The Wisdom of Dreams: Science, Synchronicity and the Language of the Soul [1 ed.] 1032121858, 9781032121857

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“In The Wisdom of Dreams, Drs. Greg Mahr and Christopher Drake take a giant step toward integrating the neuroscience of REM sleep and the psychology of dreaming into a comprehensive and pragmatic clinical handbook. I believe this exceptionally informative and engaging work is a must read not only for psychotherapists, but for all health professionals.” – Rubin Naiman, PhD, Sleep and Dream Specialist, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, The University of Arizona Health Sciences

“In this outstanding synthesis of dream science and depth psychology the author’s expertise and love of the topic shine throughout. The book reminds the reader of the importance of dreams in human history and in everyday life and is an excellent introduction to dreamwork for therapists and the general public. It is a pleasure to read and revisit.” – Bud Harris, PhD, Jungian Analyst, author of Sacred Selfishness, Into the Heart of the Feminine, and many other books on Jungian depth psychology

The Wisdom of Dreams

This fascinating and accessible book offers a comprehensive overview of dream interpretation theory and modern dream science, presenting an argument for dreamwork as a means to better understand emotional challenges and achieve personal growth. Bridging the gap between cognitive-behavioral therapies, psychoanalysis and depth psychology, the book explores topics like lucid dreams, endof-life dreams, cross-cultural dream analysis and Freudian and Jungian models of dream interpretation. The authors offer a new model for better understanding dreams based on symbol formation, narrative structure and current neurophysiology, with the aim of reinvigorating the way we value dreams and their importance to individuals and society. The Wisdom of Dreams can be of great interest to analysts and therapists, including psychiatrists, psychologists, sleep researchers, social workers and counselors, as well as anyone interested in working with their dreams for greater personal clarity and self-understanding. Greg Mahr is an experienced clinician and teacher. In addition to multiple scientific papers, he has published poetry and flash fiction in a variety of literary and medical journals. Christopher L. Drake is a clinical psychologist and sleep researcher. He authored over 200 scientific publications and is a section editor for The Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine. He received research grants from the National Institutes of Health and is former Chairman of the National Sleep Foundation. His scientific interests include insomnia, shift work and lucid dreaming.

The Wisdom of Dreams

Science, Synchronicity and the Language of the Soul Greg Mahr and Christopher L. Drake

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Greg Mahr and Christopher L. Drake The right of Greg Mahr and Christopher L. Drake to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-032-12183-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-12185-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-22347-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Introduction

1

PART I

The dream journey7   1 The daemon within

9

 2 Synchronicity

14

  3 Gender issues in dreamwork

22

  4 Befriending your dreams

29

PART II

Dreams that change lives35   5 Dreams and creativity

37

  6 Lucid dreaming

43

  7 Dreams and psychedelic drugs

49

  8 End-of-life dreams and visions

57

  9 Prophetic dreams

61

10 Nightmares

67

viii  Contents PART III

Reintegrating the dream narrative73 11 A false translation

75

12 The Black Madonna

81

13 Stockholm is burning

87

14 Sparks of the divine

95

15 Istikhara

100

16 The gods within

105

17 The way of no words

109

18 Dreaming awake

113

PART IV

Why we dream119 19 Asleep in a cage

121

20 The language of the mind

131

21 A narrative model of dreams

136

22 Affects, archetypes and cigarettes

142

PART V

Listening with the third ear149 23 Finding Irma: Freudian dream theory

151

24 Irma reimagined: Jungian dream theory

157

25 Dream symbols

164

26 Active imagination

177

27 Using dreams in therapy

182

Conclusion

187

Index191

Acknowledgments

We thank Grace Seymour and Saundra Norton for editorial assistance and Elaine Terranova for poetic wisdom.

Introduction

The dreamer is in a plain cottage with a peasant woman. He tells the woman of a long trip to Leipzig. She is very impressed and surprised. On the horizon there appears a monstrous creature, part crab, part lizard. The creature seizes him, but miraculously, the dreamer has a little divining rod in his hand, with which he touches the monster’s head. It collapses dead. He stares and contemplates the dead monster for a long time. (Jung, 2018)

A peasant woman, a crab, a divining rod? What could this dream possibly mean? Does it mean anything? Many would say it means nothing; the images are simply random visual noise that the sleeping brain generates as part of its nocturnal processing. But throughout most of human history, and in nearly all human cultures, dreams have been viewed as being important, even sacred.

Dreams in history The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the first book ever written, describes four dreams. The Christian Bible contains 21 dreams, and there are six dreams in the book of Matthew alone. Prayers for good dreams are an important part of Hindu religious practice. The Duke of Zhou’s handbook of dream interpretation, written around 1000 bc, remains popular to this day in China (Bulkeley, 2008). For native peoples, from the aboriginal peoples of Australia to native Meso-American cultures, to the shamanistic cultures in the north, dreams are an integral part of their cultural and spiritual life.

The study of dreams Modern psychology and psychiatry begin with the study of dreams. Freud’s first important work, The Interpretation of Dreams, became one of the most DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-1

2  Introduction important early descriptions of the unconscious. But since then, modern psychology, influenced by modern culture, has turned away from both the idea of the unconscious and from the study of dreams. My son graduated with a degree from one of the top-ranked psychology programs in the country. The only time he was asked to read Freud or Jung was when he took a class in the German department, not the psychology department. Psychiatrists are the direct heirs to Freud, yet the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, two volumes, 2382 pages of tiny print, devotes only 12 pages to dreams. The standard textbook of sleep medicine, The Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine, over 1,200 pages long, has only a few chapters devoted to dreams. Academic psychology and psychiatry are strongly influenced by scientism. Scientism is the belief that the only valid type of knowledge is the empirical, verifiable knowledge of science. In the academic world, only those ideas that fit a narrow definition of empirical, verifiable science are felt to be worthy of study. The great pioneers of psychology, Freud, Jung, Fromm, Frankl and Piaget were theorists. They developed systems of knowledge, ways of organizing and understanding data. Many of their ideas were not empirically verifiable yet were important and meaningful. Modern psychology is suspicious of theory and is focused on testable data. As modern psychology strives to be more and more certain, it becomes less and less interesting and meaningful. Few psychology journals today would publish Piaget, who offered only observational data on a few kids, namely his own. He’d be struggling for tenure at some second-rate university, laughed at by his peers. While the study of the physiology of dreaming fits that narrow definition of science, the study of the wisdom and meaning of dreams that forms the bulk of this book does not. Both authors had to consider whether examining the wisdom of dreams would damage our academic reputations.

Dreams and meaning In this book, we will explore the hypothesis that dreams are in fact meaningful and important. We will describe how dreams express their meaning, and why dream language often seems nonsensical because of the bizarre juxtaposition of images and weird plot twists. Our approach will be diverse and cover the dream theories of antiquity as well modern neuroscientific theories of dreaming. We will explore a middle ground between cynical materialism that views all dreams as meaningless and fuzzy idealism that views every dream as a divine visitation. We will be guided by science and philosophy, and we will consider evidence and research. To view dreams as being meaningful also involves an introspective introverted attitude toward the world. Susan Cain reminds us of our cultural bias

Introduction 3 toward extroversion in her 2012 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (Cain, 2012). To look at our dreams is to look at ourselves. We are trained from childhood that what is valuable, which leads to success and happiness, is to compete and to master the external world. The price of this extroverted stance is to fail to look within at ourselves. We will discuss in a subsequent chapter how to befriend our dreams, but our “official” culture, influenced by scientism, encourages us to ignore and neglect them. Popular culture has never abandoned the idea that dreams are meaningful. Any cursory Internet search will show a host of books and websites that will interpret dreams and use them to predict the future. One can look up any dream image and be offered its “meaning.” The simplicity of such approaches is highly appealing. Instead of thoughtful reflection, however, such approaches offer New Age magic rather than serious critical consideration. Dreams can be considered to be meaningful in several ways. For much of human history, dreams were felt to be meaningful because they could predict the future. Dreams in Genesis, Daniel and Matthew are prophetic, they foretell the future. In Chinese culture, the Duke of Zhou’s ancient textbook focuses on the prophetic possibilities of dreams. Jewish and Islamic mystics incubate dreams to see into the future. The authors of this work are scientists and doctors, not soothsayers. While we do review the uncanny predictive nature of some dreams, we cannot show you how to use dreams to pick a lotto winner. There are two other senses in which dreams can be described as being meaningful. In Freud’s view, dreams were meaningful because they depicted unconscious conflicts more directly than a patient’s own words. Dreams were, as he famously put it, “the royal road to the unconscious.” Jung saw dreams as being meaningful in a different sense. He saw dreams as a direct communication, a natural expression, in symbolic form, from the unconscious to the conscious mind. When Jung’s patient, in a dream we will discuss in a subsequent chapter, dreamed of stepping off a mountain into thin air, Jung saw the dream as a direct warning of danger from his unconscious. Freud would have seen it as a symbolic depiction of narcissism and grandiosity, not as a direct warning. In our view, there is great value in considering these conceptualizations of dreams. Dreams may not be the royal road to the unconscious, but one cannot deny the significance of dreaming in our lives. Dream science, the study of the neurophysiology of the dream state, confirms the intuition that something very important is going on during a dream sleep. All animals sleep, but only animals with highly developed brains, birds and mammals, can be said to dream. The brain rests during most stages of sleep but works hard while we dream. Not only are we cut off from the outside world, but also our body is paralyzed while we dream, making us vulnerable to predators. Yet, we still dream.

4  Introduction

The structure of this book To show the reader how dreams can be understood and utilized in our everyday lives, each chapter will begin with a dream and end with an interpretation of that dream. Try to read and reread the dream and explore it in your mind before you read the chapter. In that way, each chapter will offer a little practice in dream interpretation. In the first part of this book, called “The Dream Journey,” we will explore the personal paths that the two coauthors took for their work with dreams. Their paths, and the obstacles they faced, anticipate the journey that the culture is beginning to make to acknowledge the importance of dreams. This section also includes a chapter on gender issues in dreamwork. The language associated with the study of dreams is very “binary” in relation to the direction that society has taken. For historical reasons, the dreams of LGBTQIA+ individuals have not been given a place in the study of dreams. This section also includes an important chapter on befriending your dreams. The next section “Dreams That Change Lives” will explore the cutting edge of dream science, including dreams and creativity, lucid dreaming, end-of-life dreams, prophetic dreams, nightmares and the relationship between dreams and psychedelic trips. These chapters integrate the scientific narrative and the interpretive narrative. This integration is an important theme of this book. “Reintegrating the Dream Narrative” explores the relationship between culture, religion and dreamwork. These chapters show the wisdom that can be gained from other cultures and how they understand dreams, as well as how modern Western culture has come to ignore dreams. The section titled “Why We Dream” focuses on what we currently understand about dream physiology, as well as explicating the language of dreams. Dreams seem to be a confusing series of disconnected images. This is not a result of distortion or censorship but represents the symbolic language of the mind. To use a computer science metaphor, dreams are not presented in Microsoft Word but in the machine language that undergirds the higher-level programs of everyday, awake life. The final section, “Listening with the Third Ear,” describes strategies for interpreting and exploring dreams. Listening with the third ear means listening to both the content and the context of what you hear. It is what we do as therapists and is also a good way to understand dreams. Dreams reach beyond their surface content to deeper aspects of the psyche, and this book will offer tools for that deeper exploration. After reading this book, you will have, as a therapist, all the tools you need to work with dreams. The book is not a simple “how to” guide; however, it is an exploration. There are no simple “how to” guides for the things

Introduction 5 that matter in life, like loving your partner, raising your kids, finding meaning in life or accepting suffering and death. Those things, like working with dreams, are journeys. We can share knowledge and strategies, and you must apply them with sincerity and love, using your own mind and heart. Then you will find your own path.

Goals of this book This book will attempt a synthesis of two radically different perspectives on dreaming: a neurophysiological one and an interpretive one. Most dream books are written by sleep scientists or by therapists. This book is written by both. This synthesis is a difficult goal, and we will not always succeed. But even where we fail, the effort will hopefully be enriching. As part of that synthesis, the book will be written in single voice. Indeed, each chapter was crafted jointly, by the two of us. The two chapters that immediately follow are more personal ones and describe who we are and how we came to write this book. Those two chapters can be considered to be an individual product of their respective authors. The rest of the chapters are written jointly. One author is a sleep scientist, the other a psychotherapist, but in the rest of the chapters, those two perspectives are merged. In that same way we want you, the reader, to live in both worlds simultaneously and understand the science of dreams as well as their meaning. Dreams belong to the dimly lit but profound world where meaning is found; to see, hear and feel what our dreams might be able to tell us we have to enter their world. We must enter this world even though our culture insists that there is nothing to be found there. We will enter that world as neither New Age cultists nor reductionist observers but as curious and critical seekers attempting to be open to the potential meaning of dreams. We will use science, but not science alone. We will also consider philosophical disciplines like hermeneutics and narrative analysis as sources of knowledge. Hermeneutics is the philosophical study of textual interpretation of biblical texts or other works that require complex analysis. Narrative analysis involves methodologically viewing human communication as story and analyzing that story in terms of setting, plot, conflict and resolution. We hope that all readers of this book will gain an understanding of dream science and dream interpretation. Our vision is that dreams will be nurtured, understood and embraced as a source of wisdom that can enhance our lives and those around us. For the mental health professionals who read this book, we hope our approach can help you be more comfortable using dreams in therapy. We are all on a journey of the soul, and our dreams, when we are in thoughtful relationship with them, can guide us.

6  Introduction

The crab dream So, back to the dream of the giant crab/lizard. When Jung explored this dream with his client, he found out that the peasant reminded the dreamer of his mother, who was very poor. On a deeper level, she represents the impoverished feminine aspects of his own self. The client was a successful professor in a German city, but he coveted a more prestigious academic position in Leipzig. The journey to Leipzig represented the journey of his professional life, and a journey to a fuller richer life. The dreamer is still, in a psychological sense, living in a tiny cottage with his poor mother. Yet, this inner, mother-like figure welcomes the journey and is impressed by it. If we read the dream like a story, her presence and her openness seem to call forth the monstrous creature. The crab image may have appeared because crabs walk backwards, into the past, into the unconscious. The lizard or dragon, a creature of the underworld, may have appeared to remind the dreamer of the power of unconscious forces. Dragons are fierce and murderous, but they store treasure and bring wisdom as well. The dreamer, with the magic wand of consciousness, can slay the creature, just as we can ignore the wisdom of our own dreams by dismissing them as meaningless. Scientism is our divining rod with which we kill, or seem to kill, the inner life within us. But the dream does not end there. The dreamer contemplates the dead creature for a long time. Why? Does he want to understand it? Bring it to life? Does he realize too late that this was a missed opportunity, that he slayed a helper animal, a spirit guide? Jung reports that his client scoffed at his interpretation of this dream. He continued in his path of an ambitious and superficial life, and, by Jung’s report, soon came to “a tragic end.” Apparently, the monster did come back to life as a dangerous creature. Our culture expects us to kill the monster, ignore dreams, dismiss them as being meaningless. In this book, we will try to undo that bias and contemplate the mysterious dragon of our dreams. We will invite you, the reader, to hold back the wand of skepticism and be brave enough to contemplate that monster with us. Together, we will try to learn its secrets.

References Bulkeley, K. (2008). Dreaming in the world’s religions: A comparative history. New York University Press. Cain, S. (2012). Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking. Crown Publishing. Jung, C. (2018). History of modern psychology: Lectures delivered at ETH Zurich. Princeton Press.

Part I

The dream journey

1 The daemon within

I am in the house I grew up in. The carpet is covered with “demon blood.” I am trying to clean it up, but I am afraid I will be contaminated because I don’t have gloves. The phone rings. A frightening deep, guttural voice is speaking, but I don’t understand what it is saying. I realize that if I say the Hail Mary prayer while I clean the blood, I will be safe. Dream by the author, Greg Mahr

Daemon is an ancient Greek term for a guiding force, an inner power or fate. Later, the word came to be identified with evil and became the Christian “demon.” This chapter describes my search for my inner daemon.

Psychiatry I have many opportunities to speak to medical students about why they want to choose psychiatry as a specialty. Typically, their responses include, “I want a specialty where I can really talk to patients and get to know them.” No one ever says “I want to prescribe antidepressants and mood stabilizers,” but that is what they end up doing. Today’s typical psychiatrist does little or no therapy and does mostly brief medication reviews, about four to five per hour, with patients they barely know. These patients may be in psychotherapy with someone else or not in therapy at all. The wise psychiatrist who knows you and helps you understand who you really are exists mainly in movies like Hitchcock’s Spellbound or Streisand’s The Prince of Tides.

Psychiatry transformed When I did my psychiatric training in the 1980s and 1990s, psychopharmacologically oriented psychiatrists mostly took over psychiatric training. DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-3

10  The dream journey Antidepressants and mood stabilizers were already commonplace, and newer psychotropic agents were coming on the market including some that promised, but mostly failed, to deliver profound and lasting effects that could change our patients’ lives for the better. It was the beginning of the so-called “golden age of psychiatry,” one where localized activation of specific neurotransmitters was thought to be the key to relieving patient suffering in ways that never before seemed possible. The psychiatrists who studied those drugs were touted as heroes. Grant money in hand, often from pharmaceutical companies, and blessed by federal research funding, they produced clean, double blind research trials. In the gallant pursuit of “real” science, these heroes ushered in a new religion of data. They got accolades, faculty positions and chairmanships. The transformation of psychiatry was complete, and the few remaining psychiatrists who practiced the once celebrated art and science of psychoanalysis were gradually displaced from academia. The apparent success of antidepressants and antipsychotics in the mentally ill also changed how we viewed patients. A popular book back then was Peter Kramer’s Listening to Prozac (Kramer, 1993). Kramer, a very thoughtful and sensitive clinician, wondered, like many of us did, how much of human unhappiness was just bad brain chemistry.

My path I picked psychiatry not because I wanted to prescribe pills but because I wanted to understand people and help them help themselves. I read Freud and Jung even in high school, and I was thrilled by the idea of a world inside me that I did not know or understand. I picked one of the few remaining training programs, which was psychodynamically oriented. Most of my supervisors were card-carrying psychoanalysts, and even the sickest hospital patients, who are now medicated and ignored, were treated with intensive psychotherapy. When I graduated, I wanted to stay in academia, but there was no place for someone interested in Freud and Jung. I closeted those interests and focused on the psychiatric issues of the medically ill. There, I could fulfill my passion for reaching a deeper understanding of my patients. In my special niche as a psychiatrist in the medical world I could talk to patients and be present for them as they endured medical illnesses and the psychiatric complications associated with them. There, no one could pretend that Prozac would ultimately help you face death or life-changing illness. It was necessary, useful and rewarding work; the other doctors, who didn’t want to talk to their patients about suffering, needed me; and so did the patients, who hungered to be heard when they spoke of their suffering. The psychopharmacologists weren’t eager for such work. I was able to continue

The daemon within 11 to nurture my passion for thinkers like Freud, Jung and Eric Fromm while keeping it a secret from my psychopharmacologist colleagues.

Midlife crisis When I was in my early fifties, I had a serious heart attack. I was in a coma; I was in the ICU. I faced the kinds of existential issues my patients faced. I was not on this earth forever; what was my purpose in life? I also knew, suddenly and viscerally, the power of the unconscious mind. My heart attack occurred in the middle of a serious argument with my spouse. The moment I decided to placate my spouse, give in and pretend not be angry was the moment I developed chest pain. I had a pattern of giving in. I knew that my unconscious, my soul, revolted against the wrong I had done to it by giving in again. It decided to wake me up from the bad dream I had been living in. I had been pretending that my fake life was okay; only when I became seriously ill did I finally realize that I had been living a lie. Soon after I had what Jung called a “big” dream, a dream I will remember forever, the dream about demons and demon blood that I quoted to start this chapter, I knew I had to change my life. One of the first things I  did when I  got home was to get Jung’s enormous, beautiful Red Book. The Red Book described Jung’s journey, in active imagination, through his own darkness. I then joined a dream group that a local Jungian analyst ran. I got divorced, and I came out of the closet at work with my psychodynamic interests. I started a new life that finally feels like it’s mostly my own. At work, I am often asked to give lectures for other departments, to which I readily agree. I love talking to non-psychiatrists and understanding the issues they face. At my institution, the sleep medicine department asked me to give a lecture on “screening for depression in sleep medicine patients.” This would have been another version of the boring lecture I have given a hundred times about deciding which patient needs an antidepressant and which one they need. In the past I would have just said yes. The new, bold, authentic me replied, “That topic sounds like a real snoozer.” (I loved my little inside joke about sleep.) “How about if I talk about dreams and dream interpretation instead?” To my surprise, she said, “Sure.” My coauthor, Chris, came to the lecture. After the lecture, we talked earnestly about dreams; I realized I had found a kindred spirit. Our extended dialogue, over a year of lunches and breakfasts, became this book.

The demon blood dream As we will see throughout this book, images and stories from mythology and fairy tales are sometimes useful in exploring a dream. Jung called

Figure 1.1 While the Goddess Durga slays the Buffalo Demon, the Goddess Kali laps up demon blood with her long tongue. Brooklyn Museum, page from Markendeya Purana series. Gift of Dr. Ananda K Coomaraswamy.

12 The dream journey

The daemon within 13 this method of exploring dreams “amplification.” This image from Hindu mythology is an excellent example of amplification. Kali not only is a goddess of darkness and destruction, but also of cleansing and rebirth. When she drinks demon blood, she goes into a destructive blood frenzy. Her presence in my life is what I both feared and needed. The “big” dream that starts this chapter helped change my life. The demon may be the dark inner force that had control of my life until my heart attack. Alternatively, perhaps the dream was a warning against killing the healthy “daemon” that guides my inner journey. The powerful voice on the phone that I do not understand is probably the voice of my higher Self or, if you prefer, the more precise language of faith, God. The Hail Mary begins with the words of the angel Gabriel as he announces to Mary the new life conceived within her. Hopefully, I can be worthy of the new life developing, late in life, within me.

Reference Kramer, P. (1993). Listening to Prozac. Penguin.

2 Synchronicity

I am in a hot air balloon with a guide, another sleep researcher, and a grad school friend. The balloon is moving fast, but with the basket facing forward. The balloon is very low to the ground. I am facing backwards and see only what is passing behind us. At a terrifyingly speed we fly under three bridges and into a dark tunnel. I am convinced we will crash into a wall and disintegrate. I cannot slow down or jump out. Everyone else is calm, so I try to calm myself down, thinking the professional guide knows what she is doing. Eventually, after what seems an eternity, the balloon lands inside the tunnel and I get out of the basket and see the wall of a giant cave. To the side are tables and an old, dark, dingy two-story building with a few windows. It is foggy but I can see inside the dark building through the windows. The room inside is very nice with fine furniture. And while I can’t tell how far away the house is, it looks beautiful with warm light enveloping the interior. Dream by the author, Chris Drake

In his book Big Dreams, Kelly Bulkeley suggests that scientific inquiry into dreams should focus on unique, significant and highly memorable ones, or Big Dreams, rather than everyday ones (Bulkeley, 2016). My balloon dream is clearly a Big Dream, a journey into the unknown that ends in a place of light. As I have come to understand, the balloon ride is my life journey. To travel in a balloon requires trust. Jung coined the term synchronicity to describe meaningful coincidence, acausal connection. As he defined it, “Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.” Synchronicity is what I have had to learn to trust. It’s the wind that blows the balloon to the right place, where meaning can be found. DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-4

Synchronicity 15

Figure 2.1 Paul Klee. Red Balloon, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Estate of Karl Nierendorf, by purchase. This painting shows the mysterious journey of a red balloon through an inner space. An open door awaits.

The fence You may not recognize my father by name, but you have seen his work. He is among the most celebrated sports photographers in history. His images appeared on over 80 Sports Illustrated covers; his iconic photographs of athletes like Muhammed Ali, Pete Rose and Bruce Jenner revealed their subject in a moment when they were most perfectly themselves. Having a successful parent creates certain pressures. We lived in Philadelphia, but important sporting events might be anywhere, and my dad had to be there. He was following his dream, but I was lost.

16  The dream journey

Figure 2.2  Children at Comiskey Park. Used with permission of James Drake.

As much as I wanted to understand my true self, I didn’t know who that was. A favorite James Drake photo is one of children silhouetted against the fence at Comiskey Park. I felt like those kids sometimes, blocked by a fence from understanding who I really was, unable to get where I really wanted to be, but staring in wonder at the game being played out in front of me, wanting to climb the fence.

The balloon ride I was a reckless teen, restlessly searching for a path. I cut school regularly to the point where my nickname in chemistry class became “The Phantom.” I rode the Philadelphia subways just to see where they would end. I bought a motorcycle and moved out of my parent’s house during high school. In my restlessness I didn’t realize that my balloon ride was an inner one, not an outer one. Although I was an adventurer, I was also an avid reader. I discovered Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and other books about psychology at an early age, but those were words and descriptions. I wanted real experiences, adventure. Around that time, I had a lucid dream of being chased by

Synchronicity 17 a red bull through a forest. As it chased me down, I turned to face it, and it vanished. The exhilaration of that inner adventure led me to read Stephen LaBerge’s Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Being Aware and Awake in Your Dreams. I was hooked. I realized that dreams might be the uncharted territory that I needed to explore. Using lucid dreaming, I could experience the inner world, the intrinsic form of the mind, what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “Inscape.” I found both the awareness within the dream and the power of interacting within the vast dream world thrilling. The winds of synchronicity had started to push my balloon; I decided to become a sleep researcher.

Starting on the journey Though I was reckless, I was also ambitious. I wanted to be successful like my father. I started near home, at Penn State, where I studied psychology and worked as a research assistant. In the research lab, I was introduced to an early ambulatory electrogastrogram (EGG) device that measures stomach activity and its patterns of contraction and relaxation throughout the day. I bribed a close friend to wear the device overnight. The following day, I looked at the readings and found, to my surprise, that his gastric activity was completely different during sleep, with increased sharp contractions intermixed with patterns I had never seen in participants during the day. I thought I had made a significant scientific discovery! It turned out he had been up most of the night because of a breakup with his girlfriend, and all I had discovered was breakups are hard on the stomach. But I also discovered that I loved sleep research. After graduation, I landed a job at one of the top brain research program in the world, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), in Maryland. There, I worked as a research assistant for Dr. Norman Rosenthal. Rosenthal was an expert in biological rhythms in mental health disorders. He coined the term seasonal affective disorder (SAD) to describe the unique form of major depression that occurred seasonally. I learned about brain waves, named EEGs after the device used to record them, the electroencephalogram. I recorded the unique waves that occur during sleep, like sleep spindles, K complexes and the mysterious rapid eye movements, or REM that occur in dream sleep. Dr. Rosenthal showed that we are out of sync with the seasonal cycles of the natural world. Artificial light keeps us in perpetual summer, with long days and short nights. In the study we took away the artificial light-dark cycle, and our subjects became, biologically, more like mammals in the natural world than we are. They started to undergo the profound changes in hormones, body

18  The dream journey temperature and sleep patterns that echo those of other mammals during winter. Most of us, caught in endless summer, never feel those changes. During the long nights of our ancient past, human sleep was biphasic, involving two distinct sleep periods, and so was the release of the nocturnal hormone melatonin (Wehr et al., 1995). Interestingly, the seasonal pattern of melatonin secretion from the pineal gland, which Rene Descartes called “the seat of the soul,” is the main driver of nearly all seasonal changes that occur in mammals, including the molt of skins, furs and plumages and migratory and mating patterns (Gwinner, 2012). Appreciating the complex rhythms that govern behavior and sleep without our awareness made me even more committed to sleep research and to understanding the brain.

Academia My mentors at NIMH advised me to continue my sleep science research at Bowling Green State University. There I studied and experienced the effects of sleep deprivation. My job, as low man on the totem pole, was to keep study participants awake all night. I could barely stay awake myself, but at the end of the night I had to drive them home to their dorms. At Bowling Green, I met Dr. Jaak Panksepp, the pioneer researcher whose book Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions ushered in an entirely new field of scientific inquiry into the emotional circuitry of the brain. Panksepp paid particular attention to sleep and dreams (Panksepp & Biven, 2012). Indeed, Mark Solms, Neuropsychoanalyst and author of The Neuropsychology of Dreams, said, “Jaak Panksepp is the most important theorist of mental life that I have read since Freud.” Jaak fostered and legitimized my growing interest in the neuroscience of sleep and dreams.

A job in Detroit I needed a job while finishing my dissertation on seasonal affective disorder and melatonin. I found one in Detroit, working for the prominent sleep researchers Thomas Roth and Timothy Roehrs at Henry Ford Hospital. On weekends, I drove five hours back to Bowling Green to complete my dissertation research. Although I never intended to stay, the Division of Sleep Medicine at Henry Ford Hospital became my scientific home, and it has been for the 20 years since. I studied insomnia, sleep apnea, daytime sleepiness and the negative impact of shift work on sleep. Years ago, I had chosen a career in sleep research to study dreams, but no one in sleep medicine talked much about dreams. Why?

Synchronicity 19

Sleep medicine Sleep medicine focuses on sleep disorders. It is a multidisciplinary field involving psychiatrists, psychologists, pulmonologists, neurologists, surgeons and, more recently, dentists, nurses and many other medical professionals. It is varied and interesting, and intellectually stimulating, but it is oddly distant from the world of dreams. Ironically, ever since the discovery of REM sleep in the 1950s, sleep medicine has drifted away from the study of dreams. Dreams became a peripheral topic of inquiry within sleep medicine, and sleep medicine and dream research became distinct and independent fields over the past 50 years. Sleep medicine was a clear path to a scientific career, though it had little to do with dream research. The Henry Ford sleep lab did pioneer work in insomnia and sleep apnea. Sleep research offered an opportunity for grants, publications and academic success, and I flourished. I became an expert at cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. This type of psychotherapy was not a path to the inner world of the psyche, but it worked. Positive benefits could be achieved within weeks, sustained over time, and could even be helpful in preventing the onset of depression. I was doing “psychotherapy,” but not the psychotherapy I imagined while first reading Freud and Jung.

Midlife crisis Jung coined the term “midlife crisis” to describe the psychological issues that occur in later phases of adult development. People in midlife often realize that success has not given their lives the meaning they had hoped. I’m a successful researcher, but something was missing. Life felt void of meaning. I even lost interest in dreams. As Jung once wrote, “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.” I was trapped in an endless summer of my success but started to feel disconnected from the inner world that gives purpose to life. Jung once said: “Synchronicity is an ever-present reality for those who have eyes to see.” One day the phone rang, and on the line was my colleague, Emerson Wickwire, who said. “I have a friend who is interested in doing a study on lucid dreaming.” “Come again?” I replied. This could not be right, I thought to myself. My colleague had no idea that lucid dreaming was my first love, the initial call that started this journey of mine. Certainly, he did not know about my feelings of stagnation and my looming midlife crisis. That was a secret that I barely admitted to myself. But, unknowingly, he offered me a chance to come back to what I loved most, dreams. As I studied the physiology of

20  The dream journey lucid dreams, I began to wonder what they were for. I was ready to look at dreams in a different way.

Dream exploration Synchronicity again came knocking. One day while looking at the departmental schedule of didactic lectures, I saw something out of place. A lecture called “The Meaning of Dreams” was planned. We occasionally provided lectures about REM physiology to our clinical fellows, but this was a lecture on dream interpretation. The speaker was a former mentor and the future co-author of this book, Dr. Greg Mahr from the Department of Psychiatry. I don’t usually attend those lectures, but I decided to sit in. After briefly reviewing the theories of Freud and Jung, Dr. Mahr asked us to recount a dream. I volunteered my almost forgotten lucid Big Dream of the bull that had first inspired me to read LaBerge’s description of lucid dreaming. We talked about the dream from the point of interpretation. As a scientist I had been trained to dismiss this this kind of talk as being vague, untestable and unreliable. Now in midlife, this language made sense, and I realized I had to face the bull head on. After the lecture, Greg and I talked in the empty conference room, and this journey of ours began.

The balloon dream As I came to understand, the balloon ride is my life journey. To travel in a balloon requires trust. Jung coined the term synchronicity to describe meaningful coincidence, acausal connection. Synchronicity is what I have had to learn to trust. It’s the wind that blows the balloon to the right place. A balloon can only go where the wind takes it. Wind is spirit, wind is the breath of God, wind is synchronicity. The balloon takes me on a wondrous journey to unknown territory I am not only eager to explore, as I always was as a child, but also hesitant; I look backwards instead of forwards. I am in midlife, I have regrets. The skilled inner guide, a woman, leads me and knows the way. As we will discuss in future chapters, men often dream of such female spirit guides. Jung called such figures anima. After I pass through transitions, represented by the bridges, and into the cave or tunnel that leads to the depths of the unconscious, I find a beautiful mansion. This mansion is dingy on the outside. To me, experienced in the rules and dictates of “science,” the world of dreams seems muddy or dingy. It’s foggy, I can’t see clearly in this world with my usual scientific tools. I’m not sure how far away this mansion is, but I know that this mansion, this dream world is beautiful and well-furnished on the inside.

Synchronicity 21 In my balloon, I am pushed along by the winds of synchronicity but guided by a wise but unknown inner pilot to this world of dream exploration. I  am finally, in midlife, beginning to approach the beautiful mansion that is our inner world. As I look around me, I see dream research once again having a larger role in academia, and I realize that my journey may parallel a journey that the culture of academia is making. The study of dreams is becoming acceptable again in sleep science.

References Bulkeley, K. A. (2016). Big dreams: The science of dreaming and the origins of religion. Oxford University Press. Gwinner, E. (2012). Circannual rhythms: Endogenous annual clocks in the organization of seasonal processes (Vol. 18). Springer. Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions (1st ed.). W.W. Norton & Co. Wehr, T. A., Schwartz, P. J., Turner, E. H., Feldman-Naim, S., Drake, C. L., & Rosenthal, N. E. (1995). Bimodal patterns of human melatonin secretion consistent with a two-oscillator model of regulation. Neuroscience Letters, 194(1–2), 105–108. https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-3940(95)11740-n

3 Gender issues in dreamwork

In her Diaries, Anais Nin, the early feminist and benefactress of writers like Henry Miller, described an important, recurrent dream: “I felt a terrible oppression, as If I had crawled into a hole and were stifling.” She continued, I remembered many dreams I have had of being forced to crawl on my stomach like a snake, through tunnels and apertures that were too small for me, the last one always smaller than all the others, where the anxiety grew so strong it awakened me. (Nin, 1969)

Sexism in psychology Historically, the relationship between psychology and women has been one of abuse and exploitation. Emma Eckstein, who appears with the name Irma in Freud’s dream about “Irma’s injection,” was grossly mistreated by Freud because of his gender bias. (This dream will be examined in detail in Chapter 24) Freud believed that her menstrual problems were caused by masturbation and recommended a controversial surgical procedure which nearly killed her. Freud also tended to interpret his patient’s reports of incest and sexual abuse as being hysterical fantasies. Therapists have exploited the covert power dynamic of therapy. Like supervisors and priests, therapists are viewed as authority figures and can sometimes abuse this authority. Sexual abuse of patients by their therapists is shockingly common – in a 1973 study, 5% of psychiatrists admitted to having sex with their patients. A sexist narrative has colored academic theorizing about gender. Freud developed the idea of penis envy and in other ways espoused ideas that suggested the intellectual and emotional inferiority of women. Much of what masqueraded as general psychology was actually centered on the DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-5

Gender issues in dreamwork 23 masculine, like Freud’s ideas about the central role of the Oedipal conflict in understanding the psyche. Oedipus killed his father and married his mother; every male child must abandon this fantasy and instead identify with his father. The Oedipal conflict led to the development of emotional and moral maturity. Women were said to experience an Electra complex instead of an ­Oedipus complex. Electra plotted to kill her mother and stepfather; according to Freud she was enraged, on a psychological level, for her lack of a penis. This imagined lack or incompleteness was felt to affect female development and allowed male psychoanalysts to rationalize their beliefs that women were inferior to men. Too much of psychology has consisted of men imagining the thoughts and feelings of women and replacing the reality of a woman with their own fantasies and projections. Grandiose ideas about the importance of a penis led men to project envious wishes toward it on to women. Freud wrote, “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ ” Probably he never respected a woman enough to ask her what she wanted.

Anais Nin Anais Nin was a prominent twentieth-century diarist, novelist and essayist. Her works, famous for their frank depictions of sexuality, include A Spy in the House of Love and The Diary of Anais Nin 1931–1943, as well several volumes of erotica. Her life reenacts the complex dynamic of exploitation and seduction that is at the core of the relationship between psychology and gender issues. She was sexually abused by her father, then by psychoanalysts who treated her, including the well-known Otto Rank. She had two husbands, at the same time, one on the East Coast and one on the West. She was romantically involved with several of the influential artists and intellectuals of her era, including filmmaker Jean Cocteau, the literary critic Edmund Wilson and perhaps Gore Vidal, but her sexual relationships were nonbinary. She was famously involved with both Henry Miller and his wife June, as documented in the book and movie Henry and June. Nin’s literary works remain fresh and timeless because of their fearless authenticity. Her reputation has varied over the past decades. In the 1960s, she was considered an important feminist writer because of frank and pioneering portrayals of sex from a woman’s point of view. Although her reputation suffered in the 1990s when details of her personal life were revealed, primarily her two simultaneous marriages, she is once again viewed as feminist pioneer. Nin’s quotes have become popular memes on the Internet, especially a quote from one of her novels, “We do not see things as they

24  The dream journey

Figure 3.1  Portrait of Anais Nin. Source: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

are, we see them as we are.” Freud might have benefited from reading that quote. Dreams were an integral part of Nin’s writing process. Many of her stories were amplifications of dreams. In words that echo current neurophysiological understandings of dreams, Nin wrote “Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again: and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.” Those words are a wonderful summary of the goals of dreamwork to use dreams to make life changes. Nin’s extensive autobiographical works show a depth of insight into her own nature and the complexities of male/female relationships and gender roles. Financially, Nin had a “masculine” role. It was her financial resources that supported and nurtured starving artists like Henry Miller. Nin’s frank discussions of promiscuity and bisexuality are shocking even today. It is

Gender issues in dreamwork 25 easy to forget that she was writing in the 1940s and 1950s. She openly sought and described her own sexual pleasure in an era where sexual pleasure was considered a masculine prerogative. She offered very blunt descriptions of male sexual inadequacies, undermining male stereotypes of sexual prowess.

Gender differences in dreams Domhoff writes extensively about the similarities and differences between the dreams of men and women. Men and women tend to have similar levels of positive and negative interactions in their dreams, and the frequencies of some activities are very similar. Eating, for instance, occurs in 17% of the dreams of all genders (Domhoff, 2005). However, men dream of other men more frequently than they dream of women, while woman dream of both sexes equally. Men dream of unfamiliar characters more often, typically men, and their aggressive acts in dreams tend to be directed toward other men. Women dream more commonly of familiar characters. Much of the data used in dream content analysis is older, gathered in binary categories. Little data is available on the dreams of gay, trans and non-gendered individuals. Sex is less common in dreams than one might expect. After reading Freud, one might imagine that most dreams are about sex, but that is not the case. Sex occurs more commonly in male dreams than female ones, 12% versus 4%, respectively. Women tend to provide longer dream reports than men and generally have more characters in their dreams than men. Domhoff found that many of these gender differences cross cultural and ethnic boundaries and are reflected in cultures other than our own. The challenge is to speculate on the meaning of these findings. In the past, in traditional academic discourse, an author would report data like this and then speculate on its meaning. It is in those speculations that bias can appear. Since men dominated academia, such speculations would lend the stamp of science to male biases and prejudices about women.

LGBTQIA+ sexual imagery in dreams While we sometimes imagine that third-gender individuals are a uniquely modern phenomenon, third-gender individuals have had an important role in many societies. In many native American cultures, two spirited individuals served as shamans and dream interpreters (Williams, 1986). In Western culture, since the early days of the Church, much of education of the young

26  The dream journey and the care of the sick was done by individuals who wore gender-neutral clothes and professed celibacy. They were called nuns and priests. Gender in dreams is complex. While dream figures are typically male or female, they can change sex or have features of both sexes. One might, for instance, dream of a woman with a beard in a condensation of male and female sexual features. As we will describe in the chapter on dream symbols, sex in dreams typically represents intimacy and closeness rather than the sexual act itself. Sex with a same-sex partner in a dream usually expresses the desire for a closer relationship with another aspect of one’s maleness or femaleness.

How men see women Toni Wolff, the Jungian analyst, described in the 1950s four female archetypes; the Mother, the Amazon or warrior woman, the Medial or mediumistic woman and the Hetaira, who is a companion, lover or mistress (Wolff, 1956). Women tend to enact these archetypal roles, especially in relationship with men. A  woman like Nin would be seen by Wolff as a Hetaira. Hetairas are seductive and can sense the fantasy projections that men impose on them. They can inspire love in men but feel inwardly lonely because they are enacting what someone wants them to be and are not loved for themselves. Such typecasting by gender is troubling to modern ears. Are these true archetypes or are they male fantasies about women? To make matters even more complex and disturbing, Toni Wolff was a patient of Jung’s, as well as his longtime lover. How did Wolff’s experiences with Jung color her ideas about women? To see Nin as Hetaira is also not to recognize Nin as her own person, independent of male ideas about her. It is also not to recognize her as someone who experienced extensive sexual abuse by her father, and later sexual exploitation by two of her male analysts. In some sense, gender bias may help create and animate the Hetaira image. I am reminded of the life of Teresa of Avila, the great Spanish mystic who lived in the 1500s. Teresa was a nun, but in those days, nuns served a strange sexless Hetaira role. Women were not allowed education and essentially served as household servants, except in convents. Educated men would flock to the convent to visit the nuns. These men longed for feminine companionship with women who were their equals in education and knowledge. However, they did not allow their own wives an education or leisure. Four analogous masculine archetypes have been described that are King, Warrior, Magician and Lover (Moore & Douglas, 1990). The male terms underline the gender bias implicit in the Wolff terminology. “Hetaira” is

Gender issues in dreamwork 27 a very biased term compared to “lover” and carries implications of seductress. The term refers to a courtesan or temple prostitute in ancient Greece.

Gender as symbol Both Jung and Freud saw gender as a binary category of human experience, they felt that people were male or female and that aspects and perspectives of our experience of the world were male or female. In many languages such as the German that Freud and Jung spoke, every noun has a gender. “Gendering” the world may be a fundamental human tendency that does not in itself imply bias. Freud was very much the product of his culture, and his gendering of the world involved a negative view of women. He never really escaped his culture’s view of women as being inferior to men. Jung had a more complex and nuanced view of the masculine and the feminine. He felt that men and woman had a wholeness of being that transcended gender. Each contained the other sex within them. He felt that early in life a man enacted his “maleness,” but that later in life, perhaps after his midlife crisis, he would seek a deeper wholeness or individuation and express the feminine aspects of his being. Women, of course, followed an analogous path. Jung felt that early in adult life women tend to adopt more traditionally feminine roles but later in life became freer to express the masculine aspects of their natures. Although Jung’s ideas about the male and female aspects of people of both genders were ahead of his time, Jung’s conception of maleness and femaleness was still rather traditional. Men were aggressive, decisive and analytic; women nurturing and intuitive. Yikes! I can see Ilsa (Ingrid ­Bergman) with Rick (Humphrey Bogart) in the film “Casablanca,” crying and saying “You’ll have to think for both of us.” Ilsa is typecast as beautiful and seductive but unable to make the choices that only men can make. While Jung’s ideas about the masculine being part of a woman and vice versa broaden conceptualizations of masculine and feminine, Jung’s ideas are still gendered. Can these ideas be expressed without gender? Using midlife crisis as an example, can we, after midlife, simply explore neglected aspects of who we are, without assigning those issues a gender? Yes, such ideas and theories should be genderless whenever possible, and, if gendered, special attention must be paid to issues of bias. The dreams of LGBTQIA+ individuals must be studied and understood to consider how gender issues express themselves in their dreams. However, the figures that appear in dreams are typically male or female, and that reality must be accepted and understood. One way out of this dilemma is to remember always that gender in dreams is symbolic and has symbolic meaning, separate from culture stereotypes.

28  The dream journey The other reality that must be acknowledged is that the authors of this book are male, and males of a particular generation and class. In the chapter titled “The daimon within,” one of the authors has described adverse experiences with women in his life. Might these cultural roles and past experiences cause bias? Of course, the answer is yes. We must strive to become aware and vigilant regarding our own biases and to remember that the symbolic world is not the real world, though the real (i.e., external) and symbolic worlds interact in significant and meaningful ways.

Anais Nin’s dream In Nin’s dream, she finds herself humiliated and forced to crawl. She is put into smaller and smaller boxes, compartmentalized. Her full self cannot grow and express itself. She was perhaps bound by societal expectations of her time and by the roles imposed on her. She tried to crawl through and out of those tunnels or roles. On the surface, her life was one of great freedom from societal restrictions: two husbands and many lovers, both male and female. Yet, this Hetaira role was limiting in its own way. She was an object of desire but felt lonely and unloved, as her extensive diaries reveal. She probably adopted this Hetaira role as a reaction to the abuse and exploitation that she suffered. Yet, this passage through smaller and smaller rooms and tunnels strongly suggests birth. Nin is struggling to rebirth herself, outside of the images that bind her. Perhaps we can learn from her and be born to a new understanding of gender. Dreams may offer guidance in this journey.

References Domhoff, G. W. (2005). The dreams of men and women: Patterns of gender similarities and differences. http://dreamresearch.net/Library/domhoff_2005c.html Moore, R. A., & Douglas, G. (1990). King, warrior, magician, lover: Rediscovering the archetypes of the mature masculine. Harper Collins. Nin, A. (1969). The diaries of Anais Nin, 1944–1947. HarperCollins. Williams, W. (1986). The spirit and the flesh. Beacon Press. Wolff, T. (1956). The structural forms of the female psyche. C. G. Jung Institute.

4 Befriending your dreams

The anthropologist Loren Eiseley described a dream which depicted her hesitancy to encounter her unconscious. “The dream was of a blurred bearlike shape emerging from the snow against the window. It pounded on the glass and beckoned importunately toward the forest. I struggled against the import of that message.” The dream continued, more clearly, “Suddenly I lifted the telephone beside my bed, and through the receiver came a message as cryptic as the message from the snow . . . the voice I heard, a long way off, was my own voice in childhood. ‘I am sorry to have troubled you . . . I am sorry to have troubled you at all.’ ” (Eiseley, 1978).

Encountering the dream To understand the meaning of dreams, you need to move, comfortably and gracefully, from the language of science to the metaphorical language of poets and mystics. In this chapter, we will ask you to think like a poet. Suspend whatever you believe about dreams and try to think of them as wise messages from deep within. These messages must be nurtured. The source of these messages, the dream maker within us, needs to know that we are ready to listen. Dreams can be friends, teachers and mentors if we pay attention to their wisdom and listen. Dreams are like bears, powerful, friendly and dangerous, all at the same time. Dreams are those special friends that boldly tell us the truth about ourselves. They are gifts from within. In the sleep lab, when a subject is awakened during REM sleep, they remember a dream about 80% of the time, but, in everyday life, many people have little or no recollection of their dreams (Schredl, 2018). For one thing, our society may be sleep and dream deprived (Naiman, 2006). We sleep too little, and especially we wake up too early. We don’t give ourselves enough time to dream. Also, many of us take medications like antidepressants and sleeping pills, which suppress REM sleep. DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-6

30  The dream journey

Figure 4.1 Twelfth-century fresco of a bear: mysterious, powerful and cryptic. The Cloisters Collection, 1957. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Also, the brain must be taught to remember dreams. Unless they are consciously rehearsed, the brain tends to retain dreams in temporary storage instead of in long-term memory. Remembering dreams is a skill that requires practice and the proper attitude (Harris, 2002). Dreams must be approached with mindful appreciation. Since they can be bizarre and unpleasant at times, it is easy to skeptically dismiss dreams. Like friends, if we stop inviting dreams and ignore them when they do come, they will stop visiting. So, how do we befriend our dreams?

Ten steps   1 Have the right attitude. Honor dreams, respect them and assume that they have a message to tell even if you cannot grasp that meaning.

Befriending your dreams 31   2 Make the recollection of dreams a daily ritual. Dreams, even if vividly recalled, are easily forgotten. Some people try to write down their dreams when they first wake up. This can work, but many mornings the dog is barking, the kids are crying, the boss is calling and the spouse asks a question. By the time we attend to these “urgent” matters, the dream is lost. Some people keep a notepad beside their bed to record their dreams to avoid this problem. We prefer to record dreams on a phone through creating voice memos. Record them either first thing in the morning or upon awakening from a dream. Use your phone without any room lights. Bright light causes an alerting response and can make it harder to fall back asleep. Sometimes I am even surprised to find a dream recording on my phone that I had no recollection of.   3 Let the dream percolate in your mind as you go about your routine. Play with the images, see what thoughts and memories they bring. Don’t try to understand the dream, and don’t try to reduce its beautiful, artistic language into commonplace truisms. Instead, enter the dream world’s unique narrative flow and patterns.   4 Notice connections between past and present dreams. I have attended a local dream interpretation group for many years. Dreams have their own fingerprints; each group member’s dreams have their pattern over time. The same images recur, with interesting variations, and the same plot structures. We never share dreams anonymously, but it would be evident to any group member which dreamer authored the dream image.   5 Remember that, like any good poem, novel or painting, a dream can mean several things simultaneously. We must hold that ambiguity and find richness instead of doubt and confusion. Explore, rather than try to interpret a dream. Appreciate its richness instead of insisting on a single simple meaning.   6 With the guidance of a therapist, consider some advanced techniques, like dialoguing with dream images and characters or “dreaming the dream forward,” that is, extending it in your imagination to enrich and amplify plot elements. We will discuss these advanced techniques in more detail in a later chapter on active imagination.   7 If you are a therapist, remember that it is a meaningful gift when a patient offers a dream in therapy. Value and honor that gift by interacting with the dream and taking it seriously. Therapists often covertly discourage discussion of dreams because they feel inadequate in the realm of dream interpretation. They feel like they need to know exactly what the dream means themselves before exploring the dream. You don’t need to know what the dream means, but you may

32  The dream journey gain important insights by talking about the dream and valuing it. You are modeling for your patient an open attitude toward the whole inner world.   8 Sometimes, dreams are dark and frightening. Such dreams carry a message as well and need to be heard and understood. As Richard Rohr advised about spiritual distress, don’t panic; go deeper (Rohr, 2019). We will explore nightmares in a later chapter.   9 Practice good sleep habits. Our culture devalues not only dreams, but also sleep. We sleep too little; we shorten the night with electric lights. We wake up too early. The longest periods of REM sleep occur in the early morning hours, after 5 AM. If our alarm goes off at 5:30, we will miss most of that REM sleep. Remember that our ancestors in northern climates faced 16–18 hours of darkness during the winter months. They probably slept for most of that time, perhaps making cave paintings in some REM-like trance. 10 Perhaps most importantly, pay attention to the emotional content of the dream. When we dream, we process and integrate emotions, so paying attention to the emotional content of a dream helps you understand its message. Exploring who feels what in a dream and why they feel it will help you remember the dream and be in relationship with it. A colleague of mine grew up in Pakistan. During her childhood, a common question over morning coffee would be, “What did you dream about last night?” We will have to compensate for our culture’s neglect of dreams by making special efforts to befriend these nocturnal messengers. We must teach ourselves to dream again.

Dreams as invitations for change When I share my interest in dreams, I usually get two kinds of responses. Some people want to hear more, while others condescendingly say, “most dreams are just nonsense.” What those people do next is always very similar, as if they were reading from the same script. They report an example of a dream that seems to be nonsensical to them. Their example, however, has a patently obvious and transparent meaning to anyone else. My own father is a great example of the second kind of response. My dear father is 100 years old. He has always had troubled relationships with women. The two important women in his life, his mother and his wife (my mother), treated him cruelly, and he had a difficult time asserting himself with them, but he idealized them. When I told him that I was

Befriending your dreams 33 writing this book, he told me that dreams are usually just nonsense. “For instance, last night I dreamt that I was mowing the lawn. Someone, either my mother or my wife, was criticizing me for not mowing right. Isn’t that just nonsense!” My father’s “meaningless” dream is a succinct summary of the negative way that he experienced women in his life. These two women merge into one image and criticize him. Even now, at the time of “mowing” or harvest at the end of life, these dark figures have power over him and demean him. They are not the actual people; they are the negative aspects of the feminine that he has internalized. He can’t or won’t see the dream’s meaning, so the dream appears meaningless to him. The dream, properly understood, might offer him an opportunity to make sense of his own past, but he is not ready to explore the dream and must dismiss it. The value of understanding dreams is, after all, to change your life. The poet Rilke writes, “. . . for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.” Change is far more important than understanding. Understanding is what the ego does. Understanding can be very helpful and can lead to change. Understanding can be superficial and intellectual. We can understand many things but never change. Dreams, because they come from outside the ego, can be powerful vehicles for genuine change. They offer a perspective from outside our conscious mind, with a power that comes from their archetypal nature. Dreams can deepen the ego and confront its tendency to avoid painful truths. Yet, as my father’s words show, dreams can be ignored.

The bear and the child If you can stay in the poetic mode of thinking, you will see that the dream that begins the chapter is about dreaming and about how lovingly and patiently our deepest self is trying to awaken us to our truth. Eiseley, a prominent anthropologist, reported this dream as part of his journey toward personal growth. The dream first depicts the power of the unconscious as a great bear inviting the dreamer to the forest, the traditional setting where, in fairy tales, in plays like As You Like It or novels like The Scarlet Letter, the unconscious is free to exert its power over us. In the second part of the dream, the dream maker poignantly depicts the unconscious as the dreamer himself, a child that wants to be heard and listened to. Eiseley’s bear wants Eiseley to be a deeper and richer person. Dreams are, indeed, the voice of that friend inside us that wants to be heard. Part of that inner voice is our childhood selves, our inner potentials that want to be recognized.

34  The dream journey

References Eiseley, L. (1978). The star thrower. Harvest Press. Harris, B. (2002). Sacred selfishness. Inner Ocean Publishing. Naiman, R. (2006). Healing night: The science and spirit of sleeping, dreaming and awakening. Syren Book Company. Rohr, R. (2019). The universal Christ. Crown Publishing. Schredl, M. (2018). Researching dreams: The fundamentals. Palgrave Macmillan.

Part II

Dreams that change lives

5 Dreams and creativity

“It was two people in kind of a little circular meadow with really bright sunlight, and one of them was a beautiful, sparkly boy and one was just a girl who was human and normal, and they were having this conversation,” said Meyer about her dream. “The boy was a vampire, which is so bizarre that I’d be dreaming about vampires, and he was trying to explain to her how much he cared about her and yet at the same time how much he wanted to kill her.” Stephanie Meyer, author of Twilight, from an interview on Oprah, used with permission.

Art and science from dreams The Twilight series is among many creative works inspired by dreams, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The song “Yesterday” came to Paul McCartney in a dream. Keith Richards found “Satisfaction” on a tape recorder near his bedside. He had fallen asleep holding his guitar and accidentally left his tape recorder on. He had no recollection of writing the song. Major scientific discoveries, like August Kekulé’s discovery of the ring structure of carbon and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, came in dreams. After years of struggle, Dmitri Mendeleev put together the entire Periodic Table of the elements in a few moments after seeing it in a dream (Roland, 2021). Such moments of creative inspiration sometimes require tension and preparation ahead of time. Kekulé and Mendeleev struggled for years with the scientific problems they faced. Mary Shelley, who was 19 at the time of her dream, went to sleep very worried about presenting a ghost story to her experienced writer friends. The moment of inspiration is often followed by sustained creative effort. Mary Shelley spent 2 years crafting her novel after she dreamt the novel’s plot. It took Paul McCartney 18 months to find lyrics for the music he had DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-8

38  Dreams that change lives

Figure 5.1  The ouroboros and the chemical structure of the benzene ring.

dreamed. He kept playing the chord progressions for friends, convinced he must have dreamt something he had heard. It took him time to realize that he had dreamt an entirely new creation and to develop lyrics to fit the music he had dreamt. Such creative dreams are recognized by the dreamer as being unique and meaningful. Creative dreams reflect a variety of Big Dreams that we have described earlier. This sense of significance is associated with specific patterns of brain chemistry, especially involving the neurotransmitter serotonin. Other states of consciousness, which inspire feelings of awe and meaningfulness, like psychedelic “trips,” are linked to similar brain states. Psychedelic trips often feel very meaningful and can sometimes awaken creative ideas just as dreams can (Sessa, 2008). This sense of awe and its chemical correlates might have an important role in broadening and deepening our conscious awareness. Altered states of consciousness can inspire creativity and are the basis of many religious rituals, like the Eleusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece or the Peyote experiences in the American Southwest. Dream solutions often have archetypal elements. Kekulé did not dream of a carbon ring; he dreamt of a snake devouring its own tail. That image is an ancient symbol of life and rebirth, known as the ouroboros, first seen in ancient Egyptian art, then Greek art and eventually in alchemy and Gnosticism. Mr. Hyde is a brilliant depiction of our Shadow, the dark side of ourselves that Jung explicated, and which is what George Lucas brought to life as Darth Vader in the Star Wars series. The images of Dracula and Frankenstein also have archetypal elements and give us access to the powerful

Dreams and creativity 39 images of our ancient past. The song “Yesterday” calls up archetypal echoes of lost love and the wish for union with the feminine.

What is creativity? Creativity is much discussed, but little understood. Creativity has something to do with the bringing together of disparate elements and reintegrating them. Truly creative endeavors build upon inspiration and original ideas to form a new and meaningful synthesis. The bringing together of disparate elements is also an essential quality of the dream process. The neurophysiological changes that occur in dream sleep, as we discuss later in the chapter, seem designed to facilitate this creative process. Dreams blend images and ideas to form novel, unexpected connections. Freud called this “primary process thinking.” An example of primary process thinking is my dream of rabbits, discussed in an earlier chapter. I dreamed of rabbits when I was seeing Dr. Warren; I would never in waking consciousness have connected the rabbit image with the meaning of his name. Freud also described condensation, which is the amalgamation of multiple images into one. For example, in Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection, which was cited earlier, the character of Dr. “M” is a condensation; he looks like Dr. “M,” except he limps and is cleanly shaven. He is aspects of three people condensed into one. This process of creativity in REM sleep has been described as “informational alchemy,” a term Jung, who spent years studying alchemy, would have liked. The final crucial aspect of creativity is meaning – the creative product must be meaningful. Jungian depth psychology offers clues as to what specifically creates meaning. Archetypal images connect to deeper sources of meaning. Part of the aesthetic power of Twilight and Frankenstein comes from their archetypal roots. Even McCartney’s song “Yesterday” is about lost love, an anima figure that has vanished. Archetypal figures are not of this world, they visit but cannot stay.

Dream physiology and creativity How might dreams foster creativity? The convergence–divergence zones of the cortex are areas of the brain essential for creative imagination (Damasio, 1999). The self-excitation of cortical cell networks that can occur during sleep may be related to the convergence–divergence system. It might be responsible for some of the creative aspects of dreams. REM sleep involves activation of lower brain centers like the pons. The excitation from bottomup activation in the brain stem then spreads out to activate the sleeping brain in REM and simultaneously engage these distant cortical networks to

40  Dreams that change lives form new connections. These new connections then provide a scaffold for creative ideas. At the start of REM sleep, our deep evolutionary ancient areas of the brain are activated, and this activation bubbles up through more recently evolved brain areas and on to higher consciousness centers. This bottomup activation stimulates brain stem components of the emotion regulation system, as well as subcortical areas such as the regulator of emotions, the limbic system. Although movement is suppressed during REM sleep, brain motor areas remain highly activated. Memory systems in the hippocampus are stimulated, including areas of autobiographical memory. And finally, on functional MRI images, the visuospatial areas of the cortex light up like a Christmas tree. But in REM sleep, some areas of the prefrontal cortex (outer top edges) and the posterior cingulate gyrus and parietal cortex are suppressed. The prefrontal cortex involves judgment, decision-making, future planning and rational thought, including suppressing urges. The posterior cingulate gyrus is a critical component of the default mode network (DMN), the brain network most active in non task-oriented waking activity. The DMN has been described as the neurophysiological equivalent of the ego (CarhartHarris & Friston, 2010). The locus ceruleus, which drives anxiety and stress responses, is also suppressed. Similarly, the serotonin system is suppressed, allowing for that feeling of awe to occur in the dream context. To borrow a phrase from advertising, it is as if the brain creates, during REM sleep, a “judgment-free zone.” A virtual space is created where new connections can be experimented with, and new associations made while those parts of the brain that are worrywarts are still sleeping. Mom and dad are asleep, and the kids are playing in the basement. Recent research has confirmed the link between REM and the creative process. When subjects are awakened from other stages of sleep, they perform poorly on certain word puzzles and tasks of association. But when they are awakened from REM sleep and are still in a REM haze, they perform very well at certain creative tasks. Sometimes, they describe seeing solutions suddenly, in a flash, bizarre but often novel meaningful connections (Walker, 2017). With only a small stretch of the imagination, we might wonder if creativity is the purpose of REM sleep. Our ancestors needed a place to imagine new ways to hunt or gather food or new ways to interact with the people they lived with. Archetypal imagery guided these explorations and helped identify emotionally relevant patterns and responses. Indeed, as Damasio has hypothesized, emotions may be the foundation of sentient consciousness.

Dreams and creativity 41

Using dreams to enhance creativity Are there ways to harness the creative power of dreams? Wouldn’t we all want to solve a scientific problem or write a platinum-plus song? This is, of course, a question that involves the “ego.” The ego always wants to know, “How can I exploit the world around me, even my inner world, to get fame or wealth or power.” Our deeper self does not like to be bullied by the incessant demands of the selfish ego. Despite that caveat, dream incubation techniques have been shown to be effective in solving problems. In a study by the Harvard dream researcher, Deirdre Barrett, college students identified a personal issue. They repeated it to themselves at bedtime and encouraged themselves to dream about it. After a week, two-thirds of the students involved in the study reported dreaming about the problem, and one-third reported having dreamt of a solution. What Barrett actually developed is an experimental trial of dream incubation (Barrett, 2017). Remember that incubation is not ruminating on a problem but turning it over to the unconscious and “sleeping on it.” Perhaps if we thoughtfully and respectfully befriend our dreams, they will guide us. Perhaps if our questions are true, meaningful and worthy of our deeper selves, our questions might be answered. Kekulé and Mendeleev studied their scientific problem for years before they were given the gift of a creative dream. Stevenson and his wife were nearly starving. He desperately struggled to become a writer, and Jekyll and Hyde saved his life and career. These great people were not dabblers and hobbyists; they were determined seekers. You must enter deeply into a problem for a solution to occur. Mendeleev made cards of the names of all the elements and spent all his free time trying to arrange them without success for years. After embracing his dream, he laid out the periodic table, without error, as it stands to this day.

Twilight Stephanie Meyer’s dream is a deeply archetypal one. The vampire is a beautiful, but dangerous animus figure, which is independent and eternal, a “beautiful, sparkly boy.” How can one not fall in love with him? He is Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff wandering the moors reborn. He loves, at the same time repressing the urge to destroy. The tension within the vampire is the tension that brings to life the whole series of books. It is also the tension that animates all love. What are the boundaries? Do I cherish the one I love or devour her? The woman lured by the irresistible love of the vampire faces an eternal, archetypal question as well. Do I resist the pull of the unconscious and stay in this world, or do I surrender to its spell, risk death and become eternal?

42  Dreams that change lives The setting of the dream is a mysterious circular sunlit meadow. A circle suggests wholeness and integration. Sunlight suggests awareness, illumination and divine presence. Angelic messengers from God typically appear surrounded by bright light. The vampire appears in this sacred space, ready to be integrated, in all his complexity, in a new and creative way with the human girl. This creative synthesis of the archetypal with the human is the essence of creativity. The dreamer experiences the emotional power of the dream image and narrative and then transforms it into a work of art, Twilight. That work of art invites us to share in that same creative integration to mix the day and night in that way that twilight does.

References Barrett, D. (2017). Dreams and creative problem solving. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1406, 64–67. Carhart-Harris, R. L., & Friston, K. J. (2010). The default-mode, ego-functions and free-energy: A neurobiological account of Freudian ideas. Brain, 133(Pt 4), 1265– 1283. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awq010 Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens. Harcourt. Roland, E. (2021, January 7). 13 world-changing ideas that came from dreams (literally). Readers Digest. Sessa, B. (2008). Is it time to revisit the role of psychedelic drugs in enhancing human creativity? Journal of Psychopharmacology, 22(8), 821–827. Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.

6 Lucid dreaming

In a second night, however, the same youth appeared to Gennadius, and asked whether he recognised him, to which he replied that he knew him well, without the slightest uncertainty. Thereupon he asked Gennadius where he had become acquainted with him. There also his memory failed him not as to the proper reply: he narrated the whole vision, and the hymns of the saints which, under his guidance, he had been taken to hear, with all the readiness natural to recollection of some very recent experience. On this the youth inquired whether it was in sleep or when awake that he had seen what he had just narrated. Gennadius answered: In sleep. The youth then said: You remember it well; it is true that you saw these things in sleep, but I would have you know that even now you are seeing in sleep. Hearing this, Gennadius was persuaded of its truth, and in his reply declared that he believed it. Then his teacher went on to say: Where is your body now? He answered: In my bed. Do you know, said the youth, that the eyes in this body of yours are now bound and closed, and at rest, and that with these eyes you are seeing nothing? He answered: I know it. What, then, said the youth, are the eyes with which you see me? He, unable to discover what to answer to this, was silent. While he hesitated, the youth unfolded to him what he was endeavoring to teach him by these questions, and immediately said: As while you are asleep and lying on your bed these eyes of your body are now unemployed and doing nothing, and yet you have eyes with which you behold me, and enjoy this vision, so, after your death, while your bodily eyes shall be wholly inactive, there shall be in you a life by which you shall still live, and a faculty of perception by which you shall still perceive. Augustine, letter 159

Lucid dreams are haunting. Anyone who experiences a lucid dream, especially the type where the dreamer has full control of his experience, is exhilarated by the ability to soar at will through landscapes of one’s own choosing. It is a natural high, a mystical bliss you never forget. Much of the

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44  Dreams that change lives research on lucid dreams is driven by the wish to understand and recapture that magic.

Definition In lucid dreams, people are aware that they are dreaming while they are dreaming. Lucid dreams can involve full access to waking faculties and, in some cases, allow one to partially control one’s dreams. The feeling of flying can be a particularly exhilarating aspect of lucid dreams but is quite rare. In lucid dreams of flying, the dreamer moves about like Superman and quickly travels to different places and settings.

The spectrum of lucidity Self-awareness within a dream is the mildest form of lucidity. This “splitting of the self’ is reminiscent of the dissociation seen in trauma used therapeutically in hypnosis. This self-awareness is not full lucidity because it does not involve awareness that one is dreaming, but it can be a precursor of full lucidity. Jung describes an excellent example of such a dream. Several young Swiss and I are down by the docks in Liverpool . . . We come to a small circular lake in a centrally located garden. In the middle of this there is an island. The men speak of a Swiss fellow who lives here [on this island] in such a sooty, dark, dirty city. (Jung, 1961) Jung is both the “I” in the dream and “the Swiss fellow” living on the island. This dream is not a full lucid dream because Jung does not realize he is dreaming and that he is, in fact, the Swiss fellow. Late in life, Jung describes a dream where he, as the dream ego, sees himself as a yogi sitting at an altar. This is the next level of awareness, where he recognizes himself in the dream. From that level of awareness it is a small step to full lucidity (Jung, 1961). Full lucidity involves an awareness that one is dreaming and a full sense of control. One of the authors had the following lucid dream as an adolescent. It’s dawn, and I am in the shallow stream of a dimly lit but expansive forest. I hear a distant rumbling over the trickling stream and turn to see a colossal red snarling bull with horns pointed toward me, charging at full speed. Running for my life, I wade through the stream deeper into the forest. Suddenly, the scene changes and I’m running down the

Lucid dreaming 45 stairway of a familiar parking garage. The bull is giving chase and I’m more scared than ever. Then something curious. I’m not awake, but I realize I’m dreaming. I say to myself “this is a dream.” I turn towards the bull. At once the snarling monster disappears and my nightmare has ended. I awaken immediately with a feeling of relief, exaltation, and bliss. This dream illustrates several important aspects of lucidity. One is the exhilaration that usually accompanies lucidity. The other is the important purpose, as in the Gennadius dream, that lucidity serves in enhancing the message of the dream. The forests that are dimly lit, suggesting the lack of awareness by the dreamer of his inner world. When the dreamer “awakens” to awareness of this bull of his adolescent spirit, the danger disappears.

The Neurophysiology of lucid dreams How does one scientifically verify a lucid dream? After REM sleep was discovered, modern pioneers like Stephen LaBerge used eye movement recordings and EEG to study lucid dreams. Subjects could be taught to signal that they were lucid by moving one’s eyes in a prespecified manner, while polysomnography confirmed that they were in REM sleep. Lucid dreams became a measurable, verifiable phenomenon (LaBerge & Rheingold, 1991). The neuroscientific study of lucid dreams had begun. When dreaming, the brain’s normal executive functions, that help us analyze situations and plan, go offline. In dreams, we can experience reality unconditionally, without attempting to plan. We also lack the insight that we are dreaming. But the emotional parts of the brain are highly active during REM sleep and dreaming. Lucid dreaming represents a measurable and distinct state of consciousness, albeit fragile, somewhere between wakefulness and typical dreaming. The anterior prefrontal and parietal areas of the brain come back online. The mind steps away from the dream and begins to disassociate becoming metacognitively aware that it is dreaming. Other parts of the brain become more active during lucid dreaming, especially the dorsolateral prefrontal and parietal (precuneus, inferior parietal lobules, supramarginal gyrus) cortex. Connectivity between different brain areas also seems to increase. There is also evidence that individuals who experience more lucid dreams have higher resting-state connectivity between the anterior prefrontal cortex and frontoparietal brain region (Baird et al., 2019). Interestingly, lucid dreamers perform better than non-lucid dreamers on insight-based problem solving, perhaps reflecting enhanced connectivity of disparate brain regions (Dresler, 2022, in press).

46  Dreams that change lives Physiologically, lucid dreams are accompanied by an increase in brain frequency around 20 cycles and 40 cycles per second (beta 1 and gammaband), as well as increased eye movements beyond those normally seen during REM sleep. These changes are accompanied by increased respiration, heart rate and elevated sympathetic nervous system activity levels. Externally applied brain stimulation in these frequencies of 20–40 cycles per second during REM sleep has been shown to increase awareness during dreams and even cause full-blown lucidity (Voss et al., 2014; Stumbrys et al., 2013). In the future, we might be able to readily induce lucid dreams with brain stimulation.

Psychological techniques for inducing lucid dreaming LaBerge and others have popularized the concept of lucid dreaming with best-selling books that include induction techniques and techniques for testing and maintaining lucidity. One technique for inducing lucidity is called mnemonic induction. One simply asks oneself, “Am I dreaming?” at frequent intervals during the day. Questioning and testing awareness during the day can make one more likely to test awareness during sleep and dreams. Another technique for inducing lucid dreams is called wake-induced lucid dreaming or WILD. This technique works best immediately after awakening from a morning dream because REM sleep most commonly occurs in the early morning. The dreamer focuses on some unreal aspect of the preceding dream while falling asleep. He says to himself, “The next time I dream I want to remember I am dreaming.” Dream journals, whether recorded or written, can also help with both dream recall and lucidity. Lucid dreams are said to have certain unusual features. Light switches and clocks in lucid dreams tend not to work or work in bizarre ways, and the hands of the dream ego tend to alter when they are examined. LaBerge used these special features of hands, clocks and light switches as techniques for recognizing and deepening the lucid state when in a lucid dream. For example, in the dream described earlier, I looked at my hands and recognized the thumb reversal that can occur during lucidity. When a dreamer confirms lucidity, he can more confidently explore the lucid state. But lucidity is a fragile state that can wax and wane through levels of awareness and conscious control. LaBerge called these techniques for enhancing lucidity within the dream DILD, an acronym for dream-initiated lucid dreams. Many such techniques are based on Tibetan Buddhist teachings for lucid dreaming. Even techniques like checking light switches and clocks are based on modern Buddhist dream yoga practices.

Lucid dreaming 47

Psychology and lucid dreaming Freud briefly acknowledged the existence of lucid dreams in his 1909 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, “There are some people who . . . seem to possess the faculty of consciously directing their dream.” Jung frequently blurred the boundaries between dreams, visions and the experiences that occur in the context of active imagination (Mahr and Drake, 2022). For instance, Jung’s experience of a Siegfried-like hero and enemy in The Red Book and The Black Book is described variously as a “vision,” a “frightful dream” and a “mighty dream vision.” For Jung, what mattered was the unconscious material not the degree of awareness the dreamer or visionary was experiencing.

The therapeutic use of lucid dreams Lucid dreams might have strong potential as a therapeutic technique. As early as 1720, Thomas Reid used lucidity to eliminate his nightmares (Hurd, 2014). The capacity to have frequent lucid dreams is uncommon, however, and the popular techniques to induce lucid dreams are not always successful. In the dream of the red bull described earlier, lucidity interrupted a nightmarish experience. Depth psychology techniques for “dreaming a dream forward” can be useful in treating nightmares. Image rehearsal therapy (IRT) has been shown to be effective in treating nightmares. IRT, although it is described as a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, uses dream modification techniques reminiscent of those described in depth psychology, like dreaming the dream forward. Care must be taken, however, to use lucidity to develop and support the dream, not subvert it. I have heard lucid dreamers describe fascinating dreams that they interrupt with their own lucidity. Perhaps, for instance, they are about to meet a significant dream character like a wise old man but become lucid and instead soar off to a distant place. Lucidity should not be used as a technique for the ego to take control of the dream process. Lucidity can be used to deepen the experience of the dream itself. With a thoughtful understanding of dreams, we might have a lucid discussion with a wise woman or anima figure to learn from them. Instead, much of the popular literature about lucid dreams has limited psychological depth. Lucid dreams are used recreationally because of the sense of power and exhilaration that accompanies them, but their potential in a therapeutic context is far more untapped. Depth psychologists have a legitimate concern that the ego in a lucid dream is intruding itself upon a spontaneous dream experience. This can be ego inflation at its worst. Yet, Jung greatly valued direct contact between

48  Dreams that change lives the ego and dream/visionary figures. Much of The Red Book is a dialogue between Jung and the various figures that appear to him. He perceived this as an enrichment and expansion of the ego, which are, after all, the goals of therapy and individuation. Lucid dream experiences, used thoughtfully, can lead to the same kind of enrichment of the ego.

The lucid dream described by Augustine The dreamer in the dream that begins this chapter is Gennadius, a physician and a friend of Augustine’s. This dream occurs when Gennadius is having doubts about the immortality of his soul. The dream quoted occurs on the second night of this sequence. In the first night, Gennadius encounters, in a dream, “a youth of remarkable appearance and commanding presence” associated with music surpassing in beauty any Gennadius had ever heard. In the second night, the youth reappears reminding Gennadius of his dream the previous night, then questioning him. His questions to Gennadius about where his body is and whether his eyes are closed are not unlike the kind LaBerge or even Dzogchen monks would use to heighten lucidity. Then, this God-like youth uses the lucidity itself to help Gennadius understand the immortality of his own soul. This dream is a reminder of the kind of insights the gift of lucidity can bring. Through this dream, Gennadius regains his faith.

References Baird, B., Mota-Rolim, S. A., & Dresler, M. (2019). The cognitive neuroscience of lucid dreaming. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 100, 305–323. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.03.008 Dresler, M. (2022, in press). Lucid dreaming, in principles and practice of sleep medicine. Elsevier Health. Hurd, R., & Bulkeley, K. (2014). Lucid dreaming: New perspectives on consciousness and sleep. Praeger. Jung, C. (1961). Memories, dreams and reflections (A. Jaffe, Ed.). Random House. LaBerge, S., & Rheingold, H. (1991). Exploring the world of lucid dreaming. Ballantine Books. Mahr, G. Drake, C. L. (2022). Singing in tune: Jung and The Red Book. Sleep Health. Stumbrys, T., Erlacher, D., & Schredl, M. (2013). Testing the involvement of the prefrontal cortex in lucid dreaming: A tDCS study. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(4), 1214–1222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.08.005 Voss, U., Holzmann, R., Hobson, A., Paulus, W., Koppehele-Gossel, J., Klimke, A., & Nitsche, M. A. (2014). Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity. Nature neuroscience, 17(6), 810–812.

7 Dreams and psychedelic drugs

Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon the place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took one of the stones of the place, and put it under his head, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And, behold, the LORD stood beside him, and said: ‘I am the LORD, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac. The land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed. . . . And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said: ‘Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.’ And he was afraid, and said: ‘How full of awe is this place! this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put under his head, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Beth-el, but the name of the city was Luz at the first. Genesis 28:10–19

Jacob’s dream is among the best known of the Old Testament. It has been interpreted in multiple ways. The Jewish faith focuses on the promise of the inheritance of the land. The steps in the ladder represent the exile from the land that the Jewish people experienced multiple times throughout their history. Some Jewish interpreters suggest that the spot Jacob lay was Mount Moriah, where the Temple would be built. The Jewish philosopher Philo saw the ladder as representing reincarnation, with souls ascending and descending to earth. The ladder was thus the bridge between heaven and earth represented by the Temple. In Christianity, the ladder in this dream was felt to represent Christ, who connected heaven and earth. The ladder also represented the steps of virtue that led heavenward. According to Gregory of Nyssa, the ladder also

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50  Dreams that change lives

Figure 7.1  William Blake’s rendition of Jacob’s ladder. Source: © Trustees of the British Museum.

represented the mystical path to the divine. For Islam, the ladder represents the “straight path” to heaven, namely, the Islamic faith.

Bad trips I will share this story in the first person, as if it were me. Maybe it was a friend, or a client, or maybe it was me. My first and second to last psychedelic trip was a bad one. I was far too old to be tripping for the first time, but I wanted to learn. I got dried magic mushrooms from a friend of a friend, packed none too professionally in a plastic sandwich bag. A friend enthusiastically joined me. We wanted to trip together; we rented a cabin a few hours away and brought notebooks. We were planning a science experiment.

Dreams and psychedelic drugs 51 We got to the cabin in time for lunch. We added the mushrooms to pasta to make them almost palatable, ate and waited. I had the disappointment/ fear cycle first users sometimes go through, moving quickly from “This isn’t doing anything” to “Oh no, this is doing too much.” Very, very, suddenly I felt very, very nauseous. I wondered if this nausea was physiological or psychological, but that academic question soon lost relevance. I was in the bathroom heaving, then lying on the bathroom floor wishing I could heave some more. I wanted to get this noxious thing out of me. I became convinced I had ingested “demon blood.” After an hour or two the nausea passed, and some of the fear. I spent the next several hours in bed. If I kept my eyes open, I was safe, but if I closed my eyes I would see demons and feel the otherworldly contempt of their gaze. I would also see demons in every blank electronic screen that I saw, like my phone and the TV, though I still managed to record my thoughts and feelings into my phone. I kept having a powerful conviction that I needed to go to the basement. The cabin where we were staying had no basement, but I could see in my mind the back door and landing of the home where I grew up. With surreal clarity I could recall the yellow linoleum of the stairs, the ridged chrome edging on the nose of the stairs and the plain wooden handrail that led to the dark basement. My friend, my ersatz trip guide, was in a happy place of kaleidoscopic flowers. I wanted her to go with me to the basement. She would have none of it, “You’re ok, you don’t need to go to the basement.” The drug made her words seem preternaturally wise, and I had quite enough of demons and the dark places where they lived and decided not to go to that basement in my mind. Eventually, I metabolized the demon blood, and the paranoid feelings and hallucinations passed. I never went to this basement that never was. I have talked to several experienced trip guides since. A good guide, I now know, would have gone with me, slowly, one step at a time, in my mind. I also have learned that bad trips are usually the best trips, the ones where you learn the most. My bad trip taught me something very important. I learned that there is a basement in my mind; and that dark wisdom lurks there. Perhaps I’ve been slowly and carefully walking down those stairs ever since.

The film Jacob’s Ladder Joel Rubin, the screenwriter of this cult psychological horror film, had a terrifying psychedelic trip in his youth. He was a friend of Timothy Leary, the Harvard drug guru of the 1960s. Leary did early research on

52  Dreams that change lives psychedelics when they were still legal. He coined the phrase, “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Through Leary, Rubin got a hold of a bottle of pure Sandoz pharmaceutical grade liquid LSD. Intending to use the recommended one drop, he accidentally squirted a whole eyedropper full in his mouth. He had a profound though nightmarish spiritual experience, quit his entry-level film industry job and started hitchhiking through Greece, Afghanistan, India and Nepal (Beresford, 2020). He was trying to understand the inner world he had discovered. Rubin’s film depicts the drug experiments performed by the US military during the Vietnam War. In the viewer, it creates both horror and awe. His clever name for the film, and the drug used by the unwitting subjects, was Jacob’s Ladder, referring to Jacob’s dream of spiritual ascent. Psychedelic drugs are also known as “entheogens” or, literally, drugs that “give birth to God.” They can induce a profound sense of mystical wonder and create life-changing insight.

Entheogens and creativity In Chapter 5, I described some of the creative works that came into being through dreams. I could make a similar list of creative acts that occurred during trips. The list would be shorter, psychedelics seem to work better at generating insight than eliciting specific discoveries but would still be longer than expected. Psychedelics generate a unique sense of meaning and connectedness. Ordinary events and objects become imbued with mythological significance.

“Your brain on drugs” Those of my generation will remember that term formed an anti-drug ad in the 1970s. It showed an egg frying, and with the backdrop of a loud­ sizzle on the soundtrack. Then a deep male voice intones the words “This is your brain on drugs.” The actual physiology is, of course, more complex than that. Psychedelic drugs have been described as “oneirogenic,” from the Greek oneiros, meaning dream and gen, to create. Grinspoon and Bakalar have suggested that, “In its imagery, emotional tone, and vagaries of thought and self-awareness, the drug trip, especially with eyes closed, resembles no other state so much as a dream” (Grinspoon, 1979). Hobson described the psychedelic state as an imposition of an REM-like state on the waking brain (Hobson, 2001). Both REM sleep and psychedelic states involve serotonin. Both involve a bottom-up inhibition of sensory

Dreams and psychedelic drugs 53 gating. The gating functions that filter information coming to the cortex are suppressed, leading to hallucination-like experiences. Brain imagery becomes more vivid to the point where its intensity matches that of waking reality. Brain connectivity is enhanced in both dream and psychedelic states. Intense bottom-up inputs are reinterpreted top-down by a cortex wildly freelancing in a hyper-associative state. In both bad dreams and trips, emotions are more vivid. The brain experiences a flood of emotions and associated memories, often including fear. That is probably why, in the bad trip described earlier, intrusive vivid memories of the basement of the childhood home appeared. In a trip, like in a dream, fears and traumatic memories can be processed in a different way, leading to healing. Psychedelics, like dreams, enhance certain aspects of cognition. Creative problem-solving and associative and symbolic thinking are enhanced. Imagery, in both dreams and trips, is measurably bizarre, and there can be depersonalization and loss of control due to deactivation of the frontal control regions of the brain. In contrast to a dream, in a trip, the brain changes occur while awake, with the “doors of perception” wide open. With eyes closed, the tripping brain hallucinates; with eyes open the brain experiences sensory input with intense clarity. A tree is suddenly amazingly and more perfectly a tree than ever before. In my bad trip, I hallucinated more when I closed my eyes. In this hyperconnected state, the mind also fills in bland surfaces, like the blank screens of phones or televisions; that is why I saw demons in my phone. Fortune tellers and witches understand this; they use the blank surfaces of bodies of water or crystal balls to skry or have visions. Table 7.1  Comparison of dream state and psychedelic state. Dreams

Psychedelic Trips

Perception

• Hallucinations (typically visual)

Emotions Self-awareness

• Increase in emotions • Decrease in selfawareness (except in lucid dreams) • Transcendence only in lucid dreams

• Synesthesia • Geometric patterns • Increase in hallucinations if eyes are closed • Increase in emotions • Increase in selfawareness

Feeling of Transcendence

Source: Adapted from Kraehenmann (2017).

• Increased feelings of transcendence

54  Dreams that change lives But dreams and trips differ in their sense of self. Trips often involve a dissolution of the sense of self and a feeling of self-transcendence. In dreams, a representative of the dreamer is usually vividly present as the “experiencer” of the dream, but the clarity of conscious awareness is typically absent. An exception to this generalization can be seen in lucid dreams, where the dreamer experiences a kind of split or meta-awareness, which in some ways phenomenologically resembles the feelings of transcendence that occurs with psychedelics (Kraehenmann, 2017).

The Eleusinian mysteries as a model of a guided trip Hallucinogenic drugs have been shown to be beneficial in various clinical situations, like resistant depression, anxiety, end-of-life apprehension and substance abuse. These research and treatment protocols typically involve “guided” trips, as well as pre- and post-trip therapy. Guided trips have been an aspect of religious ceremonies in many cultures. Historically the most important of these were the Eleusinian Mysteries. Famous initiates include Socrates, Plato, Caesar, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. They walked the 19 kilometers from Athens to Eleusis called the Sacred Way. For much of early Greek history, the Sacred Way was the only true road in central Greece. In the course of a seven-day ritual, initiates enacted the story of­ Demeter and Persephone and drank “kykeon,” a barley-based drink laced with ergotamines. Ergotamines are the psychoactive precursors of LSD and are produced by fungi as the kykeon ferments. Unlike Jacob’s sky God, Demeter was the goddess of the earth and harvest; Persephone, her daughter, was abducted by Hades to the underworld. When the grieving Demeter searched for her daughter, the earth became lifeless. When she found her, the earth came back to life again. However, Persephone could only return from the underworld with the consent of Zeus’s shadow half-brother Hades. In a compromise, Persephone was allowed to spend half the year above ground, the rest underground. Her return to earth represents the beginning of spring. The Eleusinian rituals were not about ladders leading heavenward but about descending into Mother Earth to restore life. Initiates were bound to secrecy about the ritual under penalty of death, and the full details of the ceremonies remain unknown. Plato said, “the ultimate design of the Mysteries . . . was to lead us back to the principles from which we were descended.” They were practiced without interruption for 2,000 years. The sanctuaries were closed by the Christian emperor of Rome in 392 ce. Christian raiders in 396 under the Gothic king Alaric ransacked the ancient structures at Eleusis in a deliberate act of desecration and reduced them to rubble.

Dreams and psychedelic drugs 55

Figure 7.2 An initiate between Demeter and Persephone, from the Temple at Eleusis. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1914.

Jacob’s Ladder Jacob’s dream hearkens to a time when God visited us in our dreams, sacred places existed and we experienced the world with awe and reverence. To pour oil upon a stone and bless it is to bless nature that leads us to God. Hallucinogens, especially when used in ritualistic ways, have enhanced religious experience in many cultures. The neurosis of modern man, according to the German theologian Hans Kung, is his inability to experience God (Kung, 1990). Myth, a form of Jung’s “healing fiction,” has been lost. Perhaps, the resurgent popularity of psychedelic use in therapy relates to their ability when used correctly, to re-experience the world with wonder and awe. The sacred mountains, caves and springs where God spoke to us are gone, but we still yearn for them.

56  Dreams that change lives Beersheba is now a city of over 200,000 and the home of the Israeli hightech industry, reaching skyward with the magic of computing. Perhaps we have offered enough homage to the sky Gods. Perhaps we need to journey down those yellow linoleum stairs to the underworld, rescue Persephone and make the earth bear sacred fruit again. After all, “surely the Lord is in this place.”

References Beresford, J. (2020). Jacob’s ladder: How LSD, Tibetan Buddhism and Tim Robbins combined to create a cult classic. Den of Geeks. Grinspoon, A. B. (1979). Psychedelic drugs reconsidered. Basic Books. Hobson, J. A. (2001). The dream drug store: Chemically altered states of consciousness. MIT Press. Kraehenmann, R. (2017). Dreams and psychedelics: Neurophenomenological comparison and therapeutic implications. Current Neuropharmacology, 15, 1032–1042. Kung, H. (1990). Freud and the problem of god. Yale University Press.

8 End-of-life dreams and visions

The final dream reported by a dying patient named Sally was about a palm tree and an earthquake. “I was a palm tree, the middle one of three trees. An earthquake is about to occur which would destroy all life, and I didn’t want to be killed by the quake” (Wheelwright, 1981). Jane Wheelwright’s book The Death of a Woman, where this dream appears, was a landmark account of the dreams of a young woman dying of cancer. Wheelwright, like Kubler-Ross, began to work with dying patients in the 1960s. Sally, the heroine of Wheelwright’s book, was 37 at the time of her death and faced difficult issues related not only to her painful illness, but also to the sudden presence of death as a psychological reality. Our culture, with its relentless and naive positivity, ignores and trivializes death. Physicians view death as an enemy and battle against it, sometimes too heroically. When Rainer Marie Rilke, the great German poet, was dying of leukemia in 1926, he said, “I don’t want the doctor’s death, I want my own freedom.” He seemed to recognize the future direction of the culture. “The doctor’s death” can alienate from genuine human experience. With the extension of life through increasingly “heroic” means, death has been separated from life. We die in hospitals, hooked up to tubes and machines unless we actively say no and demand, as Rilke did, our own freedom.

Deathbed experiences Vivid deathbed dreams and visionary experiences occur in about 82% of dying patients (Nosek et al., 2015). Physicians can sometimes dismiss the meaningfulness of such experiences and treat them as the products of a delirious brain. When a patient near the end of life has a vivid dream or vision of, for example, a dead relative, a clinician working purely in a materialist medical model might view that experience as a hallucination and try to suppress it with antipsychotics or sedatives. DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-11

58  Dreams that change lives In the last two decades, through the work of Kerr and others, the meaningfulness of these unique aspects of the death experience has been recognized in academic medicine (Kerr et al., 2014). Those researchers realized that the vivid dreams and hallucinations that can accompany death were meaningful and important. They called these experiences “end of life dreams and visions” or ELDVs. An ELDV is defined as perceptual disturbances that occur during the dying process characterized by a marked sense of realism and emotional significance. Since patients at the end of life can be delirious and confused, and their sleep–wake cycles are disrupted, it can be difficult to distinguish between dreams that occur during sleep and visions that occur while awake.

Figure 8.1 Goya’s painting, St. Francis Borgia Helping a Dying Impenitent, shows a priest trying to protect a dying man from terrifying visions. Source: Valencia Cathedral, Spain.

End-of-life dreams and visions 59 Typical forms of ELDV described in the modern literature are those of a comforting presence, preparing to go, watching or engaging with the dead and loved ones waiting. Unlike the hallucinations in delirium, ELDVs are vivid, intense and memorable. They are remembered with clarity, and their occurrence tends to reduce emotional distress and lead to a more peaceful death (Kerr et al., 2014). In a typical ELDV, a person who is very worried about death might have a vivid dream where they experienced the immanent presence of a deceased relative with whom they were close. After this dream, the patient can approach death calmly and with acceptance. ELDVs are not near-death experiences. Near-death experiences, or NDEs, have been studied in detail by Greyson, Sabon and others but are beyond the scope of this book. About 20% of ELDVs are distressing. In Heart of Darkness, written in 1902, Joseph Conrad provided a famous literary example of a distressing ELDV. The narrator describes the final moments of his friend Kurtz’s life. As intense despair and hopelessness crosses his face, he cries out, twice, “The horror, the horror!” (Conrad, 2007). Negative ELDVs like Kurtz’s create moral dilemmas. We must be thoughtful about pathologizing even distressing ELDVs. Did Kurtz need to have this negative experience to come to some deeper understanding of his life at the moment of death? Perhaps the negative experience is part of the journey in a way we do not understand. Should Conrad’s Kurtz have gotten a sedative?

Depth psychology and ELDVs While Kerr and his colleagues have approached end-of-life dreams from an empirical, observational perspective, without interpretation, analysts have studied dreams of the dying from a depth psychology perspective. Rather than observational data from many cases, analysts had access to detailed knowledge over time of individual cases. Von Franz, a close associate of Jung, studied the dreams of dying patients in analysis. Her analysis of these dreams suggested symbolism of vegetation, marriage, a dark birth passage, encountering a sinister or benevolent other, a passage through fire or water, the sacrifice of the old body and light as a final phenomenon to be transcended. These images occurred in the dreams of dying patients that she worked with, and their encounter with death was an intrapsychic journey. Bulkeley has also provided a thoughtful and practical discussion of end-oflife dreams and has suggested that such dreams involve journeys, guides and obstacles (Bulkeley, 2006). Jane Wheelwright worked with many dying patients and spent many months in analysis with a young woman dying of breast cancer named Sally.

60  Dreams that change lives Wheelwright systematically recorded and analyzed Sally’s dreams as she approached death. Sally’s final dream is the dream that begins this chapter. Death can appear as an event in the dream of any patient. While these dreams can seem sinister, they usually are not literally about death. They are not prophetic dreams but instead symbolically describe the death of a part of the person that is perhaps no longer needed. They are actually dreams of transformation and rebirth rather than death. Both Jung and von Franz have noted that the psyche does not seem to consider death a final event. Dreams always suggest the persistence of the person after death, which is cataclysmic to the dream ego but not to the person. Death is terrifying to the ego, but, to the deeper self, it represents the ultimate transformation.

A dream at the end of life The dream that starts this chapter, recorded by Wheelwright, is a good example of a dream that depicts the transcendence of life over death. The dream image of being in the middle of a group of three trees resembles the Crucifixion. Christ is crucified between the repentant and unrepentant thief. The central tree is between opposites, between evil and good, as the ego throughout life is suspended between opposites. The patient through her associations related the palm tree with Babylon and its Hanging Gardens, the ancient cradle of civilization. The tree is the Cross and the Tree of life. The earthquake is death, which will destroy all life. Yet, something deeper in her knows she will survive. Despite her fears, she knows she will survive. The “I” in the dream is distinct from the life that will be destroyed. Despite the doubts and fears we face at death, the death that extinguishes the ego is our final transformation.

References Bulkeley, P. B. K. (2006). Dreaming beyond death: A guide to deathbed dreams and visions. Beacon Press. Conrad, J. (2007). Heart of Darkness. Penguin Classics. Kerr, C. W., Donnelly, J. P., Wright, S. T., Kuszczak, S. M., Banas, A., Grant, P. C., & Luczkiewicz, D. L. (2014). End-of-life dreams and visions: A longitudinal study of hospice patients’ experiences. Journal of Palliative Medicine, 17(3), 296–303. Nosek, C. L., Kerr, C. W., Woodworth, J., Wright, S. T., Grant, P. C., Kuszczak, S. M., Banas, A., Luczkiewicz, D. L., & Depner, R. M. (2015). End-of-life dreams and visions: A qualitative perspective from hospice patients. American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, 32(3), 269–274. Wheelwright, J. H. (1981). The death of a woman: How a life became complete. St. Martin’s Press.

9 Prophetic dreams

“Mummy, let me tell you about my dream last night.” Her mother answered gently: “Darling, I’ve no time now. Tell me again later.” The child replied: “No, Mummy, you must listen. I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.” Eryl Mai Jones, age 10, 2 days before the Aberfan mining landslide, where she and many of her classmates were killed. (Knight, 2019)

At 9:15 AM, on a rainy October day in 1966, 140,000 thousand cubic yards of wet black coal mining waste roared down a mountainside toward the Welsh town of Aberfan. The first object in its path was Pantglas Junior School, where 116 students and five teachers were killed.

Prophetic dreams As we will see in future chapters, dreams have been viewed by nearly all cultures and through much of human history as windows into the future. Two types of dreams predict the future. Eryl Mae’s dream is one type. Another type of predictive dream is not psychic but depicts an emotional or physical state of the individual, which has percolated up through the unconscious during a dream as a warning of danger. As Jung described, this current state or attitude may be a warning or signal coming from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind (Jung, 1961). These dreams are prophetic but not in a mysterious, psychic way. They show what might happen if the dreamer is not careful and does not change. Jung describes this type of dream in his description that involved an interaction he had with a colleague in Zurich as follows: He . . . always teased me . . . about my interest in dream-interpretation. I met him one day in the street, and he called out to me: “How are DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-12

62  Dreams that change lives things going? Are you still interpreting dreams? By the way, I’ve had another idiotic dream. Does it mean something too?” He had dreamed as follows: “I am climbing a high mountain over steep, snow-covered slopes. I mount higher and higher – it is marvelous weather. The higher I climb, the better I feel. I think: ‘If only I could go on climbing like this forever!’ When I reach the summit, my happiness and elation are so strong that I feel I could mount right up into space. And I discover that I actually can do this. I go on climbing on empty air. I awake in a real ecstasy.” When he had told me his dream, I said: “My dear man, I know you can’t give up mountaineering, but let me implore you not to go alone from now on. When you go, take two guides, and you must promise on your word of honour to follow their directions.” (Jung, 1933)

Figure 9.1  The Aberfan disaster. Source: Alamy Stock Images.

Prophetic dreams 63 Jung’s colleague scoffed at his advice; a few months later, the colleague died in a mountain-climbing accident. Friends who had joined the mountaineer on his climb reported that he seemed to simply step off the mountain into thin air, as he seemed to reenact his dream. The dream that he had considered idiotic became a reality. It did not foretell the future; it depicted the man’s reckless attitude that could lead him to danger. This type of dream is subtle and requires skilled interpretation but raises no metaphysical issues. In contrast to the mountaineer’s dream, Eryl Mae’s dream about the landslide at her school does raise serious metaphysical issues. Our traditional way of understanding the world leaves no mechanism for dreams that ignore the rules of time and space. What are we to make of Eryl Mai’s dream? One of the early visitors to Aberfan after the disastrous avalanche was John Barker, a Welsh psychiatrist. Barker was a well-trained and scholarly doctor. He did his undergraduate work at Cambridge, went to the prestigious St. George’s Medical School and had published a paper in The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest and best-known medical journals. Barker had a special interest in premonitions. While in Aberfan, Barker heard several stories like Eryl Mai’s. He decided to run an ad in a London paper, the Evening Standard, asking anyone who had premonitions of the mining disaster to contact him. He received 76 replies, many of which he considered plausible. He convinced the paper to start a premonitions bureau for people to call when they had foreknowledge of an upcoming disaster. Two callers made remarkable predictions. One anticipated a plane crash, even including the precise number of casualties. Another called the bureau three times with concerns about Robert Kennedy the day before his assassination. Both, separately, called Barker a few years later, warning him they had ominous dreams and visions about him. He died soon after, at the age of 46, of a brain aneurysm (Knight, 2019).

Scientism and prophetic dreams Many of us in our everyday lives have heard stories about telepathic dreams and dreams that seem to foretell the future. I have heard several stories of individuals who had a surprising and vivid dream of a relative and then learned that that relative had died the night of the dream. It is as if the deceased individual paid a visit at the time of death. Though these experiences are common, they are difficult to make sense of. But to dismiss these types of experiences, as our scientific culture often does, ignores important and potentially meaningful human experiences. Though Freud nurtured an image of being a materialist and a scientist, he was fascinated by the occult. After his break with Jung, Freud attended

64  Dreams that change lives séances and encouraged his colleague Ferenczi to study prophetic dreams. Famously, late in life, Freud said, “If I had my life to live over again, I should devote myself to psychical research rather than psychoanalysis” (Freud, 1922). In the Interpretation of Dreams, he spoke of prophetic and telepathic dreams saying, “A countless multitude of witnesses speak in favor of both of them, while against both of them there is the obstinate aversion, or maybe prejudice of science. There can be no doubt that there are such things.” This paragraph is left out of many editions of The Interpretation of Dreams, probably because of the concerns of his editor about Freud’s scientific reputation. In many writings, Freud spoke out against the possibility of telepathic dreams but acknowledged that “thought transference” can occur in dreams. Thought transference is just a more acceptable word for telepathy. Another well-known analyst, Robert Stoller, noticed the telepathic nature of some dreams but was advised against publishing his findings. His paper, “On Telepathic Dreams,” was published posthumously in 2001 by Elizabeth Mayer (Mayer, 2001). Mayer later wrote Extraordinary Knowing, a detailed exploration of her personal and professional experiences with psychic phenomena. Theorists like Stoller and Mayer may help us move beyond the narrow confines of scientism to a more comprehensive view of observable phenomena.

Synchronicity Unlike Freud, Jung openly acknowledged the presence and importance of psychic phenomena. When he coined the term synchronicity, Jung saw it as a link between two events, which is not causal but instead relates to meaning. Synchronicity can occur in everyday life, in therapy or can appear in dreams. Jung provides an example of a difficult treatment case which was transformed by a synchronous event. During therapy, just as the client relayed to Jung a dream about a scarab beetle, a scarab-type beetle flew noisily into Jung’s office window. It was as if, in this key moment of therapy, the dream called up an external manifestation of its central image. The events were connected not causally; there was no causal mechanism but through meaning (Jung, 1960). According to Jung, synchronous events were more likely when archetypal energies were involved. An archetype is an image or set of ideas that is inherited and represents instinctual energies and ways of viewing the world. We will discuss archetypes in more detail in another chapter, but Jung felt that an archetype could manifest itself in psychological images and dreams, the physical world or both. In his story of this synchronous coincidence, the physical manifestation of the archetype represented a turning point in

Prophetic dreams 65 treatment. It evoked awe and wonder in the client and made her more open to therapeutic change. For many, Jung is not a scientist because of his openness to experiences like telepathy and predictive dreams. Jung himself imagined a kind of grand synthesis of depth psychology and modern science. He was friends with Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist and pioneer of quantum mechanics. Pauli had sought Jung’s help in therapy because of his despair that his work had helped lead to the development of the atomic bomb. Pauli and Jung later became friends. Their lengthy correspondence reveals an attempt to develop just such a synthesis (Lindorff, 2004). To us, modern physics, with its weird world of innumerable and ever-smaller fundamental particles and alternative universes, reads like mythology rather than science. Prophetic dreams do not lend themselves to conventional scientific analysis. Scientism limits our appreciation of the power of such phenomena, especially because premonitions are typically vague and imprecise. The premonitions bureau at the Weekly Standard could never issue a warning. Indeed, knowing a plane may crash somewhere in the next few weeks does not really help with your choice on Google Flights. Scientific testing of prophetic dreams is limited as they typically occur spontaneously and cannot be reproduced at will. They tend to occur and be remembered at emotionally charged times. At those times, we are also prone to cognitive distortions and may retrofit the past to make it appear that a dream predicted the future.

Who gets telepathic dreams? Certain people seem to be more prone to psychic experiences and prophetic dreams. Those individuals often have a long history of psychic experiences and are commonly trauma survivors. Bernstein describes such individuals as having a “borderland” (not borderline) personality. Borderland individuals are “porous” and seem to apprehend in some direct way the feelings of others as well as, perhaps, psychic phenomena or catastrophic events (Bernstein, 2006). Harriet Tubman is an excellent example of borderland experience. She was subjected to severe repetitive abuse as a slave. Before a conversion experience, she began to experience visions and premonitions. After her own escape from slavery, she made 19 missions and freed about 300 enslaved persons using the Underground Railroad. Although these missions were very dangerous, she was always successful, typically travelling secretly at night. When she was asked how she knew where to travel, she revealed that every night of every mission she would dream the best escape route, lucidly, soaring across the sky to find the safest path (Larson, 2004).

66  Dreams that change lives

Eryl Mai’s dream When we look back at Eryl Mai’s dream introduced at the beginning of this chapter, several features are striking. First is the simplicity of the dream. There is very little narrative, just an image. The correspondence between the dream and the future event is striking, too striking to be easily dismissed as a coincidence. To dismiss it as a coincidence is scientism at its worst and denies the value and meaning of the experience. The insistence of Eryl Mai at sharing her dream is also important as she says to her mother, “You must listen!” That is the feeling we get in the face of an event that is truly numinous and spiritually alive. The story must be told. That is why the woman called the premonitions bureau of the Evening Standard three times about Robert Kennedy before his assassination. That is why when Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner sees the right person, he has to tell his story. The wedding guest shouts at the ancient mariner and shakes him off, but the ancient mariner invokes the numinous power of his inner vision and “holds him with his glittering eye.” That is why Richard Dreyfuss, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, has to keep sculpting Devil’s Tower over and over. These stories must be told. But the message is usually ambiguous and unclear. Does Mrs. Jones keep Eryl Mai home from school after she shares her dream? And, if so, for how long? On the first day after she shared her dream, nothing happened. What was the Welsh psychiatrist John Barker to do after being told that tragedy was looming? He had to live his life and not be paralyzed waiting for tragedy. As our personal narratives continue to unfold, our visions of the future cannot protect us from the pain, the wonder and the beauty of life.

References Bernstein, J. (2006). Living in the borderland. Taylor Francis. Freud, S. (1922). Dreams and telepathy. Hogarth Press. Jung, C. (1933). Modern man in search of a soul. Harcourt Brace and World. Jung, C. (1960). Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle. Princeton Press. Jung, C. (1961). Memories, dreams and reflections. Random House. Knight, S. (2019). The psychiatrist who believed people could tell the future. The New Yorker. Larson, K. C. (2004). Bound for the Promised Land: Hariet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero. Random House. Lindorff, D. (2004). Pauli and Jung: The meeting of two great minds. Quest Books. Mayer, E. L. (2001). On “telepathic dreams”: An unpublished paper by Robert J. Stoller. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 49(2).

10 Nightmares

In a study of nightmares among Hmong immigrants, the anthropologist Adler recounts the following dream. First, I was surprised but right away, I got real scared. I was lying in bed. I was so tired, because I was working very hard then. I wanted to go to school, but I had no money. I kept waking up, because I was thinking so much about my problems. The dreamer continued, I heard a noise, but when I turned I could not move. My bedroom looked the same, but I could see-in the corner, a dark shape was coming to me. It came to the bed, over my feet, my legs. It was very heavy, like a heavy weight over my whole body, my legs, my chest. My chest was frozen-like I was drowning, I had no air. I tried to yell so someone sleeping very close to me will hear. Almost awake, the dreamer thought, “What if I die.” Then, “After a long time, it went away, it just left. I got up and turned all the lights on. I was afraid to sleep again.” (Adler, 1995). This dream illustrates some of the common features of nightmares, especially the fear and the feeling of paralysis. Nightmares are common to the human experience, as 50–85% of adults report occasional nightmares, and 50% of children have nightmares severe enough to cause them to wake their parents (American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Medicine, 2020). About 4% of adults have nightmares that are severe and frequent enough to meet DSM-5 criteria for nightmare disorder, which is characterized by repeated occurrences of well-remembered nightmares that cause clinically significant distress or impairment (American Psychiatric Association, DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-13

68  Dreams that change lives 2013). Nightmares, which occur during REM sleep, are distinct from night terrors, which occur in children during other phases of deep sleep. A significant difference is that nightmares are most often remembered, while children have no recollection of night terrors. The DSM defines nightmares as “extended, extremely dysphoric and well-remembered dreams that involve threats to survival or security or physical integrity” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). While the Hmong dream described earlier technically meets the criteria for a nightmare, it is more accurately described as a hypnopompic hallucination. The hypnopompic state, or hypnopompia, is the state of consciousness leading out of sleep.

Figure 10.1 Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare. Note that one demonic figure sits on the woman’s chest, making it unable for her to move and suggesting the experience of sleep paralysis. Source: Detroit Institute of Art.

Nightmares 69 During dream sleep, or REM sleep, the body is paralyzed. In some instances, one may awaken during a dream while being still paralyzed with the conscious awareness of being unable to move. The terror the Hmong dreamer felt in his dream was amplified by the hypnopompic experience of sleep paralysis.

Nightmare deaths among the Hmong The Hmong are traditional people that live in the mountains of southeast Asia. They lived mostly in China until persecution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drove many Hmong to Laos and Cambodia. There, they allied themselves with American forces during the Vietnam War, where they served as scouts and counterinsurgents and were known for their military skills and knowledge of the mountainous terrain. After the war, many Hmong were forced to flee because they had worked with US forces. Many emigrated to the United States and settled in disparate communities where they lacked the support of their traditional tribal structures. Their religion was animistic; they believed in many gods, especially ancestral spirits. Their language did not exist in written form until the 1960s. From being in mountain village communities suddenly they were, for instance, in urban Minneapolis. In the 1980s, there was an epidemic of 117 nighttime deaths among healthy, young Hmong males. Before their deaths, many of the Hmong described a series of terrible nightmares, and some tried to stay awake for days, afraid to fall sleep. The disorder was called “Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome” or “SUNDS.” It was assumed to represent an illdefined cardiac abnormality; some researchers even suggested all Hmong males should have pacemakers inserted to stop the spread of the “disease” (Morgan, 2018). No one bothered to intervene and talk to the Hmong, as they were suspicious of Westerners, and many didn’t speak English. By the 1990s, the epidemic had passed. Twenty-five years later, Shelley Adler, a San Francisco anthropologist, studied the SUNDS epidemic. She talked to the Hmong people and understood their language. According to Hmong tradition, ancestors must be honored annually in prescribed ceremonies. When these ancestors are not honored, they visit in nightmares. These nightmares are felt to be reminders of the prescribed rituals, which only males can perform. When these reminders are ignored, the ancestors become dark and dangerous and can kill. It was these beliefs about the nightmares, Adler felt, which made them eventually lethal. The death would occur after a series of nightmares and occurred almost exclusively among males (Adler, 1995).

70  Dreams that change lives The filmmaker Wes Craven read about the nightmares and nocturnal deaths of the Hmong and the fear that some of them had of falling asleep. He developed that concept into the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series of movies (Morgan, 2018).

The purpose of nightmares Why do we have nightmares? Freud found it difficult to answer this question in the context of his theory of dreams as wish fulfillment, stating that “this would seem to be the place, then, at which to admit for the first time an exception to the proposition that dreams are fulfillments of wishes” (Freud, 1920). Freud developed the concept of repetition compulsion to explain nightmares. This repetition compulsion, or wish to reenact painful and traumatic events, is, in Freud’s view, the cause of frightening dreams. Jungian theory can adequately explain the occasional nightmare; it is a dream that is sending a message so important that the unconscious mind, metaphorically, wakes you up to a psychological problem or issue that needs to be addressed. Repetitive nightmares are more difficult to understand. Is the message repeated multiple times because it has not been heard or understood?

Learning from and treating nightmares Although the evidence is anecdotal, Jungian techniques of active imagination and dream incubation may provide effective strategies for “treating” nightmares. Discussing and exploring nightmares is a critical first step in the process of their resolution. Hostile dream figures can be approached and confronted in active imagination or in the dream itself. A client of mine had regular nightmares of a wolf pursuing her. In therapy, she realized that she no longer needed to have this dream. In an active imagination dialogue with the wolf, he said, “Feed me!” She began to work in therapy on “feeding” the unconscious drive that she had been unwilling to acknowledge. In therapy sessions, she discussed feeding the wolf and what that would mean to her. Then, in a lucid version of the dream, she was able to turn to the wolf instead of running from him. The wolf stopped, she fed him and the dream never recurred.

Image Rehearsal Therapy Image rehearsal therapy (IRT) is a structured therapeutic intervention for nightmares involving educational and imagery components (Krakow & Zadra, 2006). Clients are taught that nightmares are a learned behavior that

Nightmares 71 may have initially been adaptive in processing trauma but are now maintained as a maladaptive habit. Using imagery skills, they are encouraged to change the nightmare and rehearse the new dream that they have developed to replace the original nightmare. IRT has strong empirical support. A recent meta-analysis showed improvement in nightmare frequency in about 50–80% of cases (Casement & Swanson, 2012). The researchers who developed IRT view it as a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, and the language used in IRT is explicitly anti-analytic. Patients are taught, for instance, that nightmares are not products of the unconscious mind, but are learned. When we consider the actual IRT techniques, rather than the language that frames them, they resemble Jungian interventions in some important ways. In the story of the aforementioned wolf dream, the individual realized she could reframe and reimagine the content. Image rehearsal resembles active imagination, but without the elements of personification that occur in active imagination. In active imagination, unlike IRT, the dreamer interacts with dream entities that are personified, as if they were real people or creatures.

Understanding the message of the nightmare Nightmares may have limited plot and narrative, but they always have powerful affective tone. The lack of narrative can make them difficult to interpret. In the Hmong dream that starts the chapter, we might wonder what is making the dreamer feel so powerless. He relates this feeling to exhaustion and financial problems, but are there other issues as well? To explain the Hmong dream described earlier, understanding sleep physiology is essential. The paralysis in the Hmong dream is likely related to the physiological paralysis that occurs during REM. It is as if the dreamer became lucid during the nightmare, but instead of feeling the exhilaration that can come with lucidity, he feels powerless and trapped. He is powerless in the alien culture in which he lives, just as he feels powerless in the dream. The feeling of powerlessness also has deep archetypal roots. In a sense, we are all powerless when faced with the power of the unconscious. The ego can readily be overwhelmed when confronting overwhelming affects that it feels powerless in managing. The Hmong dreamer blames himself for the nightmare, as it is a visit from angry ancestors. His attitude toward the dream and his interpretation of it, as Jung and Krakow suggest, are crucial in coloring his response and interpretation. Similarly, those who suffer from recurrent, traumatic nightmares tend to view those nightmares as signs that their trauma is unresolved, in a sense blaming themselves for the nightmare. Part of the treatment for those

72  Dreams that change lives nightmares is to challenge that interpretation of the dream and view it instead as a persistent maladaptive pattern. As we saw in the Hmong experience, in nightmares the interpretation is as important as the dream. Influenced by guilt and shame, the Hmong dreamer overinterpreted the dream from a religious perspective. Part of the work in both IRT and in the exploration of nightmares with depth psychology is to challenge the negative attitudes of fear and guilt that color the dreamer’s experience of his nightmares and help him realize that sometimes he can control the content and plot of his dreams. As we have seen, the ultimate extension of dream control is lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming could eventually be an important treatment for nightmares.

References Adler, S. (1995). Refugee stress and folk belief: Hmong sudden deaths. Social Science in Medicine, 40(12), 1623–1629. American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Medicine. (2020). What are nightmares? American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Medicine. American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5. American Psychiatric Association. Casement, M. D., & Swanson, L. M. (2012). A meta-analysis of imagery rehearsal for post-trauma nightmares: Effects on nightmare frequency, sleep quality, and posttraumatic stress. Clinical Psychology Review, 32(6), 566–574. Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. Hogath Press. Krakow, B., & Zadra, A. (2006). Clinical management of chronic nightmares: Imagery rehearsal therapy. Behavioral Sleep Medicine, 4(1), 45–70. Morgan, T. (2018, October 30). How a terrifying wave of unexplained deaths led to “A Nightmare on Elm Street”. History.com. Zheng, J., Da, Z., Su, T., & Cheng, J. (2018). Sudden unexplained death syndrome: The hundred years’ enigma. Journal of the American Heart Association, 10.

Part III

Reintegrating the dream narrative

11 A false translation

In 375 AD, a leader of the early Church, St. Jerome, became severely ill and had a terrifying dream. In this dream, he was tried in a heavenly court and accused of being a follower of Cicero (a Roman philosopher from the first century bc), and not a Christian; for this crime, he was horribly whipped (Snell, 2019). Jerome was a classically educated young Italian scholar. As a student, he had the casual romantic encounters typical of student life in his time, but Jerome would be racked by guilt afterwards. He would visit the catacombs, where the darkness and traces of death around him reminded him of hell. After the dream cited earlier, Jerome converted to Christianity and refused to read or even own classic literature. Jerome became an influential leader of the early Church and was fervent in his asceticism. He spent years in the desert where he fasted and prayed but was haunted by temptations, especially sexual ones. In Vasari’s painting, Jerome pointedly turns away from the image of a woman. Jerome advocated for celibacy as being morally superior to marriage. He wrote a well-known treatise on virginity and espoused sexual renunciation. He developed the doctrine, officially accepted by the Catholic Church in the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD, that Mary was a perpetual virgin and that her marriage to Joseph was a celibate union. (It is jarring to modern ears to imagine an all-male Church council deciding on the virginity of a woman.) But Jerome’s asceticism seems defensive. Asceticism can be a genuine spiritual practice, motivated by the love of God. Or it can be motivated by a selfish wish for the ego to exert dominance over the instincts. We see this kind of unhealthy asceticism in anorexia nervosa, for instance. For Jerome, because he was haunted by the evils and dangers of sexuality, Mary had to be a perpetual virgin. He suppressed both his sexuality and his love of classical learning. His conscious asceticism was a defense against a richer and freer inner life that he suppressed not out of love of God DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-15

76  Reintegrating the dream narrative

Figure 11.1 “The Temptation of St. Jerome.” Jerome turns away from Venus and the pleasures of the world. Charles H. and Mary S. Worcester Collection. Source: Art Institute of Chicago.

but out of fear. His life story and his dream illustrate the powerful split that still exists within the inner world of Christianity. For a man like Jerome, the danger of dreams is that they reveal the inner world, including the dark demonic forces he is eager to distance himself from. As Daniel says of God working through dreams, “He reveals deep and hidden things, and knows what is in the darkness . . .” Jerome didn’t want to know what was lurking in the darkness. Indeed, he attempted to reject and/or hide from those aspects of his nature expressed in his dreams. While Jerome recognized the importance of his dreams, his attitude of discarding and devaluing dreams affected Christian religious approaches to dream interpretation for hundreds of years and reverberates to this day.

A false translation 77

Dreams in the New Testament There are seven dreams in the New Testament. Most are informational messages from God. An angel in a dream tells Joseph not to divorce Mary when she is with child. A dream warns the Magi not to return to Jerusalem. Dreams tell Joseph to leave Israel in advance of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, to return to Israel from Egypt, then to not return to Judea. In all these dreams, an angel directly gives information and guidance. That guidance is followed with reverence and without question as these dreams were messages from God.

God speaks in dreams God sometimes speaks directly to those whom he has chosen. Joseph, for instance, has three dreams with three direct messages, “Accept Mary as your wife”, “Go to Egypt to save your family” and “Return from Egypt and stay in Nazareth.” Yet, these messages from God, though they seem to be direct and transparent as a telegram, have a deeper psychological dimension. Accept Mary as your wife also means recognize the importance of love, ignore the self-serving messages of society and open yourself to the feminine aspects of your own soul. Go to Egypt also means make a pilgrimage to the ancient, spiritual land of your ancestors. Stay in Nazareth also means live in a little hill town and accept that glory comes from God, not from this world. These dreams that seem so concrete and literal actually have great depth.

Dreams in the early Church Augustine, who died in 430 ad is an important figure in religion and philosophy. His Confessions is a true innovation in thought and is the first genuine autobiography. Augustine’s unique self-awareness is reflected in his interest in dreams. Augustine celebrated dreams. He devoted a whole volume of his philosophical works to dreams and to the nature of the figures and feelings that appear in dreams. Gennadius’ dream cited in the chapter about lucid dreaming is from Augustine, and that dream brings Gennadius peace and strengthens his faith. Origen, another important early Church leader, discussed dreams extensively and noted that many conversions to Christianity occurred through dream experiences. Ignatius of Antioch, martyred in 108 ad, had a dream or vision of angels singing hymns in alternate chants and then introduced antiphonal singing into religious services. Other Church fathers in the early years of the Church, including Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the

78  Reintegrating the dream narrative Great, St. John Chrysostom and Ambrose, all described in detail divine wisdom that they obtained in dreams (Virkler, 2021).

Jerome As we see, the early Christian faith in many ways recognized the importance of the inner world and dreams. Church leaders like Augustine honored classical learning and dreams. Jerome rejected both. Jerome’s conflicted attitude toward his inner self had a significant role in changing the attitude of the Church toward dreams to one of hostility and suspicion. This suspicion of dreams is an important part of his legacy, perpetuated by his translation of the Bible from Greek to Latin. His translation, called the Vulgate, was used by Christians throughout the Middle Ages. It remained the official Roman Catholic Bible until the 1960s, when Jerome’s errors in translation were finally corrected. The Greek word anan means witchcraft or sorcery and appears ten times in the Old Testament. On two occasions, Jerome mistranslated the word as “observing dreams.” So, for instance Deuteronomy 18:10, instead of saying “You shall not practice augury or witchcraft,” was translated as “You shall not practice augury or observe dreams.” The Biblical scholar Morton Kelsey argues convincingly that Jerome’s error was an intentional distortion. Jerome was an excellent scholar and correctly translated the word “witchcraft” on every other occasion. Jerome’s intentional mistranslation essentially ended Christian interest in dreams for centuries (Kelsey, 1991).

The great schism Christianity has had several important schisms, especially between the Orthodox Church and the Western Church, and between Catholic and Protestant. These are vertical schisms between believers. The horizontal schism, within the believer, between the inner and outer world is illustrated by Jerome, who is terrified by his dreams and his inner world and attempts to erase them from his own history and from the Bible he is translating. It is this horizontal schism, between the truth of our inner world and the wishes of our ego, that plagues our world today. Dogmatic, literal interpretations of the Bible are defended with a vigor that parallels the implausibility of the ideas being defended. An evangelical Christian friend once told me that she believed in the Adam and Eve story as literal truth, not myth, including that creation occurred in seven days. I asked her how she understood fossils and ancient life forms. She replied that God might have planted fossils to fool us. How stupid and

A false translation 79 amoral this deity must be, to deliberately trick his children, and how bored. Nothing better to do than scatter fake fossils? My evangelical friend was afraid to face the uncertainty of a mythopoetic view of religion and preferred the safety of a rigid ego view with clear rules and dogmatic beliefs. When we disavow truth, either outer truths about the world or the inner truths of our own heart, we create a schism within ourselves. This horizontal schism forces us into dogmatism. This horizontal schism also drives the culture to ignore the wisdom of dreams.

Aquinas and the horizontal schism Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274 AD, was one of the great philosophers of the Church. He applied Aristotelian logic to theology and created a theological system based on rigorous application of Greek philosophy. His five proofs for the existence of God are a staple of introductory philosophy classes. Yet, Thomas, a rigorous logician, insisted he received advice on philosophical issues from Peter and Paul, while dreaming (Lewis & Oliver, 2009). Thomas wrote voluminously, and his vast master work, the Summa Theologica, or summary of theology, is one of the great works of philosophy. Thomas was a logician during the day, a mystical dreamer who communed with holy men at night. His dream world was split off or compartmentalized, and he focused, in his academic work, exclusively on his daylight world of logic and reason. Till the very end of his life, he managed to keep these two worlds separate. One day during Mass, Thomas had a visionary experience, which he would reveal to no one. He stopped writing entirely, though the Summa was nearly complete. He walked about in a daze. When pressed by a friend, he said only that he now realized that his works, more than 60 major works of theology, were “chaff.” He never finished the Summa and died a few months after his experience (Huxley, 1945). Did this brilliant man, suddenly, in a vision, understand the split in his own mind and realize that all his philosophy was nothing at all and that only this inner vision mattered? Aquinas, in his writings, created a powerful rational model for understanding theology. In his mind, he proved the existence of God. But proving that God exists rationally is very different than experiencing God. It is as if God played a great cosmic joke. “Aquinas, you tried to prove that I exist. Now I will show you that I exist.”

Jerome’s dream Jerome, being a literalist and a dogmatist, interpreted his dream of being flogged literally and dogmatically. He identified with those inner figures

80  Reintegrating the dream narrative who whip him and misinterpreted his dream as a call to an even more vigorous asceticism. He rejected his own inner self and became a dogmatist, afraid of his own dreams. Cicero was brutally murdered by Mark Anthony. He was an outspoken proponent of Rome as a republic. Historically, his death marked the beginning of Rome as an empire, a totalitarian, dogmatic empire. Internally, dogmatic internal figures were ready to slay the Jerome that viewed his inner world as a republic. Jerome, out of fear, created an internal, dogmatic empire and suppressed his inner world. A good modern therapist would help Jerome see that his dream was about his critical internal voices that punished him for his love of classical literature and demanded the subjugation of his inner world. The therapist would help Jerome explore the source of those critical voices and to approach them. Instead, Jerome identified with his internal critical figures and suppressed his love for classical learning. As illustration 11.1 to this chapter shows, Jerome turns away from his anima, from life, from the feminine, from his true nature. Significantly, he later disavowed the importance of his own dream. This kind of denial of the inner world and fear of dreams as products of that inner world probably motivated his intentional mistranslation of the Biblical text. This man, so vehemently self-righteous, had enough hubris to distort the Word of God. Jerome’s sin was his belief that his ego and its desires were more important than correctly translating the words of God. His fear and dogmatic convictions led him to misinterpret his own dream and then mistranslate the Bible. Although he didn’t realize it, the lust of his ego for power and control was far more dangerous than any lust he might have felt for a woman. The belief in the supremacy of the ego that motivated Jerome to distort the truth has led Western Christianity to ignore the inner world and the world of dreams. We must be ready to see what is in the darkness to be ready to understand dreams.

References Huxley, A. (1945). The perennial philosophy. Harper. Kelsey, M. (1991). God, dreams and revelation: A  Christian interpretation of dreams. Augsburg Publishing House. Lewis, J. R., & Oliver, E. D. (2009). The dream encyclopedia. Visible Ink Press. Snell, M. (2019, August 28). “A concise biography of Saint Jerome.” ThoughtCo., August 28, 2020, thoughtco.com/saint-jerome-profile-1789037. Virkler, M. (2021). Dreams and visions throughout Church history. cwgministries.org.

12 The Black Madonna

The Pagels Heinz Pagels described a personal dream at the conclusion of his book about chaos theory. I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. Pagels had a philosophical insight while dreaming; I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness. (Pagels, 1982) The character of Ian Malcolm in the film Jurassic Park is based on Professor Pagels. In his book The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics and the Language of Nature, Pagels popularizes chaos theory describing it as expressing the language of nature, an idea Jung would also have embraced. Chaos theory, with its emphasis on the linked randomness of the world, echoes Jung’s idea of acausal connection or synchronicity. Pagels’ wife Elaine is a prominent religious scholar and the author of the book The Gnostic Gospels. Six years after this dream, while on a routine hike with his wife, Heinz Pagels fell off a mountain to his death at the age of 48. His dream seems to foreshadow these events, not as a warning, not as prophecy, but as a

DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-16

82  Reintegrating the dream narrative recognition of the power, possibility, wonder and danger of embracing the darkness.

Gnosticism Elaine Pagels is the Harvard scholar who first illuminated the complexities of early Christian religious experience in her book The Gnostic Gospels. The early Christian world was rich, chaotic and complex. Before Christian orthodoxy was established in the year 381 AD, the term Christianity embraced many beliefs, especially Gnostic ones (Freeman, 2008). Gnostic ideas resonate with contemporary readers; Elaine Pagels’ book was a bestseller. That term is rarely applied to scholarly works about religious history. Gnosticism has Greek and Egyptian roots; the word refers to “gnosis” or secret knowledge. Gnosticism seeks inner wisdom, obtained not through orthodoxy or the mediation of a priest but through prayer and inner vision. Some Gnostic beliefs were shockingly modern. Women were viewed as equals and served as priests. Other beliefs were just shocking. Some Gnostic groups, for instance, considered adulterous sex to be a higher form of love than marital sex because it was genuine and sincere, not tainted by false orthodoxy. Gnosticism was the shadow form of the daytime orthodox Christian faith. In Gnosticism, the Serpent was the source of wisdom, not evil. The Pagels, each in their own way, embraced this darkness. Jung, like Pagels, was deeply influenced by Gnosticism. Jung was devoted to Christianity early in his life. Later, he became disillusioned that traditional Christian religious symbols no longer conveyed the power of the unconscious and began to explore Gnosticism. Before Pagels popularized Gnostic works, Jung wrote “Our age wants to experience the psyche for itself . . . knowledge, instead of faith.” (Jung, 1933)

Christianity Sometimes the most difficult faith to describe is one’s own. I experienced Catholicism personally, not academically. The tradition one has lived, because it carries the imprint of family and ancestry, can be difficult to view objectively. As a Catholic, the only dreams I recall being discussed were transparent, direct visitations from God, like Joseph’s dream to flee Bethlehem and go to Egypt. I also remember being told, in my all-boy Catholic high school, that boys sometimes had “bad thoughts” during their dreams, but they were not accountable for those thoughts; they were not sins. Thank goodness! Like many, I experienced Christianity as a religion of rules and orthodoxy, not as a gateway to spiritual experience. Christianity, though it was

The Black Madonna 83 initially a small, subversive sect, has been, through most of its history since Constantine, a powerful state institution. The Catholic Church continues to rule a nation state, Vatican City. Institutions, like churches and corporations, must retain careful control of their branding and their message. Dreams and visions, coming from outside the institution, must be viewed with suspicion. Like a teenager’s wet dreams, they are tolerated but are not sought or encouraged.

Procula’s dream I have surveyed the top ten websites that came up in a search for “Christianity and Dreams.” All of them warn of overvaluing dreams, suggesting that dreams might be sent by Satan, and insist on only interpreting them with the guidance of a minister. This mental split, this uncertainty about the meaning and origin of dreams, is illustrated in the story of Pilate’s wife, who warns Pilate not to harm Jesus because of a dream she had. Pilate, of course, ignores her warning. Part of the Christian world, the Orthodox Church, the Coptic Church and the Ethiopian Church, reveres Pilate’s wife Procula as a saint. In the Western Church, she was never canonized, and some, like Bede and Luther, saw her dream as coming from Satan, in a failed last-ditch attempt to prevent mankind’s salvation. Those readings are literal ones. When we look at the story as narrative instead of reading it literally, we see that Procula is an anima figure bringing a message in the form of a dream. She tries to temper Pilate’s literal reading of the law with forgiveness and justice. The message that the anima brings from the unconscious is not only vital and life changing but also mysterious and hard to trust.

Paul Despite orthodoxy’s mistrust of dreams and visions, at the very heart of Christianity is Paul, the visionary. Many consider Paul the actual founder of Christianity. Paul never met Christ on earth and was not an apostle; yet, he claimed apostolic authority based on his visionary experience of Christ. His inner vision granted him, in his mind, an authority equivalent to that of Peter or John or any of the apostles. Many, including Pagels, consider Paul to be a proto-Gnostic. In a passage in the Letter to the Corinthians, he writes in the way a Gnostic would: Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature; a wisdom, however, not of this age nor of the rulers of this age, who are passing away; but we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which

84  Reintegrating the dream narrative God predestined before the ages to our glory; the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood; for if they had understood it they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Such a passage could have been written by Jung, and many consider Jung to be a Gnostic. Dream interpretation can be considered a Gnostic search for a truth within. The Christian dream interpretation websites I examined all insisted on attempting to understand dreams only with the guidance of a minister. The anti-Gnostic, defensive nature of that advice is clear. Wisdom is not to be sought outside the Church. I can imagine how puzzled my local priest would be if I asked him for advice about dream interpretation.

Gnosticism and shadow Institutional Christianity has struggled throughout its history with the Gnostic spirit that is its rejected shadow. Though some of the Gnostic Gospels are as old and as authentic as the four canonic Gospels, they were rejected because of their Gnostic ideas. We will discuss the term shadow in more detail, but I am using the term in the depth psychology sense of that which is disavowed by the ego. Gnosticism and Christianity form a whole, but orthodox Christianity, at each phase in history, disavows Gnostic ideas. Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, Gnostic teachings were only known through the critical descriptions of those teachings by leaders of the early Church. Although early Gnostic groups were suppressed and persecuted, Gnostic ideas persisted. The first Christian Crusade was not against Moslems in the Holy Land, but against the French Cathars, a popular and influential thirteenth-century form of Gnosticism. The ruthlessness of that Crusade was striking even by thirteenth-century standards. In one of the first cities conquered by Catholic forces, more than 7,000 defenseless inhabitants were mutilated and massacred. About half were Cathars and half Catholics, who had been living together peaceably for decades. The local commander expressed concern to his superiors that he could not distinguish Cathars from Catholics in the conquered city. His superior told him to just kill everyone, saying, “God will sort it out” (Martin, 2005). The Catholic Church, to its great credit as a living faith, has maintained a mystical core beneath its institutional face. Therese of Lisieux, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and Joan of Arc are dreamers and mystics in the spirit of Paul. In our time, thinkers like Merton, Keating and Rohr have maintained that tradition. These theologians have encouraged meditation and reinterpreted Scripture from an inward perspective. For example, for them, the term “Kingdom of God” refers not to some worldly political

The Black Madonna 85 entity but to an inner presence. All three have been strongly criticized by orthodox Church members for being New Age Gnostics. The ruthlessness of the Church’s opposition to Gnosticism suggests the power of Gnostic ideas. The Church was terrified of its own antiauthoritarian and mystical roots and tried to suppress these shadow aspects of its institutional structure. But shadow is slippery and impossible to suppress; it comes back in new forms whenever it is suppressed or neglected. This shadow side of Christianity finds a symbolic voice in images of the Black Madonna. There are 500 such images in European churches; the cathedral at Chartres, for instance, has 2. Typically, an official story explains their darkness: they were stained, for instance, by smoke from candlelight. They are often a source of special veneration. Most historians feel they represent remnants of an archetypal pre-Christian feminine goddess worship of Ishtar/Osiris (Begg, 2006). Christianity is the gorgeous cathedral with a beautiful stained-glass image of the Virgin Mary in its nave and a Black Madonna/Isis on an altar in its basement. Christianity persecutes and demonizes witches during the day; yet, those witches dance and fly at night. Like the current post-Christian culture that is its heir, it celebrates the daylight and rejects the dreams of the night.

Figure 12.1  The Black Madonna. Source: Polish shrine at Czestochowa.

86  Reintegrating the dream narrative

The dream of embracing darkness We have discussed dreams that warn us and prophetic dreams. Heinz Pagels’ dream seems to be neither. A part of what dreams do is help us process emotions, so the emotional tone of a dream is often very important. There is very little anxiety in this dream, and there is no recklessness that the dream might be warning of. Unexpectedly, the inanimate world, the gravel, gives way. The dream ego grasps for life, for a shrub, but it cannot hold him and pulls loose. The dreamer’s initial terror quickly gives way to a mystical feeling of oneness. The dreamer finds it difficult to explain or name what he is one with, the cosmic code, the principle of the universe or the order of life from the chaos of disorder. Were he from China he might call it the Tao, remembering, as Lao Tzu says, that the true Tao is the Tao that cannot be named. The dream is a call, rather than a prophecy or a warning. The central image of chaos theory is that of a butterfly. The butterfly effect, which the character Malcom discusses in Jurassic Park, describes the powerful effect of small things. A butterfly flapping its wings in China may determine the course of a tornado two weeks later in Kansas. As we will see, a butterfly is a central Taoist image as well. Zhuang Zi wonders if he is dreaming of being a butterfly, or if he is a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuang Zi. The butterfly reflects an archetypal image of soul and transformation as the sluggish, earthbound caterpillar becomes a beautiful, ethereal creature of the air. Pagels, the scholar of chaos, is called to embrace the darkness and chaos of his fall. The Fall described in Genesis, as the Gnostics emphasize, is the gift of Satan and the beginning of salvation. The Fall is transformation; Heinz Pagels’ dream ends with a beautiful acknowledgment of the wonders of heaven and earth.

References Begg, E. (2006). The cult of the black virgin. Chiron Publications. Freeman, C. (2008). A.D. 381: Heretics, pagans and the dawn of the monotheistic state. The Overlook Press. Jung, C. (1933). Modern man in search of a soul. Harcourt Brace and World. Martin, S. (2005). The Cathars: The most successful heresy of the middle ages. Oldcastle Books. Pagels, H. (1982). The cosmic code: Quantum physics and the language of nature. Dover Press.

13 Stockholm is burning

In a remarkable dream he is lying with a woman who was not beautiful but who pleased him. He touched her vagina and discovered that it had a set of teeth. Suddenly this woman assumes the form of a man, the politician Johan Archenholtz, a friend and ally of Swedenborg’s. The image of the vagina dentata (vagina with teeth) appears again where he sees in a vision a fiercely burning coal fire that represents the “fire of love”. Then he is with a woman whom he wants to penetrate, but the teeth prevent him entering her. Swedenborg’s dream, described by Richard Lines

Emanuel Swedenborg was an eighteenth-century scientist, mystic and philosopher still revered by many for his theological teachings. As a scientist and anatomist, he had a prescient understanding of the role of the neuron, the cerebral cortex and other brain regions. He can be considered the first neuroanatomist, and the full significance of many of his findings was not understood for a hundred years. These two dreams were among many recorded by Swedenborg during a long journey to a new home in Holland. He kept an extensive dream diary during this trip which is one of the oldest and most detailed dream records known. This journey culminated in a conversion experience. Before this trip, Swedenborg was a scientist and a libertine who spent much of his free time carousing and visiting prostitutes. After the trip, he turned celibate and abandoned science for theology. Swedenborg became not only a prominent theologian, but also a famous seer. He had a detailed and accurate vision of the Great Stockholm Fire of 1759 as it occurred, though he was 400 miles away (Lines, 2013) The terrifying image of the toothed vagina, the vagina dentata, is an ancient one, which appears in stories and myths of many disparate cultures. It suggests that for Swedenborg the feminine had a dangerous power, and the acknowledgment of that power seemed to be central to his conversion DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-17

88  Reintegrating the dream narrative

Figure 13.1  Stockholm fire. Source: Gustaf Carleman, Stockholm City Museum.

experience. Perhaps his dream experiences led Swedenborg to seek a deeper relationship with the feminine beyond that of exploitation. He abandoned science as well and sought a different, mystical way of knowing. Perhaps he presciently understood the limits of science, as we as a culture have begun to realize that science cannot solve many of the problems we face as a species.

Western science and religion Western science and traditional Christianity have certain tacit and deeply imbedded beliefs that affect their attitude toward dreams. These beliefs are rarely questioned because they are rarely recognized or acknowledged. Science has been hijacked by scientism, the belief that science is the only source of truth. Scientism is particularly influential in psychology, which often ignores the more subjective data of dream studies.

Stockholm is burning 89 Western religion at an institutional level tends to marginalize any attempt to look within and gain genuine spiritual experience. As Jung said, “one of the main functions of formalized religions is to protect people against a direct experience of God.” Both academic psychology and official religion have become dull and moribund, and in both cases dogmatic rejection of alternative viewpoints has created the shadow worlds of pop psychology and New Age religion. Both psychology and religion have become very literal in their world views and are unable to perceive the world metaphorically or mythically. Fundamentalist literalist readings of the Bible would be viewed as being bizarre by Gnostics and even by some orthodox fathers of the Church like Origen. These early Christians viewed the Gospels as sacred stories to be understood metaphorically. Psychology tries in its own way to be very literal. The model of science that psychology tacitly tries to emulate is nineteenth-century Newtonian physics. That model of time space and matter is nothing like the weird metaphoric world of modern physics, with string theory, relativity and everexpanding worlds of ever smaller particles. We will briefly examine the philosophical assumptions that influence Western psychology and then consider the evolving world of Western faith. At the end, we will discuss the archetypal aspects of these scientific and religious beliefs.

Philosophy Metaphysics, literally “beyond physics,” is the philosophical analysis of how we know things. The metaphysics tacitly accepted in academic psychology is one of skeptical empiricism. Empiricism asserts that we can only know that which we can observe; skepticism denotes an attitude of suspiciousness toward anything that cannot be observed. David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, is among the most prominent proponents of empiricism. He wrote, very poetically: If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. By this standard, all of Jung’s works and most of Freud’s are flame worthy. As we have described, this stance pervades current academic psychology and psychiatry. This attitude is so engrained that it is not seen as a

90  Reintegrating the dream narrative philosophical position but as “how things are.” Scientism is a direct outgrowth of the ideas of philosophers like Hume. There are, however, other legitimate and valid metaphysical attitudes. Without attempting to summarize centuries of Western philosophy in a few words, we might describe two central metaphysical attitudes toward the mind. First, one is a materialist or an idealist. I am using those terms philosophically, not as in everyday speech. A materialist, in the philosophical sense, is not someone who values money but someone who believes that the only real things in the world consist of matter. In contrast, an idealist, in the philosophical sense, believes that the mind can ascertain knowledge thorough thought and reason, independent of observation. The other important dichotomy is between monists and dualists. Monists believe there is one kind of “stuff” in the world; dualists believe there are two, matter and mind or spirit. Plato and many Eastern schools of philosophy are idealist monist, as is Gnosticism. They believe there is one kind of stuff, and it is mind or spirit. The material world is just an illusion. A radical empiricist like Hume would be described as a materialist monist. Academic psychology is dominated by a tacit belief in materialist monism. For them, there is one kind of stuff, and it is matter (neurons). Matter is real, anything else is sophistry and illusion. Some brilliant philosophers were dualists. Descartes is a famous example. His much-quoted phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” shows that he believed in the reality of mental life. He saw two kinds of stuff in the world, mind and matter, and saw them both as real. These issues have been debated for centuries by brilliant minds, and there are no easy answers. Each position has troubling implications. Materialist monism seems sensible, until we realize its full implications, namely that there is no soul or afterlife, no real choices and no possibility of what philosophers call agency. In a materialist monist world, there is no personhood, no me or you in any normal sense of those words. Dualism solves those problems. It allows spirit and free will and persons to exist but faces the problem of the interaction between the realms of mind and matter. It is forced to posit a “ghost in the machine” within the brain. Phenomenology offers one interesting solution. Phenomenologists are empiricists of a sort, but they say that mental events are directly perceived and therefore are real. Jung saw himself as a phenomenologist. He said I see what I see, some of it is in my head, some is outside my head, but it’s all real. Analytic philosophy, though based in empiricism, is another interesting way out of these problems. Analytic philosophers insist that philosophical problems are really problems of language. Mental things seem real because we refer to them in language as if they were objects like trees and chairs,

Stockholm is burning 91 but they are not. Wittgenstein, one of the greatest analytic philosophers, drew this idea to an interesting conclusion. He said language tricks us, and we can’t use it to talk about a mental world, but that such a world may exist. The concluding sentence of his seminal work, The Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, is “Whatsoever we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” He implies that there are deep truths about which we cannot speak. A Gnostic, or a Taoist, would love that idea. After all, the true Tao is the Tao that cannot be spoken. Psychiatry and rarely engage these complex ideas. A young science compared to physics and chemistry, it tries to differentiate itself from its philosophical and religious origins and be a “real” science. It tries to emulate the mechanistic determinism of nineteenth-century physics. Ideas of mind and soul are its cultural shadow that it refuses to acknowledge. That shadow emerges in popular culture. The Internet is full of dream books and psychobabble; academic psychology is data driven and verifiable but often lacks meaning.

Religion Religion in modern Western culture shows a similar split. Religion, like science, tends to ignore and mistrust subjective experiences like dreams and visions. As religion has become more dogmatic, literal and creedal, traditional religion has become less meaningful. Attendance in traditional religious services has plummeted; yet alternative forms of religious expression are increasingly popular. Even online dating profiles now offer religious identifications beyond the traditional ones. An especially popular one is “spiritual but not religious.” Spiritual but not religious, or SBNR, can be considered the fastest growing religious group in America. One quarter of the population and one third of adults under 30 identify as SBNR (Pew, 2008). I think if Jung were on Match.com he would have identified as SBNR. The idea of separating religion and spirituality is a very modern one, first delineated by the anthropologists Hill and Pargament (2001). The term religious experience or spirituality is probably best defined by William James in his classic work, Varieties of Religious Experience. Religious experience is the “feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine.” People who are SBNR mistrust creeds and dogmas but search for the God within. SBNR is in fact, Gnosticism renamed. Consistent with the rise in Gnostic beliefs is a rise in New Age beliefs. A recent Pew research poll shows that 62% of Americans believe in psychics, reincarnation, astrology or the presence of spiritual energy in trees or

92  Reintegrating the dream narrative mountains (Pew Center, 2008). These beliefs characterize New Age religion. New Agers are the fastest growing religious group in America. New Age beliefs are most prevalent among the religious. About seven in ten Catholics and Protestants hold at least one New Age belief. Despite foot-stomping from pulpits and attempts at a radical return to orthodoxy in militant Catholicism, New Ageism, like Christianity did in Roman times, is converting the faithful from within.

The masculine and the feminine On an archetypal level, this analytic, skeptical, materialistic and dogmatic attitude in religion and philosophy is the culmination of the historical trend of masculine sky god hegemony over ancient goddess worship. Swedenborg’s conversion from a scientist to a mystic may have been a foreshadowing of a transition away from sky god hegemony and a return to an acknowledgment of the power of the archetypal feminine. Early human cultures tended to be dominated by goddess worship. Early Hebrews, who we think of as purely monotheistic worshipers of Yahweh, retained elements of goddess worship. Early Hebrews almost certainly worshiped Asherah, a form of the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar. Solomon praised a pillar erected in her honor, his son placed a statue of her in the Temple in Jerusalem (Patai, 1990). Sometime in the early Bronze Age, around 3500 bc, male sky Gods like Yahweh and Zeus replaced female Goddesses (Campbell, 1991). This was likely a momentous psychological and spiritual event. It has left traces in mythological systems, like Zeus’ thunderbolt battles with the Titans (Bellah, 2011) According to Jung, the unconscious is experienced as feminine by both men and women. The ascendance of the sky Gods echoes, in the inner world, the dominance of the rational logical world of the ego over a mythopoetic world where all of nature is experienced as divine. Connection with that magical world is the goal of the journey inward; it is treasure in the dragon’s lair, the elf’s pot of gold, it is the Grail. The inner world of the feminine, like the Hindu goddess Kali, can bring great beneficence or great destruction. As Swedenborg discovered in his dreams of the toothed vagina, the inner world has its guardians and dangers.

Swedenborg’s dream Swedenborg’s dream journal is a travelogue to the inner world. Swedenborg starts the journey as a scientist: someone who analyzes, studies and, in a mythological sense, conquers nature. He will end the journey as a mystic,

Stockholm is burning 93 receptive to nature, with direct access to its wisdom without analysis and dissection. Twice in his series of dreams, he encounters a toothed vagina. In the first dream, he is attracted to this symbol of the inner world. But he realizes that the final gateway inward is guarded by teeth. This is the turning point of the dream plot. The woman then becomes his friend Archenholtz. An important aspect of Archenholtz is that he is a man who has survived trauma. He was captured and tortured while he was in the military but went on to become a prominent politician. Suffering can be endured and transcended; it is possible to heal. In the second dream, Swedenborg feels the heat of a coal fire, the hottest fire possible in his time. Inflamed by this passion, he tries to enter the feminine, but he is blocked by the teeth of the vagina. Perhaps he is trying to enter in the traditional, aggressive masculine way of conquest and mastery. This is not allowed, there is no entry to the feminine though domination. Camille Paglia, the great feminist scholar, explains that the toothed vagina is “no sexist hallucination – every penis is diminished by every vagina, just as mankind, male and female, is devoured by mother nature” (Paglia, 1990). Perhaps every penis is diminished as penis, but every man is enriched as a whole person. Perhaps a man must be diminished in his culture-bound stereotypical male role to enter fully in relation to the feminine. Swedenborg had to give up carousing and visiting prostitutes to enter a deeper relationship with the internal world of his unconscious and become a mystic. Swedenborg presciently saw the Great Stockholm Fire and the functioning of the human brain. Perhaps, he also presciently realized that he could not enter the inner world of the spirit while maintaining his immature masculine persona of drinking and womanizing. The faith that Swedenborg discovered was a not a faith based on sky god creeds and dogmas, but a faith based on the direct experience of the divine. He found true wisdom beyond the teeth of the vagina in the visionary world of inner experience.

References Bellah, R. (2011). Religion in human evolution: From the paleolithic to the axial age. Harvard University Press. Campbell, J. (1991). The masks of God. Penguin Books. Hill, P. C., & Pargament, K. I. (2001). Conceptualizing religion and spirituality: Points of commonality, points of departure. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5914.00119

94  Reintegrating the dream narrative Lines, R. (2013, January 24). The erotic dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg. Public Domain Review. Paglia, C. (1990). Sexual personae: Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Yale University Press. Patai, R. (1990/1967). The Hebrew Goddess (3rd ed.). Wayne State University Press. Pew Center. (2008). US religious landscape survey. Pew Center.

14 Sparks of the divine

In the Book of Daniel, the author describes a dream by Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king. In the king’s dream, a vast tree grows in the middle of the world. The “watcher” appears and orders the tree to be cut down. Its stump is to be left and bound with hoops of iron and bronze in the grass of the earth. It will be drenched with dew, eat grass and have a beast’s heart till “seven times” pass over him. Dreams and their interpretation are an important part of Jewish theology and tradition. The Talmud, one of the central texts of Judaism, states that “A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read.” In cities in the Hellenic world, Jewish dream interpreters were a common sight; for a few coins, they would offer an interpretation of your dream (Bulkeley, 2008).

Joseph and Daniel Two great dream interpreters in the Hebrew tradition were Joseph and Daniel, and the dreams they interpreted had a parallel structure. They both faced angry rulers, Pharaoh in Joseph’s case and Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel’s case. While Joseph has the task of interpreting a pair of Pharaoh’s dreams, Daniel first has to tell Nebuchadnezzar the dream that he has forgotten, then interpret the dream. His task is reminiscent of the Freudian search for the latent content of a dream (see the chapter on Freudian dream interpretation). Nebuchadnezzar’s dream quoted above is a mysterious “Big” dream that terrified the King. None of his wise men could interpret it, except Daniel. Daniel interprets the dream as predicting the madness that Nebuchadnezzar will suffer, where he will crawl about like a wild animal in the wilderness. The tree is Nebuchadnezzar in his current proud state; the mysterious figure of the watcher brings about his fall into madness, from which he

DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-18

96  Reintegrating the dream narrative

Figure 14.1 Nebuchadnezzar 1795-c., William Blake. Presented by W. Graham Robertson 1939. Source: ©Tate, Photo: Tate.

recovers in 7 years. The time frame of 7 years echoes Joseph’s prediction of 7 years of famine in Egypt.

Dream interpretation in Judaism Daniel interpreted the dream externally, as a prediction of the future, but also internally, as a reflection of the king’s pride. Jewish tradition recognizes the multiplicity of dream interpretations that all can be valid. According to Jewish tradition, there were 24 interpreters of dreams in Jerusalem during the time of the second Temple. If a person told his dream to all 24, he might receive 24 different interpretations; yet, all would be correct. Jews considered the interpretation to be as important as the dream because the interpretation affects how a dream is used in one’s life. The Talmud states that the realization of dreams “follows the mouth” or, in other words, depends upon the interpretation given to it (Segal, 2018).

Sparks of the divine 97 The Talmudic literature describes four categories of dreams. The first category is those dreams that have more than one interpretation. In those dreams, following the mouth of interpretation is especially important. The second category of dreams is those that have a specific interpretation and are either positive or negative. The third category of dreams is prophetic dreams, like those of Nebuchadnezzar cited before. The fourth category is meaningless dreams, with suppressed thoughts leftover from the day. Big Dreams, those that stir powerful emotions, are less likely to be meaningless (Bulkeley, 2008). While valuing dreams, Jewish rabbis also advised against their overuse. They cautioned, for instance, against “dream incubation.” Jews would come to the graves of deceased rabbis and sleep on top of graves, hoping to be possessed by the spirit of the deceased in a dream. Dream incubation was felt to represent an excessive interest and attachment to dreams.

Kabbalah An important component of the more mystical aspects of Judaism is the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah is a set of ancient traditions and practices particularly influential in Hassidic Judaism. Kabbalist practices and traditions center on the ten attributes of God, the Sephiroth, and the expression of those attributes in human history. Kabbalists sought direct contact and experience with the divine, and a critical method for attaining this divine contact was through dreams. The Zohar, one of the central texts of the Kabbalah, states that “One who does not have a dream for seven consecutive days is a transgressor” (Almoli, 1998). According to the Kabballah, we live in a shattered world. Among the fragments are sparks of the divine. Our job in this world is to gather these sparks to reconstruct the world as it was meant to be. Dreams can help in this process. At night, the souls of the holy ascend to the realms of the divine, and in the merger, the divine reveals itself in dreams. When negative forces and selfish desires control one, this ascension to the divine is blocked, and no dreams come.

God’s relationship to man The Kabbalah suggests a complex bidirectional relationship with the divine. God needs the assistance of man to reconstruct the world in all its splendor. God, in effect, transforms himself through man. Jung echoes this theme in his book Answer to Job. Jung felt that in the Book of Job, the ruthless and punitive Yahweh gains moral awareness through his interaction with the patience and innocence of Job.

98  Reintegrating the dream narrative In relation to dreams, we must not only passively witness our dreams, but we must also actively engage with them. The great Biblical example of this bidirectional engagement is Jacob’s “dream” of wrestling with the angel. This may have been a dream or it may have been a vision or some hybrid of the two. Actually, it has the feeling of what a Jungian therapist would call “active imagination,” an imaginal interaction with a dream figure to deepen one’s understanding of a dream and amplify its meaning. Jacob is at a critical turning point in his life when he wrestles with the angel. He has decided to reconcile with his brother Esau, who he had tricked out of an inheritance. Jacob leads his wives and children and flocks across the river Jabbok. Jacob returns to the far side of the river and stays there alone. “Then some man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. When the man saw that he could not prevail over him, he struck Jacob’s hip at its socket, so that the hip socket was wrenched as they wrestled.” The man then demands that Jacob release him, for it is daybreak. Jacob refuses until he is granted a blessing. The man or angel tells Jacob that he now shall be called Israel, “because you have contended with divine and human beings and prevailed.” All of us, Jew and Gentile, are heir to this legacy, as we are called to wrestle with angels, be wounded and be transformed.

Nebuchadnezzar’s dream This dream was a great favorite of Jung’s. He used a woodcut of the dream to illustrate the frontispiece of Volume 8 of his Collected Works. As I will describe at the end of the chapter, the dream beautifully depicts the idea of compensation, which Jung saw as one of the critical purposes of dreaming. Jung saw the tree in the dream as a representation of Nebuchadnezzar himself. In the dream, Nebuchadnezzar is “cut down to size;” the dream compensates for his megalomania. With its roots in the ground and its limbs in the sky, the tree is a natural image of a person (Abramovitch, 2021). The narrow flow of the dream and the idealized image of the tree is interrupted by the appearance of the “watcher.” What is a watcher? The term appears only three times in the Hebrew Bible, all in Daniel, but multiple times in the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Some have interpreted the term as referring to angels, others to the hybrid race formed when angels mated with humans. The great Kabbalist Isaac Luria thought the term referred to the offspring of Adam and Lilith, his consort before Eve. In any case, the image is of a spiritual wakefulness beyond human consciousness. At the beginning of the dream, Nebuchadnezzar, as the tree, depicts beautiful but smug ego inflation. When the spiritual watcher appears, Nebuchadnezzar is forced to face his inner darkness and descend to a state of animal

Sparks of the divine 99 madness before he can reawaken as a deeper version of himself, who now humbly praises and glorifies God. The dream offers a balance or compensation for Nebuchadnezzar’s ego inflation. Joseph’s first two dreams of 11 sheaves of wheat bowing to him, then of the sun and moon and 11 stars bowing to him, show a similar type of ego inflation. His brothers respond to his dream by throwing him in a pit to die. He is transformed by suffering and becomes a different modest kind of Joseph who saves and heals his wounded family. After this dream, and 7 years of suffering, Nebuchadnezzar is healed. Joseph and Daniel are well known for interpreting the dreams of other people. Freud, more than 2,000 years later, continues this legacy. Jewish tradition reminds us of the importance of dream interpretation and its historical role in public life. Dreams can offer suggestions for balance in our lives, so that we don’t face the drastic fall from grace that Nebuchadnezzar suffered. Kabbalist ideas suggest that man and God are engaged in a transformative, bidirectional dialogue. Dreams are an important part of that dialogue.

References Abramovitch, H. (2021). Daniel: Psychological development of a master dream interpreter. Journal of Analytic Psychology, 66(1), 93–111. Almoli, S. (1998). Dream interpretation from classical Jewish sources (Y. Elman, Trans.). Ktav Publishing. Bulkeley, K. (2008). Dreaming in the world’s religions: A comparative history. New York University Press. Segal, R. M. (2018). Sefer Hachalomet: The interpretation of dreams, based on Torah, Talmud, Midrash and other sources of the millenial Jewish tradition. MOAJ Editorial.

15 Istikhara

Ibn Seerin, the great Islamic scholar of dreams, tells the story of a Caliph and his dream. “Once a Caliph saw his teeth falling out in a dream. The dream interpreter said, ‘The entire family of my master will perish.’ The Caliph became upset and he called for another interpreter and recounted the dream to him.” Seerin continues, “The second interpreter replied, ‘The dream of my master is good, for he shall live the longest among his relatives.’ Immediately the Caliph embraced the man and rewarded him for his skill and tact.” (Al-Akili, 2006) The Islamic faith is practiced by more than a billion people of many different cultures, backgrounds and ethnicities. Any attempt at a brief survey of Islamic attitudes toward dreams undertaken by an outsider will necessarily be superficial and incomplete. Nonetheless, a cross-cultural understanding of dream interpretation is useful and can help us understand human attitudes toward dreams more broadly.

Dreams in Islamic culture Islamic culture has a long tradition of valuing dreams. Mohammed is said to have asked his advisers every morning what they dreamt of that night, seeking to gain insight and wisdom from their dreams. In contrast to the secular culture of the Christian West, Islamic culture has retained the belief that dreams can carry important messages from God. Discussions about dreams and their meanings are an important part of everyday life in much of the Islamic world, in a way that is unimaginable in the dominant culture of the West. Islam divides dreams into three types: 1) rahmaani, dreams from Allah; 2) nafsaani, dreams from within a person and psychological in nature; and 3) shaytaani, dreams from Shaytaan or Satan. The dreams of the Prophets are wahy or true revelation and are protected from Shaytaan. The dreams of others must be examined as to whether they are in accord with the Koran. If DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-19

Istikhara 101 they are not, they should not be acted upon (Bulkeley, 2008). This formulation allows for the psychological dimension of dreams while acknowledging spiritual elements and spiritual dangers. In Islam, the Koran is the full and complete revelation from God and precludes further direct revelation from Allah, except in dreams. Dreams are one of the 64 parts of Prophethood. According to Islamic teaching, toward the end of time, few dreams will be untrue. Dreams are sacred and should be shared only with someone that one loves or should be shared with a scholar.

Dream interpretation in Islamic culture According to Imaam al-Baghawi, the tenth-century Islamic scholar, dreams can be interpreted according to several principles. First, they may be interpreted according to the Koran. When a rope appears in a dream, for instance, it represents a covenant or divine promise because it is described by such a metaphor in the Koran. In the Sunnah, a crow is an immoral man, and when a crow appears in a dream it should be interpreted as such ­(Lamoreaux, 2002). Remember, many of the Islamic faithful have committed large parts of the Koran to memory, so such Koranic references are natural and appropriate. Dreams can also be interpreted according to proverbs. A hole, for instance, represents a conspiracy because of the saying, “Whoever digs a hole will fall into it.” Dreams can also be interpreted according to the principle of opposites; fear, for instance, means safety in a dream. Several chapters, or suras, in the Koran contain dream references. Some dream stories, like those about Joseph, are very similar to stories in the Torah with the same characters, with subtle differences. The story of ­Abraham and the planned sacrifice of his son Isaac are both in the Koran and the Torah. In the Koran, Abraham receives the command to sacrifice his son in a dream. In the Torah, the command is the direct voice of God, not in a dream. In the Koran, Abraham was interrupted in his sacrifice of Isaac by the words of Allah saying, “Abraham, you have fulfilled your vision.” The Koran more clearly identifies that Allah requires submission to his will rather than actual sacrifice. In the early centuries of Islam, manuals of dream interpretation were very common. Most were based on the works of Artemidorus, the great Greek interpreter of dreams. According to one scholar, as many commentaries were written in the first three centuries of Islam on dreams as were written about the Koran. Just as early Christian Gnostic texts were suppressed or destroyed, most of these works have been lost, as later interpreters of Islam rejected their methods and conclusions.

102  Reintegrating the dream narrative Ibn Seerin, who died in 728 ce, was the greatest of the Islamic dream interpreters. His interpretations were not only typically based on the Koran, reflecting the centrality of the Koran to Islamic life, but were also specific to the character and personality of the dreamer. In one story, two dreamers approached him with the same dream of being the caller to prayer. Ibn Seerin tells the first dreamer that the dream foretells a pilgrimage to Mecca; he tells the second dreamer that his dream foretells that he will be accused of theft. The characters of the two dreamers, evident from their appearance and demeanor, suggest interpretations based on different Koranic verses (Al-Akili, 2006).

Istikhara At the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned the essential role dreams have in everyday Islamic life. One example is istikhara, the Muslim practice of seeking divine guidance for important life decisions. Before taking a life decision like marriage or a job change, Muslims seek divine guidance. Istikhara is a formal ritualized practice of prayer and contemplation. It can be used during waking up when the divine response comes as an “inclination of the heart” or before sleep when the answer to the life question can appear in a dream. Dream incubation in Istikhara can include special ablutions, visits to sacred places and the repetition of special words before falling asleep. The idea of guidance through dreams can be misused. Taliban and AlQaeda leaders have cited divine guidance through dreams to validate their political and terrorist attacks (Bulkeley, 2008).

Sufism and dreams Sufism is the mystical strain of Islamic practice that seeks the direct experience of God and God’s love. Dreams are highly valued in Sufism. According to Sufism, dreams change as the individual attains spiritual growth and wisdom. Rumi, the great Sufi teacher and poet, describes the inner wisdom that guides the dream and encourages the wise dreamer to access that inner wisdom. “Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth” (Barks, 1995). The Jungian approach to dream interpretation echoes this sense of inner intelligence that guides the dream. In the book Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies, Katz describes the story of the Turkish Sultan Murad. Murad’s dreams showed a deepening sense of his role as an inspired Sufi master. In one dream, a divine voice told him that the lands of Persia were his, justifying his invasion and conquest

Istikhara 103 of that land. Some Sufi initiates still report their dreams to the Sufi masters. The Sufi attitude toward dreams as a source of divine guidance is considered controversial in many Islamic groups (Katz, 2012). Sufism also nurtured contact with a supersensory world, mundus imaginalis, where archetypal figures and forms could be contacted. Dreaming involves access to this world. In words reminiscent of modern lucid dreaming, the Sufi Master Ibn Arabi writes, “A person must control his thoughts in a dream.” In describing this imaginal world, Arabi writes, My heart is capable of every form: /A cloister for the monk, a fane for idols, /A pasture for gazelles, the votary’s Ka Ba (temple)/ The tables for the Torah, the Quran./Love is the creed I hold: wherever turn/His camels. Love is still my creed and faith. This passage beautifully describes an acceptance of all aspects of the psyche, including negative ones like idolatry (Shah, 1964).

Figure 15.1  Turkish painting of Rumi

104  Reintegrating the dream narrative Sufism, because of its mystical appeal and religious tolerance, has become very popular in the West, especially in New Age circles. Rumi, born in 1207 AD, has recently achieved the rare feat of being the best-selling poet in both the United States and Iran. The political conflicts between the two states in the outer political world seems to belie an inner kinship.

Ibn Seerin’s dream The dream that begins this chapter, from Ibn Seerin, describes the image of losing one’s teeth. Freud described such dreams as depictions of castration anxiety. Jungian dream interpreters would view teeth as symbols of the aggressive grasping and internalizing aspects of life experience. In this model, losing teeth represents conflicts around this aspect of aggression. Since loss of teeth is associated with aging, losing teeth can represent the changes in our understanding of aggression as we mature and age. Ibn Seerin’s example illustrates the divinatory aspects of such dreams. The first dream interpretation directly confronts the Caliph’s concerns about aging and death. The second interpretation and his wish not to acknowledge those concerns affect his choice among the two dream interpretations he is offered. By noting the tact of the interpreter, he acknowledges that both interpretations are, in fact, true. The proper interpretation depends on context. Islamic tradition reminds us of the importance of dreams as guidance in the significant decisions of everyday life.

References Al-Akili, M. M. (2006). Ibn Seerin’s dictionary of dreams. Pearl Publishing. Barks, C. (1995). The essential Rumi. Haroper Collins. Bulkeley, K. (2008). Dreaming in the world’s religions: A comparative history. New York University Press. Katz, J. (2012). Dreams and their interpretation in Sufi thought (O. A. K. Felek & D. Alexandra, Eds., pp. 181–199). State University of New York Press. Lamoreaux, J. C. (2002). The early muslim tradition of dream interpretation. State University of New York Press. Shah, I. (1964). The Sufis. Anchor Books.

16 The gods within

While asleep I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of results in elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing. Srinivasa Ramanujan, describing one of his many math dreams

In 1913, the prominent British mathematician G. H. Hardy received a long letter from an entirely self-trained, 26-year-old Indian mathematician, Ramanujan. The letter contained hundreds of mathematical formulas, including solutions to mathematical problems that were considered unsolvable. They were presented not in the Western style of proofs and demonstrations, but simply as results. Hardy nearly threw the letter away, assuming it was written by some crank, until he realized that much of what the letter contained was correct. Ramanujan had never attended college in India because he failed his entrance exams. He would only answer questions about mathematics; the rest of his tests he left blank. He had a mystical and spiritual devotion to mathematics, saying “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.” (Kanigel, 1991). Ramanujan’s was a devout Hindu. He ascribed all his mathematical insights to his family goddess, Mahalakshmi of Namakkal. She spoke to him in dreams, like the one described earlier. Later in 1913, Ramanujan joined Hardy at Cambridge. He became one of the most celebrated mathematicians of his time, and he is credited with nearly 3,900 significant mathematical discoveries. As recently as 2012, a remark he had scribbled in the margin of a page of text was recognized as a significant discovery.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-20

106  Reintegrating the dream narrative In 1919, Ramanujan returned to India because of poor health. He suffered from infections of the liver all his life, probably the result of amebic dysentery he had as a child. He died in 1920, at the age of 32.

Hinduism Hinduism is the third largest world religion, with over a billion followers, and is considered the oldest religion. Unlike Christianity and Islam, Hinduism has no founder, no dogmas and no recognized central authority. Its sects are disparate enough that Hinduism is considered a family of religions. Hinduism is described as a way of life as much as a religion. Hinduism is polytheistic or, more precisely, “henotheistic.” Henotheistic faiths acknowledge multiple gods but view one as primary. In Hinduism, this one is Brahman. Brahman can be worshipped in many different forms and under many different names. Secondary gods may work collaboratively with him, like the family goddess Mahalakshmi who taught Ramanujan in his dreams. The Hindu goddess of dreams is Maya. She is also the goddess who maintains the illusion of the perceived world and all its myriad of forms and beings. In being the goddess of dreams, as well as the goddess of the world as perceived by everyday ego consciousness, she, in her very nature, unites the world of perceived forms with the world of dreams. Both in different ways are illusion. When we are fully immersing ourselves in these illusory worlds we can attain true enlightenment, which involves a realization of the illusory nature of the world. Christianity and Islam are theistic faiths. They believe that God is radically other and not part of the world. Hinduism is “panentheistic.” It considers that God is in and part of the world, and the world is part of God. God is also within each of us as Atman. Atman is the spiritual principle of the universe, as manifested with each person. Atman is identical to Brahman, and God is within us. These themes are alien to traditional Western ideas of God but resonate with alternative Christian views. God’s coexistence with the world is reminiscent of the work of the great Catholic theologian Teilhard de Chardin. Searching for God within is a Gnostic quest. The idea of multiple deities within each of us sounds very much like Jungian ideas about the collective unconscious. In Jungian dreamwork, we come to recognize the presence of the semi-independent archetypal entities within each of us. What better term for them than gods and goddesses? As Nietzsche wrote in Human All Too Human, “Dreaming is the source of all metaphysics; it is the source of all the gods.” Monotheism invites a literalist view of religion and faith: one God, one view, one truth. Polytheism requires a “mythopoetic” view of the world

The gods within 107 (Bellah, 2011). In a mythopoetic view of the world, there is not just true and false; there are metaphorical and mythical truths that are symbolically true, but not literally true. We seem to imagine that brilliant men like Plato or Aristotle were simpletons and literally believed that Zeus threw thunderbolts off a mountain in northern Greece. Those beliefs were probably held mythopoetically, not literally. This mythopoetic view of the world can be seen in psychotic patients. A schizophrenic might “believe” that the FBI is after him, but if you agree with him, he will be upset and think his doctor is crazy. He knows that his delusion falls into a different category of belief; and that if you share it, there is something wrong with you. The strict dichotomy between true and false is not seen in the mythical world. Hindu religious ideas are popular in the West, making Hinduism the second most rapidly expanding faith. Because Hinduism focuses on ritual practices rather than creed, its practices can be applied without religious conversion. About 300 million people worldwide practice various forms of yoga, and the practice can be adopted by religious people of many persuasions, as well as atheists and agnostics (Wei, 2016).

Hinduism and dreams Hindu sacred literature is vast and varied. Besides the Upanishads and Vedas, there are numerous other Hindu sacred texts. Dreams appear frequently in those works and are often a mechanism for a god to make his wishes known. In Hinduism, dreams are felt to originate in that part of the mind that is a direct channel to the divine. Unlike traditional Western cultures, dreams are shared in groups and sometimes experienced communally. God sometimes appears simultaneously in the dreams of multiple individuals (Maheshwari, 2019). We find this at times in our long-standing dream group. Sometimes, members will have dreams with similar images, before having heard the dream of the other member, as if they were somehow dreaming together. Psychoanalysts have told me informally that they sometimes experience this kind of shared dream with their patients. Since Hinduism is not focused on dogmas and creeds, it is less wary of dream messages. Dreams are plentiful throughout Hindi sacred works. One of the earliest Hindu references to dreams is in the Rig Vega, written about 4000 bce. The dream state is one of the four major states of the self: waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep and a transcendent fourth state. Dreams can be used to predict the sex of an unborn child and to assess the temperaments that dominates a personality (Eranimos & Funkhouser, 2017). A full account of the vast literature about dreams in Hinduism is beyond the scope of this book, but telepathic dreams, prophetic dreams and dreams within dreams are important dream categories in Hindu culture.

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Ramanujan’s dream The blood in Ramanujan’s dream makes it seem ominous. Ramanujan dreamed of blood often, and it seemed not to trouble him; he considered it to be the appearance of Mahalakshmi’s consort. If we follow this lead or association, the dream has a typical cast of characters: dream ego, anima and the consort, who is a shadow figure represented as blood. One might almost feel a bit jealous of Ramanujan. The goddess that appears in his dreams gives him knowledge that can simply be transcribed, without the ambiguities of interpretation. Yet, the very closeness of the relationship between Ramanujan and Mahalakshmi and her direct dictation are troubling. Ramanujan pretends not to see the danger and warning in the blood image, but it’s there. When gods and humans consort too closely, it tends not to go well, at least for the human. When Acteon fell in love with Artemis, she turned him into a deer. He was then devoured by his own hounds. Zeus transformed himself into a swan to impregnate the beautiful and very mortal Leda. She laid an egg after the encounter, out of which hatched four legendary Greek figures, including Helen of Troy. In the dream at the beginning of the chapter, Ramanujan dreams of a disembodied hand that writes. This is reminiscent of a famous scene in the book of Daniel. At a great banquet for the Babylonian king, a hand appears and writes on the wall. Only Daniel can read the “handwriting on the wall.” It says that the king’s days are numbered. Indeed, Ramanujan’s days were numbered, and, soon, his goddess would call him to her side. The infection in his liver, the organ of blood, would kill him. Hindu traditions remind us of the imminence of the divine and the multiplicity of selves within us. Dreams give us access to this inner world with its unique emotional and spiritual energy.

References Bellah, R. (2011). Religion in human evolution: From the Paleolithic to the axial age. Harvard University Press. Eranimos, B., & Funkhouser, A. (2017). The concept of dreams and dreaming: A hindu perspective. The International Journal of Indian Psychology, 4(4), 108–116. Kanigel, R. (1991). The man who knew infinity: A  life of the genius Ramanujan. Scribner and Sons. Maheshwari, V. (2019, April 19). Dreams – An Indian point of view. vkmaeshwari.com. Wei, M. (2016, March 7). New survey reveals the rapid rise of yoga – and why some people still haven’t tried it. health.harvard.edu.

17 The way of no words

Some nights ago, I dreamed I was sitting between the two pillars, with the sacrificial offering in full view. Since sage kings do not arise, who on earth will honor me? I am dying, I suppose. Confucius’s final dream

Psychoanalysis in China For the past 8 years, I have taught classes about psychoanalytic theory in China, including a class on dreams. Psychoanalysis is popular in China today. The program in which I teach, the Chinese American Psychoanalytic Alliance (CAPA), has graduated over 400 students since it opened in 2011. The program is very prestigious. Graduates can readily set up successful practices full of eager clients seeking psychoanalytic therapy. The Chinese government is concerned about a shortage of therapists and actively encourages mental health training. From my conversations with students and graduates, Chinese value depth in human interactions and are bored by superficiality. Cognitive behavioral therapies are seen as being superficial; depth psychology is viewed as being meaningful and important. Jung is much more popular in China than in the United States. Students in the program are already practicing therapists, and some use more advanced Jungian techniques rarely seen in the States, like sand tray. In sand tray, clients choose among a large array of figures and arrange them in wet sand. Then they describe the scene they have created. This technique encourages the expression of important unconscious material. In China, analytic ideas are especially popular among the young. In a culture where family ties are very strong, the explicit and implicit antiauthoritarian subtext of dynamic therapy is alluring. Trying to understand who you really are and what you want is a compelling and subversive DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-21

110  Reintegrating the dream narrative message in a culture where children are expected to make their parents happy. The Western path of “finding yourself” in young adulthood is not part of Chinese culture; in China, you are told who you are and you are born to support and nurture your parents. China may, unexpectedly, be leading a cultural rebirth of analytic ideas, including dream interpretation.

Confucianism and Taoism Confucius, who lived around 500 bce, has remained influential in China to this day. Confucian teaching had a strong focus on civic and family duty and the veneration of one’s ancestors. Confucianism emphasized the maintenance of order and stability. Taoism, which had its origins in the third century bce, rejected social ideals of Confucianism and instead encouraged living in accord with the Tao, or Way. The Tao Te Ching, containing the teachings of Lao Tzu, is a

Figure 17.1  Portrait of Lao Tzu.

The way of no words 111 cornerstone of the Taoist tradition. The true Tao cannot be named but can be discerned in the harmonies of nature, as well as, most importantly, discovered within. When truths are discovered within, they are outside the social order and can be destabilizing. The tension between Taoism and Confucianism is a form of the general tension that exists in all cultures between the individual and the collective, between the “I” and the “we.” The individualistic, internally directed orientation of Taoism has much kinship with psychoanalysis. A Taoist saying is “It takes knowledge to understand others, it takes a clear mind to understand oneself.” The third great Chinese religion, Buddhism, was strongly influenced by Taoism. Taoism greatly influenced Jung, especially the I Ching, the ancient Taoist book of divination. Jung described the concept of synchronicity in his now famous introduction to the Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching. Taoism introduced famous speculations on the nature of reality versus the dream world. The Taoist Zhuang Zi dreamt that he was a butterfly, then awakened to realize he was Zhuang Zi. Did Zhuang Zi dream he was a butterfly or did a butterfly dream he was Zhuang Zi? Taoists also felt that the most accurate dream interpretation is to let go of the desire to know what a dream means and avoid reducing its meaning to a literalist translation.­ Taoists would welcome the concept of befriending dreams that we discussed in Chapter 3.

Dream interpretation in China Dream interpretation and divination were meaningful in Chinese society since ancient times. In the Zhou dynasty, around 1100 bce, there was an official court position for a dream interpreter (Bulkeley, 2008). Dreams were viewed as a means of predicting the future, and dream interpretation was a form of divination. The Book of Dreams, ascribed to the Duke of Zhou, is a catalog of dream symbols and their meanings, which remains influential among Chinese to this day (Pei & Zhang, 2000). The Duke of Zhou, or Zhou Gong, was a legendary Chinese political figure known for his loyalty and trustworthiness. He is called the God of Dreams, and he viewed dreams as being predictive. If something important was going to happen to someone, like a marriage, a funeral or a promotion, the Duke of Zhou would let them know through dreams. “Dreaming of Zhou Gong” or learning of the future through dreams remains a popular expression in modern China. Popular Chinese websites, like yourchineseastrology.com, will suggest an interpretation of a dream image based on the Book of Dreams. To dream of catching a butterfly, for instance, means that you will marry the woman of your dreams. According to Zhou, symbols refer to concrete and external

112  Reintegrating the dream narrative objects. A butterfly in a dream means you will marry; Zhou did not attempt to explore the symbol psychologically. Yet, sometimes the way Zhou translates a dream image suggests a more symbolic meaning. Why did he decide a butterfly meant marrying the woman of your dreams? The nature and qualities of the image suggest its meaning. The butterfly, beautiful and delicate, is reminiscent of the soul. Its startling emergence from a cocoon suggests renewal. The woman of your dreams is soul, is anima, is transformation. Union with another through marriage is a transformative act.

Confucius’ dream In Confucius’ death dream, he is lying between pillars. This is the traditional place, in Confucius’s clan, where the dead are honored, but archetypally it represents the union of the opposites. Jesus, remember, was crucified between a thief and a saint. The dream that began the chapter on end-of-life dreams showed a similar configuration of three trees. It is interesting to compare Confucius’ end-of-life dream to that of another great political figure, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s dream seemed to foreshadow his death. A few days before his assassination, he dreamed of a funeral service at the White House for an assassinated President. In Lincoln’s dream, the wake is crowded with mourners; in Confucius’s ­ dream, there are no mourners, only a sacrifice. But what is being sacrificed? Confucius, the public figure, the ego. This sacrifice will lead to rebirth, like the Taoist butterfly emerging from the cocoon. It is as if at the end of Confucius’ life, his traditionalist, social view of life and its purpose break down. The image of the man between two pillars recalls the Biblical image, obviously unknown to Confucius, of Samson at his death. Blind Samson, chained to two pillars, tears down the temple of the Philistines, destroying it and himself. This image may represent a core mytheme, or mythical fragment, which depicts the spirit in bondage about to be destroyed as its own world is destroyed. Just as the social order Confucius had built collapsed after his death, so too his internal social view of his own person was collapsing. Confucius, the socially constructed image, is dying; now Confucius alone must face death. Confucius died about a week after this dream. His death, like every death, is also a rebirth.

References Bulkeley, K. (2008). Dreaming in the world’s religions: A comparative history. New York University Press. Pei, F. Y., & Zhang, J. (2000). The interpretation of dreams in Chinese culture. Weatherhill.

18 Dreaming awake

I dreamt about a bus circumambulating my teacher’s house, although there is no road there. In the dream, the bus conductor was my friend, and I stood beside him, handing out tickets to each person that boarded the bus. The tickets were pieces of paper that had the Tibetan syllable A written on them.

15 years later (real life): One day, I was passing out small pieces of paper to be used in a meditation on concentration. Each piece of paper had the Tibetan syllable A written on it. Dreams of Tenzin Wangyal, a teacher in the Bon Tibetan religious tradition The letter A is a powerful, secret Dzogchen dream symbol. At the age of 10, Tenzin Wangyal had the first dream quoted above. He was a child of Tibetan exiles being evaluated for admission to the Bon Monastery in Dolanji, India. The teachings were secret, and Tenzin did not know the significance of the letter A. However, he dreamt of it, and the monks recognized the special dream powers he possessed. He was chosen for the 11-year monastic program and later attained the title of Geshe, the highest degree in traditional Tibetan culture. He also received the title of Rinpoche, or incarnate lama. Later he moved to Europe, then the United States. He became the Western face of Bon and now lives and teaches in the United States.

Dreaming in Tibetan culture Bon is the original, pre-Buddhist faith of the Tibetan people, and Dzogchen Yoga is the highest form of Bon teachings. For centuries, Bon evolved and blended with a form of Buddhism called Vajrayana. Both Tibetan Buddhism and Bon coexist in the Himalayan region and in the Tibetan diaspora, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-22

114  Reintegrating the dream narrative both acknowledge the important role of Dalai Lama as a religious and political leader. Dreaming is greatly valued in Tibetan culture, as is what we would call the unconscious (Rinpoche, 1998). The cultivation of lucid dreaming is an important part of Tibetan religious practice. In Tibet, the goal of lucid dreaming is not transformation or renunciation but recognizing the way things are, pure awareness without ego issues like seeking or fear. Dzogchen seeks an “ordinary” awareness during wakefulness and while being asleep. “Ordinary” awareness is a metaconscious awareness of consciousness itself. Dzogchen cultivates an “empty mind” through becoming aware of our impermanence, developing “egolessness” and escaping from the self-imposed prison of suffering that thoughts of past and future so often bring. True awareness is light-hearted. According to Dzogchen monks, as we become more aware and contemplative in our everyday lives, we begin to see that we have perceived the world through a “self-grasping eye,” which makes us become attached to things. We must realize that what we grasp at does not exist. Lucid dreaming teaches us that the reality we perceive in a dream does not exist. In this way, lucid dreaming helps free us from the illusory reality we perceive while awake. It becomes a bridge from dreaming into wakefulness, but wakefulness that is aware that the waking world is as unreal as the world of the dream. Bon Dzogchen encourages lucidity in dreams as a way of attaining this wisdom. In a typical dream, the dreamer becomes “enveloped” in the dream. He is a participant only. In a lucid dream, the dreamer becomes aware that he is separate from the dream environment. The dream ego, “you” becomes separate from the dream. Bon dream exercises include 1) imagining that daytime experience is a dream; 2) perceiving fear, threat and challenge as a dream; 3) rehearsing the events of the day at bedtime and letting go of difficult experiences while relaxed and 4) reexperiencing lucidity upon awakening or, if lucidity was not attained, encouraging further practice.

The waking world and the dream world The practice of Dzogchen attempts to connect us to the essential nature of reality, and its dream-like quality. The dream, as conceived by Jung and Freud, was a window into the unconscious experience. For Dzogchen practitioners, lucid dreaming is a door, not a window. Lucid dreaming allows us to enter the dream world actively. This blurring of the dreaming and waking world is reminiscent of Chuang Tzu the Taoist’s butterfly dream, where he awakened unsure if he was Chuang Tzu dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being Chuang Tzu.

Dreaming awake 115 The goal of Dzogchen is to bring awareness to the day as well as the night. As Tenzin writes, “day helps night, and night helps day.” The Dzogchen process of seeking lucidity would have guided Tenzin beyond the limited sense of self that imprisons us through grasping for pleasure or material gain, guarding against threats and against ignoring the simple awareness that is our only genuine experience. Awareness of the illusory nature of the dream lightens the sense of the ego. The daytime ego is as unreal as the dream ego. This awareness helps us discard the false perception of reality driven by desire, aggression and ignorance. Thus, lucidity is a part of the journey to a primordial awareness without a sense of self (i.e., Buddhist doctrine of no self). The aware dreamer remains you, but the creator of the dream lies elsewhere. This awareness shows us that life is only a dream.

The Book of the Dead One of the most remarkable products of Tibetan Buddhism is the Book of the Dead. The Book of the Dead is a guidebook for the soul in the period immediately after death. While we do not know how useful it is in that context, it offers great wisdom for this life (Coleman, 2008). Both Jung and the Dalai Lama wrote important commentaries on The Book of the Dead. According to tradition, The Book of the Dead was written in the eighth century, when Buddhism supplanted the Bon faith. It was then buried in the hills to be rediscovered in the fourteenth century. The Book of the Dead advocated lucid dreaming to improve one’s chances for a good and conscious death and subsequent rebirth. The “sleep of clear light,” which is consciousness in non-dreaming sleep, is thought to prepare one for death and be of the same nature as death. Unlike some Western psychotherapies, but comparable to depth psychology, Bon encourages a deep awareness of the shadow aspects of life. An essential part of Dzogchen practice is becoming “aware of the darkness.” It is this conscious awareness that makes the darkness lose its power (Rosch, 2014). Like Jungian theory that distinguishes between the dream ego as a character in the dream and the person himself, Dzogchen teaches that we are separate from the dream and within the dream.

Science and rediscovery When LaBerge and others in the 1980s began to study and popularize lucid dreaming, they rediscovered ancient Tibetan practices (LaBerge, 1985). Their scientific approach, discussed earlier in this book, echoed the spiritual insights attained by the Dzogchen faith.

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Figure 18.1  Sleep of clear light mandala, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Source: Story of Light Festival.

Tenzin’s dream Tenzin’s dreams, cited at the beginning of the chapter, shows the power of the linguistic symbol itself. We in the West tend to see words only in terms of the objects to which they refer. We tend to image words not as the words themselves but as their referents. An apple is not the word a-p-p-l-e but the

Dreaming awake 117 images of the round red fruit, its taste, the sound of a bite, except in dreams, where our memories of it can stir in us archetypal images and meanings that manifest as symbols such as that of the red letter A. Tenzin’s dreams strangely echo Jewish mystical ideas about the powers of letters and sound, so prominent in the Kabbalah. Of course, the great mystery of Tenzin’s first dream is how he could know the secret teachings of his faith before he was exposed to them. Somehow in his dream, he tapped the underground river that connected him to his faith, and maybe to all true faiths. Bon teaches us that the dreamer is a participant in the dream and of the potential wisdom that can be gained when lucidity is used properly.

References Coleman, G. A. T. J. (2008). The Tibetan book of he dead: First complete translation. Penguin. LaBerge, S., & Stephen, O. (1985). Lucid dreaming. JP Tarcher. Rinpoche, T. W. (1998). The Tibetan yoga of dreams and sleep. Snow Lion. Rosch, E. (2014). Tibetan Buddhist dream yoga and the limits of Western psychology (Vol. 2). Berkeley Press.

Part IV

Why we dream

19 Asleep in a cage

I’m running down a long hall. The lights are dim, but I can sense there are people around me. Another world outside my current experience. Where I am is not familiar, but I have a sense of purpose, of seeking, though I feel lost and scared. I come to another hall with a pathway left and right. I proceed left, and after some time I come to a door. It is locked, and I have no choice but to head back to take the other path. This is another long hall and I sense myself being watched as if in a movie from a distant place. The smell of popcorn drifts through the air. Suddenly I awaken in a cage with a wise old friend I once knew, who tells me to always keep trying. Anonymous dream

For those readers less versed in neuroscience, this will be a more challenging chapter to read. But anyone who wants to understand dreams needs to know some of the nuts and bolts of their structure and evolution. The neurophysiology of dreams is the structure upon which any theories of dream interpretation must be built. Sleep is an ancient brain process that has evolved across eons. It is vital for survival, yet its primary functions remain a mystery. One third of human existence is spent in sleep. All life sleeps. It may even be that sleep is an emergent property of neuronal networks (Krueger et al., 2008). There are two distinct sleep states, rapid eye movement sleep or REM and non-rapid eye movement sleep or non-REM. Each state likely serves separate but important functions. REM has only evolved in mammals and birds, either independently or through a common ancestor, and is a brain state that more closely resembles waking than other stages of sleep which is why it is sometimes called “active” or “paradoxical” sleep. While thoughts occur in the NREM state of sleep, REM is uniquely associated with the bizarre, sensory, emotionally laden, narrative experiences we typically define as dreams.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-24

122  Why we dream

The discovery of REM sleep Bill Dement, the father of sleep medicine, was among the first to observe the cyclic nature of sleep, including the relation of periods of rapid eye movements, REMs, with the dreaming state. He discovered these exciting mind–body connections as a medical student at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. Dement was working in the sleep lab at the University of Chicago, the first sleep lab in the world. He worked under Nathaniel Kleitman and it was Dement’s job to stay up all night looking for eye movements in sleeping volunteers. He described this task as “about as tedious a task as the human mind can conceive, especially when you are sleepy yourself.” One day, another student made an offhand comment that he and Dr. Kleitman thought these eye movements might be related to dreaming. A popular book of that time, “You Can Sleep Well” by Edmund Jacobson, the inventor of progressive muscle relaxation, hinted that dream sleep is accompanied by rapid eye movements. Dement knew of Freud’s work on dreams and was fascinated by them. The lab was a low-budget affair, with an EEG machine turned on at random intervals to save paper. As Dement noticed the unique rapid eye movements and awake-like EEG patterns of REM sleep, he woke his subjects and asked them if they were dreaming. He got marvelous results, sometimes with 50 pages of dreams in just one night. It was during his work in this lab that Dement helped discover REM sleep and identified it as the dream state. Dement subsequently did his doctoral dissertation demonstrating REM sleep in cats. In 1954, Dement decided to run the EEG machine all night. He made the first continuous nocturnal sleep recordings that quantified how long each type of sleep lasted and how the transitions occurred and, importantly, discovered the 90-minute sleep cycle from non-REM through REM and back again. His participants all showed the same basic sleep cycles. Studies of sleep patterns in infants, people with schizophrenia, people of different races and even the blind were all shown to have REM sleep. The one group Dement had not been allowed to study was a group made up exclusively of women – it was the 1950s, after all. After receiving his M.D. in 1955 and Ph.D. in 1957, Dement received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to set up a sleep laboratory in his apartment in New York City. This laboratory began as a series of all-night sleep recordings, some of his wife and some of others who included several famous “Rockettes,” dancers from the Radio City Music Hall. Not surprisingly, it was confirmed in these early all-night sleep recordings that women have brain patterns during sleep identical to men (Dement, 1999).

Asleep in a cage 123 Dement realized that the brain in REM sleep was as active as the waking brain. Before becoming one of the most highly cited research papers of the time, the paper in which they described this finding was rejected by five different journals. His findings were originally rejected because the bias of his time suggested that the brain was simply not “active” during sleep. Indeed, the prevailing understanding of sleep prior to the modern era was that it was an intermediate state between wakefulness and death. As Joseph Haydn, the eighteenth-century composer, friend of Mozart and tutor to Beethoven, expressed in song, “Death is a long, long sleep. Sleep is a short, short death.”

Figure 19.1 Brain activity during 30 seconds of each of the 4 Sleep stages; awake EEG is mostly alpha frequency (8–12 cycles per second) when eyes are closed.

Figure 19.2 Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep occurs mostly in the latter half of the night with four to five episodes with a total duration between 10 and 30 minutes each.

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Special features of REM sleep Other interesting features of REM sleep are the paralysis of the body, the absence of thermoregulation and sexual arousal. Erections are common in REM sleep and are described politely as “nocturnal penile tumescence.” Why is movement suppressed during sleep? This “active” paralysis protects the dreamer from waking himself with movements and protects him from acting out his dreams. When the brain nucleus that creates this paralysis is removed in research with animals, the animal seems to act out dreams. A cat or dog, for instance, will engage in chase behaviors. These chase behaviors fit the Freudian view of a paralysis of the body to protect one from enacting the powerful wishes that were expressed as disguised latent content during REM sleep dreams. Although Freudian ideas about sexual impulses during sleep may seem to be confirmed by the presence of nocturnal penile tumescence, erections occur even if a dream is not sexual. Though REM sleep is an active process, some brain areas turn off, including the locus ceruleus, a center of noradrenergic tone that inhibits erections. In the old days of low-budget medicine, doctors would use this feature of REM sleep to evaluate whether erectile dysfunction was organic or psychological. The patient would be asked to wrap a row of postage stamps around his penis and closely adhere the ends of the row together. If the perforations were broken in the morning, the patient had had a nocturnal erection, and his erectile function was physiologically intact. REM sleep and dreams likely have distinct generators in the brain (Solms, 2021). Still, as Dement showed, they are coordinated processes, and the neurophysiology of REM may hold vital clues to functional aspects of dreaming. One of the ways to probe this question is to deprive one of REM sleep. Indeed, a theory at the time was that deprivation of REM sleep was a cause of mental illness, including schizophrenia. This hypothesis was based on Freud’s belief that both dreams and psychosis involved primary process thinking. Many long-suffering subjects were deprived of REM sleep for extended periods. They felt stress, irritability and difficulty concentrating. They even gained weight, but they did not become psychotic. The needs for REM and non-REM sleep are independent. Being deprived of either creates a rebound effect, where the brain tries to “catch-up” on lost REM or non-REM sleep. Intriguingly, REM sleep deprivation improves depression, a finding still not well understood, but one consistent with the well-established REM-suppressing effect of most antidepressant medications (Vogel et al., 1980). Sleep research on animals has led to interesting findings as well. First, animals dream. When the muscle atonia of REM sleep is blocked by

Asleep in a cage 125 surgical excision, animals act out their dreams, including stalking, fear, aggression and grooming. Indeed, all mammals have been found to have REM sleep, including many aquatic mammals. Dolphins, seals and whales have unihemispheric sleep; only half the brain sleeps at a time, presumably, so the muscle paralysis of REM sleep does not cause them to drown. In the fur seal, which lives on both land and water, REM occurs almost all while safely on land (Revonsuo, 2000). Interestingly, the only other order of animals that has unequivocal REM sleep is birds. Like aquatic mammals, birds can sleep with one half of their brain at a time. Presumably, this occurs to allow them to maintain attention to the outside of their flock to monitor threats. At the same time, the other half of their brain is safely slumbering. It can be seen in ducks sleeping in a row where the two flanking members will sleep unihemispherically. Our ancestors observed this phenomenon, leading to the saying, “sleep with one eye open “(Dement, 1999).

Evolution of REM sleep REM evolved in both birds and mammals but may even have been an early type of primary-process consciousness. This emotionally laden dream-like wakefulness, or protoconsciousness, may have evolved before the typical waking consciousness we all experience (Hobson, 2009). The amounts of REM vary widely across the animal kingdom and throughout development. Younger mammals have the most REM sleep, and animals whose young need extensive parental care (e.g., altricial animals like humans and marsupials) have more REM at birth than precocial animals (e.g., horses and guinea pigs). Indeed, immaturity at birth is the single best predictor of REM sleep throughout life. The ancient platypus is the king of REM sleep at 60% of their typical 13–14 hours of sleep time in REM as compared to humans at 20–25%. However, we have more REM sleep than our ape and monkey relatives, who are in REM for about 10% of their sleep time. Before birth, sleep is mostly REM, and most of the day is spent in sleep (Coons & G ­ uilleminault, 1982). As both Panksepp (Panksepp, 2004) and Hobson (Hobson, 2009) have suggested, REM may represent a protoconscious emotional state where connections between neurons multiply to develop the brain’s visual, motor and other functional circuits. Dream content becomes more complex as the cognitive capacities of the brain develop (Foulkes, 1999). If we take Panksepp and Hobson’s view, it may even be that dreams facilitate that development. Later in childhood, the narrative capacity of our imagination becomes possible. At around 5 years of age, dreams are experienced as strange and complex stories. REM and

126  Why we dream the associated dream state may eventually facilitate higher secondary level processing or secondary consciousness. Does the evolutionary history of REM sleep provide a clue to its function? The paralysis in REM is risky for an animal. How does REM sleep make this risk worth it? How does REM sleep specifically relate to dreaming?

Neuroscience of REM sleep EEG studies show that the phylogenetically ancient pontine brainstem initiates REM (Van Dort et al., 2015). The process of REM sleep begins with distinct waves of electrical activity that come from this deep brainstem area up through the thalamus to the occipital cortex at the back of our brains. These pontine-geniculo-occipital waves or PGO waves precede REM sleep by 30–90 seconds (Fernández-Mendoza et al., 2009) and occur in conjunction with eye movements characteristic of REM sleep. The pons and geniculate are involved with emotions, arousal, control of movement and learning, while the occipital cortex processes visual stimuli (Tattersall et al., 2014). The pons may “imagine” movements, while the occipital cortex hallucinates the visual aspects of the dream. Brain imaging of sleep states provides additional clues and shows just how different the states of waking, non-REM and REM sleep are (Braun et al., 1997). In REM sleep, frontal areas of the brain are turned off, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex. Because these brain areas normally inhibit our emotional brain, the primal emotional “limbic” circuits of the brain become highly activated during REM. The brainstem, forebrain, spinal cord and cerebellum become activated when frontal inhibition is removed. In REM sleep, the input and output gates of the brain are closed (e.g., we are blind and paralyzed), but the broad sensory and motor areas are still active. Activation is internal; there is no sensory input and no opportunity for motor output. Dreaming is an altered state of consciousness where we experience hallucinations, novel associations, emotionality, delusional acceptance of hallucinatory episodes and impaired access to previous memories. Thus, the body is frozen still, while the furious inner dialogue of bizarre images and emotions typical of REM dreams plays out. In this frenzy of activation, disparate areas of the brain that are not usually linked can become connected. What Freud and Jung described more than 100 years ago as repression or censorship may, in fact, partially reflect the normal frontal inhibition in the waking brain that ceases during REM sleep. Awaken someone from a REM period, and the bizarre, loosely associated and emotionally disinhibited quality of their experience is unmistakable. Awaken someone in non-REM,

Asleep in a cage 127 and they often describe a thought or series of thoughts without the loosely associated collection of emotionally laden experiences so characteristic of REM dreams. It may be the unexpected nature of these associations and the emotional charge of the REM dream experience that are, in fact, its purpose. One of the most well-known theories of REM sleep (and consciousness overall) is the AIM (Activation–Input–Modulation) model by Allan Hobson. The “A” of this theory refers to the activation of the brainstem pontine areas that trigger REM and propagate through the brain as PGO waves discussed earlier. These waves initiate the distinct pattern of cortical activation that occurs during REM dreaming. The “I” in the AIM model refers to input, the closed input–output gating characteristic of REM sleep, where external sensation and motor activity are blocked. Finally, the “M” of the model refers to modulation or the chemical changes in the brain during REM, which modulate (M) consciousness (Hobson, 2009). The neurotransmitter ratio in REM favors cholinergic activity over aminergic activity. Specifically, the chemical messengers serotonin and norepinephrine are turned down, while acetylcholine is turned up. Interestingly, another neurotransmitter called dopamine is highly activated in REM. Panksepp called this pattern of brain activation the “SEEKING” system (Panksepp & Biven, 2012). This system is responsible for “sensation seeking,” which energizes and animates our dreams, possibly facilitating emotional processing and providing a framework for anticipating and approaching new challenges in the future (Solms, 2021). Novel associations are important for creativity and new learning. Research has found that REM sleep is critical for consolidating new memories and is vital for learning. When animals learn a new avoidance task, they show increased REM, just as humans do after college exams (Smith & Lapp, 1991). These effects occur 3 to 5 days following the learning, and REM deprivation interferes with such learning. Creativity is a process that requires both convergent (e.g., identify new concepts) and divergent (e.g., bring disparate ideas together) thinking as we must draw from and integrate seemingly unrelated experiences to help form novel ideas. This type of novel synthesis is reminiscent of what Freud described as condensation. In condensation, disparate elements are brought together to form a new image that is a unique fusion of established memories and recent waking experiences and emotions. We know waking experiences are incorporated into our dreams, what Freud called day residue. Could one purpose of dreaming be helping the mind form, establish and integrate new ideas that can become important to surviving and thriving in the world? REM sleep may be a virtual reality and/or threat simulator. The activation of the seeking system during REM and its predominance early in life is consistent with these ideas (Panksepp & Biven, 2012).

128  Why we dream As we saw in Chapter 5, dreams can be an important source of creativity, and people sometimes seem to solve problems, especially emotional ones, in their dreams. The dream state may be necessary for preparing the organism for future behaviors (Revonsuo, 2000) to ready itself for action in various scenarios. The prophetic dreams described in other chapters may represent another way of preparing the organism for the future, using day residue from the world of hunches, intuitions and premonitions. Dreams bring us important messages, at least metaphorically, to help us prepare for the future.

The rat in a maze Let us consider the dream at the beginning of the chapter, which is, of course, an imaginary one about a rat rehearsing and sorting the day residue of his lab experiences in a dream. Research in rodents has shown that specific cells in the brain called “memory place cells” fire in a pattern that mirrors a rat’s search behavior in a maze. The exact pattern of behavior is then replayed during non-REM sleep, but at a rate that is ten times faster than occurred during the actual maze running while awake. Similarly, the same pattern of brain cell firing is seen during REM, but the pattern is replayed in real time (Pfeiffer & Foster, 2013).

Figure 19.3  Detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

Asleep in a cage 129 What might that difference mean? Recent research has suggested that non-REM sleep is involved in memory consolidation. In contrast, REM sleep connects memory with emotion and decides which memories to save and discard. Perhaps the rat quickly replays his maze runs in non-REM sleep, then plays them out more slowly to decide which ones are important and “feel” right while dreaming. The rat’s dream may also involve integrating previously unrelated memories and emotions that form novel associations and, as human dreams do, an expression through connection to archetypal imagery, that of the wise old man rat friend. Through REM dreaming, we learn and make creative new associations (Lewis et al., 2018). In this way, dreaming may provide a path out of the maze, a key to the cage of human experience we sometimes find ourselves in during wakefulness.

References Braun, A. R., Balkin, T. J., Wesenten, N. J., Carson, R. E., Varga, M., Baldwin, P., Selbie, S., Belenky, G., & Herscovitch, P. (1997). Regional cerebral blood flow throughout the sleep-wake cycle. An H2 (15) O PET study. Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 120(7), 1173–1197. Coons, S., & Guilleminault, C. (1982). Development of sleep-wake patterns and non-rapid eye movement sleep stages during the first six months of life in normal infants. Pediatrics, 69(6), 793–798. Dement, W. (1999). The promise of sleep. Dell Publishing. Fernández-Mendoza, J., Lozano, B., Seijo, F., Santamarta-Liébana, E., José RamosPlatón, M., Vela-Bueno, A., & Fernández-González, F. (2009). Evidence of subthalamic PGO-like waves during REM sleep in humans: A deep brain polysomnographic study. Sleep, 32(9), 1117–1126. Foulkes, D. (1999). Children’s dreaming and the development of consciousness. Harvard University Press. Hobson, J. A. (2009). REM sleep and dreaming: Toward a theory of protoconsciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 803–813. Krueger, J. M., Rector, D. M., Roy, S., Van Dongen, H. P., Belenky, G., & Panksepp, J. (2008). Sleep as a fundamental property of neuronal assemblies. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9(12), 910–919. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2521 Lewis, P. A., Knoblich, G., & Poe, G. (2018). How memory replay in sleep boosts creative problem-solving. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(6), 491–503. O’Keefe, J., & Dostrovsky, J. (1971). The hippocampus as a spatial map: Preliminary evidence from unit activity in the freely-moving rat. Brain Research, 34(1), 171–175. https://doi.org/10.1016/0006-8993(71)90358-1 Panksepp, J. (2004). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford University Press. Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions. Norton.

130  Why we dream Pfeiffer, B. E.,  & Foster, D. J. (2013). Hippocampal place-cell sequences depict future paths to remembered goals. Nature, 497(7447), 74–79. https://doi. org/10.1038/nature12112 Revonsuo, A. (2000). The reinterpretation of dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(6), 877–901; discussion 904–1121. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x00004015 Smith, C., & Lapp, L. (1991). Increases in number of REMS and REM density in humans following an intensive learning period. Sleep, 14(4), 325–330. https://doi. org/10.1093/sleep/14.4.325 Solms, M. (2021). The hidden Spring: A journey to the source of consciousness. Norton. Tattersall, T. L., Stratton, P. G., Coyne, T. J., Cook, R., Silberstein, P., Silburn, P. A., Windels, F., & Sah, P. (2014). Imagined gait modulates neuronal network dynamics in the human pedunculopontine nucleus. Nature Neuroscience, 17(3), 449–454. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3642 Van Dort, C. J., Zachs, D. P., Kenny, J. D., Zheng, S., Goldblum, R. R., Gelwan, N. A., Ramos, D. M., Nolan, M. A., Wang, K., Weng, F. J., & Lin, Y. (2015). Optogenetic activation of cholinergic neurons in the PPT or LDT induces REM sleep. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(2), 584–589. Vogel, G. W., Vogel, F., McAbee, R. S., & Thurmond, A. J. (1980). Improvement of depression by REM sleep deprivation: New findings and a theory. Archives of General Psychiatry, 37(3), 247–253. https://doi.org/10.1001/archp syc.1980.01780160017001

20 The language of the mind

And the Raven, never flitting Still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming . . . Poe Language is a cardinal human achievement. Language is part of what makes us human and has an important role in consciousness. With language, we can tell the story of ourselves and carry on the internal monologue that is an important part of consciousness. We give primacy to knowledge that is expressed in language and think of language as the currency of truth. Language is the great tool and weapon of the ego; words are “egospeak.” The primacy we give to language is related to the primacy we give to the ego. We identify with our egos, thinking we are that narrator in our mind that tells our story.

Language and its flaws Language is flawed for two reasons. First of all, the ego, who is the narrator and creator of language, has an incomplete knowledge of itself. Second of all, language is limited in what it can express. By replacing the real world with a symbolic world, language separates us from genuine experience. We have learned, beginning with Freud, that our internal narrator is flawed. Like the narrator of a modernist novel, the ego feigns omniscience and doesn’t grasp its own ignorance. Flawed narrators are common in modern stories. Well-known examples include Pi Patel in the film The Life of Pi, Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, Humbert Humbert in Lolita and the multiple narrators in The Alexandria Quartet.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-25

132  Why we dream In working with dreams, we see flawed narrators on two levels. On one level, the dreamer can misinterpret his own dream because of the limitations of his understanding. We see this is the Hmong nightmare, where the culturally based misunderstanding of the dream adds to its danger; and also in the case of St. Jerome. In both cases, the flawed narrator distorts the message of the dream. In Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection, which we will discuss in Chapter 24, Freud misses the deeper message of his dream because he overidentifies with the dream ego, his own image in the dream. Freud, in interpreting his own dream, adopts the dream ego’s arrogant objectification of Irma. While I was a medical student attending a lecture on hypnosis, two of my colleagues volunteered for a demonstration of post hypnotic suggestion. They were told, when they came out of trance and heard a bell ring, to get up and leave the auditorium. Once out of trance, the lecture went on. After some time, the bell rang and immediately both students got up to leave the auditorium. The speaker asked them why they were leaving. Both had plausible reasons, “I left something in my car” or “I had to go the bathroom.” The audience understood the real reason they were leaving while their internal narrator or ego did not. Much of what we do when seeking religious insight, creativity and a certain primacy and freshness of experience is to suppress the function of the ego, the source of the false narration. Group rituals, like drumming and dance, hallucinogenic experiences of ancient Greek and modern shamans or the meditative exercises of contemplatives around the world serve to quiet the ego and be able to listen to what Pythagoras called “the music of the spheres.” The second flaw associated with language is that it cannot express the fullness of human experience. The controversial and influential French psychoanalyst Lacan, a personal therapist to Picasso who was later shunned by the psychoanalytic establishment, viewed language as the great barrier to true knowledge. One of his central ideas was that language creates a schism between two worlds, the Symbolic and the Real. When we enter the world of language, the Symbolic, we are divorced forever from the world of the Real. For Lacan this, not the Oedipus complex, is the great loss we struggle all our lives to recover from. Lacan’s search for authentic experience unsymbolized by language is reminiscent of Jung’s effort to explore the archetypal roots of experience. For Jung, our struggle is to recapture our connection to the ancient myths of the archetypes that modern times have detached us from. Language is flawed when it is used in a referential sense to refer or point to things in the world. The real thing itself is left behind, replaced by the word. Language can transcend this limitation when it is used poetically

The language of the mind 133 or artistically, In Poe’s poem, the raven becomes a new thing-in-itself. By using language poetically, he stretches language to capture the Real. For both Lacan and Jung, we can reexperience the Real only through bypassing the ego and its attempts to categorize, analyze and reduce all knowledge to words. We do this in art, where images on canvas or sounds evoke an unspoken yet fundamental truth. In literature, words themselves are twisted and work beyond their usual meanings to evoke the real and offer, as Wordsworth put it, “intimations of immortality.” A dream, in many ways is like this kind of artwork, it stretches words and images to convey a meaning beyond words. Modern science has begun to recognize the value of image as a mode of processing ideas, reviving Jung’s idea of putting images at the center of the mental process of knowing (Paivio, 1986). In Gestalt psychology, a subject will flounder at a cognitive task until he suddenly “sees’ what to do, forms a mental image and then executes the task flawlessly, as Mendeleev did when he envisioned the periodic table in his dream.

The language of the mind Do we think in words? What is the language of the mind? The most common view has been that we think in ideas and images, which we then translate into words. The Greek philosophers and the medieval scholastics held this view. Modern philosophy, with its focus on relativism, has tended to adhere to a different view, one of linguistic determinism: the belief that language determines thought. The many words for snow in the Inuit language influence the thought of Inuit speakers and allows them to have a more nuanced view of snow than English speakers can have. The philosopher Jerry Fodor has revived the older view of thought as being distinct from language. He proposed a new word, “Mentalese,” to describe this distinct language of the mind which is then translated into spoken or written words (Fodor, 1975). The Nobel Prize winning neurophysiologist Edvard Moser discovered rat brain cells that fire sequentially during memory storage, though in reverse order, as if running the maze from end to beginning. These grid cells form a positioning system in the entorhinal cortex. When a rat learns a maze sequence, these cells fire in a topographical relationship to the turns of the maze (Moser & Moser, 2011). In humans, the brain’s inner navigation system may be the key to how they think. The brain organizes information in topographical patterns (Bellmund et al., 2018). Information is not stored alphabetically, as it would be in the index of a book, but visually, on the basis of the distance of associations. The mind moves topographically between ideas, retracing paths like a rat through a maze in non-REM sleep. Then as the night progresses, the mind map

134  Why we dream

Figure 20.1  Mind map by authors.

associations may become creatively connected to existing memories during REM sleep.

Mentalese Mentalese is usually viewed in cognitive terms, but as Damasio posits, consciousness and awareness probably exist to aid the processing of emotions (Damasio, 1999). A broader concept of mentalese would include emotion. Mentalese is thus a language of thought and emotion, of the Real instead of words. The images that appear in human dreams are not to be seen as primitive, prelinguistic mental products but as an evolved way of thinking and processing knowledge and emotion. Perhaps dreams are a form of mentalese, the language of the mind in its pure, prelinguistic form. Within the realm of mentalese exist the archetypal images of emotions and drives. Perhaps dreams can even be viewed as providing access to the Real, Lacan’s word for actual knowledge before its distortion by language. Thinking visually, rather than linguistically, we might imagine the dream ego moving through a mind map of emotions and ideas, retracing its steps but integrating a maze of infinite complexity, like a rat mastering a maze. Through this journey of mind, it creates a narrative map of setting, character and plot, tracing a path energized by emotionally charged archetypal images.

The Raven Poe’s Raven is one of the most stirring images in all of literature. Poe claims to have written the poem logically and methodically, without allegory.

The language of the mind 135 Certainly, his ego focused tightly on the complex rhythms and internal rhymes, echoing the Real, or what Jung would call the collective unconscious, intruding into his craft with powerful images of loss, grief, fear and struggle. Like a flawed narrator, he describes his literary effort as pure exercise in craft. Actually, he creates a brilliant evocation, in image, of a grief beyond words. The poem has a subtle narrative structure; the speaker moves from hope into deeper and deeper despair each time he hears the word, “nevermore.” Birds, when they appear in dreams, are images of spirit, and their flight is the freedom of the soul. This great black bird speaks a single word only, a word that acquires a symbolic dimension, “as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.” Poe, in mentalese, was suffering for his lost Lenore, and that mentalese expressed itself as archetypal image as poem and as that single word-symbol, “nevermore.” Poe was able to use language, brilliantly, to transcend language and convey the archetypal roots of experience. What Poe does in crafting “The Raven” is what we do every night. We assemble memory, image and emotion presented in the forms of archetypal symbols into a narrative that conveys a meaning beyond language.

References Bellmund, J. L. S., Gärdenfors, P., Moser, E. I., & Doeller, C. F. (2018). Navigating cognition: Spatial codes for human thinking. Science, 362(6415). Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens. Harcourt. Fodor, J. (1975). The language of thought. Harvard University Press. Moser, E. I., & Moser, M. B. (2011). Neuroscience: Seeing into the future. Nature, 469(7330), 303–304. Paivio, A. (1986). Mental representations: A dual coding approach. Oxford University Press.

21 A narrative model of dreams

I want to be storyteller. I have two stories. I am very excited about this insight. I am in my house with my lover. I want to tell him I can’t remember what the stories are. People are knocking on the door, but I won’t let them in. Personal dream shared by a friend

We have seen in the previous chapter that the mind thinks in symbols, in mentalese. The mind also thinks in “story” and constructs narratives to store and process information. Narrative theory views the narrative, or story, as the main strategy by which humans process and store change, emotions, insight and information. The narrative allows us to make sense of the world, process experience and link emotions to memories. Emotion is also at the heart of narrative. We share stories to share feelings and to remember. Every good teacher knows that students remember very little when information is shared, say in a PowerPoint slide. They only remember stories. During dreams, the brain transforms the raw mentalese of the dream into story. Freud recognized this narrative aspect of dreams and saw this “manifest dream” as a distortion by censorship of an unconscious “latent dream.” But the brain crafts narratives not to censor or distort, but because storymaking is how it processes and remembers ideas and emotions. According to Rita Charon, one of the foremost practitioners of narrative medicine, we don’t “store” ideas, we “story” them.

Narrative and the brain Our brains seem to be wired for stories. Paul Zak, who discovered oxytocin, the neurochemical that stimulates bonding, has been a pioneer in DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-26

A narrative model of dreams 137 this field of research. He has shown that well-told stories stimulate the release of this hormone, and that this hormone directly influences behavior. At a charitable function, for instance, when an audience is simply given information about a charity, there is no oxytocin release and very little charitable giving. But when an audience hears a story about what the charity does, helping young mothers or some other caring function, oxytocin is released and giving increases. The neurobiology helps create, strengthen and reinforce the story. Furthermore, the more “moved” one is by a story, the greater the power it coveys and the more oxytocin is released (Zak, 2015). Similar to a musical piece, stories maintain the mind’s attention by creating tension and then resolving that tension. Through narrative, the mind becomes more aware of its own feelings, and they are reexperienced (Gerrig, 1993).

Narrative theory Narrative theory is the philosophical discipline of narrative study. Narrative theory emphasizes the critical role of narrative in human culture and thought. Some versions of narrative theory, the so-called strong versions, go further. Philosophers like Dennett and Ricoeur would say that our personal identity itself is a narrative construct. Who we are is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Freud, always hoping to be a scientist and always constructing an internal narrative of himself as scientist, realized that he was in fact a narrative healer. I have not always been a psychotherapist. Like other neuropathologists, I was trained to employ local diagnosis and electroprognosis, and it still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories, and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. (Breuer & Freud, 1895) Of course, the narrative theorist would say that science is another kind of narrative. Freud tried to write a scientific narrative, but instead a literary narrative wrote itself in its place. Narrative theory is deconstructive at its core: it breaks down traditional hierarchies and explanatory models. In traditional dream interpretation, the interpreter of the dream, the therapist, tries to approach ever closer to its true meaning. The therapist is the interpreter of the dream and the final arbiter of its meaning. The analyst knows things about the dreamer and the dream that the dreamer cannot because aspects of the dream are unconscious and therefore unknowable to the dreamer without interpretation from the outside.

138  Why we dream

Narrative theory and dreams Narrative theory envisions a different kind of relationship between the dream and its interpretation. Dreams are explored rather than interpreted. In a narrative model, therapist and client cocreate a narrative about the dream. The story of the dream and the stories about the dream that we would traditionally call interpretations are linked narratives that elucidate the dream in a nonhierarchical way. The elucidation of the dream as a narrative that the patient and the analyst develop together can lead to an enhanced and amplified story. Some versions of this shared cocreated narrative are richer and more emotionally powerful than others. The narratives cannot be evaluated by the categories of truth and falsity. Like literary works, they are evaluated by which stories have the deepest and richest meaning. The narrative practitioner does not interpret or decode a dream: he “unpacks” or deconstructs it. To interpret a dream is to try to name it and to seize its power in a Promethean way. Instead of interpreting a dream we must embrace and be in relationship with its power. Interestingly, the Hebrew tradition of dream interpretation echoes these narrative concepts. As we have seen in Chapter 15, 24 dream interpreters will interpret a dream differently; yet, all the interpretations can have elements of truth. In practice though, one explanatory narrative seems to have the greatest impact. I have watched hundreds or even thousands of dreams being interpreted in the dream group I facilitate. Various members may offer ideas and interpretations that are useful, but one specific interpretation will usually distinctly resonate with the dreamer. That interpretation produces an “aha” moment. The anxiety associated with the dream will suddenly be relieved; what we will describe later as its “free energy” will dissipate. The interpretation itself becomes part of the dream process.

Narrative therapy The narrative model can be applied to treatment. Effective treatment involves changing the narrative by which one lives. Neurotic individuals, meaning all of us, are trapped in a kind of narrative prison. We tell ourselves the same stories over and over. For some, especially those suffering from depression, these are stories of victimhood and powerlessness. We experience the world through the lens of those narratives; we even enact those narratives so we can tell ourselves the same stories. These stories can be cognitive distortions as described by Beck and others in cognitive therapy, but they are more than that. They are stories and reflect thoughts, emotions and strategies for processing experience. When we awaken a dreamer from REM sleep, we hear an affectively laden story.

A narrative model of dreams 139 Dreams are, as Freud said, the royal road to the unconscious, but not because they offer hidden information. What they offer is a new narrative from a different source. This new story can challenge those maladaptive stories that we repeat to ourselves over and over. When appropriately honored, dreams can help us craft a deeper and more authentic personal narrative and self-identity. Jung realized that therapy was a narrative process: A psychoneurosis must be understood as the suffering of a human being who has not yet discovered what his life means for him . . . The doctor who realizes this truth sees a new territory opened up before him which he opens with the greatest hesitation. He is now confronted with the necessity of conveying to his patient the healing fiction, the meaning that quickens – for it is this that the patient longs for, over and above all that reason and science can give him. (Jung, 1933) The healing fiction is something we cocreate with the internal healer that guides us on our journey of recovery. Table 21.1 depicts the differences between Freudian, Jungian and narrative approaches to dreams. The differences between the approaches are more theoretical than practical, especially between Jungian and narrative analyses. The best strategy is a fluid combination of those two approaches, which views a dream as a message, trusts dreams and uses narrative analysis and amplification informed by an understanding of archetypal symbols.

Practical narrative analysis Let us use the dream that starts the chapter as a practical example of a narrative analysis. The setting is a house, apparently a single room in a house, the characters are the dream ego and her lover, an animus figure. A house, with all its different rooms and its basement, is an image of the person herself.

Table 21.1  Three approaches to the understanding of dreams.

Freud Jung Narrative

Goal

Attitude

Method

Source

Depict unconscious Compensation

Suspicion

Free association

Trust

Amplification

Tell story/send message

Neutral

Narrative analysis

Personal unconscious Archetypal sources Internal narrators

140  Why we dream The opening image of a dream is important and sets the stage for the rest of the narrative. Here, the opening image is that of a wish. Plots and plot transitions are typically important in understanding a dream. In this dream, the plot is thin, and nothing really happens. That is significant; it is not a plot-driven dream about journey or change. Rather, it is a dream about having a story (or two), a wish to share and a wish to know. The dream is not about events or change but about awareness and the limits of awareness. The only action in the dream is people knocking. This dreamer typically has dreams set in festivals, with lots of people interacting. In this dream, she is uncharacteristically alone, within the house of herself, refusing to be intruded upon. Her animus lover takes no action, he simply is, and serves as a witness and potential audience to stories that have yet to be told.

The dream The dream that begins this chapter is remarkable in that it explicitly acknowledges the importance of story in our lives. The dreamer wants to be a storyteller – she wants to share her stories. Her awareness that she is a storyteller is an important sign of growth; most of us simply live out our stories without ever being aware that we have them, let alone telling them to others. She is aware of the importance of this insight in the dream. She can’t remember her stories; that is, she is unaware of their content, only that she has them and that she wants to share them. Why are there two stories? Don’t we all have two stories, a public one and a private one? The story of who we are and who we might be? In the lonely corners of our heart, we play a duet for one. She is in a sacred space with her lover, a space she protects in a healthy way by locking the door and letting no one in. There, in that space, she is whole and can have both stories. The lover might be an internal animus figure or her actual lover. The locked door and the privacy might also suggest therapy. Maybe there are stories she dissociates and can’t share with herself, her lover or her therapist. We can create many stories about the dream; the dream becomes the source of new narratives about knowing, loving and sharing. The linked narratives may all be true to some degree, and the dreamer will have to explore them and follow, as the writer Carlos Castenada put it, “the path with heart.” Her healing fiction might involve living out, fully, the various stories of who she is honestly and openly, without judgment or blame. The dream invites her to tell the many wonderful stories of who she is.

A narrative model of dreams 141

References Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1895). Studies on hysteria. Hogarth Press. Gerrig, R. (1993). Experiencing narrative worlds: On the psychological activities of reading. Yale University Press. Jung, C. (1933). Modern man in search of a soul (pp. 260–261). Harcourt Brace and World. Zak, P. (2015). Why inspiring stories make us react: The neuroscience of narrative. Cerebrum, 2.

22 Affects, archetypes and cigarettes

I was coughing into a handkerchief and noticed with a chill that the little flecks of sputum on the white cloth were reddish-pink. . . . I sought a radiologist friend and asked him to order a chest X-ray. I will never forget the grim expression on his face as he motioned me to the light box behind his desk. Without a word, he turned and clipped my chest film onto it. Immediately I saw that my lungs harbored a dozen white spots – cancer. The wave of anguish and despair I felt was overpowering. I could hardly breathe. My life was over. I wouldn’t see my children grow up. All because I hadn’t stopped smoking, even though I knew all about smoking and lung cancer. “You utter fool,” I thought. “You’ve destroyed your own life!” William Dement, personal dream (Dement, 1999)

We met William Dement, the prominent sleep and dream researcher, in Chapter 19. The powerful nightmare described earlier changed Dement’s life. How and why does the brain produce such dreams?

Causality Why do we do the things we do? Is it our neurophysiology, our upbringing, our unconscious motivations or our conscious decisions? Aristotle described four types of causes, four answers to the why question: 1) the material cause, that out of which something is made, like the bronze of a statue; 2) the formal cause, or the form, like the shape of a statue; 3) the efficient cause, the source of the action, like the sculptor and 4) the final cause, or the goal or purpose. For sculpture, the final cause is to decorate and inspire. In the case of dreams, different causal levels are crucial. The material and formal causes relate to the neurophysiological stuff of dreams; the efficient cause refers to the internal “author” of the dreams. The final cause refers to DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-27

Affects, archetypes and cigarettes 143 the purpose of a dream, both from a survival, evolutionary perspective and from the perspective of meaning and purpose for the individual. Any theory of dreams must account for a myriad of facts within each layer of causal explanation.

Dream facts On a neural level, dreams involve a unique pattern of neuronal firing and inhibition within different levels of the brain including PGO spikes, inhibition of our default mode network (DMN), subdued locus ceruleus activity and enhanced associations between disparate neural networks. Dreams are important in memory consolidation. Specifically, activation of adult-born neurons in the hippocampus is critical for memory consolidation in REM sleep. Synchronous “Theta” oscillations reflect critical aspects of this memory process. Non-REM sleep involves the laying down of memories, while REM sleep seems to involve the pruning and integration of current and past learning and memories. Dreams involve complex purposeful brain activity including specific aspects of memory, emotions and creative imagination, not rest. On the level of the body, dreams involve motor paralysis, penile tumescence and clitoral engorgement. On a psychological level, dreams are meaningful and important and can lead to new insights and creative problem-solving. In the unique state of REM sleep, our minds are porous and open to divergent input from within and perhaps to special kinds of input whose origin we don’t understand, as we see in end-of-life dreams and prophetic dreams. On an evolutionary level, dreams are a substantial and risky investment that animals with advanced brains have made. It has evolved, probably independently, in the most intelligent creatures on our planet: birds, mammals and likely cephalopods.

Activation-synthesis and AIM One prominent early neurobiological theory of dreams is the ActivationSynthesis hypothesis, first proposed by Hobson and McCarley in 1977. This model suggested that dreams were an attempt by the brain to make sense of the random firings and noise generated as the brain integrated information (Hobson & McCarley, 1977). This model is highly reductionistic and strips dreams of all meaning. Hobson modified this model, renaming it the AIM Model (activation-input-modulation) (Hobson, 1988). He later built upon this AIM conceptualization to suggest dreams as a protoconscious

144  Why we dream training ground where the brain develops and integrates ideas and emotions (Hobson, 2009). This protoconscious dream realm expands waking consciousness. The idea that dreams expand or enrich the waking mind is a Jungian one, but as we have seen in earlier chapters, one that is based on the human experience of dreams beginning in prehistory. If we expand Hobson’s modulation phase to include the integration of archetypal material and emotional processing, we have a model that supports the view that dreams are meaningful and provides a mechanism for understanding how meaning is incorporated into dreams.

Free energy Indeed, recent theories have explicitly included meaning in their models of dreams. Using a metaphor from thermodynamics, Holms and Nolte apply Friston’s free energy principle (FEP) to explain how humans use prediction to reduce affective entropy or save emotional energy. They argue that, “Psychopathology largely resides in the discrepancy between the experience of uncertainty and paucity, or defectiveness of the procedures needed to reduce it.” The human brain does not like surprises, which Holmes and Nolte call free unbound energy. Humans try to minimize unbound free energy by anticipating the future. Accurate prediction creates an informational order, which produces meaning by reducing chaos. Knowing probable future events reduces surprise. Negative feeling states are the result of prediction error, which we attempt to reduce through understanding the antecedents and consequences of the feeling. A child, for instance, might be afraid of a dark closet because of erroneous predictions of what lies in wait in that closet. When mother comes and reassures the child, the fear and sense of future surprise and chaos are reduced. Dreams use feelings and memories to create an updated perceptual model of how the world works. In this way, the dream narrative helps us predict the future. It steers action. Dreams are a further way we aim, update and reintegrate our model of the world. The dream also allows us to manipulate the world at an early stage, developing and testing the narrative with minimal energy and resources. The paralysis that occurs during dream sleep creates a safe place for narrative experimentation.

NEAR We dream four to five times each night, for our entire lives, rinsing and repeating the sensory samples that shape our stories. We also remember

Affects, archetypes and cigarettes 145 our dreams, especially the important ones. We interpret, observe, ponder, seek, explore, tell the story and create a Narrative. We consciously process the dream narrative in this final stanza of the symphony, which can include sharing the dream with others or internally processing it. In this way, it can be updated again, with further refinements to improve its aim. Dream interpretation can be part of the dream narrative. In our view, dreams are chaotic unbound energy unleashed upon the mind-brain, behind the safety of closed sensory gates. Dreaming is a natural process of taking the Expanded virtual choices offered by our dream world, particularly the error (i.e., affect), and making the predictive model used by the dreamer more complex and accurate. Affect, which according to Jungian theory is linked to archetypal energy, is a critical part of every dream. Like Dement’s affectively laden dream, it is the journey from the energizing bottom-up affective chaos of the dream to understanding its order in the top-down process of creating and Reintegrating the narrative. In the case of Dement’s dream, the mind crafted and reintegrated a narrative charged with emotion and memory about quitting smoking. We might call this model of the purpose of dreams the NEAR model, for Narrative Expansion and Affective Reintegration. If you like Jung, you can switch in archetype for affect. To be even fancier, you can use Schrodinger’s “Negentropy” for Narrative, because that is what we strive for in a dream, to reduce entropy by crafting a dream story. But for now, let’s just call it Bill’s theory.

Bill’s theory Let me introduce you to a special character of my own making. His name is Bill the Dreamer, and he is the dream maker inside us that crafts the dream. Remember, the conscious “self” reading these words is not the real or entire you and is not the maker of your dreams. They are crafted within you, but the sculpting is often done in another room, so to speak, away from your conscious awareness. While you are sleeping, Bill is sculpting, writing your dream narrative. He is the efficient cause of your dreams – the sculptor, the playwright. Let us ask Bill how he does his work.

Bill’s story After you have been asleep for about 90 minutes, rehearsing memories as you sleep, I go to work. When REM sleep begins, you are the host; I am your dream maker. First, I  shut off your visual and motor cortex, so you can’t see or move. Then I  shut off your locus ceruleus, so you don’t get

146  Why we dream too upset about any mysteries I might show you. This allows us to safely play with memories, thoughts and feelings to produce my story. Then I tune down the default mode network and open the doors and windows. Even the cellar is sprung open for our feast. I let in the riffraff that you try to keep out. They are my actor friends. Some you know and like; others are chilling and menacing; the undesirables you can’t bear to see. When the lights of the default mode dim, the Dionysian feast begins in earnest. The secrets come out, and the play can get sexy. However, I don’t write sexy for its own sake; I invoke those feelings as symbols for what matters, what’s alive, what has energy. That energy drives the play I’m writing in your mind. Emotions are fundamental; they keep the audience excited. I admire Shakespeare, that’s why I named myself Bill. Like Shakespeare, I have a standing troupe of actors with whom I work. I cast them as I see fit; they appear and reappear in distinctive forms. Shakespeare’s troupe was named Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Mine are called archetypes and complexes; but to me, they’re great actors. They can dress and act like people from your life, like that beautiful woman you met once in college, your mother, your wise philosophy professor or the scary man lurking on the street corner. I pick the pieces that fit the story. Like Shakespeare, I like old stories, the ancient ones you barely remember, but I like to retell them in different ways. When these doors are opened, the stories come alive. My associates, whom you rarely meet while stuck in your little world, come and make our story. Some are affected by what you have done. Others yearn to be known, with their wishes expressed. They want to be remembered and understood. You overvalue words; my friends speak in symbols. They have things to say that are too powerful for words. They use pictures, scenes and stories. Sometimes the play is frightening, what you call a nightmare. These are crafted by what Steven King called “the boys in the basement.” Those plays have important messages too. My job is to create the stories that stick, matter and change your life. Even when our little plays are forgotten, like most of them are, they still serve their purpose of storing meaning. They decide what to remember, forget and to know. You have your boss at work; I have my own boss who you’ve never met. My boss sometimes calls with a special request and wants to send you a special message. When he has a special scene in mind, everybody gets on board; excitement is in the air. The feelings are powerful; my troupe is at their best. Those Big Dreams can change lives.

The dream maker Bill’s story captures, in a fanciful way, what really goes on in the brain and mind during dreams. This description of dreaming incorporates the many

Affects, archetypes and cigarettes 147 layers of explanation needed to understand the complex phenomenon of dreaming. It is a comprehensive model that includes both neurophysiology and analytic theories of interpretation. We have only intimated at the purpose, or final cause, of dreams. Bill’s boss determines that final cause, but it has to do with deepening consciousness and gaining wisdom. This book aims to help us appreciate the artistry of Bill’s troupe and the importance of his nightly performances. I started this chapter with Dement’s dream to pay homage to a pioneer of dream research. At the time of the dream, Dement was a heavy smoker. After the dream, he never smoked another cigarette. Although the meaning of the dream is transparent, it is clearly a warning to quit smoking; but there are symbolic elements that give it special power. The radiologist is an archetypal wise old man figure. Light can represent awareness in dreams; the lightbox allows us to look inside and see the truth. The dream involves affects and incorporates archetypal images and archetypal energy. The most important part of the dream is the way it connects emotions to dream content. Dement knew, intellectually, the medical consequences of smoking. All of us who have bad habits “know” we should stop. However, knowing is often not enough to change behavior. That knowledge must connect with feelings and emotions. The dream knew what doors and windows to open in Dement’s mind and allowed him to “feel” the consequences of his smoking. Those connections were what gave Dement’s dream the power to change his life.

References Dement, W. (1999). The promise of sleep. Dell Publishing. Hobson, J. A. (1988). The dreaming brain. Basic Books. Hobson, J. A. (2009). REM sleep and dreaming: Toward a theory of protoconsciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 803–813. Hobson, J. A., & McCarley, R. W. (1977). The brain as a dream state generator: An activation-synthesis hypothesis of the dream process. American Journal of Psychiatry, 134(12), 1335–1348.

Part V

Listening with the third ear

23 Finding Irma Freudian dream theory

The first personal dream that Freud cites in his published works is about a woman with the pseudonym “Irma.” In the dream, Irma complains of abdominal pains and is scolded by Freud for it. Freud and then his friends Dr. M and Otto examine her. She reluctantly submits. They look in her mouth and examine her chest through the bodice of her dress. They find her to be infected from an injection that Otto had given her of acids perhaps with a dirty needle. Freud misremembers the names of the acids, “a preparation of propyl, propyls . . . propionic acid . . . trimethylamine . . . Injections of this sort ought not to be given so thoughtlessly” (Freud, 1955). The Freud we met in Psychology 101 is not the real Freud. There, Freud is cast as a dogmatic, sexually preoccupied straw man that “scientific” psychology has transcended. Freud’s wish to be a scientist was complicated by the fact that the phenomena that he wished to study, like dreams and neurotic symptoms, did not lend themselves readily to the application of the scientific method. Freud teaches us, however, that we are not who we think we are and that those hidden parts of ourselves reveal themselves in our dreams. Dream theory was central to Freud’s conceptualization of the mind, and this “Dream of Irma’s Injection” that starts this chapter was the first dream Freud described in his great book, The Interpretation of Dreams. This book, Freud’s first major scientific treatise, was published in 1899. Sometimes, a market has to develop for a book to sell. Freud sold only 500 copies of his book in the first 10 years it was in print (Broadcasting Program, 1998). Now, it is considered one of the most important books of the twentieth century.

Freudian dream theory Freud developed several concepts which have remained influential in dream theory to this day. Freud felt that dreams had both manifest and latent DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-29

152  Listening with the third ear content. The manifest content is the dream that you remember when you wake up. According to Freud, the manifest content is an elaboration and distortion of the latent content or the “true” dream as it was. Freud felt that the conscious mind, or ego, censored and distorted the dream’s latent content to produce the manifest content. To Freudians, the dream is not a message or communication. In dreams, the mind processes the day’s events, known as “day residue,” in Freud’s language. These events stir up unconscious wishes and conflicts, which express themselves in the images of the dream. Some of the wishes are disturbing to the ego and produce anxiety; for that reason, the ego censors and distorts the images to protect sleep. Dreams were seen as a byproduct of the ego’s attempt to censor the unconscious mind as it tries to fulfill its wishes in the imagination. Realization of these powerful unconscious wishes would produce disruptions in sleep. Thus, the purpose of dreams and their content, according to Freud, was to maintain sleep. Freud called dreams the “royal road to the unconscious.” He felt that dreams can reveal the contents of the mind of which our waking ego is unaware. Dreams can be confusing for two reasons. One, some imagery is censored or disguised to protect sleep. Two, dreams reflect a “primary process” mode of thinking. Primary process often involves visual imagery, puns and wordplay. When I saw an analyst named Warren, I had a dream about rabbits in holes in the ground. Rabbits live in a “warren,” so the rabbit image was a primary process reference to Dr. Warren. Although Freud’s views changed later in his career, at the time of the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud felt that sexual energy was the main driver of human existence and felt that we attained maturity by harnessing and repressing sexual urges. The unconscious mind, for Freud, housed these suppressed urges. In classical Freudian theory, these forbidden sexual feelings attempt expression when we sleep and form the dream’s latent content. But this latent content causes anxiety and is transformed, censored and disguised as manifest content. For instance, to use a facetious example, we might have a dream of meeting a friend’s wife, then taking a train through a tunnel. The manifest dream image of the tunnel is an expression of the sexual wish in censored form. The latent dream is about the forbidden sexual wish. Anxiety about the wish causes censorship and changes the wish into an image of a train going into a tunnel. For Freudians, many images that appear in dreams are disguised and censored sexual images. Long upright objects like poles, umbrellas, towers, knives, swords and trees were phallic symbols. Numbers like “one” represented a penis; three the complete male genitalia. Freud saw objects that rise as representing erections, such as balloons, missiles and airplanes. Animals like snakes and fish are, according to Freud, phallic symbols as well. Body

Finding Irma 153 parts that project, like teeth, are penile stand-ins. As one analyst joked, anything that is longer than it is wide is a penis. Objects that enclose a space that can be filled are symbols of female genitalia, namely tunnels, boxes, bottles, caves and the like. Breasts for Freudians are often depicted as fruits. Early analysts viewed the discovery of unconscious content to be central to treatment, and dreams were an important way of accessing that content. Later Freudians viewed the relationship between the patient and the therapist as being central to treatment and recovery. This relationship has unconscious elements, called transference. Some characters in dreams appear as wise figures that guide the dreamer and can be viewed as representations of the analyst when such dreams occur in therapy. My dream about Dr. Warren, described earlier, has clear transference elements. The fact that warrens are underground connects him to the unconscious and Mother Earth. When analytic theory began to make transference the cornerstone of psychoanalytic treatment, dreams lost their prominence. While Freud’s early work reawakened a cultural interest in dreams, modern psychoanalysis tends to trivialize dreams as manifestations of transference issues.

Dream research and Freud Modern research supports some aspects of Freudian theory. Dream physiology, shows that dreams occur primarily during REM sleep. Both sleep paralysis and nocturnal erections are a physiological aspect of REM sleep. In other words, sexual excitement occurs, but we cannot act upon sexual feelings because the brain’s motor system is shut off. These facts seem to suggest a confirmation of Freud’s theories about sexual expression in dreams. The empirical studies of Nielsen confirm the importance of “day residue” in dream imagery (Nielsen & Powell, 1992). Modern cognitive psychology demonstrates the importance of thinking in images, nonverbally. What Freud called primary process thinking is prevalent in many areas of life, not dreams alone. It is an especially important aspect of creativity. Modern psychologists would not, however, consider this type of thinking to be “primitive.”

Freud and modern psychoanalysis Freud’s insistence that primary process thinking was primitive is an example of what we might call “ego bias.” The ego tends to devalue things that are alien to it. The ego does not use primary process thinking, so it considers it primitive. We see this kind of ego bias in many dreams. The dream ego

154  Listening with the third ear will sometimes dismiss important characters and experiences that do not fit the dream ego’s world view. Freud’s focus on internal censorship and the distinction between the manifest and latent content of dreams is not widely held in modern psychoanalysis (Fosshage, 1983). It is also at odds with the narrative model of dream interpretation that we propose in this book. Much of the narrative and plot structure of a dream was considered by Freud to be secondary elaboration that formed the manifest dream content. He would focus on analyzing specific dream elements to arrive at the “real” or latent dream meaning. This formulation of wish, latent dream, censorship and then the manifest dream was important to Freud because it helped maintain some of the underlying tenets of his broader psychological theories, especially his view of the unconscious mind as a dark and dangerous place. Most modern Freudians and post Freudians view the narrative elements of the dream as being central to its meaning, not as a distortion (Aron, 1989). Freud saw the dream “story” as being a secondary elaboration that disguises the latent dream, while modern analysts, especially Jungian ones, see the dream story as being central to its meaning. The insistence of modern psychoanalysis on relating the dream to the therapeutic relationship (i.e., transference) is sometimes puzzling, especially to outsiders. While the analyst is certainly an important figure to the patient, people not in analysis have dreams. People have dreamed for eons before psychoanalysis existed as a field. I had a friend who was in Freudian analysis. At times, he shared his dreams and his analyst’s interpretations of those dreams with me. His analyst seemed to interpret characters and events from the dreams almost exclusively through the lens of transference. Every character that appeared in his dream seemed to represent the analyst. Instead of an interesting interpretation, what I would hear, as an outsider, was the analyst saying, “That’s me! That’s me again! What do you know, there’s another aspect of me.” When transference is overemphasized, the real message of the dream can be lost.

The dream of Irma’s injection The dream that begins this chapter is Freud’s own dream and the one he first cites and interprets at length in The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud viewed it as a perfect illustration of his dream theories. This dream is called the “Dream of Irma’s injection.” Irma in the dream is Emma Eckstein, a patient of Freud. Freud believed Emma’s abdominal pain and menstrual issues were related to her masturbation. He sent her to a colleague who believed in a relationship between nasal issues and sexuality. This colleague, Fliess, appears in the dream as Otto. Fliess performed nasal surgery, and Emma

Finding Irma 155 had severe long-lasting complications. Freud always regretted referring her for surgery. Freud felt that the dream illustrated several aspects of his theory. First, the dream involves “day residue.” The large hall with many guests is reminiscent of a party Freud had the previous evening. The dream also prominently involves wish fulfillment. Freud interprets the dream as expressing and displacing his own guilt about his treatment of Eckstein. The dream blames first Irma, then Otto, for the problems that Eckstein experiences, relieving Freud, through the dream, of the guilt that he himself felt for his mistreatment of Eckstein. Primary process is evident with wordplay and punning in the names for the compound that was injected, “propyl, propionic . . . The chain of names ends with trimethyl amine, a compound with the “fishy smell” related to female sexuality. Dream images can be earthy. This dream and its interpretation are famous in the history of psychoanalysis. It has been reinterpreted by prominent analysts like Max Schur, Erik Erikson and Jacques Lacan. Several commentators have noted that considering Freud described the dream as the perfect illustration of his theories; his interpretation included nothing about sexuality or, for that matter, the unconscious. Freud’s guilt over his treatment of Emma was very much a conscious issue, not an unconscious one (Aron, 1989) Although Freud didn’t see this, the dream does involve a kind of sexualized objectification of Irma, with intrusive male interventions. Freud seems not to have recognized the obviously “Freudian” aspects of his dream, the exploration of orifices, the undressing, the bodice, the curly structures, the “turbinates” in the nose that resemble female genitalia or the needle that injects. Elements of the dream seem to relate to Freud’s deeper personal issues at the time. Freud’s wife was pregnant, suffering from abdominal pains, and the pregnancy was an unwanted surprise. Although Freud did not seem aware of it, the dream relates to unconscious sexual conflicts and issues, not simply his guilt about Irma’s treatment. The dream’s focus on oral examinations also suggests the examination of speech that is central to psychoanalysis, the “talking cure.” A doctor who assisted Freud in his own self-analysis appears in the dream, suggesting important transference issues that Freud himself did not recognize (Kramer, 1999; Kuper, 1982). Freud’s incomplete interpretation of the dream suggests the drawbacks of self-analysis. I can hear a good analyst telling Freud, “Well Sigmund, there are a lot of other things going on in the dream that we need to talk about.” Freud doesn’t recognize his own objectification of Irma or, obviously, his gender biases. Freud sees the dream as primitive defense and a manifestation of neurotic conflict. For that reason, he misses its message.

156  Listening with the third ear Freud illuminated many aspects of dreams and the symbolic language of dreams but could never accept that dreams were messages. He wasn’t humble enough to listen to and honor his own dreams. Exhilarated by the hubris of his own ego, he treated dreams as a puzzle that he had solved, instead of honoring them and trying to learn from them. He recognized the importance of the unconscious but failed to see its wisdom. In the next chapter, when we discuss Jung’s contributions to dream theory, I will offer a Jungian interpretation of Freud’s famous dream.

References Aron, L. (1989). Dreams, narrative and the psychoanalytic method. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 25, 108–126. Broadcasting Program. (1998). A science Odyssey: People and discoveries. Aired. Fosshage, J. (1983). The psychological function of dreams: A revised psychoanalytic perspective. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 6(4), 641–669. Freud, S. (1955). The interpretation of dreams. Basic Books. Kramer, M. (1999). Unresolved problems in the dream of Irma’s injection. American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 27(2), 253–263. Kuper, A. S. A. (1982). The dream of Irma’s injection: A structural analysis. American Journal of Psychiatry, 139(10), 1225–1234. Nielsen, T. A., & Powell, R. (1992). The day residue and dream lag effects: A literature review and limited replication of two temporal effects in dream formation. Dreaming, 2(2), 67–77.

24 Irma reimagined Jungian dream theory

Jung and Freud Jung and Freud met in Vienna in 1907; their first conversation lasted for 19 hours. For 7 years, from 1906 to 1913, the two worked, socialized and traveled together. Although Jung was 19 years Freud’s junior, Jung seemed destined to be Freud’s successor. Jung even became inaugural President of the International Psychoanalytical Association at Freud’s request, an appointment that was to be “for life.” Freud called Jung “my eldest son (Andrews, 2017).” Jung, however, developed a radically different theory of the mind, emphasizing spirituality rather than sexuality, and a lifelong personal and professional rift ensued. Jungian and Freudian schools of psychoanalysis remain hostile to this day. A hundred years later, Jungians and Freudians train in different programs, attend different conferences and publish in different journals. Some reconciliation between Freudian and Jungian attitudes toward dreams have occurred. Most modern Freudian analysts reject the idea of censorship in dream production and the distinction between manifest and latent content. Freudian analysts like Fosshage describe the function of dreams like regulating emotions and integrating the psyche, explicitly acknowledging the convergence between Freudian and Jungian dream theories (Fosshage, 1983).

Jung’s influence Freudian ideas were initially much more popular than Jungian ones. In academia, Freudian ideas were especially influential in literary criticism and philosophy. In psychiatry, Freudian theories were dominant. Although very few psychiatrists are trained in psychoanalysis today, in the 1960s, half of all psychiatrists were psychoanalysts, including nearly all chairmen of DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-30

158  Listening with the third ear psychiatry departments in major universities. Freudian ideas filled twentiethcentury pop culture. Hitchcock films like Psycho and Spellbound and, more recently, Black Swan are prominent examples of Freudian films. Psycho even ends with a Freudian analyst explaining the motivations of the villain Norman Bates. The twentieth century has been called the century of Freud, but the twenty-first may be the century of Jung (Samuels, 2012). If Hitchcock was the consummate Freudian filmmaker, George Lucas is his Jungian counterpart. A Hitchcock film is an intrapsychic journey; a Lucas film explores the power of myth on a vast cosmic stage. Lucas explicitly developed his plots and storylines according to the outlines developed by the great scholar of myths, Joseph Campbell. Campbell is considered a disciple of Jung and directly applied Jungian theories to his popular studies of myths. Luke Skywalker is a mythical hero right out of Campbell and Jung; Han Solo is his wily and shadow counterpart. Han is cynical, worldly and skilled at ­getting things done; Luke is the starry-eyed idealist. Jungian terms like “complex,” “introvert” and “extrovert” are part of everyday speech. Jungian personality tests, like the Myer–Briggs, are commonly used in industrial psychology (Darowski & Joseph, 2016). Jung strongly influenced artists and writers like Jackson Pollock, Jorge Luis Borges, Martha Graham and Federico Fellini (Library of Congress, 2019). Most importantly, Jung is regarded as the father of “New Age” religion. Jung anticipated many New Age ideas about philosophy, religion and medicine (Mehrtens, 2013). Jung saw true religion not as creed but as a way of approaching the divine. He felt that traditional Christianity no longer guided individuals toward the numinous or spiritual aspects of human experience. Jung’s pioneering studies of parapsychological phenomena and synchronicity were also very influential and provide a conceptual language and philosophical support to modern interest in mystical ideas like telepathy and precognition. New Age religion seeks commonalities between religious traditions, as Jung did.

Jungian dream interpretation I have found Jungian theories to be more useful in interpreting and understanding dreams. Many of the ideas in this book are strongly influenced by Jungian theories. In his Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud tried to fit his psychological observations to the physiology of his day. Jung was less burdened by the cultural legacy of scientism and had no such aspirations. Jung considered himself a phenomenologist, or someone who studies consciousness and direct subjective experience, rather than a scientist. Yet, modern understandings about the neurobiology of dreams are surprisingly

Irma reimagined 159 consistent with Jungian dream theory (Zadra, 2021). Jung anticipated, what modern science has since confirmed, that dreams integrate affect and provide creative solutions for emotional problems. For Jung, dreams both expressed and balanced the psyche. Some dreams, according to Jung, were compensation dreams. If the ego, for instance, was being too pompous, dreams might balance and deflate that arrogance. Jung realized that dreams brought useful messages from the unconscious. Jung understood that to interpret a dream successfully, one must use, as a working hypothesis, the idea that a dream is a meaningful communication from the unconscious. Jung’s dream theories, therefore, are of great practical value in dream interpretation. Freud saw dreams as meaningful, but only in the way that symptoms are meaningful, as depictions of unresolved unconscious conflicts modified by censorship. But Freud was a brilliant clinician and a wise interpreter of dreams. In his work with patients, Freud treated dreams as if they brought messages. But in his theoretical papers, he viewed them as accidental byproducts of psychological conflicts. In other words, he therapeutically interpreted dreams like a Jungian, though he wrote about them like a Freudian.

Beyond “ordinary human pain” Unlike Freud, Jung believed that core human issues were not sexual but spiritual. He felt that beyond the personal unconscious described by Freud, there was a collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is a pool of images and inborn drives, which are part of our shared heritage as humans. This collective unconscious expresses itself in the dreams of individuals and in myths, fairy tales and works of art. These collective ideas frame our experiences. We experience our life paths and events in mythological frameworks. To use Joseph Campbell’s words, we experience the hero’s journey (Campbell, 1990). Dreams, for Jung, are very much like works of art. They tap unconscious reservoirs of meaning and then depict that meaning symbolically to the audience. Like creative works of art, the audience does not always understand them; sometimes, they have to grow into the message. I have had clients who suddenly understand the message of a memorable dream they had years prior. They were not ready to hear the message of the dream when they first dreamed it but could suddenly understand the meaning of the dream once they attained a deeper level of personal maturity. The goal of life, for Freud, was to resolve neurotic conflicts or, as Freud himself put it, to replace neurotic conflict with “ordinary human pain.” Jung saw life as a spiritual journey to find meaning and integrate the disparate and

160  Listening with the third ear unacknowledged aspects of the self. Jung called this process individuation and used the exploration of dreams to assist in the individuation process. Jung did not view dreams as censored attempts at wish fulfillment but as messages from a deeper self that should be honored and acknowledged. Jung called the living images in the collective unconscious “archetypes.” Archetypes are innate dispositions that form “coherent, affectively charged images (archetypal images) that are expressed unconsciously in dreams, mythologies, folklore, art, religion, rituals and literature in similar forms the world over” (Young-Eisendrath, 2000). Archetypes connect us to our own inner selves and to the world of spirit.

Archetypes The concept of archetypes and the idea that unconscious images and ideas come from an inherited and shared pool of living energy are very influential but controversial Jungian ideas. We do not inherit archetypes in the way that we inherit eye color. Archetypes are frameworks for the emotional integration of life experience. A close analog would be Kant’s categories of experience. Kant believed that we inherit frameworks for experience, like time, space and causality. These ways of experiencing the world are what we bring to the world as sentient beings. Similarly, we make meaning of our life experiences through archetypal images. Unlike Kant’s categories of experience, which relate to thought, archetypes relate to emotions and instincts. Archetypes are never directly experienced; they manifest themselves as archetypal symbols. Archetypes are like an unconscious substrate upon which archetypal images crystallize. Jung felt that the process of archetypal symbol formation reduced anxiety, in a manner analogous to the way Friston, discussed in an earlier chapter, said that dreams reduce free energy. The very process of symbol formation makes emotional distress more manageable. The distress is bound and can be incorporated and integrated in the virtual world of the dream narrative. A man, for instance, carries within him the archetypal power of the feminine archetype, especially the feminine aspects of himself. This feminine archetypal energy crystallizes in the archetypal symbol which Jung called “Anima.” Different aspects of this archetypal symbol may be called up in dreams at different times. Anima can become a guiding force in life, like the lady that a knight might serve. Anima images appear in literature as spirit guides, like Dante’s Beatrice that guides him through hell to heaven. Anima images have dark aspects and can lead men to ruin, like Sirens singing on the rocks. Men can be led to ruin by addiction to pornography or by bad

Irma reimagined 161 choices in love. Anima figures are common in the dreams of men, appearing as seductresses or guides. The archetype of the masculine in a woman presents in the form of the archetypal symbol of animus. Animus images appear in different forms depending on the aspect of the masculine that the situation evokes. The Prince Charming that wakes a woman from the sleep of unconsciousness is an animus figure, as is the murderous Bluebeard. More archetypal symbols will be described in Chapter 27. Jungians, like Freudians, first explore a dream using their client’s associations with the dream as a whole and with specific dream elements. Jungians, in addition, “amplify” a dream by considering myths and fairy tales with related images. Amplification is a good way to explore archetypal material. For instance, in a dream about a wolf, a Jungian therapist would consider personal associations to wolves and the typical meanings of the wolf image in myths and fairytales. Jungians tend to view dreams not as a reflection of pathology but as a source of growth and healing. Narrative theories about dreams are consistent with Jungian ideas. Archetypes can appear in dreams as characters and serve as the substrate for the narrative structure of dreams. Their interaction with the dream ego is usually what gives the dream its story. Archetypes are involved in the processing of emotions, and that is why archetypal figures appear regularly in dreams. Panksepp’s work on the processing of emotions can be linked to Jungian archetypal theory; archetypes are, in some sense, symbolic depictions of complex emotional experiences.

Irma’s injection revisited I did not start this chapter with a dream because I wanted to reconsider the dream from the previous chapter, Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection, in Jungian terms. We will not only analyze the images, as Freud did, but also the overall plot structure. We will amplify the dream with mythological and historical data. Irma in the dream is a typical anima figure. The other doctors who examine Irma are Freud’s shadow figures. Irma is very much treated as an object in the dream. She complains, she resists, but none of the male figures relates to her as a person. Her nose and mouth are particularly scrutinized, men look into her throat and nose, and even including the internal structures of the nose, the turbinate bones. These shadow figures, aspects of Freud that he cannot recognize, are cold and intrusive, especially Otto. When Irma resists this intrusive scrutiny, she is criticized by the dream ego. Freud notes that Irma finally opened her mouth “properly.”

162  Listening with the third ear Irma, Freud’s anima or the feminine, feeling aspect of his psyche, is damaged. Specifically, she is infected by intrusive male interventions like Otto’s injection. Her problems center around her nose and mouth. The mouth is the way we take in or ingest the world and express ourselves in words. Here we might turn to amplification. The nose, in mythology, folklore and science, is closely connected to instinctual expression. In Egyptian mythology, the nose is one of the most important organs of the body. Special attention is paid to the nose in the process of mummification. Egyptians cut off the nose of their deceased enemies to prevent their survival in the Land of the Dead (Ronnberg, 2010). The nose connects directly to the limbic centers of emotion in the brain. Pheromones unconsciously stimulate sexual desire through the nose. When we have a keenness for instinctual warnings, we have a nose for trouble. Smells can trigger chains of limbic associations, as manufacturers of perfumes would well understand. Proust’s monumental three-volume Remembrance of Things Past was inspired by the smell and taste of a madeleine dipped in lime blossom tea. That madeleine brought the flood of memories that became the book. Interestingly, both organic compounds mentioned in Freud’s dream, propionic acid and trimethylamine, have strong earthy smells, one of body odor and one of fish – perhaps what the dream figure of Freud or Freud’s dream ego views as an infection is the anima’s visceral, instinctual earthiness. In short, the dream seems to warn Freud of the ruthlessness with which he is treating his feminine side, his anima. He views this feminine side as damaged and tries to analyze and examine her instead of relating to her. Similarly, Freud analyzes his dream instead of listening to its message. Had Freud been able to respect and honor his anima, he might not have been so resistant to Jung’s ideas, and the history of psychoanalysis might have been very different.

References Andrews, S. (2017). When Freud and Jung first met. thevintagenews.com. Campbell, J. (1990). A hero’s journey. Haper Collins. Darowski, E. S. D., & Joseph, J. (2016). Carl Jung’s historic place in psychology and continiuing influence in narrative studies and American popular culture. Swiss American Historical Society Review, 52(2), 1–22. Fosshage, J. (1983). The psychological function of dreams: A revised psychoanalytic perspective. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 6(4), 641–669. Library of Congress. (2019). The red book of Carl G Jung: Its origins and influence Jung’s cultural legacy. Library of Congress. Mehrtens, S. (2013). Jung and the new agers. jungiancenter.org.

Irma reimagined 163 Ronnberg, A. (2010). The book of symbols. Taschen Press. Samuels, A. (2012). This could be Carl Jung’s century. The Guardian. Young-Eisendrath, P. (2000). Self and transendence: A postmodern approach to analytic psychology. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10, 427–441. Zadra, A., & Stickgold, R. (2021). When brains dream: Exploring the science and mystery of sleep. WW Norton & Company.

25 Dream symbols

I am sitting next to a beautiful woman. She is guiding me with a red string as if I were on a leash. Patient dream, with permission.

Signs and symbols When we dream, we open the door to a symbolic world. In the world of the dream, the mind speaks in symbols, not words. As in most things that matter, words are not enough. Symbolic language is deeper and richer than words. In everyday life, words are used as signs to point or refer to things. A symbol is not a sign. A red light is a sign for “stop.” It means “stop” exactly and precisely with nothing left over. Words cannot capture the meaning of a symbol. As we saw in Chapter 21, symbols, not words, are the language of the mind. When a symbol is reduced to words, something is lost. Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” conveys much more than the word “scream.” It reverberates in the depths of the psyche and captures a horror that words fail to describe. Words are typically used in a referential sense to refer or point to objects, qualities or events and are merely signs. But sometimes, when used poetically, words become symbols. William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” is not about the animal Panthera tigris and cannot be replaced by that name. The poem is about something that cannot be named, a terror that resembles what is captured in Munch’s painting. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven is not about a big black bird but unnamable grief, something entirely beyond words. In Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection, the names of the organic chemicals, trimethylamine and propionic acid are used symbolically to represent a meaning beyond chemistry, with sexual and olfactory elements. We dream in symbols, not, as Freud thought, to censor the message of the dream but to convey it with a meaning beyond words. As Jung put it, DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-31

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Figure 25.1  “The Scream” by Edvard Munch. Source: © Photo: Annar Bjorgli, Nasjonalmuseet.

“Dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts” (Jung, 1964). That is our journey to enrich the poverty of our conscious minds. The meaning of dream symbols can never be fully translated into the concrete words of everyday language, and lists of dream symbols and their meanings can never replace the personal contextualization of dreamwork in therapy. Thoughtful interpreters of dreams are sometimes hesitant to use lists and catalogs of dream symbols because they limit and trivialize our encounters with the unconscious. When we examine dreams in therapy or self-analysis, we should be attentive to personal associations and history, as well as day residue. The dream that I mentioned in the earlier

166  Listening with the third ear Chapter 24 about the underground homes of rabbits cannot be meaningfully interpreted using a mere symbol catalog. If the idiosyncratic fact that my analyst’s name was Warren would not be included, the meaning would be lost. Acknowledging these caveats, understanding the universal human meaning of certain dream symbols can assist dream interpretation. Some traditional symbolic meanings are well recognized and consistent across individuals and cultures. Knowing this symbolic language can jump-start the work of dream interpretation exploration. Symbol guides are not Google Maps; they are more like an old-time treasure map that gives rough landmarks and suggestive hints as we search for buried treasure.

Content analysis Dream content analysis has extensively categorized dreams according to images and themes. This work, pioneered by Calvin Hall, has produced extensive databases of typical dreams (Hall & van de Castle, 1966). Content analysis has produced extensive and remarkable data but in a way that decontextualizes dreams and treats them as if they had little meaning. Using content analysis data to understand dreams is like studying Shakespeare by examining how frequently princes, fools or swordfights appear in different plays, rather than reading and experiencing the actual plays. Dream databases do, however, provide reliable occurrence data about common dream images. The ten most frequent dream images in data gathered are, in order, 1) being chased, 2) being attacked, 3) trying, again and again, 4) feeling stuck, 5) eating food, 6) being late, 7) swimming, 8) being confined, 9) seeing a snake, 10) finding money (Nielsen et al., 2003). In our consideration of dream symbols, we will be guided by such data, augmented by traditional Jungian and Freudian concepts. Content analysis is not intended to be a guide to interpreting dreams. Some dream images are particular instances of a general symbol. A number of female figures may represent anima images. In content analysis, it may be useful to identify these specific images. Still, in interpreting dreams, it is more useful to recognize the general symbol of anima, shadow or phallic symbol. Content analysis also minimizes the feelings associated with a dream. As we have seen, the processing of emotions is a critical function of dreams. “Swimming,” for instance, the seventh most familiar image, may mean something very different when happily bathing in a pool compared to swimming against a horrifying tidal wave. Those nuances of meaning can be lost through content analysis. Plot, character and setting are crucial in understanding the meaning of a dream since dreams have a narrative structure.

Dream symbols 167 The authors will also be guided by their personal experience with interpreting thousands of dreams, both in therapy and in dream groups.

A symbol guide Settings 1) Houses: Dreams are most often set in a house. Both Freud and Jung would say that a house in a dream depicts the person as a whole. Sometimes the house is your childhood home, inviting a reconsideration of the past. The upstairs signifies the intellect; the basement signifies the unconscious mind. Stephen King jokingly disavowed authorship of his own work, saying his books were written by “the boys in the basement.” Often, the dreamer discovers new rooms or corners in the house, suggesting unexplored aspects of the psyche. The dreamer might find himself retreating to the upstairs of a house in an intellectual defense against overwhelming instinctive energy. 2) Water settings: Freud viewed water as a symbol of birth, especially climbing in and out of water. Jung viewed bodies of water as representations of the unconscious. Small pools of water tended to suggest the personal unconscious. In contrast, larger bodies of water stand for the deeper collective levels of the unconscious mind. Rivers, and waters that drift, represent the flow of life. Sitting beside a river can symbolize awareness of the flow of our existence. The attitude toward water in dreams can represent our approach to inner worlds. Swimming in water, the seventh most common dream image, suggests beginning immersion in the unconscious. One might also view water from afar and explore water while being on the shore or floating in a vessel. One might approach water eagerly or be terrified of its depths and dangers, such as the immense waves of a storm. A dream situated near water suggests proximity to the source of life and transformation such as rebirth. 3) Towers and high places: Towers are man-made structures that rise heavenward. Freud saw towers as phallic symbols. Jung would have agreed but saw the image as representing our inner drive toward life and growth. Towers can represent spiritual development and ascent, or misguided hubris, as in the story of the Tower of Babel. From towers and mountaintops, one can see the world from afar; one is closer to God and can see the world through God’s eyes. Moses returned from the top of Mt. Sinai with a new vision of humanity, organized by rules of law and justice.

168  Listening with the third ear

Figure 25.2  “The Tower of Babel” by Peter Brueghel the Younger.

4) Caves: Caves and tunnels are certainly feminine symbols, as Freud realized. However, beyond this quality, they lead us into the depths of the earth, our mother, into the unconscious. When Alice’s dream takes her down the rabbit hole, she emerges with essential insights into who she is, the purpose of her life and the possibilities of her future. “So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.” 5) Foreign lands: Foreign countries represent unfamiliar landscapes, exploration and the unknown. The area we dream of may carry personal or even culturally collective associations, like India with spirituality or the Middle East with conflict. Of course, a foreign country might be our birthplace or that of our ancestors. Such dreams may relate to issues of family origin, including unresolved family conflicts. 6) Schools: Schools are a place of learning and represent internal development or transformation. The type of school, like high school, elementary school or college, may represent the level of learning associated with that period in the dreamer’s life. For instance, if high school was

Dream symbols 169 a time of conflict and confusion, revisiting high school in a dream may suggest returning to those kinds of conflicts, such as issues about role and identity. 7) Urban areas: Urban areas, especially scenes of urban blight, may represent parts of the external world where one feels unsafe and uncomfortable. These are landscapes where shadow figures dwell. Urban landscapes are also rich and full of life and energy. We can discover new aspects of ourselves in journeys to and through such landscapes.

Characters 1) Shadow: Shadow is this unrecognized, unacknowledged, disavowed aspect of the self. A  same-sexed figure in a dream that is approximately the same age as the dreamer represents this archetypal image. Mr. Hyde, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is a classic literary depiction of shadow. Shadow figures often appear as villains or beggars, the boogeymen

Figure 25.3  Jekyll and Hyde; Hyde is shadow.

170  Listening with the third ear of dreams because they are rejected aspects of the self. For Jungians, coming to terms with shadow is an important first step on the road to individuation and maturity. 2) Anima: Anima means soul, and the concept of the soul transcends culture, history and our current scientific understanding. Anima is a representation of the soul, and anima figures are powerful soul guides. For a male dreamer, an opposite sexed figure roughly the same age, especially if she is attractive in sexual or other ways, usually depicts the anima. Beatrice, the figure that led Dante through heaven, hell and purgatory, is a classical anima figure. As well as being attractive, anima can be dangerous. The Sirens that lure sailors to their deaths with their haunting songs are anima figures as well. Spiders are common symbols of the dark, devouring aspects of the soul, like the

Figure 25.4  “Beata Beatrix” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Tate Gallery.

Dream symbols 171

3)

4)

5)

6) 7)

8)

arachnid emerging near the end of the Lord of the Rings, beautifully named “Shelob.” Animus: In a woman’s dream, an opposite sexed figure approximately the same age is an animus figure. Animus is also a spirit guide to the soul, a figure of mystery. The dark, handsome strangers of romance novels are animus figures that awaken deeper aspects of oneself. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights is an animus figure, as are the princes in fairy tales that rouse a woman with a kiss. To be asleep is symbolically to be unconscious, and it can be the animus prince that stirs a deeper consciousness. As in Beauty and the Beast, a woman’s love and wisdom of a woman can transform a negative animus figure into a positive one. “Bad boy” figures, like Edward in Twilight or the characters portrayed by James Dean, are complex animus figures with positive and negative aspects. Dream ego: The you in your dream is the dream ego we naturally identify with, but it is not us in a deeper sense. The ego finds itself in a particular setting and encounters various characters in a dream, like a shadow anima and animus figures. What does the dream ego seek? What does it fear? The dream ego may learn a lesson and broaden its horizons. When the dream ego befriends a shadow figure, we often see growth and deepening of the psyche in the waking world. Wise old men and women: Both Freud and Jung see such figures as being important inner guides. When such figures appear during therapy, Freudians tend to view them as images of the analyst. For example, Gandalf, the wizard in The Lord of the Rings, is a wise old man figure. Children: Children in dreams tend to represent new life, new potential. Newborn babies in a dream are special gifts that suggest an important new phase of development. Old friends: Sometimes, a person we knew long ago appears in a dream. This appearance can represent a trait associated with that person, an aspect that needs to be better understood. For instance, such persons may invoke associations like kindness, miserliness or irresponsibility. Their appearance in a dream may encourage us to examine new aspects of ourselves or reflect traits we “left behind” and should revisit. Demonic figures: Christianity has cast demons in an exclusively negative light. The more ancient term is daimon, a spiritually neutral figure that helps shape one’s personality. Socrates spoke of a daimon that accompanied and guided him throughout life. Demons can represent spirit guides, especially ones that take to important but fearful places. Don Kalsched, in his book Trauma and the Soul, elucidated a different

172  Listening with the third ear aspect of demonic figures in trauma survivors. The psychological defenses against trauma involve a dissociated inner child that must be protected at all costs against further injury. Dream figures guarding this inner child can appear demonic as they protect one from traumatic exposure to the outer world. The witch in Rapunzel is a prime example as she guards Rapunzel in the tower. It is only when Rapunzel tries to leave and meet her prince that the witch becomes malevolent. 9) Witches: Witches are complex figures in dreams. They are feminine, malevolent but serve as sources of wisdom. They often represent a dark anima figure from which one must free oneself to attain autonomy and fulfillment. The witch-like figure of Cundry, the Loathly Lady, finally spurs the Arthurian Knights to action to seek the Holy Grail.

Other dream symbols   1) Snakes: Snakes are the ninth most common dream symbol in dream databases and are complex figures with deep symbolic meaning. They are chthonic images that belong to and reflect the underworld. They bring wisdom and danger, knowledge and sin. They lurk in corners of Paradise, call to us, ask questions. A snake in a dream usually brings wisdom, but a wisdom that is not of this world and can appear as evil. The ouroboros, the snake devouring its own tail, is an image we saw in Chapter 5, in Kekulé’s dream of the ring structure of carbon molecules. Here, the snake symbolizes death and regeneration, as carbon recycles in the death and regeneration of life forms.   2) Money: Finding money is the tenth most common dream image. Money typically represents spiritual energy in contrast to poverty as barrenness. Dream figures might give money, while shadow figures sometimes pick one’s pocket or take one’s possessions. Perhaps they need to steal the time and energy that we are not enabling. Paradoxically, depending on the context, money can also be the practical stuff of the world; Jesus advises to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s encouraging citizens to pay the taxes state authorities demand of them.   3) Fish: Fish are living forms that represent positive or threatening aspects of the unconscious. Fish can be terrifying, like the bizarretoothed Angler fish that lures smaller fishes to its jaws and dwells in the unimaginable depths of the ocean. Fairy tales describe wise talking fish and describe the magic powers of eating (internalizing) fish. Fish can devour us but then release us, like Jonah or Geppetto. Sometimes fish as dolphins may guide lost swimmers. The Ichthys was an early symbol of Christ, two arcs going beyond their right point of intersection to form the image of a fish.

Dream symbols 173

Figure 25.5  The Ichthys, carved into stone in early Christian times.

  4) Birds: Because birds fly and inhabit the heavens, they are often symbols of spirit. Flying spirits can be bright, like Ariel in Shakespeare’s Tempest, or dark, like Poe’s Raven. The albatross in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is symbolic of spiritual loss. Hitchcock’s horror film, The Birds, may represent the vengeance of a spirit world treated with neglect and contempt. Flying is a common dream image (11th in Nielsen’s list). In flight, humans become creatures of spirit, birdlike. Humans taking flight can be a dangerous overreaching, as it was for Icarus, who fell to earth as his wax in his wings melted because he dared to fly too close to the sun.   5) Colors: Red is a color of passion and energy, green is a color of life and white is the color of soul and purity. Silver is the color of the moon and the anima night. Gold is the color of the sun and animus energy. The color and the object associated with the color are linked. A white bird

174  Listening with the third ear may represent a flight into spirituality, and a blackbird, like a raven, may represent death, or transformative rebirth.   6) Numbers: The number One suggests loneliness, independence or solitude. The number Two represents division or partnership, coming together and the union of opposites. Three is on its way to becoming four so is a number of transformations. The number four signifies stability and wholeness. In Keats’ poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” the knight/hero makes love to the mysterious fairy. Then “I shut her wild, wild eyes/with kisses four.” He is complete in the moment of the consummation of his love. For Pythagoreans, the number eight, or twice four, is plenus (Latin for full, completed, strong, resonant and perfect), symbolizing equity and balance in heavenly harmony. Large numbers suggest a particular emphasis on the image. One spider is alarming; 20 demand attention.   7) Clothes: Clothing covers the true self representing the social aspects that we project to others as our persona. Often in dreams, the dreamer is naked or in borrowed clothes or the wrong clothes. Joseph, so skilled in playing roles and adapting to life in Egypt, was given a coat of many colors. The coat represents how adeptly he is able to change personas.   8) Swords and knives: Swords and knives are weapons with a Freudian, phallic quality. The origin of the word vagina is a sheath for a sword. Knives are tools that cut, in the sense of analyzing and cutting apart. The opposite of wholeness, such objects represent the analytic function of the intellect. A dream of getting or using a knife may represent a need for that analytical quality in one’s life.   9) Fire: Fire is a primordial symbol encompassing passion and emotional energy, psychic heat. Shadow figures and figures of wisdom sometimes appear near fire as such images represent our deepest selves. The dream might seek a fire, flee from it or create it. The attitude toward fire represents one’s internal approach toward instinctual passion. 10) Animals: Animals represent instinctual energy. Different animals can reflect specific traits: dogs are loyal; cats are feminine (through their relationship with witches); birds, being creatures of the air, are spiritual. Animal archetypes of mythology have totemic or spiritual significance. The first known human works of art, the cave paintings from more than 50,000 years ago, often depicted animals showing human characteristics. 11) Modes of transportation: Cars commonly appear in dreams. A car is how we get around in the world. It can depict the ego or the conscious aspects of the self. In dreams, we lose our cars, let other people drive them, drive recklessly without self-control and sometimes can’t

Dream symbols 175 start them at all. All of the symbols suggest how the ego relates to the world. Some modes of transportation, like buses and trains, suggest the immersion of the ego in collective thinking and conformity. In contrast, other modes, like bicycles, are more individual and personal. When other people in our dreams drive our cars, it suggests a surrender of autonomy. 12) Death: For Jungians, when death appears in a dream, it suggests change or transformation, death to a part or aspect of the self. The dream ego rarely dies in a dream. To dream of someone else’s death may mean that the quality that person represents is dying or should die.

Common dream plots 1) Dreams of being chased or attacked. Such dreams are common nightmares and are among the most common dream images in content analysis. The figures that chase us are parts of ourselves. We may need to be vigilant and protect ourselves and/or develop a healthier relationship with that aspect of self that is trying to get our attention by attacking us. Sometimes, neglected aspects of ourselves can only get our attention by attacking us in nightmares. 2) Dreams of meals and nourishment: Eating represents being nourished emotionally or spiritually. This dream image is the fifth most common. We might eat healthy food or junk food, be sated or remain hungry. What we eat and who feeds us are essential details. Sometimes other dream figures, like animus or anima figures, symbolically offer food and nourishment. 3) Dreams of being late or lost: This sixth most common type of dream suggests a loss of purpose or direction and indicates a need to reappraise one’s goals and directions in life. Being lost leads to being late, a common dream image. Being late is missed opportunity. Such dreams invite a greater consciousness or awareness of life’s priorities. 4) Journeys: The outer journey depicted in a dream is often a representation of an inner journey. Journeys often begin with difficulties and roadblocks but end in a place of self-discovery and insight. As described by Joseph Campbell in A Hero’s Journey, a hero leaves home, encounters danger, feels despair and comes to a deeper understanding of the world. Ulysses’ wanderings in the Odyssey and Frodo’s journey in The Lord of the Rings are perfect examples of this mythical journey. Dreams sometimes can depict mini versions of such journeys. 5) Examination dreams: Examination dreams can be nightmarish; for instance, the dreamer takes an exam in a college class he never

176  Listening with the third ear attended. Freud found these dreams difficult to reconcile with his theory of dreams as wish fulfillment; he decided they were intended to remind the dreamer of exams he has passed already. This explanation never seemed satisfying to us. A Jungian would view this type of dream as a psychological test, perhaps one for which you are not prepared.   Examinations also have a mythological component. Trials like those posed by the Sphinx involve answering riddles. In fairy tales, anima figures sometimes test suitors with questions or tasks to prove their worth. Prospero, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, forces his daughter’s suitor to undergo such a trial. 6) Dreams of sexual intimacy: Sex in a dream is usually not about sex but relationships. It involves seeking closeness with anima or animus. Dreams about same-sex intercourse relate not to covert homosexuality but a relationship with shadow. It is relatively rare to consummate a sexual act with anima or animus. These figures are spirit guides rather than lovers. The brief dream I cited at the beginning of the chapter depicts a relationship between the dream ego and the anima. In this dream, the anima is serving as a guide, leading the dream ego. The dream, however, shows a relationship that is not equal. The dream ego is passive and submissive, led like a puppy on a leash. The dream makes a point of the color of the thread, suggesting that passion is part of what gives the anima her power in this dream. The red thread is also reminiscent of the red thread by which St. Margaret led the dragon she had tamed. Suppose this dream were presented in the context of therapy. In that case, the therapist might explore with the client whether he is ruled too much by the feminine aspects of himself, tries too hard to please others or is loved instead of honoring the dragon’s needs. This brief dream with very little content is an example of a dream that can be more easily understood using a symbol guide like this.

References Hall, C., & Van de Castle, R. L (1966). The content analysis of dreams. Appleton Century Crofts. Jung, C. (1964). Man and his symbols. Dell. Nielsen, T. A., Zadra, A. L., Simard, V., Saucier, S., Stenstrom, P., Smith, C., & Kuiken, D. (2003). The typical dreams of Canadian university students. Dreaming, 13(4), 211–235.

26 Active imagination

A damsel with a dulcimer   In a vision once I saw:   It was an Abyssinian maid,   And on her dulcimer she played,   Singing of Mount Abora.   Could I revive within me   Her symphony and song,   To such a deep delight ‘twould win me That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! Those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.[4] Coleridge, from “Kubla Khan, or a Vision in a Dream,” final stanza

In 1797, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, feeling indisposed, took a sedative and began to read a book about Kubla Khan. He fell asleep for three hours, then awakened with a vivid memory of a 200- to 300-line poem. It was so clear that he felt he could have written it down in its entirety. However, he was interrupted by a visitor, the unfortunate “person from Porlock,” now much cursed by lovers of poetry. By the time the person from Porlock left, Coleridge could remember only eight to ten lines of the vast poem he had dreamt. Based on the few lines he did remember, Coleridge constructed a poem of 54 lines, which he called a “fragment.” This poem is quite unlike DOI: 10.4324/9781003223474-32

178  Listening with the third ear Coleridge’s other poems, which were long narratives, like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Coleridge did not think the poem had literary value. It sat among his papers for over a decade until friend and fellow poet Lord Byron encouraged Coleridge to publish it. Although Coleridge’s contemporaries denounced the poem, “Kubla Khan” is now considered Coleridge’s best poem and stands among the greatest English poems. What Coleridge practiced was what Jung would later call active imagination; he entered into a creative dialogue with unconscious material and produced a synthetic work that was a product of that dialogue. Blessed by genius and good fortune, his exercise in active imagination produced a great work of art. While active imagination does not always produce great art, it can provide valuable insight and awareness.

Jung and active imagination Jung first began to describe the technique of active imagination in 1916. Active imagination involves letting the unconscious rise to the level of awareness and then coming to terms with that awareness (Chodorow, 1977). Active imagination can be used to elaborate and deepen the experience of a dream. When we have befriended our dreams, as discussed in Chapter 4, it is very natural, when appropriate, to have a further relationship with certain dream figures. Active imagination can also involve, as in Coleridge’s case, a controlled reentering into the dream state. Jung used active imagination extensively in his personal and clinical work. After his break with Freud, Jung went through an intense period of personal crisis. He decided to “drop down” into his inner world. Through encountering this inner world in active imagination, he found a path out of his despair. Not only did he see demons, images of death and seas of blood, but he also met Philemon, his winged spirit guide. This journey is described in his Memories, Dreams and Reflections and depicted visually in The Red Book (Jung, 2009).

A personal example I will use a brief, simple example from my own dreamwork. Recently, I had a dream that involved an elf. An abbreviated version of the dream is as follows: I am told there is something going on in my house. At night when I am alone, I go down to investigate. I am trying to find some entity that is there. There lounging in the easy chair downstairs is a small elf like

Active imagination 179 creature. He taunts me, saying, “Are you looking for me?” He has straw-like brown hair, and dark skin. In the dream, the elf taunted me, but, upon awakening, it seemed that such an elf might have more to offer than sarcasm and jests. With amplification, we realize that elves, after all, usually have access to pots of gold. This sort of dream invites dialogue. The elf seems to be there for a reason and seems to have a purpose beyond his sarcastic persona. In active imagination, one would set aside a quiet time and place to have a conversation with the elf. I sat in the easy chair in my study and spoke to him. “Thank you for visiting; what have you come to tell me?” It is essential to speak to inner figures respectfully and thoughtfully. At first, nothing may come; give the process of active imagination time or pick another time to talk to the elf. Of course, because we are affected by our cultural milieu, an inner voice will tell us that this active imagination idea is stupid, and that we are just making it up, etc. Allow that more critical voice to speak, but do not take his voice as truth; allow other voices to speak. With practice, one will enter a kind of reverie and experience a genuine interaction with an inner figure with practice. For those doing dreamwork, especially with a therapist, active imagination can become a once or twice weekly practice.

Talking to the elf With the elf’s permission, I  offer a bit of dialogue, though he asks that I should not be too personal. For clarity, when I transcribe my dialogues, I put my words in regular case and the responses in upper case. Thank you for coming. Tell me who you are and why you are here. YOU CAME LOOKING FOR ME. YOU WANTED TO UNDERSTAND THAT ENTITY INSIDE YOU THAT TRICKS AND DECEIVES. You scare me, but somehow, I trust you. So often, I should be happy, but I’m not. I am loved, I have accomplishments, but sometimes these accomplishments don’t seem real. It seems that these good things are doomed to vanish. Why do I feel that way? Is that your doing? OF COURSE, I DO TRICK YOU, BUT I AM SHOWING YOU WHAT YOU ARE DOING TO YOURSELF. I SHOW YOU WHAT YOU ARE, DEEP INSIDE, DOING TO YOURSELF. YOU HAVE TO LEARN TO IGNORE MY WITCHERY. I CAN ONLY TRICK YOU BY DOING TO YOU WHAT YOU ARE DOING TO YOURSELF. WHEN YOU CAN LEARN TO SEE THROUGH MY TRICKERY, I CAN, IF I CHOOSE, REWARD YOU. How can you reward me? I CAN TEACH YOU. KNOWLEDGE IS THE TREASURE I OFFER.

180  Listening with the third ear The dialogue goes on a bit longer. I ask for a bit more advice from the elf and get answers that surprise the conscious me. My own questions surprise me; like the first one about my unhappiness. I don’t know where that came from. This dialogue is a bit cerebral; often dialogues are more emotional and stir feelings I didn’t know I had. One should be careful with some inner figures. The elf seemed friendly enough in the dream, so I felt comfortable talking to him. Spirit guides and old friends that appear in dreams are usually easy to talk to, but I would discourage a novice from talking to darker figures, like demons, witches or dangerous-looking people without therapeutic guidance and support. So, was I really talking to an elf? In the real, day-to-day world, of course not! I  have not lost my marbles, at least not yet. But in the world of the imagination, yes, absolutely, I was, and in that world, he answered. As the poet W. H Auden said, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” I have chosen a verbal example of active imagination. People interact with their unconscious with art, music, dance or any other medium that touches their soul. Remember that you are not Coleridge, so do not try to use active imagination as an aesthetic technique or a trick to enhance creativity. If you do that, you will censor material based on artistic judgments. Making art is not the point. The point is to nurture a relationship with the inner world, with that inscape, that landscape within.

Dream incubation Another advanced technique for dreamwork is “dreaming a dream forward.” For example, instead of or in addition to dialoguing with the elf in the elf dream, I might have tried to continue the dream. To dream a dream forward, when one is getting ready to go to sleep, one should contemplate the prior dream, reenter that world and invite the dream to continue. Dreaming a dream forward is a type of dream incubation. Dream incubation is an ancient technique practiced by Jewish and Islamic faithful, where pondering an issue in a prayerful way can yield solutions and insights in dreams. Empirical studies confirm that thinking about a problem, even a math problem, before going to bed makes it easier to find solutions to that problem (Dement, 1972; Barrett, 1993). These studies involve incubating a dream by focusing on a problem while falling asleep and confirm that dream incubation is effective in generating solutions to problems. “Why is the elf here?” is a dream problem that may, for some people, incubate an answer. Dreaming a dream forward can include altering dream imagery. If, for instance, the elf had been a frightening figure, I might invite a dream where I approach him in safety, with weapons and powerful protective figures. You

Active imagination 181 wouldn’t visit Dracula without lots of crosses and garlic, and Van Helsing close beside you. Coleridge’s experience with dreaming the words of a long poem and forgetting them before he has had a chance to write them down reminds us of the importance of recording dreams immediately upon awakening. Dreams tend not to be connected to the long-term memory storage centers of the brain unless they are actively rehearsed and recorded. We all have an internal person from Porlock who will make us forget our dreams. The stanzas of Coleridge’s poem, not included at the beginning of this chapter, describe with vivid imagery the “pleasure dome” built by Kubla Khan. It includes ice caves and the mysterious “Alph,” the “sacred river” that runs through underground caverns. The book Coleridge was reading about Kubla Khan incubated the dream and became the scaffolding for a series of unexpected and rich archetypal creative associations. Suddenly, the “damsel with a dulcimer” appears, out of nowhere. The damsel creates a sacred space, enclosed by a triple circle. Three is the sacred number of transformation. To the rational mind, two seemingly unrelated poems are juxtaposed. To the deeper self, however, the connection is obvious. The caverns and streams of the unconscious call up a manifestation of the feminine, the anima guide, the damsel. He who meets her has indeed “drunk the milk of Paradise.”

References Barrett, D. (1993). The “committee of sleep”: A study of dream incubation for problems solving. Dreaming, 3, 115–123. Chodorow, J. (1977). Introduction to Jung on active imagination. Routledge. Dement, W. (1972). Some must watch while some must sleep. W.H. Fremont and Co. Jung, C. (2009). The red book: Liber Novus. Norton.

27 Using dreams in therapy

I am helping a woman at a job interview. She is wearing a white silk jacket, but I realize there are stains in the back, like coffee and a patch of mud. I try to clean her jacket, but the man she is going to meet notices it too and is brushing the mud off her shoulder. Personal dream by the author

Bringing dreams back into therapy Dreams were once an important part of therapy, just as once they were an important part of everyday life and a topic of conversation at the breakfast table. This chapter, as well as this whole book, is an attempt to restore dreams to their rightful place in our culture. According to research by Schredl et al., more than 60% of patients bring dreams to psychotherapy, no matter what form of therapy is used. Yet, most therapists are uncomfortable working with dreams (Leonard & Dawson, 2018). Despite their discomfort, more than 60% of therapists, including humanistic and cognitive-behavioral therapists, find dreamwork to be helpful for their clients (Schredl et al., 2000). Perhaps clients intuitively know it is helpful to talk about their dreams. Rather than our clients, it may be us, as therapists, who are uncomfortable about their value or unclear how to use dreams in therapy. In considering dreams, the therapist must be mindful of the patient’s needs and the kind of therapy being attempted. Dreams in clients seen in purely supportive treatment, especially those with more severe pathology, should be examined from the point of view of strengthening and maintaining the ego, not from exploring unconscious material. Thus, the use of free association or amplification should be limited in those clients. When therapy is more insight-oriented, fuller dream exploration is more appropriate. The fact that a patient brings a dream to therapy may suggest

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Using dreams in therapy 183 that they might benefit from dreamwork. If a patient in ego-based therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy, brings a dream to therapy, it may indicate that they are unconsciously seeking a more insight-oriented approach.

Big Dreams It is also important to distinguish between what Jung called “big” and “little” dreams (Jung, 1961). Little dreams concern themselves with day-today issues and personal neuroses and conflicts. They represent the psyche’s attempt to balance itself. Though important, they are more easily forgotten and do not carry a significant degree of emotional “charge.” Big Dreams are experienced more deeply, remembered for years or even a lifetime and often concern themselves with timeless, collective, mythical themes.

Twenty-two tips for dream exploration We would like to describe a stepwise strategy for working with dreams in therapy. We will try to make the process as generic as possible. A good therapist wants to do effective therapy that truly guides a client rather than a therapy that fits the model proposed by a particular school. First, if a client does bring a dream to therapy, it should be recognized and honored as a gift. This is true for all types of therapies, including supportive therapy in the severely ill (Hill & Sarah, 2010). Opinions have varied as to whether patients should be invited to bring dreams to therapy. In insightoriented work, patients should be told that dreams can be a part of therapy early in treatment, when the nature and structure of therapy are described. In this way, dreams are explicitly welcomed. For patients in therapies that include insight-oriented work, the dream should be explored further. I will describe a systematic strategy for working with dreams in therapy on the basis of years of working with clients, supervising therapists and coleading a dream group. The most important client we treat is ourselves. The most important tip is to work with your own dreams, learn to remember them, record them and explore them. The following suggestions apply to your personal dreamwork as well as your work with clients.   1 Acknowledge the dream as an important contribution to therapy. Many of the ideas described in the chapter “Befriending your dreams” are appropriate here, especially that of writing down or recording your dreams.   2 Ask the client to describe the dream in as much detail as possible.

184  Listening with the third ear   3   4   5   6   7

  8

  9 10

11

12

13

14

Do not interrupt the description, except for brief clarification. Ask the client what thoughts they have about the dream. Ask the client to describe the feelings they were having in the dream. Ask the patient if the dream seems to be related to any recent event. This is an exploration of what would be called, in Freudian terms, day residue. Ask the patient about associations with specific dream elements (events, situations, people, feelings). Explore dream elements neutrally, without having a preconceived idea of the meaning of the dream. Pay special attention to details that seem odd as those are often important. If people appear in the dream, ask the client about the characteristics or traits of each person. Figures that are important in a dreamer’s life, like parents and spouses, frequently recur in dreams. Figures that had minor roles in a client’s life, like a high school friend, may represent traits associated with that person. Examine the emotions that the dream brought up: was it happy, sad, peaceful or nightmarish. Consider the possible relationship of the dream with the therapeutic situation. A therapist is an important figure in a person’s life and may appear in dreams, and issues about therapy may express themselves in the dream. Resistance can also express itself in dreams. Jung, Freud, Kirsch and others (Kirsch, 1990) have noted that patients can focus on long, tedious and pointless dreams as a way of avoiding therapeutic issues. This is rare and would be difficult for an inexperienced therapist to recognize. Consider amplification of dream elements. Amplification concerns the recognition of mythical and collective material in the dream and can be strengthened by images or associations from outside the dream. Amplification is especially important in Big Dreams and dreams with archetypal elements. Examine the: 1) setting, 2) plot and 3) key turning points in the story. These can represent important conflictual issues in the patient’s life. The plot and characters point to conflicts and their expression in the life of the patient. It is natural for clients to view a dream externally as if the dream figures were representations of characters in the patient’s life. The mother in a dream, for instance, will be experienced as if she were the patient’s actual mother instead of the internal representation of the mother within the client. Explore this external stance toward the dream by discussing the relationship with the mother. Invite the client to view the dream internally. The mother in a dream, for instance, may not be a depiction of the real mother but of the

Using dreams in therapy 185

15

16

17

18

19

20

21 22

internalized mother image, the mother archetype. The internal and the external are often linked. The personal external elements of the mother call up the archetypal collective elements. Internal and external elements may express themselves together in a dream. Similarly, consider the dream ego, not only as a reflection of the person himself but also as a personification of some particular aspect of the person. For instance, in the dream of the crab/lizard that begins the Introduction, the dream ego (the image of the dreamer in the dream) is not the person himself but that aspect of the person that fears and wishes to control the unconscious. Imagine the events of the dream as being internal rather than external. This is especially important with negative aspects of a dream. Death of the dream ego usually does not portend physical death but rather a death of some personified aspect or attitude of the dreamer. This can be very reassuring to the client. When possible, relate the current dream to the past dreams of the patient. Important patterns may emerge, and growth and change may be evident to therapist and patient when past dreams are explored in relation to current dreams. Relax. Dream exploration should be fun for you and the client. As Jung emphasized, there are no right or wrong answers, multiple ideas and interpretations can be entertained and multiple interpretations can be correct. Remember the story from the discussion of dreams in Judaism. Two dozen dream interpreters can interpret a dream differently, yet all of them may offer valuable insights. Consider the outcome of the discussion and interpretation of the dream. Did it “connect” with the client and seem meaningful to him or her? Do subsequent dreams and discussions seem to confirm the dream interpretation? Did the dream and its interpretation expand the client’s self-awareness? Remember that dream interpretation can be challenging, especially if a therapist has minimal experience with this kind of work. Seek the wisdom of supervisors or colleagues to help with dreamwork. Ongoing practice will increase comfort in working with dreams. Experienced therapists and clients consider specialized techniques like active imagination and dreaming the dream forward. These concepts are discussed in detail in the previous chapter. Where appropriate, especially with creative patients, consider artistic exploration of the dream or dream elements in media like drawing, painting, music or poetry. This can deepen the connection with unconscious material.

186  Listening with the third ear

Four Pitfalls in dream exploration 1 2 3 4

Not trying. Don’t be afraid to try to work with dreams, and don’t be afraid to be wrong. Giving up. Sometimes discussion of a dream will not be productive, as any discussion in therapy is sometimes not productive. Don’t feel like it is a failure. The only failure is if you give up. Focusing on yourself. Dreamwork can bring up deep issues in you as a therapist. That’s okay, but don’t get caught up in your own ideas and associations. Looking for a single interpretation or answer. Remember, you are exploring, not interpreting. There are different meaning narratives about a dream. Just as a dream is an exploration in the virtual space of REM sleep, so discussing a dream is an exploration in the virtual space of therapy or self-therapy.

Getting muddy The brief dream that starts this chapter is personal. I chose it to illustrate how even brief dreams can be meaningful. The female figure, who is unknown to me, suggests an anima representation of the feminine I am just becoming acquainted with. This female figure is seeking a new job, perhaps a different role within me. The soiled jacket shows that she is more earthy, less proper, though the men in the dream try to clean her off. The other male figure in the dream may be a shadow aspect of myself, a part of me with more authority, which may “hire” her and work with her. Perhaps she is this book, a new job for the creative aspects of my psyche. Creativity, because it “gives birth,” is symbolized in feminine form. I try to make her more scholarly and clean off her jacket, but she comes out more direct and earthy, with mud stains.

References Hill, C. E., & Sarah, K. (2010). The use of dreams in modern psychotherapy. Review of Neurobiology, 92, 291–317. Jung, C. (1961). The collected works of C.G. Jung. Princeton Press. Kirsch, T. B. (1990). A pedestrian approach to dreams, in dreams in analysis. Chiron Press. Leonard, L., & Dawson, D. (2018). The marginalisation of dreams in clinical psychological practice. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 42, 10–18. Schredl, M., Bohusch, C., Kahl, J., Mader, A., & Somesan, A. (2000). The use of dreams in psychotherapy: A survey of psychotherapists in private practice. Journal of Psychotherapy Practice Research, 9, 81–87.

Conclusion

Mother, I had a dream last night. Stars of the sky appeared, A meteorite of Anu fell next to me. I tried to lift it but it was too mighty for me, I tried to turn it over, but I could not budge it . . . Men clustered about it, And kissed its feet as if it were a little baby. I loved it and was drawn to it, Like one is drawn to a woman. Epic of Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh’s dream, from the Mesopotamian epic poem written about 4,000 years ago, is one of the first ever recorded. A shooting star, a meteorite, a gift from Anu, falls from heaven. Anu is the highest god in the Sumerian pantheon. Gilgamesh, normally not prone to homage and worship, adores the object, “like one is drawn to a woman.” Gilgamesh is the first hero; his journey is the first hero’s journey. Gilgamesh is a mythologized historical figure and one of the first rulers of Uruk, the first great city. Abraham, from the Bible, was a refugee from Uruk; he carried with him the memory of what a city could be, of what man could be. Gilgamesh’s journey is an internal one. When we first meet him, he is a brutish creature, partially divine but wholly lacking in self-awareness. His wildness is tamed by his love for Enkidu, his comrade in arms. Together, Gilgamesh and Enkidu seek the fearsome monster Humbaba, who protects himself by calling up nightmares. They slay him recklessly. For this, Enkidu is punished by death. Gilgamesh is beset by grief he cannot bear. He grieves for what could have been, the great love, Enkidu, that he lost.

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188  Listening with the third ear Gilgamesh’s story is reminiscent of the dream that begins the introductory chapter, the brief fairy-tale-like narrative of a man facing a crab-like beast. Just as the dreamer in that introductory chapter slays the crab-like beast, so Gilgamesh slays Humbaba. Although Humbaba is the bringer of nightmares, in his death something is irreparably lost. In writing this book, we have tried to heal that loss of our inner world in a small way. We are drawn to the meteorite from heaven that represents our dreams. Understanding dreams can help us understand both ourselves and our patients. We have attempted to rebuild the relationship with dreams that our culture has lost.

NEAR NEAR is the acronym for the model used in this book to describe the mind’s process of dreams creation. The N represents narrative. We have talked of dreams as narratives and described the stories told by different cultures at different times. Modern culture has relegated dreams to the periphery of public discourse. As therapists, we have neglected dreams as a source of healing. This book hopes to change that neglect by creating a new narrative, a healing one that includes both science and a thoughtful understanding of what dreams mean. The narrative of science must be part of the understanding of dreams, and those two realms must remain in ongoing and open dialogue. The E represents expansion. We have described expansion on multiple levels. Scientific data shows that dreams involve expanded connections between divergent brain regions. This neurophysiological expansion involves expansion on other levels, including the creative problem-solving posited as the purpose of dreams and the dream explorations that expand the dream story. In this time of “evidence-based” therapy, psychological treatment has become limited in scope. Dreamwork can expand therapy to include the deeper levels of the psyche. Gilgamesh, early in his story, is all feeling and impulse. He is described as a wild bull. In the lucid dream described in the second chapter, Synchronicity, recklessness is also symbolized as a bull. Gilgamesh is stronger than anyone and does exactly as he wishes, laying waste to his own empire. In some ways, internally, humanity has done the same, as we have ignored our souls and stripped our bodies of purpose. With our scientism and our greed, we have run amok in our internal Uruk, just as we have ravaged our natural world. But feelings are to be incorporated and understood, not controlled. That is what Gilgamesh finally learns to do during his hero’s journey, and that

Conclusion 189 is what our dreams invite us to do. Affect or feeling is the A in the NEAR model. Feelings have instinctual and archetypal roots; the A is also archetype. Archetypes are the language of feeling, feeling expressed in mentalese. Finally, through growth, suffering and awareness, there is reintegration, the R in NEAR. The Gilgamesh at the end of the story is not the Gilgamesh we first meet, he is a deeper richer person; he is conscious and has a soul. Through his love for a woman, through his love for his friend and through grief he is transformed, reintegrated as a whole person. R also stands for remembering. Neurophysiologically, dreaming integrates memory, affect and story. For our clients, dreamwork can help them remember and reintegrate the past. Dreams remind us of who we are. They are the stories that our deeper selves tell. In honoring and trying to understand dreams, we honor our deeper selves. As therapists, we can help our clients accept and understand this neglected but essential aspect of their lives. By exploring dreams with them, we can help our clients reintegrate memories and feelings with a depth that goes beyond just talk and talk therapy. Every Abraham remembers lost Uruk and tries to build Jerusalem or Mecca or Rome or Lhasa or Varanasi. When we become aware and develop “ego,” we become refugees from our inner selves. We must rediscover Uruk and rebuild it. Dreams help us remember, seek, regain, and reintegrate what we have lost.

Gilgamesh’s dream The stone that Gilgamesh dreams of, that the townspeople revere, is reminiscent of the Black Stone in the Kaaba, one of Islam’s most sacred sites. This stone is a meteorite as well and, according to the Islamic faith, was given to Abraham by the angel Gabriel. Gilgamesh, touchingly, shares his dream with his mother. This powerful man wants reassurance and comfort. He, like all of us, wants his dream to be interpreted and understood. She, symbolically, is the great goddess mother who understands all dreams; she is Ishtar, Isis, Eve, Lilith, Mary and the Black Madonna. Gilgamesh yearns for relationship with this part of himself that he does not yet know. The heavens sent a gift in the form of a shooting star; it represents new life. The townspeople understand this, and worship the object as a baby. This heaven-sent thing is beyond the power of even all-powerful Gilgamesh. He cannot lift it or even roll it over. Gilgamesh is drawn to this star-like object as one is drawn to someone one loves. He shares the dream with his mother, a positive embodiment of

190  Listening with the third ear

Figure 27.1  A medieval image of the Black Stone.

the feminine. The feminine is not gender, it is symbol. As Anais Nin put it so well, “Woman fills out the circumference,” the circumference is the whole, the circle, the round stone from heaven, the completeness and fullness of life. The unconscious is experienced as feminine, as anima. The unconscious wants relationship and love. When we have used “poetic” language rather than the language of science in this book, it is because we want to reawaken the love that, in the end, gives life meaning.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. Aberfan disaster 62 academic psychology 2, 89 – 91 Activation-Synthesis hypothesis 143 active imagination 11, 70, 98, 177 – 181; dream incubation 180 – 181; example 178 – 180; Jung and 178 Adler, Shelley 67, 69 affect 145 Affective Neuroscience (Panksepp) 18 AIM (Activation-Input-Modulation) model 127, 143 all-night sleep recordings 122 Amazon (warrior woman) 26 amplification 13, 139, 161, 162, 179, 184 analytic philosophy 90 anima 20, 83, 112, 160 – 161, 170 – 171, 176 animals 174 animus 41, 139 – 140, 161, 171, 176 Answer to Job (Jung) 97 – 98 Anthony, Mark 80 antidepressants 10, 29 antipsychotics 10, 57 Aquinas, Thomas 79 Archenholtz, J. 93 archetypes 145, 146, 160 – 161, 189 Aristotle 142 Artemidorus 101 asceticism 75 association 40, 108, 139, 182

Atman 106 Auden, W. H. 180 Augustine 77 Bakalar, J. 52 balloon dream, of Drake 14 Barker, John 63, 66 Barrett, Deirdre 41 “Beata Beatrix” 170 Beck, A. 138 Beersheba 56 befriending, dreams: The bear and the child dream 33; encountering 29 – 30; as invitations for change 32 – 33; steps 30 – 32 Bernstein, J. 65 Bible 1, 3; Book of Daniel 95 – 96, 108; Jacob’s Ladder dream 49, 50, 55 – 56; New Testament 77 bidirectional relationship, of God 97 – 98 Big Dreams 11, 13, 38, 97, 146, 183 Big Dreams (Bulkeley) 14 birds 173 Black Madonna/Isis 85, 85 Black Stone 189, 190 Blake, William 50, 164 Bon tradition 113 Book of Daniel 95 – 96, 108 Book of Dreams, The (Zhou) 111 Book of the Dead 115 Bosch, Hieronymus 128

192 Index breakups 17 Bronte, Emily 41 Bulkeley, Kelly 14 Bulkeley, P. B. K. 59 butterfly effect 86 Byron, Lord 178 Cain, Susan 2 – 3 Campbell, Joseph 158, 159, 175 CAPA see Chinese American Psychoanalytic Alliance (CAPA) Casablanca 27 Castenada, Carlos 139 Catholicism 82 – 83 causality 142 – 143 caves 168 change 32 – 33 chaos theory 81, 86 Charon, Rita 136 chased/attacked dreams 175 children 171 China: Confucianism and Taoism 110 – 111; dream interpretation in 111 – 112; psychoanalysis in 109 – 110 Chinese American Psychoanalytic Alliance (CAPA) 109 de Chardin, Teilhard 106 Christianity 82 – 83; institutional 84; schisms 78; shadow side of 85 Chuang Tzu 114 Cicero 75, 80 clothes 174 Cocteau, Jean 23 cognitive distortions 138 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 177 – 178, 180 – 181 collective unconscious 106, 135, 159 colors 173 – 174 Comiskey Park 16 compensation dreams 158 Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry 2 condensation 127 Confessions (Augustine) 77 Confucianism 109, 110 – 111 Confucius’ dream 109, 112 Conrad, Joseph 59 Cosmic Code, The (Pagels, Heinz) 81 Craven, Wes 70

creativity 127, 186; art and science from dreams 37 – 39; dream physiology and 39 – 40; enhancing 41; and entheogens 52; meaning of 39; Twilight 41 – 42 daemon dream, of Mahr 9 – 13 Dalai Lama 115 Damasio, A. 40, 134 darkness 86 “day residue” in dream imagery 152, 153 Dead Sea Scrolls 84 death 57 – 60, 69, 109, 112, 115, 123, 175; see also end-of-life dreams and visions (ELDVs); near-death experiences (NDEs) deathbed dreams 57 – 59 Death of a Woman, The (Wheelwright) 57, 60 default mode network (DMN) 143 Dement, William 122, 142, 147 Demeter, and Persephone (goddess) 54, 55 demonic figures 171 – 172 Dennett, D. 137 depth psychology 39, 47, 59 – 60, 65, 72, 109 Descartes, Rene 18, 90 Diaries (Nin) 22 DILD see dream-initiated lucid dreams (DILD) dissociation 44 DMN see default mode network (DMN) Domhoff, G. W. 25 dopamine 127 Drake, Chris: academics 18; balloon dream 14, 20 – 21; balloon ride 16 – 17; Detroit job 18; fence 15 – 16; midlife crisis 19 – 20; sleep medicine 19; starting journey 17 – 18 Drake, James 16 dream ego 44, 86, 114 – 115, 131, 153 – 154, 171, 185 dream exploration 20, 183 – 186 dream incubation 41, 70, 97, 102, 180 – 181 dream-initiated lucid dreams (DILD) 46

Index  193 dream interpretation 20, 84; in China 111 – 112; Duke of Zhou 1, 3; in Hebrew tradition 95 – 96, 138; in Islamic culture 101 – 102; in Judaism 96 – 97; and narrative 145 dreams: in early Church 77 – 78; of embracing darkness 86; facts about 143; in history 1; and meaning 2 – 3; in New Testament 77; recording 31; study of dreams 1 – 2; in therapy 182 – 183; in Tibetan culture 113 – 114; understanding 139; vs. psychedelic state 53 Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies (Katz) 102 dream symbols 26, 164 – 166, 172 – 175; characters 169 – 172; common plots 175 – 176; content analysis 166 – 167; Dzogchen 113 – 115; settings 167 – 169 Dreyfuss, Richard 66 Duke of Zhou 1, 3, 111 – 112 Durga (goddess) 12, 13 Dzogchen tradition 48, 113 – 115 early ambulatory electrogastrogram (EGG) device 17 early Church, dreams in 77 – 78 Eckstein, Emma 22 – 23, 154 – 155 EGG device see early ambulatory electrogastrogram (EGG) device ego bias 153 Einstein, Albert 37 Eiseley, Loren 29, 33 ELDVs see end-of-life dreams and visions (ELDVs) Electra complex 23 Eleusinian Mysteries 38, 54 emotional content, of dream 32 emotions 40, 53, 86, 134, 136, 146, 161, 166, 184 empiricism 89 end-of-life dreams and visions (ELDVs) 112; deathbed experiences 57 – 59; and depth psychology 59 – 60 entheogens, and creativity 52 ergotamines 54 Erikson, Erik 155 Eryl Mai’s dream 66

“evidence-based” therapy 188 examination dreams 175 – 176 expansion 145, 188 false narration 131 – 132 false translation, of St. Jerome 78, 80 FEP see free energy principle (FEP) fire 174 fish 172 Fodor, Jerry 133 foreign lands 168 Fosshage, J. 157 Von Franz, M. 59 free energy principle (FEP) 144 Freud, Sigmund 1 – 2, 3; about creativity 39; and dream research 153; dream theory 151 – 153; and Emma Eckstein 22 – 23, 154 – 155; gender as binary category 27; Interpretation of Dreams, The 1 – 2, 16, 47, 64, 151; Irma’s injection dream 22, 39, 132, 151, 154 – 156, 161 – 162, 164; and Jung 157, 178; and modern psychoanalysis 153 – 154; narratives 139; Project for a Scientific Psychology 158; about prophetic and telepathic dreams 64 Fromm, Eric 11 Fuseli, Henry 68 future prediction, and dreams 3 gender issues/differences 25; archetypes of men/women 26 – 27; gender as symbol 27 – 28; LGBTQIA+ sexual imagery 25 – 26; sexism in psychology 22 – 23 Gennadius dream 43, 45 Gestalt psychology 133 Gilgamesh Epic 1, 187, 189 – 190 Gnostic Gospels, The (Pagels, Elaine) 81 Gnosticism 82; and SBNR 91; and shadow 84 – 85 goddesses 92 Goya’s painting 58 Gregory of Nyssa 49 – 50 Grinspoon, A. B. 52 guided trips 54

194 Index Hall, Calvin 166 hallucinations 53, 58 hallucinogens 54, 55 Hardy, G. H. 105 Haydn, Joseph 123 healing fiction 139 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 59 Hebrews 92 henotheistic faiths 106 Henry and June (book & film) 23 Henry Ford Hospital 18 – 19 hermeneutics 5 Hero’s Journey, A (Campbell) 175 Hetaira 26 Hill, P. C. 91 Hinduism 106 – 108 Hitchcock, A. 158 Hmong people 68 – 70, 132 Hobson, J. A. 52, 125, 127, 143 Holms, J. 144 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 17 horizontal schism 78 – 79 houses 167 Hume, David 89 I Ching (Taoist divination book) 111 Ichthys 173 Ignatius of Antioch 77 Imaam al-Baghawi 101 image rehearsal therapy (IRT) 47, 70 – 71 individuation 27, 48, 160, 170 informational alchemy 39 “Inscape” 17 institutional Christianity 84 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud) 1 – 2, 16, 47, 64, 151 Irma’s injection dream (Freud) 22, 39, 132, 151, 154 – 156, 161 – 162, 164 IRT see image rehearsal therapy (IRT) Islam: dream interpretation 101 – 102; dreams in 100 – 101; istikhara 102; Sufism 102 – 104 istikhara (divine guidance) 102 Jacob’s Ladder (film) 51 – 52 Jacob’s Ladder dream 49, 50, 55 – 56 Jacobson, Edmund 122 James, William 91 journeys 175 Judaism 95; dream interpretation 96 – 97; God’s bidirectional

relationship 97 – 98; Joseph and Daniel 95 – 96; Kabbalah 97; Nebuchadnezzar’s dream 98 – 99 Jung, Carl 2, 3, 19; Answer to Job 97 – 98; blurred boundaries between dreams 47; commentaries on Book of the Dead 115; crab dream 6; and Freud 157, 178; Freud’s Irma’s injection dream 157 – 162; gender as binary category 27; narratives 139; about prophetic dream 61 – 63; Red Book, The 47 – 48; and von Franz 59 Kali (godesss) 12, 13 Kalsched, Donald 171 Kant, I. 160 Kekulé, August 37, 38, 40 Kelsey, Morton 78 Kerr, C. W. 58, 59 King, Steven 146 Klee, Paul 15 Kleitman, Nathaniel 122 Koran 101 Krakow, B. 71 Kramer, Peter 10 Kubla Khan 177, 181 Kubler-Ross, E. 57 Kung, Hans 55 LaBerge, Stephen 16, 45 – 46, 48, 116 Lacan, Jacques 132 – 133, 155 language: and flaws 131 – 133; mentalese 134; of mind 133 – 134 Lao Tzu 110 late/lost, in dreams 175 latent content, of dream 152 Leary, Timothy 51 – 52 LGBTQIA+ individuals 25 – 26 Lincoln, Abraham 112 Lines, Richard 87 Listening to Prozac (Kramer) 10 Lucas, George 38, 158 Lucid Dreaming (LaBerge) 16 lucid dreams 17, 19, 43 – 48, 72; Augustine descriptions 48; definition 44; inducing techniques 46; neurophysiology 45 – 46; psychology and lucid dreaming 47; spectrum of 44 – 45; therapeutic use 47 – 48; in Tibetan culture 114

Index  195 Mahalakshmi (goddess) 106, 108 Mahr, Greg 20; daemon dream 9, 11 – 13; midlife crisis 11; psychiatry path 10 – 11 manifest content, of dream 152 masculine archetypes 26 Maya (goddess) 106 Mayer, Elizabeth 64 McCarley, R. W. 143 McCartney, Paul 37 – 38 meals and nourishment 175 “meaningless” dream 33, 97 Medial (mediumistic woman) 26 melatonin 18 memory consolidation 143 “memory place cells” 128 men: archetypes 26 – 27; dreams 25 Mendeleev, Dmitri 37, 40, 133 Mentalese 133 – 134 Meyer, Stephanie 37, 41 midlife crisis 19 – 20, 27 Miller, Henry 23 Miller, June 23 mind map 133 – 134, 134 mnemonic induction 46 modern psychology 2 money 172 Monotheism 106 mood stabilizers 10 Moser, Edvard 133 Mother archetypal role 26 Munch, Edvard 164 – 165 Murad (Turkish Sultan) 102 – 103 muscle paralysis, of REM sleep 124 – 125 Myer – Briggs personality test 158 nafsaani (dreams within person) 100 Narrative Expansion and Affective/ Archetype Reintegration (NEAR) model 145, 188 – 189 narrative(s) 145, 188; analysis 5, 139 – 140; and brain 136 – 137, 140; scientific 4, 137; theory 137 – 138; therapy 138 – 139 National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) 17 NDEs see near-death experiences (NDEs) near-death experiences (NDEs) 59

NEAR model see Narrative Expansion and Affective/Archetype Reintegration (NEAR) model Nebuchadnezzar (Babylonian king) 95, 96, 98 – 99 neurophysiology, of dreams 45 – 46, 121 New Age religion 91, 158 New Testament 77 Nietzsche, F. 106 Nightmare on Elm Street 70 nightmares 67 – 72, 68, 146; defined 68; Hmong deaths 69 – 70, 132; IRT 70 – 71; learning and treating 70; purpose 70; understanding messages 71 – 72 NIMH see National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Nin, Anais 22, 23 – 25, 28, 190 Nolte, T. 144 non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep 121, 143 numbers 174 Oedipus complex 23, 132 old friends 171, 180 Origen 77 ouroboros 38 oxytocin 137 Pagels, Elaine 81 Pagels, Heinz 81 – 82, 86 Paglia, Camille 93 Panksepp, J. 18, 125 Pargament, K. I. 91 Pauli, Wolfgang 65 Paul the Apostle 83 – 84 perception 53 Peter Brueghel the Younger 168 phallic symbols 152 phenomenology 90 pheromones 162 philosophy 89 – 91 Plato 54 Poe, Edgar Allen 131, 133, 134 – 135, 164 Polytheism 106 – 107 powerlessness 71, 138 prediction 61, 144 premonitions 63, 65 primary process thinking 39

196 Index Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine, The 2 Procula’s dream 83 Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud) 158 prophetic dreams 61 – 63, 97, 128; Eryl Mai’s dream 66; and scientism 63 – 64; synchronicity 64 – 65; telepathic dreams 65 Proust, M. 162 psychedelic drugs 49 – 56; bad trips 50 – 51; entheogens and creativity 52; Jacob’s Ladder 51 – 52; “Your brain on drugs” 52 – 54 psychedelic state: and REM sleep 52 – 53; vs. dream state 53 psychedelic trips 38, 51 psychiatry 2, 9 – 10, 157 Psycho (film) 158 psychoanalysis 153 – 154 psychology 89 psychopathology 144 psychotherapy 19 Quiet (Cain) 3 rahmaani (dreams from Allah) 100 Ramanujan, Srinivasa 105 – 106, 108 Rank, Otto 23 rapid eye movement (REM) sleep 19, 121, 146; in animals 124 – 125; creativity 39 – 40; discovery 122 – 123, 123; evolution of 125 – 126; neuroscience of 126 – 128; and nightmares 68; and psychedelic states 52 – 53; special features 124 – 125 “rat in a maze” dream 121, 128 – 129 Raven, The (Poe) 131, 134 – 135, 164 Real schism 132 Red Book, The (Jung) 11, 47 – 48 Reid, Thomas 47 reintegration 145, 189 relativism 133 relaxing 185 religion 88 – 89, 91 – 92; see also specific religions Remembrance of Things Past (Proust) 162

REM sleep see rapid eye movement (REM) sleep repetition compulsion see nightmares Richards, Keith 37 Ricoeur, P. 137 Rig Veda 107 Rilke, Rainer Marie 33, 57 Roehrs, Timothy 18 Rohr, Richard 32 Rosenthal, Norman 17 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 170 Roth, Thomas 18 Rubin, Joel 51 – 52 Rumi 100, 102 – 104, 103 Sacred Way (Athens to Eleusis) 54 SAD see seasonal affective disorder (SAD) SBNR see spiritual but not religious (SBNR) schools 168 – 169 Schredl, M. 182 Schur, Max 155 scientific narrative 4, 137 scientism 2, 63 – 64, 88 – 90 Scream, The (painting) 164, 165 seasonal affective disorder (SAD) 17 seasonal cycles 17 “seeking” system 127 Seerin, Ibn 100, 102 self-awareness 44, 53, 185 sexual abuse 22 sexual intimacy dreams 176 sexual pleasure 25 shadows 169 – 170 Shakespeare 146 shaytaani (dreams from Satan) 100 Shelley, Mary 37 sleep cycles 122 sleep habits 32 sleep medicine 2, 11, 19 sleep physiology 71 snakes 172 Solms, Mark 18 spirit guides 180 spiritual but not religious (SBNR) 91 spiritual distress 32 spirituality 91 Stevenson, Robert Louis 41

Index  197 St. Jerome 75 – 76, 78, 79 – 80, 132 Stockholm fire 88 Stoker, Bram 37 Stoller, Robert 64 Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome (SUNDS) 69 Sufism, and dreams 102 – 104 Summa Theologica (Aquinas) 79 SUNDS see Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome (SUNDS) Swedenborg, Emanuel 87, 92 – 93 swords and knives 174 Symbolic schism 132 synchronicity 14 – 21, 64 – 65, 111 Talmud, The 95, 96 – 97 Taoism 110 – 111 telepathic dreams 63, 65 Tenzin Wangyal 113, 115 – 117 Teresa of Avila 26 “Theta” oscillations 143 third-gender individuals 25 Tibetan Buddhism 46, 113, 115 Tower of Babel 168 towers/high places 167 transcendence 53 transference 153 transportation 174 – 175 trauma 44, 71, 172 Trauma and the Soul (Kalsched) 171 – 172 Tubman, Harriet 65 Twilight series 37, 41 – 42

urban areas 169 Vajrayana 113 Vatican City 83 Vidal, Gore 23 Vietnam War, drug experiments 52 virtual space 40 vivid dreams 57 – 59 Vulgate (Jerome) 78 wahy (dreams of Prophets) 100 wake-induced lucid dreaming (WILD) 46 water settings 167 Western science 88 – 89 Wheelwright, Jane 57, 59 WILD see wake-induced lucid dreaming (WILD) Wilhelm, Richard 111 Wilson, Edmund 23 wise old men/women 171 witches 172 Wittgenstein 90 Wolff, Toni 26 women: archetypes 26; dreams 25 Yesterday (song) 37, 39 yoga practices 46 yourchineseastrology.com 111 Zak, Paul 136 Zhou Gong see Duke of Zhou Zhuang Zi 86, 111