Potential
I sat for an hour with my Nephew, Aiden, napping in my arms this evening. He stirred a couple of times, twitching in his sleep, eyes darting back and forth behind closed lids. It's my first Nephew, and it's the most exposure to a baby I've had. A few times he raised his head and muzzily looked around before flopping back down, and for being only twelve days old I'm told that's pretty good process. So what do babies dream of? If dreams are how we process the events of the days, then it makes sense that babies dream. Everything is new to them, so there's a lot to process. And being out of the womb and in the real world must be one of the most bizarre changes of scenery imaginable, if they had the experience or vocabulary to talk about it. How are they even able to dream, given that I still don't have the ability to put in words some of my dreams, and I've had thirty years of abusing the English language.
Maybe there's some sort of different level they function on, where thoughts aren't words. After all, there are so many instances in our lives where we don't need to use words to communicate: a loving glance, the memory of a smell, the brush of a hand, different colours, music, almost everything about our lives is given to communicating, and very little of it, when you stop to think, is done with words. Maybe when we're born we think in colours, and every sound we hear, unmuffled by our mother's belly for the first time, is perceived as a colour, and this gives us the ability to dream from the first breath. Or maybe it's smell. After all, smell is more linked to memory than any other sense. Maybe the connection of smell to memory is linked to how we first learnt to dream, cradled in our parents arms, associating smells with new sensations.
Either way, what to babies dream of?
Impossible question to answer, so this is what I decided, sitting back with Aiden in my arms, what I want babies to think and dream of.
There is so much potential that you hold in your arms when you cradle a baby, it's incredible. There is the potential to change the world, to impact the entire population of the planet, for good or bad. You could hold the next Leonardo Da Vinci in your arms, or the next Joseph Stalin. They might create something that it remembered for generations to come, or they might destroy what others have done. They could be remembered for generations to come, or become part of human history without impacting it in the slightest. Potential seems to me very similar to miracles. A miraculous event can be as bad as it can be good due to a series of coincidences. In the same way there's no way to measure how good or bad a child's potential is. What I like to think that a baby dreams about, in those first months of life, before language exists and there's just the senses, is their own potential. Their own potential to change the world, dreams about how they're going to accomplish those changes, and hopes for the future. Maybe in those first days, when life is a chaotic scramble and every sense is tested for the first time, those tiny eyes are flickering behind closed lids and plotting a course in life, in dreamful sleep, that is no more explainable to them as it is to us.
Whatever they are dreaming about, as Aiden's uncle I'll do my best to help him get there.