Running on All Fours

I have sometimes woken up in the morning feeling utterly strange, shaking my head, stroking the back of it after experiencing visuals speeding past me, enamourously blurry enough, to make me be still for ensuing moments in order to re-live, or crudely, re-dream,  a dream of running on all fours. The after-effects of tunneling speedily through a hazy continuum of images in the dream more often than not succeeds every time in leaving me desiring to be an animal, to run on all fours, to experience the eye of the cheetah, the tiger, the speed guns in the animal world. Some dreams have begun with me running on two legs, but thereafter shifting to all four limbs, in order to gain faster speeds. My hands would clutch the ground without my body shape being a hindrance. The sense of the self grows more powerful when my fingers dig into the ground, at times clutching grass leaves or by spading the ground to get “ground handles”, holding which I would add “leaps” to my speed to add an extra thrust and when that happens, it all becomes a matter of exploring how fast I could run. It all boils down to the maximum attainable speed by me. It feels amazing to feel the muscles connecting with each other in machine-like formations right from your fingers to your deltoids. In the dream, I have never felt strange or not-normal in doing something un-person like or felt that me running in such a manner would trap me into a quadruped fantasy. In the dream, I would feel as if running like that has always been a part of me, and consider it as something that I still remember how to do and can still take to it if I wish to experience the sheer thrill of speed.

This dream, is remarkable, and leaves me with more wonderment than what I experience during dreams of time travel, space edges, or even parallel worlds, and it is distinctly exhilarating for the sheer speed it provides to my senses, even while being just a dream. That particular thrill is not achievable by riding high-velocity on motor driven vehicles because at the heart of it lies one's own muscular ability, one's own natural body, which will amaze you when it lets you propel through any surface like an object that values with high regard even fractions of seconds. Of course, after one awakes from such a dream, the drab assiduous slowness of our human bi-peds remind us of the unused possibilities that inherently lie in us. Funnily though, this ever increasing desire for speed sometimes tumbles into disbalance and in the dream, I have to often slow down to regain the right posture and balance again and the cautionary significance of the tumbling down does not also escape me either.

Evolutionary Purpose of Dreams

Not much progress has been made in this regard as even the evolutionary purpose of sleeping itself has not yet been concretely agreed upon by different experts on the subject, even though Carl Sagan speculated upon dreams as a consequence of the supersession, by the neo-cortex, of the reptilian brain, as living beings progressed through evolution. Reptiles preceded Mammals and therefore lack the neo-cortex which is present in mammals and lets the latter experience reality in a different way than the way in which reptiles do. This neo-cortical brain is believed to have superior cognitive abilities than the reptilian brain which, in waking life, is forever in a state that we would call dream like, responding only to primal stimuli. So Sagan, further explicated that in our sleep, the reptilian brain possibly becomes alive and significant, since our neo-cortex is not required in an asleep stage and therefore that activation of the reptilian brain during our sleep sends us to our dreams, much the same way in which reptiles are believed to experience reality in their waking life. If the preceding is true, then having dreams of running on all fours points to an exciting possibility that the evolutionary road has been encoded into our very DNA. However, happy I might be to make such connections, I would hesitate to tread farther beyond, owing to my skepticism engendered due to other interpretative possibilities that are often ascribed to dreams.

What Could It Mean?

Many interpretations abound everywhere, regarding the possible meanings of such a type of dream. Depending on the context and dream-factual matrix, implications vary across a range of interpretations such as 1) When you are running away from something on all fours – it points to the mind’s intentions, implied obviously through literal symbolism, to inform you of your inclination to run away from a part of yourself or something or some obligation as fast as possible, or 2) it can indicate the dreamer’s need to utilize all available resources at his disposal to achieve his personal goals in real life, as fast as possible as he desires, or 3) it could imply the brain suggesting the person to slow down in his personal life as the sensory perception of an otherwise sedentary life during the waking stage (involving only mental exercises) might in actuality be akin to bullet trains criss-crossing the neural highways, which then get expressed as dreams involving high speed chases during sleep. Some suggest that those kind of dreams let bloom the animalistic propensities repressed over the ages because of the evolutionary direction in which man’s motor abilities proceeded.

Whatever it may mean or imply or be for, that dream is my personal favourite despite of its abject simplicity and lack of extended story plots that often underlie my dreams and that dream is something that I would like to repeatedly have, as often as possible, since for me, this particular dream stands for the free human spirit; that which desires the freedom to roam and run - to explore possibilities, to test limits of human endeavour and most importantly at the heart of it all, it stands for the piquant curiosity resident in every homo sapien to feel the rhythm of his body, to feel closer to his soul, to experience the package in which he has come to see and live in this world, to just be!! This dream, for me, catches in a gist the essential purpose for which man has forever marched.

Image from here.