What Dream Awareness Suggests

Webster’s sensible definition of being conscious is “perceiving, apprehending, or noticing with a degree of controlled thought or observation.” Whatever we experience in dreams falls short of that. Missing from dream awareness is Webster’s trailing phrase pointing to controlled thought or observation. In my own memories of dreams, I am always seemingly in motion; I have the feeling of being hurled or pushed along. I never stop to consider; never say, “Hold on a sec” and then examine something carefully. The process is passive—that of a leaf being carried by the wind. Indeed when the observations cause genuine thought to surface, the end is sure to follow in a moment. There are, of course, times like that in the waking state as well; the option to cry “Stop!” is, however, always present. And when I do stop the dream also ends, that is to say the automatic flow comes to an end. In a way I do wake up—being already, technically, awake.

That moment—the moment of awakening, the summoning of “controlled thought”—marks a transition from what psychology has come to call unconsciousness but might be more precisely labeled automatic or habitual behavior, also as identified behavior. When I’m watching some movie or program on TV, and all is going well, meaning that the writer-producer-director has managed to make me believe in the action enough so that I willingly, passively follow along, I am really dreaming—or it comes to the same thing. But then, when the situation suddenly jumps the shark, as the phrase has it—when I notice something I simply can’t believe or will not accept as legitimate—ah! there comes that moment again! I am awake. The identification is broken.

A quite similar process takes place when I engage in idle musing on some subject—thus letting the mind run along in neutral, presenting associations, digressions, whatever comes down the pike. Such a process is the opposite of “controlled thought,” of course—even if a problem, goal, or intention is vaguely present in the mind. Then along comes a particular thought or image or memory—and something in me responds to it by waking up. Aha! I’ve recognized something significant in this more or less pointless flowing. Here is something of value. I take hold of it. The musing then, of course, comes to an end.

Where do those thoughts come from? They’re from my memory. Are they all from memory? The question is idle because we cannot tell. The unconscious, therefore, (sometimes elevated to the Unconscious), is mostly habit and memory. Neither is particularly awesome or grand. When the personal unconscious is elevated into a kind of autonomous province, or enlarged by an even deeper layer into Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious, it begins to serve as a very fecund sort of realm. We populate it with equally autonomous archetypes and endow it with higher wisdom. It turns into a powerful, dynamic, multi-dimensional Rorschach blot useful in explaining anything. But in fact—and until someone can actually demonstrate how ancestral memories could possibly be present in us—the dream or the musing may just be us, inattentive for the moment. And Brigitte wisely suggests, the Collective Unconscious may be explained as our own memories of the culture as a whole, what portions of it we’ve managed to absorb.

The most striking aspect of dreams is precisely their quality of mindless flowing—but with the content of thought-fragments artfully woven into scenes. By whom or by what? The truth is that we don’t genuinely understand the layers that lie beneath genuine consciousness—as we do not really understand how the body manages its vast coordination of cells and its intra-cellular repairs, etc. Something in our dreams triggers that flow of thought. Here, also, we know too little. Is the brain rotating through recent thoughts? Or does the soul perceive realities somewhere that draw associations from our idle brain? No way to tell—unless we’ve had lucid dreams. And if lucid, are they really dreams? What I am quite sure of, however, is that consciousness is the genuine state of being a person; we are not the tips of some submerged grand-wisdom iceberg. The superior is above us, not below. Not that there is anything wrong with habits or with memory. With either one defective, keying this post would prove impossible.