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.

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.”