Every Dream is A Secret Mission
I re-posted this aphorism on my facebook wall on November 16, 2016. It’s a condensation of an array of astonishing features of dreams and dreaming that I have experienced and long reflected upon. The fact that we dream at all is staggering — as is the experience of it; but it’s rather common in our time to explain this away or pretend the waking mind has some kind of handle on what all that’s about.
Speaking generally, it doesn’t (i.e: we do not understand dreaming at all; in part because to do so we would have to deeply understand the essence of both consciousness and awareness — and possibly birth and death, too), even though the waking mind participates in aspects of its dreaming twin all the time — in fact, the waking mind can be understood as a structured way of constraining the faculties of the dreaming mind, and sustaining the results across the gap of sleep.
In any case, we cannot really trust models and ideas about dreaming that have been invented and popularized in order to either explain it away. Nor should we too easily trust those that appear to be ‘well researched’ or turned into a practice cult. I would argue that we should explore the entire experience together with the innate senses of curiosity we had about it when we were small. In any case, we need a broader perspective, some new ways of seeing into and understanding dreaming that we can explore, directly.
In our modern societies, we tell ourselves all sorts of stories about dreams and dreaming. There are (ersatz) ‘dictionaries’ of ‘dream symbolism’ ranging from the obtuse to the esoteric, and there are theories — amateur and professional — related to the interpretation of dreams (I suggest that what we are interpreting is never a dream, it is a record, in consciousness, of (primarily) the plot of a dream).
Upon and ongoing throughout awakening, without being aware of this, we stitch together a chronology of scenes or events recalled from dream experience, thus rendering them in the form popular to waking consciousness and, particularly, thought. I suggest that the products of this unconscious process are not even the skeletal remains of dreaming.
Without being able to say what dreaming is, it is clear from the experience that its relationships with time and identity are essentially unlike their waking-world analogs in many important senses. Nonetheless, the results of our ‘memory’ of a dream are interesting and useful to examine or wonder upon, but they are not actually dreams. To belabor the point: the aspects of memory seemingly active in dreaming do not generally survive the transition to waking consciousness very robustly. We may carry some of the felt senses of the actual experience for a time, or not. We may end up with a sequenced collection of scenes and transitions; or recollect a continuous experience with great detail… yet these memories are not dreams.
Dreaming is another way of having a mind.
Let’s just stop and solidly take that idea in for a moment. This would mean that our ordinary waking-state minds and awareness are so different from their dreaming aspects that they ‘cannot hold the produce of their twin’ in consciousness and remain themselves. If we could remember an actual dream… we would need, necessarily, to be dreaming. *It would be interesting if a specific aspect of the ‘false awakening’ dreams, often experienced as a repeating sequence of the same situation, were actually the experience of truly remembering a dream with the dreaming mind. Where, to remember at all… is… necessarily, to dream.
My experience and reflection have led me to suspect that our waking minds are the moment-to-moment product of the extreme inhibition and reformation of something more like dreaming than we suspect. Our waking mind is a peculiar arrangement of conserved structures and relations, forged by habit and sociality to resist flood-like tides of ‘the little death’ of sleep and dreaming. But it did not always do so…
During our childhood, we slowly pieced together this structure from lived thought, belief and experience; yet it is ‘powered’ by and conceived alongside something like dreaming that persists just beneath our awareness even while awake. In fact, you’re using these faculties to ‘understand’ what I am writing here, now.
From this perspective, for the waking mind to exist, it must actively inhibit the faculties involved in dreaming, or channel their momentum in directions appropriate to the preservation and elaboration of the conserved structure-like metafaculty we call the Mind.
Between these different (as day and night) aspects of consciousness and awareness there is a conflict which is also a relationship. And it transforms as we fall asleep and awaken, each night. This conflict, which is intimate and momentous, is uniquely historied and experienced — in each of us. This is a conflict between a mind that may be the actual foundations of consciousness and awareness… the dreaming mind… and it’s upstart competitor who “rules the mind by force of structured habit” in our waking lives.
This naturally brings to mind the likeness of a similar history and struggle in the conflict between our human nature and the societies we somehow assemble and support. Between the world of children and that of adults. Between nature and machine; between imagination… and declaration.
If the waking mind is like a peculiar kind of knife that cuts reality into classes, categories and individuals, the dreaming mind is a wave that imparts unity in the between of all moments and distinguished things. Indeed, the waking mind itself is a likeness of something. But the dreaming mind becomes what it does. It is not a likeness…
Secret Mission
It’s almost trivial to point out that a vast array of our cultural stories, films, plays and even tragedies are heroic. They arise within an context of conflict between primordial forces of harm and haven. Apparently, our actual lives are not fulfilling the deeply human desire to have a meaningful role on acts of great beauty and humanity. From Star Wars to Ghandi, a vast portion of our films set up a small team of people against what we like to call ‘impossible odds’, these odds being generated primarily by the critical aspect of the waking-mind’s inner accountant, who, by the way, never participated in any caper more adventurous than sideline commentary. It’s this inner aspect that actually inhibits our creativity and play, and it’s the same one implicated in the original transformation of the dreaming-mind of childhood to the comparatively dead husk that many unfortunate adults inhabit.
The conflict is real. And our endless generation of simulated dreams (films and shows) about it is conclusive as evidence by itself. Yet our own lives show the stigmata of these facts. The conflict is not a thing somewhere in the imagination of a delusional person; it’s everywhere around us. The transformation of living places to cities and factories. The poisoning of the environments our lives and futures are direct expressions of. The socio-cultural domination of ideas and ‘values’ whose primary virtue is contagion.
The conflict is real.
I’m not going to argue that this is based in the structure of our brains, directly, but it’s useful to mention that thoroughly researched neuroscientific understanding strongly suggests that our hemispheres, at least when clearly differentiated by a stroke or commisurotomy, differ in a few key aspects. The left hemisphere, relatively dominant while awake and during languaging activity, is happy to invent and declare any kind of fiction that it finds pleasing or explanatory, and then demand this is the truth in absolute disregard of sanity or sense. At least, in the absence of any functional connection with its otherwise active twin The right hemisphere, however, is inclined, so much as we can discern, to be nearly incapable of lying. It cannot speak of what it does not know, and it will tell the truest thing it can, in general, regardless of the context.
From Cain and Able to the shoulders bearing an angel on one side and a devil on the other, our cultures have preserved this ‘twin conflict’ in both popular and ceremonial aspect.
Three-Part Harmony
It was an awakening for me to realize that many if not most dreams can be understood to be instancing aspects of this conflict, and mixing it with personally meaningful situations, contexts, participants and events in the process. Dreaming itself ‘is about’ this activity, and each dream is also ‘about this’ in an often indirect — yet commonly obvious sense.
In order to illustrate this idea, let me compose a sketch with three aspects, the Dreaming Mind, The Between, and the Waking Mind.
Allow me to exaggerate a bit for effect: from the Waking Mind’s perspective, something bizarre happens at night that essentially shuts it down and traps it in a paralyzed cage. Or ejects it from dominance and its habitual way of acting (which represses its ‘imaginary twin’). Essentially, the waking mind ‘dies’ into sleep and dreaming, where ‘but a ghost of it’ is preserved in those experiences. Nothing as we can understand it is preserved ‘when asleep and not dreaming’.
So, for the waking mind, the onset of sleep and dreaming can be compared to death. Or exile from dominance. It doesn’t understand ‘who’ it is that ‘takes over’ at sleep. And, although it may be relatively ‘used to’ this process, it’s my sense that it essentially objects. After all, who wants to give over control to some voiceless ghost that simply claims to be your twin… or even origin?
This essential conflict appears in endless expressions in our human cultures and activities. It corresponds to structured societies based upon bizarre accounting games, ‘business’, court-like contexts, language, machines, and hierarchies of evaluated function and identity. Even advertising and politics are easily found to reflect this aspect of our waking-mind’s ‘common sense’, which is neither common nor sensible… but based entirely upon poorly articulated conceptual dilemmas.
Then we have the dreaming mind, whose basis is relational, rather than conceptual. Everything we use to navigate in reality transforms there, from an abstraction (like linear time) to a felt sense (like warmth or relatedness). For its part, the dreaming mind is concerned about things like why dreaming ends and who is the twin on the other side?
I suspect that if seen from the perspective of the dreaming mind, its waking ‘twin’ would appear as a strangely skeletal preservation of the results of inhibiting and ‘functionalizing’ aspects of its own activity over time, a bit like the transformation between a living forest and a factory.
They are still ‘the same place’, on every map. The factory, however, is a nonliving process that has dominated and replaced the entire living nature and history of the place. Its purposes are those of a machine. And it is the ‘standing structure’ that the living places and animals ‘were changed into’, according to the outcomes of their encounter with human beings.
The dreaming mind’s ‘goals’ involve ‘sustaining the dream’ and ‘rescuing the dreaming way’ from the strange, waking-world captor whose introduction into its world ends the dream and dreaming.
My own experience is that the ‘one who dreams’ within me is extremely ‘curious’ about why the dream collapses into waking consciousness… and ‘what lies on the other side’. In a sense, ‘waking up’ is death to the dreaming mind. It is at once aware of this process and has a sense of having been resurrected many times from it. For the dreaming mind, there is a heroic quest that is both the sustaining of the dream (at least until its completion) and to gather intelligence about the process of transformation that occurs upon awakening. Unlike the waking mind, the dreaming mind is aware of the between. I use this phrase to represent the strange universe between waking and sleeping, dreaming, and awakening. The dreaming mind is also curious about the Between.
In effect, every dreaming cycle undergoes apocalypse at the point where wakeful consciousness intervenes. I have a private lexicon (array of terms) that I use to refer to features of the situation. I use the term ‘manifold’ to refer to dreaming awareness and, distinctly, to waking awareness. They are two related but distinct manifolds. By manifold I mean something like a multi-dimensional array, or a ‘bubble formed of many bubbles’. It is quite difficult to cause the waking mind’s manifold to collapse into dreaming while we are awake. However, there are many features of consciousness in which various aspects of the dreaming mind’s faculties become involved. Most of these fall under the umbrella of trance. Conversely, the dreaming mind’s manifolds require complex synchronization of a variety of usually ‘distinct’ aspects of conscious awareness. ‘Falling asleep’ doesn’t guarantee dreaming; for dreaming to occur, a veritable ‘symphony’ of otherwise distinct faculties and situations must be allowed to properly synchronize. Disruptions to these complex synchronies produce a broad array of reported experience, from sleep paralysis and OBE experiences to nightmares of various kinds or aoneiria (the absence of dreams during the sleep cycle).
Over many years of research, dreaming and discussion with others, I have come to a personal understanding of many of these features, some of which certainly feel and seem supernatural. I am not claiming they are not. The concept ‘supernatural’ ordinarily refers to situations in which other dimensions of sensing, feeling, concern, conception, or ‘interruption of the waking narrative’ arise to awareness. Effectively, most of what would violate our common-sensical (an oxymoron) conceptions of waking reality ‘seems’ supernatural. So rather than concern myself with the ontological or epistomological questions related to dreaming/waking, I merely notice the absolutely staggering fact that, during ‘sleep’, something that should be miraculous … actually occurs. We have experience of a world that doesn’t actually exist. That experience is rich with deep dimensions of intimacy and meaning. Ordinary identities are blurred (they are rarely explicit). We experience exchanges that we remember upon awakening as having occurred in language, even though this is relatively unlikely or uncommon due to the fascinating problem with explicit identity in dreaming.
The dreaming mind doesn’t generally utilize waking-world language. In situations of desperation, we may try to do so… and this usually fails or causes the dream to collapse into waking. Conflict is another method that produces the collapse of the manifold, as are explicit demands for ‘identification’ (someone in a dream asks for your ID, or phone, etc). The dreaming mind is profoundly distinct from the waking mind in that the nature of identity in dreaming is generally liquid, relational, multidimensional, and nearly never explicit. The converse tends to be true of most of our waking experience.
Water is the most common symbol of the dreaming mind’s own nature. But many of the seemingly ‘symbolic’ aspects of dreaming which have been studied and considered by, for example, psychoanalysts, form something that resembles an interior lexicon… an encyclopaedia of ways of expressing the origins, intentions, and concerns of the dreaming mind.
Another feature of dreaming that is rarely suggested, but has often occurred to me is structural, in a sense. Most dreams are about the entire history of dreaming. Most also include a given individual’s entire dreaming history. In this it resembles waking-world senses of identity, history and persona. The dreaming manifold has a variety of features that are unusual to waking consciousness, however. Another is that the dream is ‘self-informing’, in the sense of feeding its own form, history and origins back into the moment-to-moment developments within the dreaming experience. In this sense, the dream is about itself, but not in the ordinary senses of the terms. The situation is confused by the fact that we have a single word to refer to all such phenomena when, obviously, there exists a vast library of different modes of dream experience, some of which are staggeringly profound to experience or remember. And it’s also clear that there are forms of dreaming that directly affect reality in a broad array of ways.
The dreaming aspect of ourselves pays attention when we speak of it. It is mostly inhibited while awake, but it is extremely curious about the history of its own situation in consciousness… particularly, the history of how, in childhood, it was slowly evicted from waking-world experience to the ‘underworld’ of dreaming, death, and visionary phenomena. This is a crisis with its origins in our childhood, and the peculiar necessities of language, enculturization, and representational cognition.
I will close, for now, with a report of a dream from a friend. Can you see how this example illustrates many of the features I have explored in the last few paragraphs?
Dream:
Water was being rationed. Someone controlled a single source of drinkable water. Long lines of people waiting for some water. Lots of dirt everywhere. Almost a desert like environment. You know the pink princess from Super Mario Bros? Princess Peach Toadstool of the Mushroom Kingdom. She was on my shoulder and we were connected telepathically and was an extension of my will. Yet she also had a mind of her own. She showed me the location of the water main that was being hoarded. We started toward it and she beat up some baddies along the way. She was in a physical body that could grow and shrink in size visible to everyone. When we found the main pipe she destroyed it. She got stronger as we neared that source of water. She then ran off to do something else without me. In the process she was seen by many people and was being chased. I met up with her once it was safe and she hopped back onto my shoulder.
End Dream.
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.
As a cognitive activist, my dream is that my work may contribute to our ability to understand the origins of our strange situation as modern humans, and assemble effective replacements for what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of.
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