I have always loved these lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” (1980):

“Now those memories come back to haunt me

They haunt me like a curse

Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true

Or is it something worse“

They sound true at first. But when you look closer, they are actually quite hard to interpret.

What does “something worse” mean here?

Six interpretations:

• Epistemic problem and suffering: The unfulfillment of a dream differ from mere epistemic failure. It is not simply that our predictive faculties erred; the difference between expectation and reality creates actual suffering. This interpretation posits a deep connection between knowledge (or lack thereof) and emotional states. The “worse” here stands for the painful experiential consequences of unfulfilled dreams and suggests that dreams carry more weight than mere predictions.

• Comparative suffering through awareness: Knowing how things could have been good intensifies the pain of how they actually are. In this interpretation, suffering is relative to modal cognition. It is not just about the absolute state of things, but how that state compares to imagined alternatives. The “worse” in this case stands for the deeper suffering that comes from awareness of missed potential and implies that ignorance of better possibilities is often a blessing.

• Dreams as non-truth-apt concepts: This interpretation challenges the very notion that dreams can be “true” or “false”. It suggests that dreams, like aesthetic judgments etc., exist in a conceptual realm where truth values don not apply. The “worse” here is the realization that we have been categorizing dreams incorrectly all along and forces a reevaluation of how we understand hopes and aspirations. This raises questions about the nature of dreams and their relation to truth-apt cognitions. There clearly is some connection (our dreams are usually based on some factual understanding), but at some point, dreams become non-truth-apt.

• External origin of dreams: If a dream is a lie, it might originate from outside of a person. Usually, a lie is something that person X tells person Y (where X =/= Y). If dreams originate from outside ourselves, this introduces complex questions about personal identity and autonomy. If our dreams shape us but come from external sources, how authentic is our sense of self? The “worse” in this scenario is the potential loss of agency and the unsettling implication that our deepest aspirations might not be our own.

• False memory and retrospective dream construction: This interpretation suggests that we might fabricate dreams retrospectively in response to present dissatisfaction. We see the world as unsatisfactory and only then falsely remember having dreamed of something better. The “worse” here stands for two things: the realization that our memories are unreliable, and the unsettling idea that our capacity to perceive the world as not-so-great depends on illusory past hopes.

• Persistent memory and inescapable comparison: Dreams that come from memory haunt us more persistently than recent realizations of how things could be better. The “worse” in this case stands for the inescapable nature of these dream-memories that constantly remind us of unmet expectations. This interpretation highlights the tyranny of memory over present experience and suggest that the past dreams we carry with us shape our perception of reality in more profound and potentially painful ways than present perceptions

Be that as it may, I think the lyrics capture something important. We hate it when our dreams don’t come true. However, we must remember that Nightmare is a fantasy that became reality as Slavoj Žižek said.