their shared dreaming are not much different from people’s motives in waking life. One character seduces and sexually assaults another in her dreams. Several characters are infiltrating other people’s dreams to make money, by generating unconscious fears that prompt them to make bad business decisions. A scientist is using shared dreams to experiment with the powers of the mind. A religious cult is using the dream world to gather, worship, and plan for a global spiritual revolution. Everyone seems to have a ruthless determination to find and control a mysterious child blessed with special dream powers.
The three protagonists—Tess, Burton, and Taka—have mostly virtuous reasons for entering into the shared dream world. Tess is seeking her child, Burton is trying to learn more about a recurrent woman in his dreams, and Taka is trying to help his catatonic mother. These are morally good and virtuous reasons to explore the dream realm as they do. But all three are quickly drawn into the more shadowy dimensions of shared dreaming, where right and wrong no longer seem so clear and nothing is as it appears.
So far, the challenges faced by the characters in the dream world are primarily posed by each other, humans versus humans. There are no alien, transpersonal, supra-human forces at work, at least that have been revealed so far. I’ll be curious to see if and when other forms of intelligence and intentionality enter into the dream world. People who engage in a long-term study of their dreams often find they become more open to such possibilities, not less so—that’s been my experience from teaching and research, in any case.
