Dreams: Winding Down

In that most dreams appear to be produced by autonomous activities of our brain—as it drifts off or becomes more active again—dreamland seems to be a much less promising route into the border zone than, say, paranormal phenomena or, in general, more conscious experience.

The exception here appears to be the precognitive dream—until you realize that the subject is a cul-de-sac. At best such dreams set down a marker. The marker itself is useful—but limited. It says: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Yes. But you can’t get at them. Attempts to do so produce monstrosities. J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time serves as an illustration; so does P.D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum. People like me will wander off into these thickets just to see what they might hold; but what such excursions usually reveal are the temperamental leanings of their authors. In these cases my own intuition rears up in protest. Dunne spatializes time so that he can do his engineering with neat graphs. Ouspensky imagines a kind of infinite universe, not unlike that produced by the many-worlds theory; every possible choice already preexists within a vast multi-dimensional matrix. So does every choice that derives from that one. And all others from each of the siblings. Ad infinitum. Our actual lives thus become a tracing out of one possible path among trillions. Both J.W. and P.D. produce instances of a kind of violence: they force something clearly transcendent into the narrow confines of our realm. No. Precognition is a marker. It says: There is more. But you stop here.

Carl Jung took another tack. He thought he had discovered a vast Collective Unconscious (CU) that, paradoxically, is the reality behind consciousness. The very logic of this reveals its New Age flavoring, its “emergent” sort of character, its evolutionary creation ex nihilo. In Jung’s lexicon, indeed, consciousness is somewhat inferior in character to the Unconscious which latter, in his hands, looks more and more god-like, if, to be sure a pagan god of nature.

Jung viewed dreams as ways of exploring that nebulous realm—and that nebulous realm as spewing out content, almost like lava. The problem, it seems to me, is that waking consciousness, if rendered into symbols but detached from its concrete objects—those that in our waking states render the world objective and real—that consciousness, thus uprooted, becomes a vast Rorschach blot onto which one can project, and from which one can obtain, anything one pleases. Jung used the CU in that way constantly. It became a deus ex machina for him. But there is no independent fixed point of reference from which to judge it, no court of appeals before which the CU’s strange judgments may be presented for resolution.

In summary, then, dreams appear to be, with exceptions, a form of inferior mental activity. Their magical character comes from two sources: their spontaneity on the one hand and their symbolical presentation on the other. The latter really means picture language. The magic that we project into the dream actually comes from the conscious mind and its own pleasurable marvel or its terrors. The dream itself just twirls its magical show without awareness.

The exceptions prove the rule. Significant dreams strongly suggest something transcendental, either the action of an agency (clear meaning) or of an environment beyond our grasp (time distortions). Neither kind of exceptional dream, however, lends itself to any kind of empirical explanation. They require speculative approaches.