Meaning Of Dreams
(Meaning
of Dreams Pt 1)
(Meaning
Of Dreams Pt 2)
(Meaning
Of Dreams Pt 3)
(Meaning
Of Dreams Pt 4)
(...Continued
From Pt 2)
Sigmund Freud
The great theorist Sigmund
Freud attempted to bridge brain and mind by theorizing that
dreams helped protect sleep by partially covering up disturbances,
while letting them blow off a little steam. Thus we might
feel the need to urinate during sleep, but not strong enough
that it would cause damage, so instead of the mind receiving
the message from the brain to wake up and pee, it instead
got the signal that it was already awake and looking for a
bathroom. The dreamer could imagine him/herself urinating
and get some relief from this, thus allowing the body to continue
sleeping until the need to urinate was truly urgent and not
just a little impulse. The same process was then applied to
thoughts about topics and situations in the dreamer's past
that might arise during sleep, especially the ones that the
dreamer might keep repressed when awake.
Carl G. Jung
Swiss analyst Carl G. Jung
also tried to bridge the brain-mind barrier with his theories
of dreaming. One of his theories involved the theory of compensation.
Jung felt that during the daytime, the human mind, especially
in Western cultures, was very willful and often acted in ways
that were not conducive to the maturation of the whole individual.
That is, we often decide to ignore the messages of health
and wholeness and "damn the torpedoes" and "go
our own way." This leads to a psychological imbalance
that Jung felt dreams tried to address. During sleep, the
unconscious attempted to address and compensate this daytime
attitude symbolically by finding reconciling symbols that
could hold the rational and irrational together in a way that
would further the development of the dreamer.
However, most psychological
dream theories avoid dealing with the brain-mind connection.
Most have story-contexts which don't necessitate bridging
this gap. In psychotherapy, for instance, its not so important
that the dreaming brain seems to be activated at regular cycles
by the brain stem causing rapid eye movements (REM). But it
can be important that the dream produced during this REM cycle
includes a story about the patient finally asking a clown
to smile. The story-context of brain-evolution is superceded
by the story-context of emotional healing. The meaning and
value of a dream then is found in the service of story-context
in which it is told.
But wait, is this saying that
the meaning of all dreams is just relative to the person and
his/her story-context? Don't dreams have a real and true meaning
independent of the person that is trying to impose a meaning
on them?
I feel they do, but not in
the way we used to think about real and true meanings. 3
Tribal Meaning and Value.
It used to be that we all
lived in local zones, less globally distributed, and the true
meaning and value of life and its dreams were determined very
differently. I live in a very different world now, but pockets
of these indigenous peoples still exist. At one time, meaning
and value was circulated through one's family and tribe, as
well as one's affiliations. Dream stories were circulated
and flowed through lines of filiations and alliance. That
is, one got up during the night, went to the fire in the village
and told whoever was there what their dream was. The people
gathered there used the rules, the story-context of the their
tradition, to extract various meanings and notice various
impacts that the dream produced. Sometimes these needed to
be further told to a specialist, a village shaman, and sometimes
the shaman called in other shamans to discuss the meaning
and value of the dream. The results could change the flow
of goods and people, marriages and other events. It was if
the dreams came up from the night of the bio-cosmic earth
itself, were captured by the tribes, coded, and circulated
among them.
Despotic State Meaning and
Value.
There was, and at too many
places still exists, yet another form of society that imposes
a particular style of meaning and value, the despotic state.
Here there is a singular center that draws together all the
meaning and value to a central point. The king is one and
the earthly servant of the One. All the codes in the despotic
state point to this singular accumulator and distributor.
Everything flows to and from the Pharaoh, the King, the Despot.
All money bears his image or the god he represents. All primitive
codes and laws that determine the flow of life are overcoded
and redirected to flow through him. The meaning and value
of life is rigidly set and any questioning of this is considered
a sin and transgression of his law. The first thing to know
or find out about a dream in this kind of system is its relationship
to the emperor. Does the dream indicate favor or bad omens?
Will there be more money and children, or illness and poverty?
Dreams can no longer be messages from the gods, as this might
challenge the hierarchy and place the authority for revelation
and the flow of goods and ideas and people beyond the court.
But elaborate systems of interpretation and representation
in service of the Pharaoh will proliferate so that no flow
of decoded dreams escapes the empire.
Capital Economy and the Free
Market of Meaning and Value.
and go to their cars in the
parking lot and think they have moved from the unreal back
to the real. What a farce.
Dreams are made to serve
quick analysis that brings people back into alignment with
the culture, to serve to bring the people who can no longer
handle it, the decoded flows, back into conformity with the
capital economy and its needs. Good little job, nuclear family,
and lots of time to watch advertisements for products to consume.
So fine, if we are all conditioned
to see only the meaning and values that our culture, or some
past culture imposes, how can we get to the really real of
the meaning of a dream?
James Hillman
Jungian theorist James Hillman,
speaks to this issue of true meaning in dreamwork and creates
a bridge to many postmodern theories in his writing about
perspectivism and Archetypal Psychology. In perspectivism,
one is always coming from at least one or more perspectives.
This is the story-context. Even the belief that one can set
aside all perspectives, [as in the phenomenological epoche
of "bracketing-out"] is itself a perspective. But
Hillman is not a relativist, he is an archetypalist. This
means that each perspective we put on to see and understand
the world is not ours, it is just borrowed. And usually we
can't even borrow them, they borrow us. It would be better
to use the word 'possession' than 'borrowed'. Consider how
young lovers see the world. They don't choose to be in love,
they are possessed by this perspective of Eros and more likely
than not, to play out the game of love very unconsciously
and without much control. Depressed individuals also rarely
choose their depression, but are seized by it and dragged
down into the underworld and its perspectives.
We find the myth of Heracles,
who could will his way through most situations. But note what
happens when he goes down into the underworld. He doesn't
get it. He starts swinging his club at phantoms with no effect.
Hillman points out that each time we attempt an interpretation
of a dream, we impose upon it a particular interpretive stance,
a particular perspective. The way around this, he feels, is
to stop imposing structures on the dream images and begin
listening to them. Though this too is a perspective, it is
one that includes the dream as valid autonomous image that
is not *our* image but an existing essence in its own right.
When we are asleep we are more aware that we are in the dream,
it is not in us. It is only when we are awake and more willful
that we take on the notion that the dream is in us. Hillman
would rather we see the dream image as living in-between,
in the mundus imaginalis, an imaginal world. This is not an
imaginary world of an individual, but a world that exist somewhat
independent of the individual. This used to be somewhat of
a radical notion, but with the advent of the Internet and
the growing abundance of virtual realities that exist outside
of us, it becomes clearer that there are realms that we participate
in, but do not fully control alone. However, the mundus imaginalis
is not controlled like computer mediated virtual reality where
groups of people contribute somewhat consciously. The mundus
imaginalis is more like the world of Greek gods, inhabited
by powers that can enlighten us, frighten us, and seize control
of us through the parts of our personality that remain forever
beyond our control. Its a realm that we continually live in,
but of which we are not very aware.
The importance for us here
is that this view breaks up the mind-body split into a neo-platonic
three way split of 1. matter/empirics/concrete ---- 2. imaginal/soul/psyche
---- 3. ideal/abstract/spirit. Psyche in Greek means 'butterfly'
and in this system psyche, like the butterfly, hovers between
the material world and the abstract sky of spirit. It also
connects them. Our minds or imagination interpret the material
world and its relationship with the ideal world. And in the
other direction, we interpret the ideal world and attempt
to create it in the material world though our imagination,
our perspectives.
This is also how psyche gets
a bad name. She operates by taking what is and bending it,
twisting it, distorting and folding in, unfolding out. She
can fool us and deceive us about the world and our relationship
with it. These same procedures can also create new perspectives.
But if everything we see and
understand is a perspective from this middle zone, how can
we ever escape this hall of mirrors? Hillman's suggestions
to listen to the forces as they manifest to us can lead us
to know more about the realm itself and its inhabitants, but
it also sucks us deeper into the soul. For a dreamwork that
is interested in exploring the soul, this may be enough. True,
Hillman's soul is more a cultural thing, out there and surrounding
us as much as in us. However, for a dreamwork that wants to
connect with the material world, the political world, the
social world, this relation building with images, in or out,
though vital, will not be enough.
Hillman's attack on using
dreams as representations of something other than themselves
seems to lead to a kind of theatre of the unconscious which
parades itself through all aspects of life, dispensing thoughts,
feelings and actions to individuals who no longer can do much
but act out the individuation of these powers.
At times, this is exactly
what is needed. In dreamwork that connect image and body,
for example, like Gendlin's Focusing or Arnold Mindell's process
psychology, the is an increase in the fluxion or flow of mind/body/emotions.
The dreamworker listens to his/her images with the ear of
the body, and gives voice and movement to processes that are
often blocked. I feel that one of the keys to this work is
the shift from representational work to a process of making
connections. Not singular connection, not conscious connections,
but swarms of connections, multiplicities of connections,
connections that break into the normally rigid channels and
create disjunctive synthesis, connections that are themselves
in-process of making more connections rather than consolidating
territorialized representations.
I feel that many dreamwork
programs can get at this real level of the dream, though their
theories cannot, or more accurately, have not. Freud gave
us the technique of free association, for example, which allows
for the images and emotions remembered about the dream to
begin to speak again with polyvocity. And yet, at just the
moment he released the dream image, he again theorized its
meaning back into a pre-assigned object. Free association
is seen as leading backwards up a chain of associations to
a singular cause of the dream. Carl Jung was deeply aware
of the many voices and trajectories of the soul and knew one
didn't have to follow up the chain of associations to get
at a profound level. And yet his techniques to bring people
in contact with the polyvocity of life get overcoded by the
project of the integration or alignment of the Self, a teleological
being that guides all the multiple becomings and thus tends
to wreck their true freedom. For these voices need a complete
indetermination, from the future or the past, to establish
legitimate connective syntheses that will provide novel trajectories.
However, I don't want to fully
develop a postmodern dreamwork here, but rather to investigate
the problem with answering the simple question, "Do dreams
have meaning?" (Continued
In Part 4...)
(Meaning of Dreams Pt 1)
(Meaning
Of Dreams Pt 2)
(Meaning
Of Dreams Pt 3)
(Meaning
Of Dreams Pt 4)
| Authors Details: Richard Wilkerson
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