Dream Dynamics

I am becoming more and more convinced that a very common although always unique pattern of waking-dreams shows where the soul goes during sleep.

These are dreams in which I’m traveling but now I’m going home. The problem always is that I have a pretty good sense of the general direction in which “home” lies; I’m also aware of certain landmarks and, generally, the lay of the land. But then, as I set out, I discover that the landmarks have changed. I get lost. In consequence all sorts of complications arise; for example I discover that I have no money for the train. In due time, sometimes abruptly, sometimes gradually, the landscape becomes ever more ugly, ever more urban, “industrial,” unpleasant, dark, and dangerous. Eventually, in midst of this—and often “this” is some kind of conflict—I wake up.

A kind of parallel floated into my mind this morning. If in this dimension we haven’t the faintest idea of how to get to the “higher” world, it makes sense that being in the higher world we may experience the same problem going in the other direction. Finding our way into the higher, or, more precisely put, simply finding ourselves over there, happens smoothly because the body is shutting down for the night in sleep. One part of that shut-down is memory formation. We don’t remember the process; for all I know it might be very pleasant. At best we recall dream-like imagery as we fall asleep. If that imagery is very vivid and we pay attention to it, wakefulness results and the “scene” abruptly disappears. But going in the other direction, we remember the confusing process of re-entry because the brain, this time, is already half alert.

Today’s case is quite banal but illustrative. The hand on which my head lay had become twisted in sleep and had started to hurt. I discovered that as the cause of my awakening after a rather involved process, as above, of “going home.” You might say that the body needed a conscious assist to stop this minor trauma, and the wandering soul was somehow notified. It had to “go home.” 

Now it is not at all surprising that this process of return conjures up scenes of deterioration, density (as in “urban”), industrialization (our bodies are vast industries), and the like. We are descending from a region of freedom into one of necessity. On waking we re-enter the world of boxes, the phrase Carl Jung used after a near-death experience of his own following a heart problem in advanced age.† We don’t find it pleasant—although, on awakening, we feel a kind of relief; but then we are already used to living in the world of boxes—and our memories of that other world are largely absent.

Memory, in this context, produces interesting puzzles, but a closer look requires too much space. Another time. What I would note here is the rare but well-established body of reports on so-called lucid dreaming. These are people who, for as yet undiscovered reasons, retain, or in the dream itself regain, a link to the brain’s memory-forming machinery. They can therefore experience dreams as the rest of us cannot. They are also, you might say, more present, in the dream while the ordinary person remains disassociated. I’ve reported on a famous case here, the experiences of a prominent psychiatrist, Frederick van Eeden (link). He reported the recurring phenomenon of meeting inferior beings at his own reentry.

The realm we appear to visit while asleep would seem to be the real world—thus richer in dimensions than our own realm of three-spaces-and-one-time—but not its higher reaches; thus it seems to be an intermediate geography. The confusing character of dreams may come from the fact that it does, in fact, possess additional aspects not available to people forced to see through the world past the blinkers of the physical. And in that world the soul appears to gets its refreshment while, in this one, the body gets its rest. Denied those restorative daily visits in sleep deprivation, quite horrific results arise, not least death. We must die, daily, before we die.

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†In Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, written with Aniela Jaffé.