Thursday, January 19, 2012

The (un)meaning of dreams



What does my dream mean?  - This is probably the most usual first question about dreams.

Regrettably, there are no meanings in dreams.

Meanings are aspects of waking consciousness, not dreams'. Meanings mean and signify something for our intellect. To mean something is to find an explanation for intellect. Meanings and explanations are post festum, secondary, later processes. They are born afterwards, in retrospect, in the dreamer's head. Everyone of us has a unique meaning dictated by our individual and collective life histories, brain structures, personalities. This simplified, pruned, impoverished construction we call meanings, gluing them on the dream, believing that these labels have something to do with the dream.  All various meanings are merely external formulations without any corresponding content in reality.

In the very moment you think that you have understood what the dream means, you have put it into the prison of your intellect. What does a beautiful sunset mean? What does love mean? It is easy to understand how by thinking that you have understood their meaning, you have missed the living essence of them.

Every dream is an infinite ocean where you can see waves rising. You can discern the wave; the dream born from the ocean, being at the same time an integral part of the ocean. The more you see the wave being only a very short term, very small movement in the living ocean, the more possibility you have to feel the whole invisible ocean of your soul, roaring even deeper than the dream waves on the surface.

To interpret dreams with theoretical classifications is like classifying snow flakes. The classifier's mind has invented these classifications, these "meanings", but we know that the variations of flakes are infinite. Classifications are projections of the observer's own mind, not realities.



The relationship of meaning to living contents in dreams is like the relationship of an Earth-centric worldview to a heliocentric one. The Earth-centric model was comprehensible, logical, yet fallacious. The same is valid for dream interpretations. In life, as in dreams, there is more than meets the eye. A meaning given to some dream may seem very logical, explaining it nicely, but still leave the dreamer unconcerned, unmoved, untouched at the emotional level, which means that it has not yet touched the real contents of that dream.

To evaluate dreams with yardsticks of meanings is no more fruitful than to judge people from their shadows. When we succeed in tuning ourselves away from the shadow level of meanings towards the experiential, multidimensional visions of dreams, they rush through our whole being, creating impressionistic, truthful paintings of our life on the dream canvas. Only then are we able to see that meanings are only shadowy, frozen snapshots of ever-dancing silhouettes on the surface of our waking consciousness, originally created by the flame of life, but petrified by interpretations.

Meanings may be related to dreams as a view through a keyhole is related to an unrestricted view of the whole landscape. Many consider a keyhole view to be the widest view possible. But peeping is better than nothing. Perhaps the dream door may later open for the earnest seeker. 

(More detailed treat of this topic is found on pages 37-39 in my book UnderstandingDreams - The Gateway to Dreams Without Dream Interpretation)

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

The difference between archetypes and archetypal symbols



In 1912 Jung turned away from Freud and his individual level standard symbols. According to Jung, individual symbols cannot actually be given any standard meanings, and that even sexuality itself is not the ultimate final point where interpretations could find their fulfillment, but only one of the manifestations of forces of existence, higher than all our instincts and drives.

But even Jung had his standard symbols. They were not individual, but collective symbols, so universal that they apply to all cultures and across all generation gaps. He called them archetypal symbols and they have a central position in his thinking. They are symbols that have no dependence on the individual and his life experiences. They appear in dreams and fairytales, mythologies, religious traditions, fantasies, confusional states, and illusions.

Almost everybody knows some of them, usually Animus (male archetype in woman) and Anima (female archetype in man), Persona (our personality, our face, our exterior towards others, like an actor’s mask), Shadow (unpleasant things in ourselves, which we have pushed aside into the shadow, away from the daylight of our consciousness), and Self (the essence, the central core of us). 

Archetypes are not archetypal symbols, however. Archetypes are not images, but transcendent, totally beyond any conscious perception, even beyond dreams. They are like mirrors, which do not contain any images in themselves, but are essential prerequisites as reflectors of them. They are like the “idea” of salt solution with salt crystals that have not yet begun to crystallize. The salt solution contains thus an invisible prerequisite, which does not manifest itself in the realm of perception until the crystallization process has begun. In the same way, respectively, archetypes are manifested only through archetypal symbols, which appear in forms conditioned by individual and cultural characteristics, most clearly in dreams.

Jung considered his archetypes to be universally real, but they are not. Despite their seemingly all-embracing, elegant nature, they are only Jung’s own constructs born from his personal experiences. In the vortices of  capricious history, it just happened to be now, in our time, Jung's turn to create this kind of explanatory classifications for the ever-present mystery beyond our consciousness.


(More detailed treat of this topic is found on pages 44-47 in my book Understanding Dreams - The Gateway to Dreams Without Dream Interpretation)

Monday, January 9, 2012

The most significant difference between Freud and Jung


The Tower of Babel


Theories can be built beginning from building blocks of concepts. Additional blocks are arranged onto the collection of these base blocks in order to erect as general a theory as possible. Freud built his theoretical system this way, from observational details towards a more and more general psychoanalytic theory. He tried to see the wholeness with the help of combinations of details, piecing them together to give rise to a higher system. His construction can be compared to the Tower of Babel, which was built more for the praise of man’s intellect than for forces beyond. This lack made it possible for him to leave psyche in the animal-like state, where primarily lower drives and instincts reign and rage. Jung considered this view about unconscious as a trash can that collects all the refuse of the conscious mind.

He had no other choice. He was unable to perceive the inner visions spontaneously, that's why he had, contrary to Jung, to approach dreams from the angle of scientific analysis, and was compelled to erect his analytical construction with his own, arduous work. He had only three of life’s four dimensions in his own consciousness and in his theory of dreams; the individual, biological, and later in his life, increasingly, the social dimension. 

However, what he was lacking, was the fourth dimension, which has no specific name but can be called transpersonal, cosmic, transcendental, younameit, experiences. He considered them to be religiously colored fantasies and primitive remnants from early babyhood experiences. His negative attitude towards religions manifests itself in a conviction expressed in his later life: "I am firmly convinced that the most careful elaboration of the material upon which the problems of religion are based would not shake these conclusions [of psychoanalysis]. He saw religion "as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity".

Down to Earth



Jung’s theory was born in an opposite; top-down way, from the general to the specific, contrary to Freud’s bottom-up approach. When Jung was 37 years old, he was plunged into a very intensive four year long flood of images, for which he then searched appropriate expressions for decades. He writes: "All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams, which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them". Images, experienced in both his nightly dreams and his daytime fantasies, were the fiery lava from which his conceptual rock of scientific work was crystallized. 

His material gushed out spontaneously and vividly from same internal sources, from where also dreams rise to the surface of our waking consciousness.


(More detailed treat of this topic is found on pages 51-54 in my book Understanding Dreams - The Gateway to Dreams Without Dream Interpretation)

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Dream groups' tremendous advantage

Once upon a time there was a wise emperor who sent emissaries to take care of his country which was too wide for him alone to rule. His cleverest emissary began to see his Master's gentle wisdom as a weakness, and finally dethroned his Master, bringing the kingdom eventually to ruin.

This tale is told in Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and his Emissary. The introduction of the book is found here

According to him the Master is our right hemisphere and the Emissary our left one.

The book is not an oversimplified popularization of the functions of hemispheres but largely based on extensive neurologic and neuropsychologic research, especially among split brain and brain lesion patients. McGilchrist projects his interesting, thorough analysis of the main differences and similarities of our hemispheres onto the canvas of poetry, music, human body language, in fact onto the whole evolutional and cultural history.

The modern Western culture reflects the unbalanced overpower of the left hemisphere's narrow, theoretically based, self-consisted model of the world, which is tremendously powerful in mastering the physical world, but which does not understand the infinite world outside of all theories.

Typical for the right hemisphere is the ability to grasp intutively what is going on, but it needs the left hemisphere to express it. It knows that it needs the left one, but the left one does not know that it does not know, thus believing to be self-sufficient, needing no one else, eventually collapsing the whole kingdom in ruins.

*

McGilchrist's allegory is remarkably suitable to demonstrate the most important task for dream groups: by reviving the right hemisphere, helping the Master return to the throne from exile, restoring the equilibrium between both hemispheres; finding ways where both knowledge and understanding, analysis and intuition, science and art can work in unison, recognizing their deep dependence of each other, and their importance of their united teamwork for mental health of human beings for the well-being of the whole community and culture.

Dream groups have in this task a tremendous advantage: they have in their hands the most powerful tool for exploration of the most unfathomable abysses of our psyche: the product of (predominantly) the right hemisphere; our dreams, illuminating the innocent, most authentic depths of the human soul. If we are wise, understanding what we have seen with the help of dreams, allowing them to speak with their own voice, our emissary may understand better its proper place, serving the Master, spreading around the wisdom of our innermost being, helping the kingdom of humanity to prosper in human relations.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Deceptive dreams

Perusing my own dream book I just now found that this sentence in my Finnish dream book had fallen inexplicably away from its English translation:

Dreams are not the most authentic manifestations about us, but distorted reflections of what we really are. Dreams appear to be most authentic only in the limited viewpoint our day consciousness is capable of.

I hesitated to include that sentence in my book because in a way it pulls the rug from under the whole book, which from the beginning to the end considers dreams to be the most authentic phenomena of our true soul state.

Yes, most authentic, but only from this narrow standpoint. Realizing that there is nothing absolute, nothing which is undeniably and unambiguously true, is a necessary antidote against any orthodoxy, among them any dream movement which promotes dreams as our most important tools for understanding ourselves and others. Yes, dreams are very important, but not most important tools for understanding ourselves. Dreams are not the true state of our soul, but filtration products, conditioned and constricted by our individual brain properties.

The second dream distortion phase takes place in our imperfect daytime memory, and the third when they are shared with other people because of limitations of spoken language and other individual and societal factors.

But fortunately, despite this multiphase dilution process during the dreams' journey from beyond our consciousness to the sharing phase with other people, they still contain a substantial amount of their original potential, which may be unveiled with dream exploration processes which help to create a safe, intensive, non-restrictive, non-interpretative (=nonviolent) atmosphere. Thus far I have found only one process which meets all these conditions; Montague Ullman's experiential dream group process. 

As much as I appreciate dreams and as much as dreams and dream groups are now the most important activities of my life, there is always something more to learn, something more what any dream can ever contain. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  Despite the fact that there are still deeper, albeit rare, insights into the nature of reality than dreams are able to afford, the main idea still holds: dreams are most authentic expressions of ourselves in our everyday life, and exploring them carefully and sincerely always brings us more near to our authentic self.