Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence, psychic dreams

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"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".


This is only true when the claim really is extraordinary. 


And the criterion of extraordinary ought to be that of common sense - the wisdom of the ages - extraordinary cannot be defined by whatever weird beliefs Westerners of 2011 have been filled-with.

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This phrase "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"is attributed to Carl Sagan - which is hardly any kind of recommendation for its validity in my book - but it is a common, near-universal, rhetorical move used by people to dismiss claims that they want to dismiss. 

It is a standard method of 'debunking'. 


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Let's think of one extraordinary claim, as it is perceived to be in mainstream modern discourse: 'psychic dreams'.

I mean dreams that mean something more than having reference to personal psychology and physiology - especially dreams that foretell future events or provide knowledge of remote or inaccessible matters.

Does the claim that there really are psychic dreams count as extraordinary, such that it should not be believed without extraordinary evidence?

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1. Every child apparently believes in psychic dreams. Such a belief is apparently spontaneous.

2. All of the hunter-gatherer, nomadic tribes I have ever read about seem to regard psychic dreams as not just real but very important for tribal well being - having and interpreting such dreams may be the role of the 'shaman'.

3. Educated intellectuals in, say, medieval Europe, seemed to believe in psychic dreams. For instance, Chaucer did, and wrote about little else. Langland's great poem Piers Plowman is also structured as a series of symbolic and insightful dreams.

4. JRR Tolkien, C.S Lewis and some of the Inklings believed in psychic dreams and were indeed fascinated by them - as I have documented on this blog and the Notion Club Paper's blog.

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5. A lot of modern people in modern societies actually do believe in psychic dreams, as I see from a recent article by Erlendur Haraldsson in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (2011; 75: 76-90).

In Iceland 36% men and 41% women (30% of university graduates) report having had experience of psychic dreams. This proportion rose between 1974 and 2006.

In terms of attitudes, 30% Icelanders thought psychic dreams were likely, a further 26 percent thought they were certain - more than half the population.

In other countries, 40 percent of people in Virginia USA reported experiencing psychic dreams, 35% of people in the UK said they believed in psychic dreams.

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So it seems that most people of most types in most places seem to believe in the reality of psychic dreams, and even in modern societies at least a quarter of people still do.

So, why are psychic dreams counted as extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence?

(In practice, to state this about psychic dreams means that there is nothing which would ever be enough to convince the skeptic of the reality of psychic dreams.)

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The matter of psychic dreams is important because it shows how a common sense belief, a universal and cross-cultural human belief, and what is more a belief held by some of the most intelligent and able people in history, can be framed by mainstream modern discourse as being so utterly extraordinary that there is no point in considering the evidence of the matter since any evidence is certain to be insufficiently extraordinary.

Vast areas of basic human conviction and experience are eliminated from mainstream public discourse by this method: once a belief has been labelled extraordinary, then that belief becomes intrinsically and irrevocably absurd such that only stupid or evil people could hold it.

The knowledge and experience and wisdom of the ages - matters we all used to know as children - matters which in fact are believed by a quarter or half the population - become (sometimes quite suddenly) excluded from all serious consideration.

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Yet the truly extraordinary claims - extraordinary claims made by the intellectual elite concerning matters of the greatest human import such as morality, beauty and the nature of truth; matters of vital fact - such extraordinary claims distinctive to the Leftist rulers rapidly are progress from oddball hypotheses, to careerist intellectual fashions, then to become not merely accepted in public discourse, but positively encouraged, subsidized and rewarded, then ruthlessly enforced...

This is the actual nature of skepticism in modernity.

The official skeptic makes a big display of gagging and spitting on ideas such as psychic dreams which are human universals, then effortlessly swallows great draughts of socially-approved poisonous, nihilistic drivel.

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The (un?) importance of dreams

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From Nevill Coghill - The Poet Chaucer, 1949

"As for us [i.e. in 1949], so for Chaucer, dreams were a matter of scientific and philosophical enquiry, whether they were the dreams of poets or lovers or of humours of the blood, dreams of the soul or belly, dreams that were no more than a rag bag of past impressions and dreams that, being true visions of the future, had metaphysical importance since they seemed to establish that the future was in some way already fixed."

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That preliminary 'As for us' shows the decline of the importance of dreams since 1949 - at the height of the influence of Freudian and Jungian analysis.

Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers (unfinished novel) is from this same era (1945-6) and has a similar fascination with the importance and possibilities of dreams.

And yet this recognition of the importance of dreams, which extends back as far as human records reach - back, even, into hunter gatherer times so far as we can tell - has now been displaced by the presumption that dreams are merely trivial. (I have even noticed a significant decline in interest in dreams during my adult lifetime.)

As usual, there are no discoveries to account for this displacement and downgrading of dreams - dreams have simply come to seem absurd, boring, irrelevant.

Dreams have not been explained - merely explained-away.

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To recapitulate: (some) dreams used to be seen in spiritual terms as (potentially) providing of insights, supernatural guidance or power, perhaps prophetic, sometimes revelatory.

Then later on (and simultaneously, overlapping with the spiritual interpretation) dreams were seen as diagnostic - the medieval doctors would infer humoral imbalances from the nature of dreams, which had implications for treatment. Freud also saw dreams as diagnostic while Jung saw them as, in addition, either healing in their own right or providing clues to healing.

Now dreams are categorized as, at best, mere wish fulfillment - like a virtual reality home movie in the mind; or at worst nightmares that are unpleasant, hence require suppression or analgesia.

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Dreams are yet another example of modern culture seeing-through, de-valuing, dis-enchanting and finally ignoring altogether a great swathe of human experience which had 'always' previously been regarded as highly significant and important.

Think dreams are useful? - Well, we know better! 

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I don't believe the detailed accounts of dreams that abound in psychoanalysis and spirituality

I have rather suddenly realised that, for decades, I have been not-believing the detailed accounts of dreams that I read all over the place.

I suppose I must have read many tens of thousands of words of detailed dreams in the books of Freud, Jung and their descendants; and in all manner of non-fiction on spiritual and paranormal themes... And I have been quietly not-believing them all along.

This was triggered by hearing a lecture (by a Rudolf Steiner followers - and Steiner gave detailed accounts of dreams) - in which he described in detail a dream he supposedly had, with various spiritual symbolisms and implications; exciting, weird, moving... and realising that I Didn't Believe It. No Way!

I am very interested by dreams - much more so than most people, and for more than forty years - and I have of course had many thousands of dreams... several per night. But never have I had a dream that could accurately and honestly have been described in the detailed and descriptive way used in so many published accounts.

What I recall from dreams is much more like images, or short segments - I cannot remember the stages and transitions - and I beyond such snatches, I would not find it possible to verbally-describe or to write-up the dream in a satisfactory 'public' way - a way that really captured its actual quality. The dream falls-to-pieces in my hands when I attempt to communicate it.

Furthermore, I have never (in real life) met anyone who was convincingly able to do any better or more than myself.

And yet - I am asked to believe that all over the place, in all kinds of situations, are a majority of people who can recall their dreams in detail and describe them satisfactorily - rather like short stories by Henry James! - to the extent that entire edifices of insight and knowledge have been built upon this foundation. (Yes, I'm talking about you, Sigmund...)

As I say - I Don't Believe It. I believe, instead, that the meaningful and sequential dreams, the exciting and moving dreams - as they appear in the spoken and written accounts - are fabricated; consciously or unconsciously; wittingly or unwittingly; whether from from joining-up genuine fragments or from whole-cloth; whether from wishful thinking or simply with degrees of dishonesty ranging from casual self-deception to calculated manipulation.

The thing about real/ actual dreams is that they are not meant to be remembered. They surely have a function - or at least represent the workings of a process, albeit one that remains mysterious; but they are not created to be remembered, or else people would be able to remember them - whereas many people I have spoken with claim not to dream, at least not usually.

I am not saying that dreams are meant not-to-be-remembered - but that clearly there is not a functional mechanism or instinct by which they are remembered. As soon as we wake, we can feel the dream sliding through our grasping memory, leaking away even over just a few seconds - and much too rapidly to capture.

There are some specific dreams that I do remember in greater detail (although still aware that much has gone). These dreams probably do have some kind of different or additional function, I can probably lean something from them. But even these rare, clear, significant-feeling dreams lack the kind of clear, sequential, recall-ability that we take for granted in waking life. 

Dreaming is a qualitatively different state from awake consciousness - in particular time passes at an extremely different rate, and the dreaming consciousness is a different person than the waking consciousness.

And that difference is exactly why I am convinced that people don't remember dream content in the ways claimed. After all, if one dreams many hours in a few seconds (as I often have done, and others have reported); it is not surprising that this cannot be expressed in terms of waking life - writing-up a dream is like trying to describe in words a piece of music, a sculpture or a smell!

Where do we go in our dreams, and why?

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From what I have read of anthropology, tribal people (hunter gatherers especially) seem to believe that when you dream of a place, you go to that place - or your spirit does. This belief seems very sensible, and - with a few qualifications - probably more true than not.

My general perspective on dreams is that they are very important, but remembering dreams is not very important - they do their necessary work at an unconscious or subliminal level. The few and infrequent dream fragments we recall on waking can therefore be misleading. However, they are all the evidence we have.

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I have certain places where I go in my dreams - and each tends to have a fairly typical mood or type of event associated with it.

Firstly, none of these places much resemble the 'real' places. So, when I dream of Durham Castle (which is a university college where I lived for a year) it has negligible physical resemblance to the actual castle - it is some kind of essence I dream about. The Durham dreams are always enjoyable and somewhat inspiring - which is my attitude to the place itself.

When I dream about Newcastle upon Tyne (where I live), I am often discovering some new and wonderful place or building that I 'never noticed before' - although last night I had the opposite kind of surprise, that the West End of the city (a street I lived while a student) had become a site of social collapse and violent strife.

(But, to be fair, that was one of those maddening dreams when, for some reason, I lacked shoes and socks - and pretty much anywhere is threatening in those circumstances.)  

I quite often dream negatively about Glasgow, dreams with a sense of oppression and meaninglessness - which are a fairly accurate encapsulation of my state of mind during the time I lived there.

(Glasgow was certainly bad for me; but probably for reasons having little to do with the place or people; and mostly to do with my own wrong attitudes, beliefs, weaknesses, and basic unmarried and living alone situation.)

In contrast, I have recurrent delightful dreams about Oxford - which is a city where I have spent many weeks over the decades. Although I love being in the places, walking around, visiting bits and pieces; in real life, I regard Oxford university as mostly a corrupt, dishonest, mediocre and not just useless but actively-very-harmful institution - however, in these dreams it is a kind of paradise of true scholarship and religion (as indeed it has been, through much of its history).

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Most of my dreams that I recall are simply those dreams at the end of the night's sleep, from which I am pleased to wake - cyclical and irritating dreams, seedy and violent dreams, dreams of oppression and dementia (the way in which life, especially memory and understanding, keeps slipping away from me in dreams seems like a taste of dementia).

I assume that the purpose of these dreams is vicarious experience of temptation, pain, fear, cowardice, hatred and other types of evil, so that I know these states not just theoretically. And this, although horrible to go through, I presume is one of the potential benefits of a prolonged mortal life. After all, CS Lewis had terrible nightmares all his life, and I infer that much of his vivid writing on evil was a direct consequence of these dream-experiences.

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But do I go to these places? Is my body, lying there in bed, one from which the spirit has departed to another place? Am I away voyaging, and often suffering?

Well, yes to all of these; somehow, in some sense.

Therefore, sleep is not a waste of time!

Sleep is not an avoidance of experience but a form of travel, and a valuable balance to waking experience. Not something to be minimised or to be ashamed-of.

Sleep is a biological necessity, a psychological benefit - and probably has great religious significance as well.

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The role of dreams - inferences from J.W.Dunne and the Inklings

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An Experiment with Time by J.W Dunne was a major influence on The Inklings, and forms a background to the posthumously-published and unfinished novels The Notion Club Papers by JRR Tolkien and The Dark Tower by C.S Lewis.

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One of the most striking passages in The Dark Tower is the following:


" '... that we see the future is certain. Dunne's book proved that - '

"MacPhee gave a roar like a man in pain.

" 'It's all very well, MacPhee,' Orfieu continued, 'but the only thing that enables you to jeer at Dunne is the fact that you have refused to carry out the experiments he suggests. If you carried them out you would have got the same results that he got, and I got, and everyone got who took the trouble. Say what you like but the thing is proved. It's as certain as any scientific proof whatever.' "

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Dunne had recorded his dreams in detail and in writing the instant he awoke. The method he describes is very specific, and he is clear that unless this method is followed, then the necessary information will not be available.

Dunne's conclusion - surveying these results, from himself and others - was that some parts of some dreams consisted of recollections of past events (especially the day preceding the sleep) mixed with anticipations of future events - quite thoroughly mixed, so that which-was-which only became apparent later.

My sense is that Lewis and Tolkien both accepted this by the late 1930s into the 1940s, sought an explanation, and discussed its implications - presumably in Inklings meetings.

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Let us assume that Dunne was right and that Lewis and Tolkien were right to accept his evidence.

And let us take the evidence of the Dark Tower and the Notion Club Papers to conclude that Dunne's experiments were replicated, were verified, at least by Lewis and Tolkien and (probably) some other of the Inklings.

Then why has this idea died-out? Why do so few people nowadays believe that dreams can predict the future?

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The reason is easy enough to understand on reading Dunne - that the dreams were a mixture of past, future and apparently irrelevant material - but there was no way to evaluate which elements were predictive until after they had been confirmed.

So, although Dunne seemed to show convincingly that some aspects of some dreams were visions of the future - this had no practical value: specifically this partial and mixed knowledge offered no powers.

You could not - therefore - use future visionary dreams to make money (e.g from bets), manipulate people, avoid disasters or anything of that kind.

To the modern mind, this means that Dunne's work seemed trivial, hence ignorable, and was eventually discarded (without consideration) as being fake, or gullible, or something...

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That dreams contained visions of the future was, of course, believed by everyone until a few hundred years ago - and probably is believed by the vast majority of people in the world even now. But in ancient times, the ability to interpret dreams, and decode the future visions - so that the knowledge they contained might become useful, was regarded as a rare gift (and one associated with a lot of fakery).

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On the other hand, if Dunne was correct (and I find the testimony of Lewis and Tolkien hard to ignore) then this is very interesting for what it may tell us about the human condition.

Among other things, it suggests to me the following:

1. That dreams have a natural function - and not just related to memory (the past) but also to the future.

2. That this natural function happens during sleep and does not require conscious awareness (since most people most of the time do not recall dreams - and Dunne's results depend on specific techniques of rapid recall, association and the making of an objective record, which techniques were apparently not done by anyone before him; and by very few since).

3. That - therefore - although containing material from the future, the natural function of dreams is not predictive; and that the use of dreams to predict the future is a special, individual, learned skill.

4. My guess as to one function of dreams is therefore that they locate each person in time ('in the world') in an unconscious, implicit, non-verbal way; that dreams provide our relation to reality, our embeddedness in time, which we carry with us as a background to waking, conscious life.

(Dreaming is not, then, functioning only to 'consolidate' past memories, but perhaps also to prepare for the unfolding future - time stretching-out on both sides from the present moment of the dream.)

5. That it is therefore possible that the lack of dreams, or of dreams of the right kind (perhaps as a result of some illness, or unnatural lifestyle, or drugs or something) might cause alienation: might cause someone to feel isolated, un-integrated with life, solipsistic, that life has no meaning nor purpose.

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Note: The above was adapted from a posting on my Notion Club Papers blog.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2011/05/experiment-with-time-by-jw-dunne-and.html


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"Unfinished business" in dreams

I often have unpleasant dreams just before waking; and if I try to go back to sleep after one such, I simply return to the dream. 

At one level, I take this to be telling me "You have had enough sleep: time to get-up!"

But if I set aside the specific content of the dreams, and instead consider what the dream makes me think-about and how it makes me feel; I can often recognize that the unpleasant qualities of a current dream derive from unhappy aspects of past times, decisions, situations, relationships, or the like.

The dreams are about "unfinished business" from my past. 

The "rawness" of such dreams, their power to evoke sharply unpleasant feelings; is, in particular, a response to highlighting my own defects, weaknesses, errors, and sins relating to particular events or eras of earlier life. 

Underneath these dreams is an insight that much of those problems I experienced from bad situations and events and people; was rooted-in - or at least made much worse - by problems in myself... 

The unpleasant dream nearly-always draws my attention to negative aspects of myself - aspects that (it seems) need to be recognized and acknowledged...

My bad character traits and selfish, short-termist mistakes; that require to be registered as indeed... bad character traits and selfish, short-termist mistakes. 

And I need also to note that these problems remain; as evidenced my my continued inability to come to terms with the situations and events... 

It is this persistence of the problems - and the attempt to deny my own part in the matter - that gives bad memories their continued raw power to annoy and irritate!

Of course, this can be considered at the psychological level - with the "therapeutic" aim either of stopping the bad dreams, or else of stopping their power to annoy, irritate, induce misery etc. 

But this is to miss the point; which is that these dreams are spiritual phenomena; if we are able to recognize the fact and to respond spiritually. 

From a spiritual perspective; these dreams are doing an important job; and that job is open-ended - so we should neither expect nor want such dreams to stop!

(At least, not if we want to make spiritual progress throughout our mortal lives.)  

The dreams need to continue because our defects of character, the errors and selfishness of our past sins, are not finite! There are more genuine and significant problems about us than could possibility be dealt-with. There is always "room for improvement".  

The matter of acknowledgement and repenting is always good-for-us; but does not have any end-point - we are never finished with repenting so long as we are alive: there is always more such work to do. 

However; I am not suggesting that this ought to be a full-time occupation or anything like it! 

That would be a lop-sided, unbalanced, distorted life. And a life that seems extremely unlike that of Jesus Christ during his years of ministry - which was a life which had many aspects and facets; many positive, loving, and creative; as well as those that were negative, sorrowful, and reactive. 

But I am suggesting instead that for some of the time, and some-times more urgently than others, and some-issues more urgently at some times (when some specific unrepented actions/ attitudes/ sins etc. are - here-and-now - e.g. blocking spiritual progress or causing us to advance in evil) - we ought to give attention to our unfinished business. 

So there is a question of priority, or even necessity, about the particular issues that each of these dreams are raising for our attention and consideration. 

After all; dreams (largely) come-from us; therefore usually have meaning-for us. 

In sum - when we have such dreams - it is probably worth thinking about them in the spirit of learning from them... Rather than simply forgetting about them ASAP; or "curing" the bad memories with a strong cup of coffee! 

Lucid Dreaming and Tolkien

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The Notion Club Papers - an unfinished, posthumously published novel by JRR Tolkien - open with the character Ramer's accounts of what are often termed Lucid Dreams - that is, dreams in which the dreamer is aware they are dreaming, has some degree of control of the dream, and in which the dream experience feels real.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream

One question is whether Tolkien uses Lucid Dreaming as a literary device (although at the time he was writing there was no concept of Lucid Dreaming - but there was a long tradition of dreams of this type - whether shamanic, mystical, prophetic or pure imagination or fantasy - e.g. 'opium dreams'); or whether, on the other hand, Tolkien was using Ramer to report his own experiences.

I have argued in my Notion Club Papers blog that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Tolkien was indeed expressing his own dream experiences in a fictional form.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/

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This inference has now been confirmed for me by a personal experience of Lucid Dreaming.

From this it is even clearer that Ramer's experiences are consistent with being precise reports of Tolkien's experience of Lucid Dreaming.

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From the perspective of the NCPs, the striking feature of a Lucid Dream is the feeling of sensory contact with the dream world.

In most instances, dreams are 'dreamy' - they have a feeling of imprecise unreality due to the constant shifting of association and the shortness of memory - so that the dream is happening to the dreamer (who is trying, but failing, to make sense of it), rather than in Lucid Dreams being dreamed-by the dreamer.

The Lucid Dream is not 'dreamy' - except in that it is known to be a dream, and that events unfold in a somewhat slow motion and emphatically experienced way. By contrast, it is more sensitively appreciated and considered than normal everyday reality: as if realer than real.

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Furthermore, in a Lucid Dream moral agency is preserved: the dreamer consciously makes choices. This chimes with Tolkien's discussion in NCPs that there is potential for evil influences to enter dreams, but that this can only happen if the influences are invited by the dreamer.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2010/10/evil-minds-attacking-during-sleep.html

By contrast, normal dreaming is not subject to the agency of the dreamer, and the dreamer is not responsible for what he dreams - because he cannot help what he dreams.

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Assuming that Tolkien was indeed a Lucid Dreamer - and one for whom this was a regular experience, rather than my own one off experience - this leads onto further speculations.

The Lucid Dream turns out to be phenomenologically (experientially) identical to Tolkien's description of how elves might create Faerian Drama (as described in the essay On Fairy Stories and again discussed in the NCPs) - I mean the presumed elves experience of creating this kind of drama.

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Furthermore, the rather overwhelming experience of Lucid Dreaming raises may of the problems about fantasy, its validity - and the nature of that validity, and the potential benefits and hazards; matters with which Tolkien so often grappled in his writings.

After all, Lucid Dreaming approximates to being given Absolute Power, and none knew better than Tolkien that Absolute Power has a strong tendency to corrupt.

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In sum, I am suggesting that Faery, for Tolkien, was directly experienced via Lucid Dreams; and in that sense he was an intermittent visitor to Faery; and perhaps in that sense it was fear of a cessation of Lucid Dreaming which provoked Tolkiens mid-life poem The Sea Bell/ Frodo's Dreme/ Looney - and when the Lucid Dreams had actually stopped in Tolkien's experience, provoked Tolkien's late story of Smith of Wootton Major. The story was his farewell to Faery.

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I make the tentative guess that Tolkien was always aware of the fragility and unpredictability of his ability to experience Lucid Dreams of Faery; and that when Tolkien stopped having Lucid Dreams in later life, he was (as it were) no longer 'allowed' to visit Faery himself, but had only fading memories of these experiences, and the hope that the ability would be passed-on to others - as the Faery star was passed-on by the eponymous Smith.

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Deep Sleep dreams compared with Dreaming (REM) Sleep dreams: visions, meditations, inspiration and revelation

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Most, almost-all, the dreams that we remember are those which occur in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, such that this type of sleep is termed Dreaming Sleep. By contrast, Deep Sleep is usually recalled as dreamless, and when someone is woken from it (difficult) and does recall dream content, it is conceptually simple, slow, non-narrative.

Yet, I have come to believe that it is these slow, simple dreams of Deep Sleep which really matter, while the narrative dreams REM sleep are nearly always trivial.

I need a new name for the 'dreams' of Deep Sleep - because they are so different from REM dreams. I propose Slow Motion Segment - because although the Deep Sleep content is very simple and may be in words, emotions, or any other domain; when the 'dream' is visual it is not really static  - not like a picture - but more like a slow motion segment of video - like a second of waking time, stretched-out and its inner workings and evolution examined in incredible detail.

So, just as the release of the cricket ball from a bowler's fingers (or a baseball from the pitcher's fingers) can barely be seen in real time (taking only thousandths of a second), in 'super slo-mo', the extraordinary and evolving, interacting intricacies of finger, wrist and arm movement can easily be observed: that is a metaphor for what goes-on in the 'dreams' of Deep Sleep. 

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I have read many, many accounts of dreams - in all sorts of writings from the psychoanalytic, through the scientific, to the personal; and people have told me their dreams, and of course I have my own dreams... and the overwhelming impression is that dream content is nearly-always (but not always) trivial, emotionally-shallow, and lacking in serious significance.

REM dreams, by and large, are not a profound message awaiting decoding, they are at the level of a TV soap opera - sometimes emotionally sensational in a manipulative sort of way, but ultimately just froth: 'chewing gum for the mind".

But Deep Sleep is the most therapeutic, recreative and necessary form of sleep - despite that its mental contents are apparently not explicitly accessible. We are only indirectly aware of the consequences of Deep Sleep - seldom of the goings-son: we feel the difference that Deep Sleep makes, but are seldom aware of what made than difference.

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Meditation is, or should be, about linking-up the conscious mind with the slow, simple and significant world of Deep Sleep - and not with the flashy trivialities of REM sleep - which lead merely to hallucinations, delusions and other delirious phenomena.

The content of meditation is not supposed to be like a REM dream, but more like a Slow Motion Sequence - an examination and experience of something tiny and apparently-fragmentary that waking life would barely notice, it would flash-by in an instant; but which is revealed as rich and significant and enlightening.

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This means that when a mystic reports his visionary experience derived from this Deep Sleep type of meditation, he will be using the language of waking consciousness to describe what was perhaps a tiny and apparently insignificant moment of awake time, and will have to contextualise, elaborate and interpolate details in order to make sense of the Slow Motion Segment.

Indeed, this is, I think, why Deep Sleep and Visionary and Meditative and Inspirational and Revelatory experiences are seldom explicitly remembered (they are remembered by the effect, rather than by their content) - the awake time-scale is so extremely different from the experiential timescale of Deep Sleep.

I would say, many hundreds of times slower; so that Deep Sleep might spend an hour of awake time (as measured in the 'real world) examining the inward workings and implications of one experienced second of Deep Sleep dreaming...

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So to take a revelatory vision such as William Arkle's Hand of God

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/the-vision-of-william-arkle-question-of.html

My belief is that the actual vision which underlay the written account was probably of the nature of a slow motion segment - a short, visual and emotional experience, which was known in extraordinary detail - but which can only be recalled and described in narrative language of the type we associate with the awake state and REM sleep.

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I think this is also what happens in inspiration - for example in science. A very simple, short segment - known intuitively in rich inner detail - is what provides the insight, and not an extended explicit narrative: I am thinking of the simple visions of Kekule's Benzene Rings symbolised by ouroboros snakes with tail in mouth, or Szilard's Eureka moment about nuclear fission as a traffic light changed to green.

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What about those relatively rare examples of REM sleep dreams which are experienced as significant: Jung's Archetypal, Mythic or Great dreams. I suppose that these are a combination of normal narrative dreams of REM sleep, with an incursion of Deep Sleep and its Slow Motion Segments - so that, as it were, the trivial REM dream story suddenly slows down a hundredfold, and becomes extremely detailed, reveals great profundities: an epiphanic moment showing 'the world in a grain of sand'.

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These reflections came to me while pondering the prophecies of Isaiah from the Old Testament (and Book of Mormon); and how obscure yet significant they seem to the waking mind.

If we can suppose Isaiah having true revelations, yet needing to translate these into the shallow, trivial, fast moving world of everyday life - we can imagine that he hit upon a poetic method, in that lyrical poetry can condense vast meanings into few words.

(Perhaps this is, indeed, the primary 'function' of poetry in the human condition?)

There is the problem of translating poetry, and translating between an ancient society and a modern one is also difficult (some say impossible) - but in a divinely-inspired version such as the Authorised/ King James Bible, when being read in a proper spirit - the meanings will be there even for the modern and English speaking reader/ meditator; at least, to those able and willing to attune poetically, and not 'literally'- and thereby to intuit vast depth and detail from few words: words that can unpack hours from seconds.

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To sleep, to dream...

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I have never been satisfied with the usual cultural and scientific views on sleeping and dreaming.

These see sleep and dream as both subordinate to awake life, and also as optional extras.

Behind current concepts is the idea that it would be better not to sleep at all, but if we must sleep then it should be as little as possible.

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By contrast, I tend to think that sleep is, in a sense, primary - at least in its creative and generative role -

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/04/sleep-elaborationawake-pruning-seap.html

I think it possible that sleep (or equivalent but weaker states which occur during awakeness, daydreaming trances etc) produce most of our subjective 'experience' - which is then shaped and fitted to the world around us during awakeness.

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Valuation of dreaming is split between a minority of people who regard dreams in a distorted and exaggerated way as the royal road to understanding neurosis (Freudians) or to understanding the prerequisites for personal growth (Jungians); and the large majority who see dreams as (merely) a kind of entertainment.

A few who trivialize dreaming regard them as a kind of home movie, which might be controlled and made more enjoyable - e.g. people interested in lucid dreaming.

And of course the highest value on dreams is placed by 'shamans' - in the broadest sense of the word - who regard dreams as a source of arcane knowledge; and in some societies these individuals are accorded high social status.

*

I am unconvinced by psychodynamic concepts of dreaming since most people do not remember their dreams most of the time - so it seems unlikely that dream recall is of the essence.

Like Tolkien, I believe that dreams can, by various mechanisms and routes - some psychological and others revelatory, be a source of knowledge otherwise unavailable to the awake mind; but I regard this as a rare gift (and one usable for evil as well as good).

What what about 'normal' people who certainly dream but cannot remember much about it: people like myself?

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Dreaming certainly feels important to personal well-being (I regard this insight of Jung's as correct), and if so this means that dreaming does its work whether we recall dreams or not.

In a nutshell, I believe that dreams are important in giving 'depth' to our subjective experience.

Without dreaming I think that life would be a matter of 'what you see is what you get' - like watching soaps or the news on TV - a matter of emotional stimulation by this, then that, then something else.

With dreaming, our minds make connections and relate things to one another; so life has at least a semblance of being whole.

Of course, since we fill our minds with dross, our dreams don't have much to 'work on'; nonetheless they do what they can.

And, of course, since modernity regards sleeping and dreaming as a big waste of time, we don't sleep enough and do things which probably damage our dreams; and so get less good from this than we should (or could).

*

But, since most dreams are not remembered, how could we know any of this? How would we know if dreams were doing this kind of work?

Well, there are theoretical arguments such as I make in the co-authored paper linked above (which I think is one of the best - or at least cleverest - things I ever did in psychology - although naturally it has been completely ignored).

And there is introspection (what the German psychiatrists termed phenomenology), i.e. awareness of one's own psychological states - which ought to be regarded as a vital check on all psychology and psychiatry.

Introspection is an ability which varies quite widely between individuals, and can also be trained or suppressed - and bear in mind that introspective ability is quite different from the ability to write on the subject of inner states.

Jung was a hugely naturally-gifted introspector who developed this ability, Freud seemed to have no abilities at all in this domain - but Freud was a much better writer.

Among modern writers Tolkien was an introspector of genius and also a writer of genius - so is a primary source.

*

I conclude that if we introspect we know that sleep and dream are very important indeed.

At the very highest levels, ascetic Saints seem to reach a state in which sleep and awakeness merge and fuse; but at the lower levels the rest of us inhabit, sleeping and dreaming represent a vital alternation of human being - even though we can seldom recall or discuss explicitly and exactly what they are doing.

*

The content of visions is non-objective, clearly - and yet...

I had missed this very interesting post by William James Tychonievich - Visions as irruptions of dreaming consciousness into waking life - when it came-out some six months ago. 

I agree with his remark that dreaming goes on all the time, but only sometimes emerges into awareness; and some of these times may include visions. 

Such considerations open-up a very important theme, about which I have often been confused. 

The thing about visions is that they can be very compelling, in an overall sense. They may feel very important: which probably means they do have genuine significance. Yet at the same time the content of visions is non-objective. 

I conclude this not only from my personal experiences - in which the objective content of some very compelling, highly convincing, dreams and visions has turned-out to be untrue - factually false, informationally wrong - wrong in various ways and degrees. 

But also, I have noticed this factual/ informational falseness/ wrongness in others.... From having read and pondered large numbers of accounts of visions from all sorts of people... From some famous founders of religions and denominations and societies. And in more recent reading in the works of 20th century people who were Christian mystics, in the Western tradition of ritual/ ceremonial magic, and from "New Age" and Western practitioners of Eastern religions. 

Of course, among all these reports are plenty of people who I judge to be dishonest (pretending to experiences in order to manipulate other people), and others who seem self-deluded and dominated by wishful-thinking. 

Most self-styled visionaries are indeed of these kinds, and are spiritually interesting only in a pathological sense. 

However; there are also plenty of visionary experiences described by people whose honesty I believe, and whose competence I respect. 

There is, therefore, truth of some sort in their visions. 

And yet: the objective content of their images I usually believe to be wrong. 

Furthermore, there are stark contradictions between information reported by the various trustworthy people, even among those who I most respect. 

They cannot all be correct - at least not correct in the kind of straightforward and literal ways in which so many of the individuals themselves seemed to accept the content of their visions.    

This is not at all surprising if, as WmJas says, visions are (mostly) waking dreams - because dreams are, notoriously, often incoherent; and "factually impossible" dream material is frequent. 

It would seem like an obviously futile project to try and build some kind of objective "system" of spiritual knowledge from the material of dreams... Yet, exactly this has been (and still is being) often attempted. 

My conclusion is that we should not be trying to use visions (or, indeed, other "paranormal" kinds of experience) as a method for gaining factual understanding. 

Although this is exactly how visions often have been used; the actual results are idiosyncratic to individuals (and potentially unstable, in that future visions may contradict those of the past). 

In the case of formal religions (or systems such as Steiner's Anthroposophy); such intrinsic idiosyncrasy is controlled, and a quasi-objectivity is externally imposed, by privileging particular visions by particular persons. Usually the founder's visions are regarded as factually true, eternally objective; such that they cannot be refuted by anyone else's visions. 

To this end; there is a frequent practice of either forbidding, or ignoring, contradictory visions by other and later persons (as when Steiner's legacy Anthroposophical Society expelled the occultist-mystic Valentine Tomberg, for doing what Steiner had done). Or (as with the CJCLDS Mormons) doctrinally limiting the significance of later visions and personal revelations to minor and individual matters. 

Or, within mainstream Christianity, when there have been times and places when it was insisted that revelation ended with Jesus, or the Apostles, or the Bible, or particular Ecumenical Councils - and later claims of revelation were assumed necessarily to be subordinate, or false. 

But this seems, pretty obviously, merely an expedient exercise of top-down power, designed to maintain an institution or system. 

If a religion or other institution is founded-upon and derives-from visions (and other supernatural experiences); then there is something very dubious about later generations suppressing or limiting the significance and scope of visionary experiences. 

But such negative and sceptical evaluation of visionary experiences is not the whole truth of the matter - because it would seem to point to the rejection of this kind of experience as intrinsically false, or impossible to evaluate. 

(And if visions really are impossible to evaluate, then most religions have cut away their own foundations.) 

Even though having the quality of waking dreams; visionary experiences are (I believe) potentially very important, and rightly regarded as (in some way) significant. 

Because our dreams themselves are potentially important - and this was a fact recognized in nearly all times and places except the modern West.  

My own attitude is to try and get away from the idea of visions (and dreams) as a source of factual, objective, information or knowledge - and instead to seek the significance at another level. 

In line with my general attitude, with respect to theology and Christianity; I think it probable that the true and important facts of our mortal life are few and simple; graspable-by and innate-to young children. 

In essence, visions ought not to be used such as to increase the volume, complexity and difficulty of information; and should instead be understood as leading us towards clarity and simplicity. 

What we might reasonably expect from dreams may be of this kind: simple affirmations or refutations of simple and basic understandings; pointers towards or away-from broad aspects of our mortal lives.

I would add that it has usually been recognized that most dreams, and probably most waking visions, are essentially trivial. And only some, maybe few, and maybe rare - dreams impress themselves upon us as significant: those numinous dreams and visions, ones having a mystical feel and a sense of personal importance. 

It is these numinous/ mythic/ significant-feeling dreams to which I refer.

For instance; when I awake from a dream of a particular place having a magical quality, and this dream lingers; such a dream is not likely to be indicative or confirmation of specific information about a specific place. Perhaps, instead, it may be a very general affirmation of the potentially magical reality underlying my mortal existence - and the specifics of the dream are just a means to that end.

I have had an occasional lucid and realistic dream of Jesus Christ in his mortal life, and in one such dream he gave some specific information, which I later became sure was wrong information. Yet even when all the details are false or dubious; the dream had a lasting inner significance as a subjective confirmation of the simple reality of Jesus, as a personage. 

Broadly; that is now how I try to "interpret" my dreams, visions, or any other supernatural-type experiences that happen from tie to time. 

I try not to become focused upon specific detail and facts; and instead to reflect upon my own simple responses as a guide to what was "really" being communicated. 

Another way of thinking about it, is that visions (like dreams) are not about telling us something new; but are about the simple discernments involved in sorting-out our already-existing and most basic assumptions concerning our lives, and how they relate to reality. 

Visions are therefore about discernment, not knowledge. 

Evil during sleep

People holding the materialistic view of life have no idea to what man is exposed between going to sleep and waking. He is actually exposed to these beings who persuade him in his sleeping state that good is evil, and evil good. The moral order on Earth is bound up with the human etheric body, and when man sleeps, he leaves his moral achievements behind him on the bed. He does not pass over into the state of sleep armed with his moral qualities.

From a 1922 lecture by Rudolf Steiner

This passage, which I encountered in a book collected some of Steiner's writings about sleep, stuck in my mind and triggered reflection on the topic of evil dreams.

Sometimes - quite often - I behave in a evil way during my dreams. In one sense this is hardly surprising, because I (like everybody) have much evil in my heart; so why wouldn't it come-out in dreams?

Furthermore, if dream experience is - as I assume - an aspect of the experience of our mortal lives, then the point is how we respond to these experiences. Dreams may provide experiences which can be good for us, or turned-to good - but which are (thankfully) absent from waking life. If we respond well to these experiences, then we will move towards divinity during our lives (i.e. theosis).

On the other hand, if we respond wrongly, then we will move away from divinity - and this was encouraged by the 'Freudian' idea that the evil we do in dreams is evidence of fundamental hypocrisy, and proof of each of us being 'really' depraved - dreams reveal the true self.

Steiner disagreed:

You may recently have seen in the newspapers some interesting and thoroughly well-founded statistics. It was stated that criminals in the prisons have been found to have the soundest sleep of all. Really hardened criminals are never tormented during their sleep by bad dreams or the like. This only happens when they dip down again into their etheric bodies, for it is there that the moral qualities lie. It can much more easily happen to one who is striving to be moral, that through the constitution of his etheric body, he carries over something into his astral body and is then tormented by dreams as the result of comparatively trifling moral lapses. But generally speaking it is a fact that man does not carry over at all, or only to a very slight extent, the moral constitution he acquires during earthly existence but is exposed during sleep to the beings just referred to.

So, Steiner suggests that spiritual progress during waking life is not carried-over into dreams; indeed there is a sense in which there is a reciprocal relationship whereby the better the waking Man, the more evil he experiences during sleep. (This made me think about how CS Lewis, a good man, was terribly plagued with nightmares.)

But Steiner goes further in attributing some dream evil to demonic (specifically Ahrimanic) beings. He says that awake-good people (at least during this consciousness era) are especially exposed to these ultra-materialistic anti-spiritual beings whose aim is to prevent men taking the next developmental step.

It isn't clear to me from this lecture - but often Steiner sees Ahrimanic beings as providing the challenges and threats - the necessary resistance - which modern man needs in order to grow.

If Steiner's view is broadly-correct, then it seems we must continue to suffer the misery, fear, disgust and shame of evil dreams - for our own ultimate good. The point is not to stop, ignore or be afraid of these dreams; but properly to understand them, and constructively to learn from them.

Dream-dozing - Micro-sleeps and micro-dreams

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Usually when people (including myself) have a micro-sleep (e.g. momentarily nodding-off while reading quietly) this is perceived as an absence, an interruption in the stream of consciousness, a jump-ahead in time with a chunk missing.

Indeed, people may not realize that they have been asleep unless told by an observer.

*

But sometimes I doze-off straight-into REM/ dreaming sleep; indeed alternate between being awake and aware of surroundings with being asleep and in dreams.

Eyes open, there is the world; eyes closed, in a dream.

So the micro-sleeps are associated with micro-dreams, or fragments of dreams.

*

(Dream-dozing can typically only happen if the person is lying down, or has their body and head supported to some extent - such as resting in an armchair; since dreaming sleep is associated with muscle relaxation which would otherwise cause the person to jerk-awake.)

*

My experience of this phenomenon of dream-dozing with micro-dreams is interesting.

It feels like flipping-between two ongoing realities, with time subjectively moving at the same rate in both waking and dreaming; but going at different rates when one state is compared with the other.

By ongoing realities, I mean that (of course) the real world is going-on even when I am not attending to it, so that when I awaken from a micro sleep things have moved-on in the real world: if I have been asleep of a second, then a second has gone past - obviously).

*

The same applied to the dream world: if I have been awake, then when I return to sleep, then time has passed in the dream world.

But if I have been awake for one second, then more than one second of subjective experience - indeed much more than one second, has passed in the dream world when I re-enter it.

And, conversely, what feels like some minutes of dream story can occur in a few seconds of awake time.

*

If awake time is taken as the calibration, then dream time moves 'faster' - in the sense that a lot more narrative happens in a dream during one second of awake time than vice versa.

*

Also, the dream world is narrative, a story; whereas the awake world may not be perceived as a story.

The micro-sleep is a slice of narrative; the micro-awakening may be simply an image - for example a static picture of the room where I am dozing.

So in the micro-sleep I am in a story, when I open my eyes, I merely see the wall and chair.

*

What this feels like is that dreams are stories going on all the time, without me being aware of them.

When I have a micro sleep I can sometimes dip-into a segment of this on-going dream narrative.

So I fall asleep and experience in dream what feels like quite a lot of some narrative, then wake-up and almost no time has passed; then fall asleep and rejoin the dream but the dream has moved on a lot while I was awake.

*

In general, dreaming seems to be like a process that is going on behind the scenes, mostly without awareness. Awareness of dreams seems like an non-essential optional extra.

Whatever it is that dreams are doing, apparently does not need our awareness (and indeed many people claim not to dream, or very seldom; and everyone rapidly forgets most of most dreams).

*

So if (if) it really was true that dreams are pre-cognitive in the kind of way tha JW Dunne and JB Priestley have said, and that JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis apparently believed, then much of this pre-cognition would have to be having effects without awareness, would be having unconscious effects.

If pre-cognition was real and had a purpose; that purpose would be unconscious, implicit, a background to our aware lives.

*

Why my tedious, mundane, materialistic bad-dreams?

I enjoy sleeping, and generally do plenty of it; but I do find myself irritated by the propensity of my subconscious mind to torment me with dreary dreams - so dreary that they are a significant factor in making me an 'early bird' who tends to rise a couple of hours before most people. 

Getting-up before dawn is a lot better than suffering the tedium of such mundane, materialistic and repetitive dreams as I frequently experience - particularly at the beginning and the end of the night. 

(Because, if I do go back to sleep after such a dream, I will almost invariably take up the same dreary dream much at the same point I left-off before surfacing.)

There is a resentment that I am having these experiences when I might instead (perhaps ought instead to) be experiencing magical and ecstatic - or, at least, pleasurable and interesting - dreams. 

(Note: I do sometimes, quite often, have such good dreams - but they don't seem to need explaining.)

What is the purpose of one part of my mind torturing the other part? And torture not with anything spectacular and terrible, but merely with the kind of dreariness of location and events with which CS Lewis depicts Hell in The Great Divorce.

I seemed to be standing in a bus queue by the side of a long, mean street. Evening was just closing in and it was raining. I had been wandering for hours in similar mean streets, always in the rain and always in evening twilight. Time seemed to have paused on that dismal moment when only a few shops have lit up and it is not yet dark enough for their windows to look cheering. And just as the evening never advanced to night, so my walking had never brought me to the better parts of the town. However far I went I found only dingy lodging houses, small tobacconists, hoardings from which posters hung in rags, windowless warehouses, goods stations without trains...

With me it is likely to be seedy rented flats; dirty, leaking, insecure. Loud and intrusive people crowding in. 

Tiring journeys with inevitable repeated delays; cramped, slow disintegrating vehicles; and when I wander in a state of perplexed dementia - forgetting where I am going and why, but insisting that I keeping-going anyway...

And my dream self is no better than the setting - I am peevish, petty, spiteful and dishonest. Altogether as mundane and materialistic as the places I inhabit. 

What is interesting about these dreams is that they are an exaggerated caricature of everything I have always most disliked In Real Life; living in a context where all is trivial, superficial and sordid - and yet where the people around me insist upon keeping things that way; refusing to think or speak deeply, truthfully, from the heart. Where people strive to conform to a world without purpose, meaning or love. 

My general perspective about this mortal life is that its experiences are for us to learn from; and I believe that this applies to our dreams - including those of which we remember nothing. Our dream experiences are an opportunity for us to learn lessons, and to make good choices and benefit spiritually from them - or suffer the consequences of bad choices.  

Overall; it seems likely that these tedious dreams are trying to teach me that we should choose Not to live like that - and when we do live like that should notice and repent the fact. 

These dreams are indeed a negative of Heaven (that is - Hell); and remind me what it is that I so much desire to escape from - forever - by salvation... Noting that Heaven is as much about escaping from the many bad aspects of myself, as from bad environments.  

It really is an educative shock to bemoan the miserableness of the dream that I have just had, and then to reflect that the whole thing was my doing; either coming direct from my own invention, or maybe as a consequence of my inviting dark spirits into the dream.

It is - at any rate - All My Fault. 

And, if I don't like that sort of thing - then I know what I must do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Dreaming

*

Edited from the beginning of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Demonology.

The name Demonology covers dreams, omens, coincidences, luck, sortilege, magic and other experiences which shun rather than court inquiry, and deserve notice chiefly because every man has usually in a lifetime two or three hints in this kind which are specially impressive to him. They also shed light on our structure.

 

The witchcraft of sleep divides with truth the empire of our lives. This soft enchantress visits two children lying locked in each other’s arms, and carries them asunder by wide spaces of land and sea, and wide intervals of time.

 

’T is superfluous to think of the dreams of multitudes, the astonishment remains that one should dream; that we should resign so quietly this deifying Reason, and become the theatre of delirious shows, wherein time, space, persons, cities, animals, should dance before us in merry and mad confusion; a delicate creation outdoing the prime and flower of actual Nature, antic comedy alternating with horrid pictures.

 

Sometimes the forgotten companions of childhood reappear or we seem busied for hours and days in peregrinations over seas and lands, in earnest dialogues, strenuous actions for nothings and absurdities, cheated by spectral jokes and waking suddenly with ghastly laughter, to be rebuked by the cold, lonely, silent midnight, and to rake with confusion in memory among the gibbering nonsense to find the motive of this contemptible cachinnation.

 

Dreams are jealous of being remembered; they dissipate instantly and angrily if you try to hold them. When newly awaked from lively dreams, we are so near them, still agitated by them, still in their sphere,—give us one syllable, one feature, one hint, and we should repossess the whole; hours of this strange entertainment would come trooping back to us; but we cannot get our hand on the first link or fibre, and the whole is lost. There is a strange wilfulness in the speed with which it disperses and baffles our grasp.

 

A dislocation seems to be the foremost trait of dreams. A painful imperfection almost always attends them. The fairest forms, the most noble and excellent persons, are deformed by some pitiful and insane circumstance. The very landscape and scenery in a dream seem not to fit us, but like a coat or cloak of some other person to overlap and encumber the wearer; so is the ground, the road, the house, in dreams, too long or too short, and if it served no other purpose would show us how accurately Nature fits man awake.

 

There is one memory of waking and another of sleep. In our dreams the same scenes and fancies are many times associated, and that too, it would seem, for years. In sleep one shall travel certain roads in stage-coaches or gigs, which he recognizes as familiar, and has dreamed that ride a dozen times; or shall walk alone in familiar fields and meadows, which road or which meadow in waking hours he never looked upon.

 

This feature of dreams deserves the more attention from its singular resemblance to that obscure yet startling experience which almost every person confesses in daylight, that particular passages of conversation and action have occurred to him in the same order before, whether dreaming or waking; a suspicion that they have been with precisely these persons in precisely this room, and heard precisely this dialogue, at some former hour, they know not when.

 

http://www.bartleby.com/90/1001.html

 

** 

 Note - I only came across this essay a couple of days ago  - despite that I have been reading Emerson for about 40 years. It was bundled into the remarkably good value Delphi edition of the 'Complete' Emerson I bought for my Kindle reader. As a whole Demonology is incoherent and very variable in quality and subject matter - but the above beginning struck me as extremely astute in a typically Emersonian fashion - as well as being beautifully expressed.
*

Dreams as another world

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Subjectively, phenomenologically, dreaming mostly seems like another world.

To drop-into a dream is to drop into an on-going' narrative - something which was already-going before I began to dream it, and which continues after I waken.

Also, dreams usually feel like another time, another place, and without connection with my waking life except for it being 'me'.

(A few dreams are connected with waking life, but these are rarer and seem to be shorter and less complex - the kind of dreams I get when frequently dozing and waking.)

In commonsense terms, dreams feel like the mind goes somewhere else - moves in space and time, in dreams I am both a time traveler and a place traveler; in other words that experiences of 'shamans' are the normal experiences of dreams.

(This sounds much more exciting than it really is. My major experience of dreams is boredom and futility - just b&f in other times and places.)

*

Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths. Yes, true - but so what?

*    

"Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.   By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth-world in which you live. But just as in dream, the subject and object, though they seem to be separate, are really the same."    

Joseph Campbell - summarizing CG Jung.  

**

I used to think a lot about this - in the era from c1998-2008 when I was most into New Age, neo-paganism, neo-shamanism, Jung, Campbell and synchronicity...

My current opinion is that it is sometimes true - myths are sometimes public dreams, dreams are sometimes private myths (although not very often, in either case). 

But - so what?

*

Unless either myths or dreams or both are more than just myths or dreams - so what if they are the same in essence?

(This 'essence being, presumably, the level of the collective unconscious (i.e. a universally shared psychological sub-stratum.) 

*

So what if humans share a deep psychology - unless this signifies more than that humans share a deep psychology, it merely kicks the can of meaning and purpose a little further down the road.

Maybe this knowledge is potentially therapeutic, but therapy for what? Psychological well-being is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

*

Thus the Jungian perspective is actually a fake religion: it does not deliver - and this failure is not (fundamentally) because it does not work in practice (which is probably true); but because Jungian/ New Age perspectives intrinsically lack the resources to supply that which needs to be supplied by a religion: meaning and purpose.

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Dreams are grown-from memories

*

Although dreams (and presumably the Dreaming phase of sleep, of which dreams are only a sample accessible to awareness and persisting in memory) - are in a sense made-from-memories - but more accurately they are grown from memories.

If dreams were just combined from memories, some memories being intact and accurate while others are incomplete and distorted to to entropic degradation - then this does not account for the experience of dreams as narratives that are both unpredictable and open-ended.

So, it is best to thing of dreams as not merely permutations of combinations of memories (including damaged memories) but as a creative process in which memories are used as the basis for novelty.

In a sense dreams are extrapolated memories; but the extrapolation is not so much like the predetermined rigor of the growing crystal seed; but more organic - more of a speeded-up evolutionary process.

So dreams are evolved memories - evolved according to a transformative process in which one thing serves as the basis for what comes next, in a linked yet open-ended sequence of transformation-built-upon-transformation.

Yet an evolution and transformation that is not chaotic - always with some kind of logic behind it.

We do not know and cannot predict where a dream is going - not least because a dream has no necessary end but can keep-going indefinitely - but we feel that the dream has each moment a direction - a direction which is consequence of the processes which make the dream. 

Always according to rules - the presumed rules of dream logic which are only faintly intuited in advance, whose operations seem obvious in retrospect - yet which defy summary...

*

Field of Dreams (1989) and literalising the yearnings for Original Participation

Field of Dreams is a movie I like - I rewatched it recently to check. At the time I first saw it, which was perhaps 1991, it coincided with an awakening of yearning for what I would now regard as Original Participation. In other words, I sought meaning and purpose in life in something like a return to the consciousness of early childhood of early tribal Man.

(Spoiler alert.)

Original Participation is participating in the creative love of the universe by a passive immersion in it; in the way that we all did in early childhood. And this is what the Field of Dreams 'dream' is about - it is about recovering and reliving that child's-perspective; by watching baseball games featuring  long-dead players, in an idyllic situation which literalises a common set of yearnings and fantasies.

That is what I wish to emphasis. Much 'fantasy' is popular because it suggests that 'if only' we could literalise our fantasies, then we would be perfectly happy forever. Of course, they are seldom foolish enough to state explicitly the idea that any kind of external objective situation would really make us perfectly happy forever; but that is what innumerable works of art (novels, plays, movies, tv series) show us.

In Field of Dreams we are shown a man who (obediently) follows his deepest promptings (in the form of an hallucinatory voice, unsought), and is rewarded by what looks to be a wholly satisfying life (with his wife and daughter; and an expanding circle of aficionados, who pay him for the privilege and continue to make it possible...) of watching old-time baseball and tending to the ball park where it happens.

Or, as the movie blurb has it: His dreams came looking for him.


Thus, the 'lesson' is that our destiny comes to us from externally, as a perceptual communication; and our job is to obey it - the reward is to be 'made' happy. It is the theme of so many fantasies; If Only (we think) fairies, Middle Earth, Hogwarts or whatever were literally true and I could live there, or meet them - then I would have a wholly-satisfying-life.

Yet, the stark reality is that if we had everything we wanted; exactly as we most want it - if our fantasy situation was literalised - it would pretty soon cease to be wholly-satisfying. We would get used-to-it; and probably we would get fed-up of it.

Watching the Chicago 'Black Sox' ghosts play every day, a couple of times a day, while feasting on hot dogs would certainly be great At First... but it is very far from enough!


For post-adolescents the fact is that a literalisation of Original Participation would not suffice, and we only suppose it would suffice because we know it cannot happen. We can daydream that the Field of Dreams would 'make us' perfectly happy forever, because we know it wont happen - this the illusion is maintained, and may harden into delusion.

(I mean - and this is a position I personally reached before I became a Christian - we may come to believe that the best possible life would be a benign delusion; that is, something gratifying but untrue that we nonetheless believe. This seems to be the logical conclusion of atheistic hedonic materialism; and is the underlying reason why transhumanism is becoming mainstream; since that promises that technology will provide us with a life of benign delusion by means of drugs, genetic engineering, virtual reality etc.)  

This is the way in which we - modern Men - are maintained in a state of spiritual paralysis. A bureaucratic, materialistic, totalitarian ('Ahrimanic') machine - such as Hollywood, big business and the mass media - produce multiple ('Luciferic') dreams of passive, immersive Original Participation; which we yearn for but which we know cannot happen... We simply try to spend as much time as possible living 'in' these dreams; in the (shrinking) gaps between serving the machine.

The sixties showed, and the lesson has been confirmed multiple times since; that we are not going to be able to return to Original Participation, that we don't truly want to; and most importantly that even if we did, it would not suffice.


We simply must find a third path into the future - that which Barfield terms Final Participation. This is the state we can confidently hope for in Heaven; but also a state which we can inhabit and cherish for periods of time, and rather imperfectly, here on earth - as part of that learning from experience which is our task.

Because, on closer examination; even the daydreams of Original Participation have elements of Final Participation about them; they are often highly conscious, active rather than passive, exist in the realm of thinking rather than inarticulate Being, and are developing situations into which we bring creativity from our-selves.

If we recognise that our goal should not be a static-suspended-state of blissful passive immersion with minimal consciousness; but instead a process of participating and joyful active creation with our unity attained in the world of thinking - then we are most of the way to where we ought to be.

Dream seriously

We live in weird times in which nobody is interested by dreams, nobody remembers dreams, nobody discusses dreams with other people: this can't be healthy.

The consensus of the past and of spontaneous human life (our childhood) is that dreams are sometimes significant - and we have to be aware of them so that when a significant dream does come along, we are ready for it.

Dreams are used for all kinds of purposes - to get past our psychological defences (such as indifference, unbelief, hostility); one part of ourselves telling another part something it needs to know - as a kind of healing or for wise decisions; as a communication between people remote in time, place and state; plus of course as a way that God speaks to us - as he did to Joseph, husband of Mary.

So we need to go against the spirit of our age, and start to attend to our dreams, and those of others.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=dreams

What is happening in dreams?

As I have said before, I don't think we have to, or are 'supposed to' remember dreams - at least not normally. But dream experiences affect us - they are remembered and make a difference to our behaviour.

This we can infer from those dreams that we do remember - we know that they have affected us, we know that they can alter our attitudes to people, places, events; our likes and dislikes, our apparently-spontaneous motivations...

Indeed, the effect of a dream may be most powerful when we do not recall the dream, and when therefore the influence it has can operate unchecked. Perhaps we specifically remember only those dreams that we do Not want to influence us; these dreams which we want to be able consciously to refute or resist in our awake life.


The basic experience of dreaming is that we leave the body and go somewhere else - the body remaining (pretty much) inert and insensible. Yet that place we go is accessed from-within. And that dream place is quite different in form and kind, from any place we experience in awake life.


In dreams the 'law of attraction' is seemingly at work. It seems that our emotions create the dream - it seems that our fears become manifest: we fear a tiger, then a tiger appears...

I regard this as an illusion. In reality the dreaming mind is attuned to the dream future.

This future-focus is at the cost of the dream past; which is continually dissolving behind us, slipping from our grasp. And it is the opposite of awake life - when we know the past (especially recent past) but not the future.

In a dream we live in the future; but in awake life we live in the past...

Consequently, in dreaming we lose the ability to think strategically (and make sense of the big picture) because we are thinking tactically: coping with the dream events are they arise, being aware of things that are just-about-to-happen...


(Is this the basic state of being a young child, or a paranoid psychotic with ideas of self-reference? Is it, indeed, the 'cause' of paranoia?)


So, the 'law of attraction' is Not because we 'attract' to us that which we expect; it is Not a matter of life conforming to our emotions...

Instead, it is that we know-in-advance what will happen; therefore our emotions respond to the future and prepare us for the future.


In dreams we already-know how we will choose, and what we will do. Because - for the future-orientated dream mind - we already-have chosen, we already-have done.

This is a negation of agency (free will) within the dream.


But the agency comes in the dream creation, our personal making of the dream, as we move-through the dream-world. Thus the dream comes-from-us - even though its components are given, and already-present in the dream world.

That is how we know the dream future; how we know in advance what will happen.

We comprehend our perspective on the dream world, and create-from-it our dream - by our agency - and according to what experiences we need, or would most benefit from.