Steadiness

I note (with what I hope will soon be sang froid) that a state of steadiness is only present when hormones do not flood the body. Some dreams produce emotional states, indeed the most complete, because in dreams awareness does not mitigate experience. I awoke from one of those emotional dreams this morning. A hard look showed that my dream arose from a more or less routine reflection on the state of our collective life—a reflection which, when no one’s present to stare it down, can indeed flood the body with anxious emotions. I feel for animals. In them such states must come and go unobstructed, awake or asleep. It is the order of nature: the inner always reflecting the outer—but the outer is not just the inorganic, the winds, the temperature, the skies, the dry, the wet. It includes also the living creatures and their agitation or lack thereof.  Steadiness is being above, meaning beyond, this lower realm, even while within it. But bodies are physical, they need their sleep. The self goes away on long perambulations in heavenly landscapes. It is on returning to the body (no doubt with a sigh) that it encounters psychic states brought about by recent memories, just surfacing again, which flood the tissues with hormonal discharge. And then it’s time to calm everything down. Such observations lead to the notion that beings in bodies have a three-fold nature: body, soul, and spirit. Only the spirit is steady because it isn’t influenced by the endless flux of this dimension.

Managing Dreams

I went to sleep last night giving myself a strong instruction: None of those horrid waking dreams, please! Such dreams are always about “going home,” but I’m usually lost in an urban landscape, and the landscape always gets ever more horrid. Then, as bad conditions escalate, I wake up in an effort to get away. The process is more fully described here.

Well, during the night that followed I had only one waking dream. In it I was at home and heard the doorbell ring. It had a single chime, meaning the back door—where craftsmen usually ring the bell—rather than multiple chimes, meaning the front door. Then I had the image of a huge yellow, big-wheeled shovel on the driveway. This woke me up.

Evidently “myself” had gotten the message—and when the time had come for me to wake up, it woke me up without the help of horror stories. You might say. Having such a shovel put to work in my yard would, of course, be a bit of a tale of woe!

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.

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.

If Dreams Are Thoughts…

…and that is what I think they mostly are, dangers arise because the contents of dreams have a distinctly objective feel. By this I mean that as we dream we never doubt the reality of the projection we experience, even when the dream performs amazing jumps. The dream reporter will then say: “The next thing you know, I was looking at a river…” but such abrupt transitions are accepted. And when we become aware of the dream’s strangeness—or real thought is required for some aspect of it—we wake up.

The danger lies in misunderstanding certain dreams as messages—not from our own thoughts but from some mysterious beyond. Most dreams are just a streaming of associative thought rendered as dynamic images. To be sure the thoughts of some, asleep as well as when awake, are circling around arcane subjects that, rendered in dream imagery, produce fantastic visions. The skill of the sleeping mind in producing visual renditions of abstraction is quite admirable as well as occasionally clumsy and amusing—once understood. Alongside dangers are boons. Sometimes we solve problems in our dreams. A famous example of such a boon was Friedrich Kekulé’s vision of a serpent biting its own tail, which came to him in a revery and helped him understand the structure of benzene, a subject that had long plagued him.

The absence of genuine consciousness in dreams—meaning detached self-awareness—is the most interesting aspect of ordinary dreaming. We appear to experience dreams as if we were embodied presences in them, but altogether absent is even a hint of how we would react if we were really present. If now as I am sitting in my backyard writing in the sun I would be suddenly at the airport waiting at a gate, I would certainly immediately feel that something was drastically wrong. But if this thought recurred in a dream, I would be at the airport; and, at that airport, all kinds of signs, elaborately realistic, would signal some kind of trouble.

These thoughts arise because, recently, I was revisiting Carl Jung’s conceptualization of the Unconscious, a realm peopled by archetypes. That theory arises from dream analysis. And it occurred to me then that unconsciousness is the chief marker of the dreamer; the dream itself is usually accessible enough. The really weird dreams are those in which we dream the future—and, sure enough, a short while later the dream event actually happens. But if a person dreams that God has told him to do this or that, a little cold water splashed on the face will not be out of place.

Now as for lucid dreaming, on that subject I have only hear-say. I know what “lucid” means in the waking state. I’d have to experience a lucid dream before I could judge. Some people might consider lucid what I do not. There is nothing like tasting for yourself.

The Demons at the Border

Waking dreams in my case very often have the character of a “return.” There is a trip in the background, a clear sense of heading home, sometimes a sense of urgency—because something needs to be done when I arrive. “Return” or “trip” are also marked by the presence of trains, trolleys, buses, roads, and the like. Very often the surroundings are pleasant but, as I proceed, they become urban, industrial, slum-like, crowded, and ever-more depressing. A sense of being lost arises as well. The landscape keeps changing. Home is “over there”—but then the expected landmark isn’t where it ought to be. And quite often as the chaos increases, some kind of very unpleasant encounters also follow. In this morning’s waking dream, for example, I found myself confronted by people trying to collect a debt I did not remember owing. After long discussions it suddenly occurred to me that if I had borrowed money, I must have signed some documents. I began demanding the documents and—unless they were immediately produced—I threatened to hire lawyers. And with that energetic thought I found myself awake—angry but awake.

The Dutch psychiatrist, Frederick van Eeden (1860-1932), the man who coined the phrase “lucid dream,” also had such dreams; he recorded some 352 of them over a period of 14 years. Toward their end, as he reports, they often morphed into ordinary dreams. And in such situations he sometimes encountered demons. Van Eeden was not asserting the reality of demons per se. They might or might not be real. But he gave an interesting definition. “I call demoniacal those [dream] phenomena which produce on us the impression of being invented or arranged by intelligent beings of a very low moral order.” For more see this paper of his—in which he also describes how to deal with such creatures.

Old van Eeden came back into my memories this morning as I reflected on that unpleasant waking dream of mine. Such dreams get one’s attention. The episode with the would-be debt collectors, within the dream, took place after I’d finally finished my trip and I was “home,” home because Brigitte lived there, but at that moment she was “out.”

It occurred to me that those “returns” might actually be genuine—the return of the soul to the body after some excursion outside of it. That return is usually from a splendid place (a plane that some, like van Eeden, experience lucidly) to the realm of matter, the coarse, the cosmic slums, as it were, the turbidity of the pools. We must return but aren’t eager. And at that lowly level might be assemblies of those “left behind” after they died and still playing their wretched games.

It was Ibn el Arabi who wrote that in some ways the experience of dreams and of the higher realms have similarities—but dreams are an inferior and distorted perception of what lies beyond them. The lucid, perhaps? Here is how van Eeden describes the human state in lucid dreams:

In these lucid dreams the reintegration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper remembers day-life and his own condition, reaches a state of perfect awareness, and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition. [See earlier link]

Both the ordinary and the lucid dream-worlds are symbolic, according to van Eeden. He defines symbol as follows: “A symbol is an image, or an imaginary event, standing for a real object or event whereto it has some distant resemblance. Now the invention of a symbol can only be an act of thought—the work of some intelligence.” Thus it is one—or many—minds that create environments and situations in the disembodied states we sometimes “dream.” Hence the “demonic” phenomena in waking dreams may be the projection of intelligent beings of “a very low moral order.” My own dream diaries have lots of examples; in virtually every such case, what ultimately wakes me up is the distinct feeling that “this isn’t me.”

Anne Boleyn

I woke up this morning with a dream. It concerned the deadlines of a book the author or translator of which was a certain clever but unreliable figure called Buleyn. Book deadlines used to be a major part of my life and still occasionally if only distantly worry me. In this dream someone asks me to call Buleyn to put the pressure on. I don’t approve of this request; I suspect that bugging our author will have precisely the wrong effect. So I refuse. But in the dream the name then catches my attention. I don’t know why, but (still in the dream) it fascinates me. I repeat it to myself, with emphasis: BULL-EYN, BULL-EYN. And doing so I visualize the name in letters. Such mental efforts, needless to say, invariably wake me up—and did so this morning. But the sound remained on my mind; the letters were there too. Within a minute an  association surfaced. Anne Boleyn. This made me look up that lady’s history after my breakfast.

Morning dreams, as I call those that wake me—and the sun’s already up—usually deal with mundane matters, looking ahead. At present a book is just some slogging steps from publication in our realm, and the dream refers to an already resolved problem with one lady author. What didn’t fit here was that name.

The thought then occurred. If this was a precognitive dream—in which, alongside morning thoughts I also saw the immediate future, thus reading about Anne Boleyn—it was a very circular dream. I’d never have looked up the name had not the dream brought her to mind. But what then comes to mind is that, most likely, we might be in a detached dimension in our dreaming where Time has a character quite different from that which we experience in waking consciousness. Along with processing recent memories, I was also seeing something that was still ahead, the associations of past and future fusing. Therefore a future action produced its own cause. The proof of that is found in the dream itself where my peculiar fascination with that name resulted in my repeating it, trying to spell it. Which is, truth to tell, always an issue, for me, with that name. It is pronounced Boleen, with emphasis on the “e” sound. I prefer Bolayn, which might be spelled Bollein, as indeed that name was sometimes spelled, e.g. in the illustration of the Queen by Holbein.

Can the future act upon the past? I think it can. We are able, occasionally, to see events in this dimension from another more generous perspective. And then, as it were, one thing leads to another.

Precognition: Some Curious Trails

If you looked for a thinker who has expended serious thought on precognitive dreaming—and did so before this 2011—the one name that would surely surface is that of John William Dunne (1875-1949). Since publishing his book, Dreamer, Andrew Paquette joins Dunne as another.

J.W. Dunne, born in Ireland, worked as an aeronautical engineer in England. His book, in multiple (and drastically-changing) editions, is An Experiment with Time (1927) arose from multiple experiences of his own in which he dreamt of events that, later, actually took place—both private and very public events. His theory, Serialism, was an attempt to explain it.

Paquette is an artist of some renown, with multiple achievements in comic books, video games, teaching, the fine arts, and as an author and teacher in computer graphics. He is also a psychic of obviously high gifts—a very well-written report of which experience is his book, Dreamer. He discovered these talents following a precognitive dream, the first of many (see my last post here).

I could, but almost hesitate to, add a third name to the list, that of the Russian, P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), who developed his own theory in A New Model of the Universe. Ouspensky did not address the subject of precognitive dreams narrowly, but his model, presented in the book mentioned above, appeared at about the same time as Dunne’s book (1931).

The first two (Dunne, Paquette) both assume that the future we see in dreams actually exists, with the implication that free will is at minimum problematical. Ouspensky provides a model of time in which this preexistent future is potentially present, but its manifestation (actualization) is due in part to choices. Therefore in Ouspensky’s scheme, the future we dream can be changed—if we make other choices—but the event that we actually live was also there, hiding in potential right alongside the more painful alternative that we avoided by acting differently. We’re dealing here with very original people; therefore it may not come as a total surprise that Ouspensky believed in eternal return, thus that he lived the same life, over and over again—a fact to which he attributed his experiences of déjà vu, whereas others in turn explain that sensation by saying that we’ve dreamt the future the night or the week before but just don’t remember the dream. Sorry, but that’s the nature of this subject…

Dunne and Ouspensky both think in terms of geometrically arranged times. Dunne projects a serial succession, one time existing above the other—so that from T2 you can see the entirety of T1; thus from T2 the observer sees T1’s life all at once, from childhood to death, all at one glance. Dunne imagined an infinite regress of times—and staunchly defended this heterodoxical view. Ouspensky’s model, presented on pages 343-406 of his book (Vintage, 1971) presents an infinite time in which a multi-dimensional matrix contains an infinite number of lines, each linking points of possibility. One life is thus a single branching line traced through this (to the human mind unimaginably complex) matrix of possibilities. The line is what we actualize; other possibilities, other lives we might have lived, remain in the matrix. (One is reminded of the many-world theory we owe to physicist Hugh Everett (1957)—with the difference that in Everett’s scheme, each world tangibly exists.)

Alas, precognition is a genuine problem. If we see the future, something must be there to see. Is it a tangibly existing hard real something? Ouspensky avoids the problem of free will—the existence of which we assert from experience—by moving preexistence to a quasi-real matrix of potential. You might say that he reifies Aristotle’s potential. But if we accept hard preexistence, we must find another explanation for free will. One solution Paquette presents is that we choose to live a life, a life shown to us, in the sublime world, and in great detail, before we’re born. Thus we exercise choice outside this life but not in it. But Paquette is no doctrinaire; his focus is on rich actual experiential data. He reports precognitive dreams that come out almost, but not precisely, as dreamt; thus choice is exercised here. Sometimes he says that everything’s fixed; he also asserts that we are here to develop. He does not resolve the contradictions that thus sprout here and there; no coherent cosmology has yet (I’m still not finished with his book) emerged that might explain how we can possibly learn anything in a life in the midst of which the most crucial element of agency, choice, is denied us except as an illusion.

The fully worked-out models all reflect a modern form of thought in which it is not at all common to ponder such divine powers as omniscience—or to take them seriously. At the same time, the actual experience of precognitive dreams frequently features instances showing that (1) they do indeed happen, (2) are confirmed later in very large part, but (3) then sometimes do not end tragically, as they did in the dream. This would suggest that the assertion of a fixed future must be opened up in some way, thus minimally as Ouspensky opened it. Another way to do that is to suggest that agencies may be involved—other than ourselves, that precognitive dreams may be in the category of communications. Let me flesh that out a little more.

The best way to do this is to imagine that the future may actually be visible—thus projected to the eyes of minds—without being tangibly there. At some resolution all events and things are energy in motion, at all kinds of levels of coarseness and subtlety, mental and physical. Our reality may be more transparent to higher beings than ourselves. God, of course, is omniscient, but angels (not least guardian angels) may be multiscient, or much-knowing, just eyeballing the vast energetic flow and, furthermore, communicating instantly with one another. And if you hate the very notion of an angel, why not every human being but not in our ordinary waking selves but genuinely near-angelic when we are asleep. Either way, the future may already be here, in projection, and the distant future as well as the near—but the nearer the more detailed. And our sleeping selves may see it (or may have it framed as dreams by guardian angels). And some of us are more gifted, alert, or open to these things than others—and the dramatic is more likely to catch our attention than the ordinary.

What we are seeing, then, are patterns of the future, not the actual rooted and cemented tangible reality of it. Therefore it remains open to change, certainly at the level of personal detail, which is what matters to individuals. It is simply a general kind of communication of reality, in projection, which is present quite naturally based on the very design of reality. And if apprehended can sometimes be a source of help in need.

One of the more interesting aspects of the paranormal, and Paquette notes this fact in his book, is that willful attempts to produce psychic results tend to fail dramatically. A prominent explorer of this phenomenon is J.E. Kennedy (for some of his papers, see this link). One aspect of this well-documented observation is that paranormal phenomena may possibly be a means of communication, form beyond the borderzone, to humanity here, to indicate that something more exists than we can actually see. It’s there like water, but nobody is forced to drink. And precognition may be a means of signaling that fact to many people in times when great disasters loom ahead—already clearly visible from “over there,” not fixed in every detail, but visible, from patterns already forming now.

Notes on Paquette's Dreamer

A fascinating book, by Andrew Paquette, titled Dreamer (O Books, 2011). All through the years I’ve complained about the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg saying that it is all analysis, not enough raw material. Well, here we have a case of all raw material, not enough analysis. Paquette is a gifted psychic, by profession an artist—commercial, fine, etc. Mostly in dream-scapes, he reports on experiences that range far beyond the borderzone. He discovered his talents by dreaming the future, rather dramatically, while working in the Netherlands. He dreamt of a hold-up in which he was killed, shot, died, and rushed back to New York as a spirit to his then girl friend, later wife, to tell her of his misfortune—still in his dream. And then woke up—still in the Netherlands and very much alive. Some time later the event actually took place, but, in the midst of it, remembering the dream with great shock as, again, two men, in the same locale, actually took hold of him,  he managed to escape his assailants.

Here we have a classical dilemma. He dreamt the future with one outcome. It happened, and identically, more or less, in real life—but only up to a point. Then the recall of the dream itself served as the cause of his action to escape the consequences. So how do we explain what appears to be a contradiction. The future is visible, hence apparently fixed. But the future is changeable, hence subject to action arising from knowledge and will.

In a much more minor way, I’ve been concerned with dreams, including the precognitive kind, for more years (I think) than Paquette has lived. My own powers are drastically muted compared with his, but I’m open enough to recognize the same objective reality over there that he reports. Multiple posts on this blog deal with some of my observations.

Thus far I haven’t penetrated very far into this modest but rich book (less than 300 pages). I may have additional notes on Dreamer as time goes on.

The Necessary “Over Against”

Sometimes, when I wake from a dream, the thought occurs: “Lord, I sure hope that life after death isn’t like dreaming.” The maddening aspect of dreaming is that there is no genuine “over against.” Everything appears to issue from the dreaming self—the scenery, the characters, the action. I do not consciously feel the process whereby this generation actually takes place; but what I sometimes become aware of is that I can modify the situation, never much but, yes, just a little, and always in my favor. Objects sometimes appear just when I need them; in my falling dreams I always manage to slow down and land smoothly, and so on. But these more or less conscious interventions are infrequent; and most of the time they wake me up.

Most characteristically of all, in dreams—where the environment is clearly unstable and unreal, however awesome, beautiful, confusing, or threatening—consciousness of the kind I call hard (thus a distanced, separated, observing, judging self-consciousness) is also entirely absent. That mental “over against” is also conspicuously lacking. And when it does awaken, as it tends to when things get really hoary, the dream is doomed to end like the descent of a lead curtain.

The substance of dreams is clearly thought, associative thought. It can be quite complex thought, thus for instance a memory of some situation which also holds within it the conscious reaction to it that I had when I first lived it. The judgments I made about the situation, e.g., “That’s awful,” do not display as an abstract judgment, however, but are mirrored back in the arrangements which I see in the dream, awful, ugly arrangements. A great power of image-forming thus seems to reside at a level below that of consciousness. Not surprisingly, therefore, the mediaeval view was that the imagination is part of the sensory apparatus. Notions like Henry Corbin’s that imagination is a higher, spiritual power are not thereby denied; his thought may be rendered by saying that imagination also has a higher form of which the dreaming brain’s uncanny skills are a lower manifestation.

The substance of dreams is unreal because they’re memories—but dynamically manipulated. The dream self is also just a memory of our self as an experiencer—and equally dynamically reactive. Memory must be functioning or else the dream would not be remembered; the emotions arise because the body dumbly reacts to what it sees with hormonal responses. These responses are quite the same as (although stronger) those we get reading a novel or watching a show. The core self, in such situations, withdraws but does not entirely go away—hence if some jarring element intrudes, we protest; if not, we feel the sudden withdrawal of the semi-dream state when the credits begin to roll. And we’ll move our bodies just a little by way of marking a kind of awakening.

All this of course makes a very strong case for the materialistic view of consciousness—as I’ve noted here before. I reject that explanation because it is incomplete and does not comprehensively explain the entirety of our experience. But the materialistic view is well-founded in partial observation. The frontal lobes are sleeping, and the primitive brain plays; or, watching a show, the frontal lobes at least relax to let us enjoy the drama.

But if I’m right the question then arises: Where is that core self when we undergo our convoluted and often quite bizarre dream-experiences? It might have to be absent so that the body can recover from the stress of real awareness. It might be absent because it too needs to be refreshed in an environment where the stresses of materiality are gone and it can then breathe freely, as it were. What I don’t buy is that self-consciousness is merely a brain function. But if it is, I certainly don’t have to worry about spending my after-life in the tohu va-bohu of the dream tale that never ends, never stops, and my stupid self can never trust the ground on which it treads.

Ordinary Like a Salamander

Herewith a brief dream snippet just before I woke up this morning. In that dream four people were engaged in an exchange, two on one side, two on the other. I was one of one of the pairs. It was a case of strangers meeting one another, indeed the dream suggested that the couple across from us was culturally different. My companion was a woman; and, perhaps to counter a sense of unease that she felt, she began explaining what kind of people we were. She went on for a while and she ended by saying, “We’re just ordinary people, very ordinary.” Hearing this I heard myself say, “Yes, very ordinary—ordinary like a salamander.”

Theorizing: Awakening from Physical Sleep

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.

Theorizing: The Transition to Sleep

It seems to me that we may live our lives close to another kind of world, a more subtle one; but that world feels and looks much like our own. It may well be that we visit that realm in sleep—in deep rather than in REM sleep. Here is the speculation. We don’t remember our time in deep sleep because, while we are in bodies, what we remember must be stored using the brain’s intermediation. When the brain falls asleep, it stops storing experiences. At the same time, when the brain is awake, its noisy functioning prevents our linking to the more subtle memories in the state we inhabit during deep sleep. This view requires the idea that memories are not stored in tissue but in something like Sheldrake’s morphic fields.

The simple rule here is that we must be at least half-awake to form reliably retrievable memories while we’re in bodies. We are therefore half-awake when we dream; rapid eye movements (REM) attest to this fact. In transition to sleep, when hypnagogic vision sometimes briefly occur, the brain is still active enough to make a record the experience; but it is then in the process of shutting down its memory-storing activity. Therefore we only remember the beginnings of these visions. Those who remember them in toto have found the trick of keeping the brain minimally awake—minimally because, otherwise, the visions would be inaccessible. I’ll try to say more about this point.

I imagine the mechanics of this process as follows. Even to glimpse the subtle realm, the physical state must be in neutral; it cannot be very active. Under normal circumstances, thus ignoring special practices like meditation, we reach this quiet state only at the time when we’re going to sleep. I’ve noticed the following sequence.

1. I close my eyes and see a sort of darkness. It is not a uniform black totality; rather, it is darkness with patterns. In nine cases out of ten, after a brief period in this state sleep takes me away. Most instances of falling asleep never proceed past this stage.
2. If I maintain a kind of observant alertness during the first phase of darkness, I begin to perceive more and different patters. The new patterns are only minimally visual but they will have mental shapes. I signal that by putting the word “see” in quotes. Something suggests faces or figures, motions or moving patterns. The faces “seen” are not really made of light; they are more felt—but they’re also quite distinct. The same holds for whatever else I “see.” The darkness appears to be “populated.” Sometimes these patterns produce quite unpleasant visions, minimally vulgar, sometimes funny, sometimes violent. Ignoring these—sometimes willfully ignoring them—brings about the next phase.
3. In this, the third phase, I perceive dim light. It appears as a graying out of the darkness on the periphery of what we would call vision; sometimes it is ahead. A dim sense of light grey will then develop more luminosity. These patches may also have shapes, but not of any object—just bits of cloud or a circular shape.
4. Finally, and invariably startling me, the blackness abruptly vanishes. It is replaced by a panorama of vivid reality—usually outdoor scenes, landscapes, skyscapes, trees. This vision may also feature built-up structures, animals, people. The startling nature of this vision invariably, in my case, brings me awake. But as I’m shocked, as I’m surprised into awareness, the vision instantly disappears. And it is precisely this “awakening” that makes me realize that, a moment before, I was almost entirely detached from my physical surroundings, thus my awareness lying in bed with my eyes closed. That feeling had retreated far into the background, the attention entirely on the vision—be it of darkness, patterns, or dim light.
5. Now, curiously, this brief last stage of awakening also rapidly disappears. Vivid images return but, this time, more dimly defined, almost as if behind a thin veil; and, my attention being drawn by them, they are the last thing I hazily remember.

One more note on the first two phases. If thoughts are flowing during the first stage and are not stopped, they will transform into dream snippets and carry me away. Similarly, in the second state, if I permit the images to rouse me to mental commentary, I will become more awake, interrupting the process. To cause this sequence to take place, I therefore stop my associative mentation by focusing attention on simply seeing the bits of darkness in phase 1 or “seeing” the images in phase 2 without mental commentary.

All of this leads me to conclude that physical existence, including ordinary mentation, causes a great deal of noise. It comes from the body itself and from the brain’s activity as it perceives physical reality. As this noise diminishes, awareness of a subtler world emerges. But so long as the brain is still active enough to store memories, it will record what I perceive. And, I would emphasize, it also reacts to the appearance of these phenomena. If these are incongruous—like the startling appearance of a stunningly real landscape—they surprise the brain. In response it activates the body to a higher state of alertness. And that very alertness then breaks (interrupts, interferes with) the subtle perception.

All of the above illustrates that to make sense of this sequence of events requires various theoretical underpinnings which cannot be independently checked by third parties. I’m well aware of the fact that most people don’t experience this sort of thing frequently enough (if at all) to build what might be called a data base. I’ve had this experience many times before; therefore it makes me curious, indeed it all this fascinates me.

Now as for dreams, I’ve discussed those at various points in this blog at length. To provide a summary, I think dreams are the equivalent of waking-thought but experienced in half-awake states; and because those states are more primitive, as it were, the thoughts are rendered into animal forms: they’re translated into images. As the body comes awake, the first thoughts might, indeed, be about the visions the soul sees in the other world; or they may simply be memories last stored before going to sleep.

Dream Puzzle Revisited

My fascination with dreams never ends, but it has a wave-like pattern. The subject fades from view for a while until some dream snippet reminds me of the mystery again. One such snipped came this morning. Nothing dramatic is about to be unfolded. In the dream I was simply sitting on a concrete ledge idly playing with little balls made of soot or ashes, playing in a kind of mindless way. In the dream the very mindlessness of that activity surfaced into awareness; but with awareness suddenly present, I promptly woke up. Ninety times out of a hundred this sort of thing fades by the time I’m halfway down the stairs. Today it was still there—they were still there, those little balls of soot. Sometimes I just stand in the still dark kitchen waiting for the water to boil, the only light coming from above the stove; I’m in what is technically known as a “brown study.” (Where did that phrase originate?) And sometimes then I break that state and force the mind to concentrate.

Doing that this morning, and pondering that snipped with a stern frown on my face, it occurred to me that dreams produce splendid samples of consciousness without self-consciousness. What actually happens, I propose, is this:

As it is gradually aroused from deep and entirely unconscious sleep, the sleeping brain begins to process memories. The memories processed tend to be those of recent experiences—quite frequently thoughts of the night before. In this process the brain arranges what it finds lying about into the best possible patterns—almost as if it were trying to orient itself. The brain lacks visual inputs at this moment; the eyes are closed. Consequently it arranges whatever happens to be present into visual images. This arranging is, of course, a sequential process. And that sequence, that movement in time, is presented as a dynamism, as the “action,” of the dream. Whatever materials the brain thus arranges—remembered objects, actions, or thoughts—were accompanied by a mix of feelings when they happened in reality. The brain also integrates those feelings into the dream pattern. And those feelings then become the consciousness of the dream self.

Now the dream itself, of course, is stored in memory too. And when the self actually returns, when we wake up genuinely, we also become aware of that dream. And then it seems to us as a sequence of lived experience. When we tell the dream, we describe ourselves doing this, doing that, going here, driving a car, etc. — indeed much as above I described myself playing with balls of soot.

But what we do not notice in recalling dreams is the absence of self-consciousness in dreams. Or that, if self-consciousness is present, it is almost immediately followed by awakening.

Today’s dream snippet was as instructive as it was precisely because my brain wove a ridiculous picture. I don’t usually sit around for extended periods playing with marbles—much less marbles made of soot. The real self—wherever it might be during sleep—glimpsed this picture. Its incompatibility with my normal state of mind—and actions—aroused it. But when it becomes a presence, then dreams depart.

The real puzzle of dreams, I think, is focused right there. The puzzle is the absence of the self. Materialism has a very simple explanation—which fits the facts very nicely. There isn’t such a thing. The self is simply the top-most layer of the brain. During dreams it’s still inactive; the dream comes from the lower, the more primitive stem. That region can, if not with great precision, detect anomalies in experience—and when it does, it rouses the higher functions so that they can deal with the “emergency.” My cerebellum was thus smart enough to see that playing with soot-balls was not appropriate behavior; therefore it called the frontal lobe to report this misbehavior—and I promptly awoke.

What you see is what you get. All this makes pretty good sense. But I also see something else—experience something else. It is that the waking self is something quite distinctly and sharply different from any other physical experience I have. Consciousness has a unique quality that I simply cannot with any genuine conviction reduce to the same phenomenological basics as being hungry, thirsty, sleepy, sexy, scared, eager, hot, or cold. I’m also intellectually persuaded that all that I experience must in some way be capable of rational integration—thus that consciousness and meaning must have their own adequate explanation—much as biological or inorganic mechanisms do. Therefore the puzzle for me is where the self is when I dream or sleep. Monistic approaches (e.g., body and soul are sides of the same coin) don’t produce in me, as in so many others, a feeling of closure at all. Concerning where we might go in sleep, that subject I've at least tentatively explored here.

Mind-Produced Reality?

There is a mystical line of speculation suggesting that beyond the border, that side of life, what we see is the creation of our own minds. Suppose you, an elderly lady, die, and, having been brought up in the Christian tradition—and your conscience reasonably clear—you expect to be in heaven. Heaven is all things good and beautiful—hence you behold beauty, harmony, see lovely lights, hear splendid music. Or suppose that you’ve just been shot dead in a store that you were holding up, but you didn’t see the owner in the hallway, holding a rifle, and just as you try to pistol-whip the clerk, by way of saying “I mean business,” you’re shot, fall to the ground, crawl to the door of the store, and die on the sidewalk. Got it? Good. Now you, a hoodlum, old enough to know that hold-ups are a no-no, a vague conception of Christianity alive in your noodle too, over there, beyond the border, you don’t anticipate the best. Rather the opposite. This mystical speculation therefore suggests that you’ll see devils advancing on you, a sea of flame behind them silhouetting horns and three-pronged spears. You would say “Woe is me!” but, alas, you haven’t read enough to know that phrase. Instead you say, “Oh, shit.”

Now what about this notion that the mind creates reality?

I’m fairly convinced that the idea arose because we do seem to create reality in dreams. I’ve had the experience countless times, usually in quite banal dream situations. Here is one that I recall. In this dream I had to cut something out, a picture from a printed piece of paper. I was standing at a table then and, in dream memory, there was nothing on that table except a cup, pencils, and the sheet. But now I just reached to the left, over there, and sure enough a pair of scissors in my hand, but, I swear, it materialized, manner of speaking. It wasn’t there before. I noted this fact in the dream itself. Indeed that thought caused me to awaken. And I lay there thinking about it—and that’s why I even remember this snippet. But I’ve noted this phenomenon many times before. I think of people, and there they are. But other things far more outrageous also happen, not least—and everybody has experienced this—the scene suddenly changing, without any transitional state. People will say: I was gardening, and the next thing you know I’m in this, like bazaar…

Dream reality, in the dream, a little less so when remembered, precisely for the reasons just outlined, seems very real. But the progression of events convinces me that what we experience as concrete reality is thoughts expressed in three-dimensional picture form. Thus when I think of scissors, I hold them because I thought of them. The gardener is in a bazaar because an association, perhaps a memory, brought a bazaar to mind, a place where once she’d seen some tool she needed at that moment. The reason why scenes change abruptly is because they do. They do so in our head. I just thought of Kroger, a big fruit display. If I were asleep, I might be in that Kroger.

The thinking behind this theory—based on the dream although it is—is that outside of bodies our mind becomes our only home and that, in consequence, we are subject to its spontaneous productions whether we will it or not. The good will enjoy heavenly pleasures, the evil will be tortured forever. End of story.

Something in me dislikes this notion. Let me look and see what it is. The notion has no anchorage in anything except dream experience, and that I’ve managed to explain that to my own satisfaction. Furthermore, why would that be so? What, if anything, would that have to do with galaxies, say, or shells on sandy shores? For any real life beyond this frontier, the other side would have to have some kind of immovable, resistant reality by means of which we should be able to orient ourselves. Without an objective over-against, our own minds would have no meaning whatsoever. Do I think that the elderly lady and the hoodlum will have identical experiences over there? No, I don’t. But the notion that this whole fantastic universe exists merely so that, having spent a lifetime doing—whatever, you fill in the blanks—so that, thereafter, I can spend it reliving my brief jaunt at Woodstock in 1969—Naw. I find that preposterous.

Oh, by the way, just a figure of speech. Too old for Woodstock. And had I been the right age, I’d have been too busy doing something really fun…

Time Concept Goes Wobbly

Time is like a fortress, unassailable, impregnable—until the experience of precognition makes the concept go wobbly. This is no problem for those who dogmatically deny that precognition is possible. But if it has happened to them (it has for me), they have problems denying it. Precognition is also the only paranormal phenomenon that resists explanation by the ever-handy super-psi explanation (discussed here); thus it’s difficult to explain away.

It’s easy to see why. We feel time as a moving front and therefore do not feel that the future exists, now, in any sense. The raw material of future events is already here, enduring along, as it were, but events are waiting for causation in that nebulous land of potential. Time is thus a necessary part of causation because cause-effect relationships are sequential. Therefore no one can pick up precise, complexly-related features of the future from presently existing minds—by telepathy, for instance—no matter how advanced the telepathic power might be. For this reason I’ve thought for quite a while now that precognition is a genuine hard pointer to some kind of transcendental reality. The really good cases totally resist explanation by naturalistic assumptions. In Einstein’s universe, by way of contrast, time is a function of space and space a function of time. You don’t get one without the other. Can we even think a future space?

Good (believable) cases of precognition therefore force us to question either our own understanding of time or our concept of free will. Let’s take the latter and see where it leads.

If we jettison free will, we are able at least to hypothesize that past, present, and future coexist. If that is true, the future is already present, we just don’t see it. Everything is fixed because everything happens deterministically—and therefore must be. No choice, no alternatives. The future then is totally predictable because it is produced deterministically. J.W. Dunne, one oft-cited thinker about this subject, suggested in the early editions of his An Experiment with Time that if we could move ourselves into the next dimension over, into a time above our time, we would be able to see our lives as a whole, from beginning to end, much as, from a high hill, we can see a whole train progressing east to west, say, on the plain below. Dunne believed in a serial time, a layered time. I came to realize that Dunne mustn’t have thought his example all the way through. Foolishly, perhaps, I did.

Yes. I made a real effort to picture the situation that Dunne described. And I realized that I wouldn’t see a body. I would see a very strange snake formed of endlessly many instances of my body. Let me explain. Take tonight. I would see myself as I was an hour ago (watching TV), as I am now (at the computer), as I will be in an hour (lying in bed). But I would also see my body rising from the chair, moving up the stairs, would see myself slightly advanced at every second, but still connected to the earlier versions, one for each of my slightest movements, each of which would still be there. I’d be a continuous snake. Indeed, the whole house would be filled with my body—up near the ceiling too, because once I painted the ceilings. This giant snake would grow smaller as I moved ever farther into the past and ultimately I would see myself emerging from my mother’s body. — Or, to change the example, the earth wouldn’t appear as a globe but, rather, as a solid ring of many, many earths, all overlaid, forming a ring around the sun. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be able to see anything because the light of the sun would still be there, the photons would also be present at every instant of time, and the brilliance would hide everything.

As you can see, “collapsing time” so that past, present, and future coexist produces some fairly serious problems in seeing anything—or anything clearly. Everything is jam-packed into a solid mass of bodies. Because I don’t live in this house alone—and every visitor is still here too—as are the bodies of the men who built it, the birds that flew through this space before there was a house, and the trees that grew here once are still here too. But I’ve said enough to make the point. The past remaining as it was, the future as it will be—so that it can be seen, if only we changed our perspective—is not a very plausible hypothesis. So I abandon it—and get my free will back as a reward.

But if the future is not already present, how can anyone perceive any piece of it in a precognitive dream? Not by attempting, as Dunne attempted, to finesse the situation by spatializing time. I’d like to be able to deny that precognition is possible at all—but as I’ve shown in an earlier post, I’ve experienced it, and you can’t doubt your own experience. So I punt, seeing especially that it’s nearly midnight. Alas. There are more things out there, beyond the border, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…

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.

Precognitive Dreams

I had one unambiguous dream of the very near future, an event that came to pass two or three days after my dream of it. The matter was rather ordinary in a way, and the only reason I became aware of the dream, and able to check that it had come true, was because, at that time, I’d just read J.W. Dunne’s book, An Experiment with Time. Dunne, who published this work in 1947, is probably the best-known expositor of precognitive dreaming. Having read the book, I set myself the task of recording dreams when I remembered them on waking. I wanted to test Dunne’s assertion that most everybody occasionally dreams the future. But just because the future is pretty much like the past, we don’t notice the fact. Record your dreams, Dunne had urged. Compare them to later events. You’ll convince yourself. I took up the challenge. This was in the early 1960s. I had my proof within about a week. As soon as I did I stopped my experiment because recording dreams was tedious. The intention to do so kept waking me up.

The dream itself developed as follows. I dreamt that I was in my office with my door closed so that I could concentrate on writing a final report on what had been a long and painful research project for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. My office happened to be next to the conference room. As I was laboring at my typewriter, this is still in the dream, noises penetrated through the wall and gave me the impression that people were arguing. After a while the argument ceased. Someone then knocked on my door. I rose and opened it. Outside stood the head of our Washington office. He was in the company of a tall black and rather distinguished-looking gentleman. With that the dream ended.

I noted this dream and went back to sleep. I promptly forgot it again—until, some days later, I actually lived the actuality. Events in reality developed almost exactly the same way. The only difference was that, instead of an argument next door, I heard muffled conversation and the persistent clicking of chalk on the blackboard. The noise disturbed my concentration enough so that I grew quite incensed. And, yes. My door was closed. Then the dream-event actually happened. A knock sounded on the door, I opened it. The head of our office stood there with a tall, black gentlemen. He wanted to introduce me to his visitor. The man was the president of the National Bar Association, then a body of black lawyers. The American Bar Association, at that time, had only white members. This was the 1960s, after all. The gentleman was the only black person I ever remember seeing in that office as a visitor in the course of the year I then spent in Washington, D.C.; thus it was an unusual and memorable event. After a few words of conversation, my chief took the gentleman to lunch. I sort of staggered back to my chair, sat down and shook my head: I’d actually dreamt the future. The dream had come rushing back the moment I’d opened the door. And my notes, still there at home, confirmed it with a date.

As Dunne pointed out, precognitive dreams are still dreams; they use symbolical representations of future events. They’re not always as boringly literal as my dream had been. Brigitte had a precognitive dream of Kennedy’s assassination two days before it happened. We lived in a second-storey apartment at the time. She dreamt that she was upstairs looking down at the street below. I came driving by in a convertible. We didn’t own a convertible then; we drove a VW beetle. Then she heard a shot and saw, in horror, that my head was rolling on the pavement down below… In her dream-vocabulary, the President was symbolized by a stand-in, someone who had the role of “head of household” in her own immediate life.

The literature on precognitive dreaming is extensive, some of it recent. Nine-eleven produced a rash of these that some people have collected and made available on the Internet. Mere laziness prevents me from giving links here. But they’re available. Great public events always seem to ease such dreams out of hiding; people recognize, from the news of the events, that they’d actually dreamt them. Thus there were also people who dreamt of the Titanic’s sinking before it actually took place. Denial of this sort of thing is literally impossible if they happen to you or to immediate members of your family. This then lends credence to more distant reports because we are sensible and rational in knowing what we know. Here I refer back to an earlier entry on epistemology.

Precognitive dreams, therefore, represent a dimension of dreaming which goes far, far beyond the more ordinary explanation, which I’ve presented already, namely that dreams are (and most certainly are) the automatic presentation of memories by the awakening brain. What precognitive dreams indicate, at minimum, is that our conceptualizations of time and space, however useful they are in everyday life, do not exhaust the possibilities available to a transcendent function that I call consciousness or mind.

Significant Dreams

Next I want to present a dream of unusual character and then compare such dreams to the usual product of the night.

Content. In this dream I stood on a grassy plain. Ahead of me in the near distance was a wide river, smooth as glass; it curved to my left; a single mansion stood on its far shore. A boatman across the way was preparing to cross; he was an older fellow but had a young boy helping him. I ignored the boatman, he was to my far right, and headed through grass toward the river’s curve. On my way I came across two long beams or sticks that resembled a broken ladder. I used these sticks to float across the river to the far shore where the mansion stood.

The river was very full but peaceful, reaching right to the edge of the bank. My mother met me at the entrance to the mansion. She was young and wore one of her favorite dresses of that time, blue with white polka dots.

I understood, without communication, that the mansion was her house, still under construction. We passed through a dark passage where workmen had left various tools and supplies. We entered a strikingly bright, radiant, sun-filled sort of living or central room. Its windows were shaded, but very warm sunlight lit them and came in on the edges of the shades. The room faced some inner courtyard or garden, but, I understood, we couldn’t see out until the house was finished and the shades had been removed. Then I woke up.

Meaning and Symbolism. The dream had a peaceful, radiant mood. It had no discontinuities. I felt the water as I laid down on the beams to float across, and the water was warm. I decided to decode this dream to get at its numinous quality.

My mother lay dying in those days. She would die within a month of this dream. I knew right away that a mansion in heaven was being prepared for her; the still hidden garden in the center of the house was Paradise. The river, of course, was the river Styx. I saw that the moment when I attempted to explain the rods I’d seen laying there. My mind kept wanting to call them “sticks” even though they were much sturdier beams and, indeed, resembled the uprights of a ladder. The word ladder, then, in turn, reminded me of Jacob’s ladder, the means by which Jacob had managed to reach heaven. Next I realized that the boatman across the way, preparing to get me, had to be Charon, he who ferries the dead across the Styx. But I crossed lying on Jacob’s ladder, instead, perhaps because I was just visiting.

The dream implied—by the still, warm water of the river and my mother’s youth—that I had made this trip before, but going the other way, the warm water being amniotic fluid…and also in a happier time: “The sea of faith was once, too, at the full and round earth’s shores lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled” (Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach").

This dream illustrates some aspects of the Unconscious as Carl Jung saw it; it is also a very good instance of the manner in which dreams use images to signal abstract concepts. During the dream itself I had not the slightest understanding of it. Had I had, I would have woken up. The name of the river was symbolized by objects, the two rods which lay pointing in an A-shape toward the water. In the manner of poetry, the image made by the rods had a double meaning, an overlaid meaning. The “sticks” were also a discarded ladder by means of which I crossed over to “the other shore.” The river’s ample curve was my mother’s belly filled with amniotic fluid, and so on. Death’s ferryman was just an ordinary man, not in any way antique in appearance. The symbolism was very sophisticated, the reference to Arnold’s poem, one of my favorites, rendered by nothing more than the unusual “fullness” of the river which I noted as an oddity in the dream itself.

Comment. While this dream was very neatly constructed, coherent, and very vivid, it can still be understood as simply a thought. The thought here could be rendered as: “Mother will soon be in heaven. I hope they’re making a place for her. ‘In my house there are many mansions.’” Something like that. It seems to me that dreams are almost always the “unpacking” of such a thought into symbolism, and as the presentation unfolds, we feel as if we were in the dream and taking part in it although, in actuality, we are a passive observer.

What I saw in this dream—I call it the Styx Dream—was a presentation rather than an actual physical, tangible place.

Some people, reading the dream account itself, will consider my interpretation of it—especially such aspects as “amniotic fluid,” Jacob’s ladder, and a “paradise” inside a house—pure projection of a heated brain. All right. The entire interpretation flowed right out of my intuitions into consciousness with great rapidity as soon as I understood the symbolism of the “sticks.” It was my dream, and my mind does work just like that. It is always filled with images even in the most ordinary circumstances.

Three features make dreams of this sort “significant.” One is their high energy, made plain by heightened color and bright light, another is their coherence from beginning to end, and the third is a sense of unified meaning that bursts forth as soon as effort is made to decode the symbols. Thus there is a possibility here that dreams of this sort may be messages. They are more energetic, better designed, and more beautiful than ordinary thoughts. They communicate their meaning more directly. The mind is absent in both, but in the ordinary dream random thought formations are responsible; in the significant dreams, the agency may be fully conscious. And dreams of that sort, furthermore, “higher” dreams, also carry a numinous quality that is quite unmistakable.

A Paradox. Here is a paradox. If the significant dreams are messages rather than thoughts mechanically built by associations of a brain, the recipient of the dream, the sleeper, would have to be at least potentially capable of understanding the symbolism that, in dreams, must be used as the language of communications. In this particular case, I was certainly “adequate” to the understanding of the symbols used. The sender of the message, of course, would also select the symbols so that they would be understood. The paradox arises thus: The very fact that I can decode the dream can be used as an argument to say that no message is being sent, that the whole mirage is my own creation. Things are cunning arranged. You know what you know internally, but the skeptic will also be protected in his skepticism.

Dreams: More Notes

Dreaming is such a vast subject that second, third, and fourth-order reflections occur at regular intervals. Here are three notes that I want to append to what has been written so far.

Not Telepathy. Shared Memory. When I labeled some dreams “telepathic,” I noted a dislike of the term. I don’t regret the naming because approximate definitions are steps toward better ones. Telepathic captures the sense that we are hearing or seeing something we ordinarily wouldn’t. It occurs to me this morning that dreams of this type might be explained by something analogous to Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious. There may be fields, as Rupert Sheldrake suggests, that holds all memories. We normally have access only to our own. In sleep, however, the precise linkages between our brain and these banks of memories may be sloppier; it may therefore be possible to touch other’s experiences too. In the great majority of cases, we wouldn’t notice any strangeness. My memory of going to Costco is pretty much the same as another’s trip to Sam’s Club. A dream therefore seems “telepathic” only in cases where (1) the subject matter is noticeably strange, (2) the personality who had those experiences is very differently structured, and (3) we would decidedly not, repeat not, act in that situation as this other person—with whom we are temporarily identified in the dream—acts. In this view, telepathic dreams, so-called, are simply dreaming others’ experiences. We may do that frequently but don’t notice it because the behavior we see more or less fits our own range of reactions.

The Dream-Self is Passive. The more I think about it the more it seems to me that the Self in a dream resembles someone watching a television drama. The couch potato is passive but identified, sometimes strongly, sometimes not. It all depends on how well we like the characters. In dreams the identification is stronger. We’re not merely watching the character drive a car, we drive the car. That aspect of dreams which has to do with choices is very murky. Do we actually make choices or is it something that we seem to do. In dreams I never reflect. When reflection kicks in, good-bye dream. If I acted from my own considered reflection, I would not do stupid things in dreams, thinking in the dream itself, “That’s utterly stupid. I wouldn’t do that.” Such thoughts, of course, come just before I wake up.

Active Elements in Dreams. Contrary to what I just said are instances where we seem to be actively shaping the dream. In a dream I wanted to cut a clipping from a sheet of paper. I needed scissors. Sure enough, scissors appeared on a desk surface where they were definitely absent a moment ago. Quite often when I dream of falling, I slow the fall down before I land on my feet. These are quite possibly cases where the real Self is just about to return to consciousness and therefore becomes a real agent in the dream. After the scissors came, and I “noticed” their miraculous appearance—and after those cases of “slowing down the fall,” awakening is rapid.