In a recent post I’ve speculated about entering the sleep state. There I theorized that as we leave the body behind, as our body quiets down, indeed as higher ranges of mentation shut down, we enter a more subtle world. Today I want to look at the reverse of that, the process of awakening. Here analysis is more difficult because, I think, awakening has multiple and diverse forms. Quite arbitrarily I’ll suggest three broad categories of awakening—not in the least implying that these exhaust the range.
1. Our brain awakens. This means that mental processes, consciousness, resumes. We start to mull things, but more or less passively, thus in the same manner as we might when setting off on a drive to the store. Idle thoughts, immediate concerns or memories, are freely associating. As in the dream state so in idle waking states, this isn’t really thinking; it is the stream of consciousness. As awakening approaches, the stream resumes its flow. Depending on the situation, we may experience this sort of mulling as a story or sorts, meaning that images are present; or, alternatively, images may be at best peripheral; in that latter case the thoughts have a conceptual framing; they’re words colored by feelings, but the abstract qualities are to the front—as indeed they always are in the waking state.
2. External events draw our attention. This may take the form of an abrupt awakening, thus as when we hear a sharp noise, fall out of bed, or someone shakes us awake. The stimulus for awakening is some event, in other words. The brain may first show us the stimulus in a picture story. Thus a loud knocking noise produced by the wind banging a shutter may be represented by a scene of some man hammering. This combination of external stimulus and its internal dream depiction is sometimes explained as the brain’s attempt to resist awakening. The parsimonious explanation is simply that dream-thought is symbolical and uses images, and before we wake up to hear the banging, we think of it (and see it) as hammering. We tend to see living agents as responsible for stimuli—rather than inanimate phenomena like the wind.
3. Our body awakens and we reenter it. This third case is much more speculative than the other two and is the point of my focus today. In my case it takes the form of a meandering journey—always through a vast city or a great hospital. Perhaps I ought to reverse this exposition and say that I frequently awaken in the morning after convoluted dreams which are journeys (through a city, hospital), and I interpret these as reentering the body. Let me get into this third case in more detail.
Such dreams have a uniform structure but an endless variation of detail. I’m always underway and trying to get somewhere. That somewhere is always “home,” but there isn’t anything like a realistic picture of my actual house in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, inside my dream thoughts. The journey isn’t realistic in that sense at all. In those cases where I’m in a building—and invariably it is a huge one and I interpret it to be a hospital—I’m trying to find somebody in the hospital, but this person has no identity. Other elements of the structure are: (1) crowds of people with members of which I interact; (2) a frustration because I have a sense of the direction I’m supposed to follow, but nonetheless I still don’t know the way; and (3) as the dream’s end approaches (but I’m unaware that the end is coming), the crowds get ever more dense, the route I’m following narrows. Finally I find myself facing a claustrophobically tight opening I’m supposed to go through. Invariably I refuse to go forward. And in that moment I wake up.
I used to interpret that claustrophobic “closing in” as due to loss of breath in snoring; and, indeed, that might be the best explanation. But in paying close heed to such dreams over the last year or so, I’ve noticed that I wake up feeling perfectly fine on awakening, not out of breath at all. This has led me to theorize, and that’s all that it can be, of course, that reentering the body, which from a spirit perspective would appear as a vast city or building as I approach it, means a narrowing, a confinement, the loss of a much greater freedom that, until reentry, I enjoyed in the spirit realm.
This reminds me of Carl G. Jung’s account of his near death experience in the wake of a heart attack, related in his autobiography, written with the help of Aniela Jaffé (Memories, Dreams, Reflections). In that account, compelled to return to “life,” Jung recounts bitter feelings about being forced to return to the confining world of “boxes.” As in my earlier post (here) I spoke of the stunning vistas of magical landscapes that open as we fall asleep—but conscious enough to remember the “opening”—so we may also find a panicky resistance to reentry. Paradoxically, awakening from such a dream, it is a relief to have escaped the dilemma. But the truth may be that we actually suffer the confinement that we thought we had escaped.
Posts of this kind may appear to be excessively subjective. To this I would respond that in the “sciences” of the Borderzone, such accounts as this one serve as data. The responsibility is to render the experience as accurately as possible, not least its interpretation, which is an important element. This sort of thing may actually have public value and has nothing to do with me as such.
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