Born to dance

Dance

I’m walking in town tonight. There was rain in the day, the streets are still glossed, and puddled in places. I pass an alleyway, warmly lit, and there I spy a small group of people, waiting outside a doorway. I’m curious and venture down the alley to see what’s going on. Normally, I’m afraid of the darker places in town, wary of the night creatures who, I’m told, stalk them, but there’s an air of charm about this group, something in the ease of their posture, and the soft cadence of their conversation. Others arrive, and the numbers swell. They are a polished crowd, well groomed, and fragrant. Some men wear suits and bow-ties, others wear silk shirts. The ladies wear shimmery dresses, and stockings.

The door opens, and we are washed by a cosy fug which escapes the warm interior, and dissipates into the cool of the night. There is music – an infectious rhythm, part jazz, part tango. It takes hold of one’s hip and has them swaying as if by remote control. Inside, the people dance, while a man plays piano with a magician’s skill. The waiting crowd enter, greedy for the vibe. I remain where I am, longing to join them, but I am too casually dressed. I have not shaved, and my shirt is unironed. It would be good to dance again, but I’m a mess and these are no longer my people.

I’m dreaming, of course.

So many metaphors to explore here, so many thoughts and feelings to unpick! It harkens a little to the past, visiting a dance hall in town by night, long ago. Dance, music, rhythm. I remember, it was the greatest of joys. One transcended everything, at least for the duration of the music.

Normality? Yes, the dream harkens back to a time of what was once normal, to the well groomed, fragrant crowds at their ease, seeking transcendence. Then there is the dark, and the cackling night creatures, real enough and ever-present. But they and their attendant, multifarious sufferings, are held at a safe distance by the soft cadence of a greater number of the sweetly voiced.

There is nostalgia then, or perhaps more specifically, there is the realisation of the magnitude of change, from the way we were then to the way we are now. There is a sense, too, that we no longer have access to the rhythm of the dance that drives us, or at any rate we’re no longer smart enough to gain admittance to that particular world, to the world of smooth, waxed dance-floors and infectious music. In such a place one does not step, one glides. And one does not move, one flies.

It’s true, I’ve not been ironing my shirts. I’m thinking to save electricity. But a clean, ironed shirt was once also normal. This is something else the dream is showing us, a parade of sorts, but not out of vanity, more out of respect for the company one is keeping. There is also a dignity in it. Ah, dignity! Now, that rings a bell. Let’s explore that one.

As I ponder the dream, I recall a quote I heard the previous day about how we are no longer in the business of heating our homes, but “heating our selves”. We have no longer the energy, the spirit needed to afford our own dignity, as in the metaphorical dignity of a warm home. We have bowed too long to the pressures of the manifest world, the world whose will is to strip away all dignity. So we turn the heating off and sit in a sleeping bag, or something equally grotesque. It’s an allegory for the degree to which normality has shifted, the way things have grown narrow, the multitude of ways the music, both the metaphorical and the literal, have grown faint for us.

Oh, I know,… it may just be I am the downhill side of sixty now, and slightly deaf, that the twenty-something’s can still hear, can still ride any storm, still dance to the point of rapture, and thumb their noses at the world of their parents for disgrace it has become. Like many my own age, have I merely traded my Mojo for carpet slippers and a keyboard, and dreams of a past that never actually existed? And yet,…

There is this place I pass in town, a flight of steps, and an old weathered sign with an arrow pointing optimistically upwards, to a disused, dusty attic room. “Dance”, it says. And I wonder. Shall we ever? A clean, pressed shirt, a lady in stockings, skirt split to the thigh? And we shall dance again? Shall we dance like nobody’s watching?

Without the music, without the dance, the world simply is, and what it is, is pointless. To be born into such a world is surely a mistake, for all there is is the blind, grasping will. It manifests through everything, including us if we allow it, and its name is suffering. Without the moderating influence of our desire for transcendence, that’s all we shall ever know. But we were not born to merely live. We were born to dance.

Thanks for listening.

Beautifully acted, and dramatically cut, and the line: “Be this alive, tomorrow,”

But the prize for dance goes to this couple: Be this alive, always:

Header photo courtesy of Pixabay on Pexels.com

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Busy feet

On dreams, and facing down the scallywags of the past

The philosopher Ouspensky reminds us the act of studying our dreams changes them. They take on a form that acknowledges the fact they are observed and alter their contents accordingly. This has also been noticed by the psychoanalysts. There is a difference in the way analysts of the Freudian and Jungian schools interpret dreams, which would seem to make a nonsense of the whole business, but for the fact those under Freudian analysis experience Freudian dreams, and those under Jungian analysis experience Jungian dreams. The unconscious psyche, to which dreams and other altered states are our only clue, appears to respond intelligently. This suggests dreams are more than the disjointed garbage of a sleeping brain. There is an intelligence behind them. But anyone who dreams regularly, already knows this.

I circle the literature from time to time, on the lookout for something new that will explain more of the nature of dreaming. But I find this is well trodden ground, that most new sources are based largely on the old, that what there is to know, or what it is possible to know about dreams, and dreaming, has already been written.

My most valued sources include the psychoanalysts, mainly Jung, and Hillman. Then there are the writers who were dreamers – J B Priestly especially, Ouspensky also, and the time theorist JMW Dunne. Less familiar, and less accessible, are the Tibetan Buddhist texts for which I have a great respect, but there seems a gulf of culture and language separating me from them. I have gleaned the occasional gem, however, including how to protect oneself from the night ghouls that occasionally bother us. Of the philosophers, the idealists are best suited to this territory, though the only one to have saved me from the infuriating trap of solipsism is Bernado Kastrup, to whose clear explanation of analytical idealism, and his enlightened reading of Schopenhauer, I am grateful for the leg up. Of the contemporary, western, new-age shamanistic scene, I find Robert Moss particularly engaging. On the other hand, the purely scientific literature tends to be of the dismissive sort, which I find disappointing. The exception is the Lucid Dream research of Stephen Laberge, though of lucid dreaming itself I am not an adept, and am instinctively cautious of treating the dream realm as a playground. It is a strange land, and, as in all strange lands, we should tread lightly.

My own dream life has faded. I trace it to the acquisition of the first smartphone, around a decade ago. On waking, the phone is now immediately the centre of attention. I read the news, I do a chess puzzle, I do the daily Wordle. Before you know it you’re down the rabbit hole, and anything you might have dreamed has already slipped through the neck of the hourglass, the grains of any possible dream-meaning, lost to memory and cognition. Not many dreams can compete with the noise of the material world intruding before our feet have even touched the carpet.

But sometimes reading about dreams and dreaming is all it takes to break the habit, that and installing a journal app on the smartphone, on which to dab such dream snippets as I can remember, before current affairs, chess, and Wordle make their demands.

Sometimes I can capture no more than a few brief snatches, other times I remember more, but, in general, I think the dreams are returning. I remember how I once scoured them for evidence of precognition, as per Dunne. I remember how I once dismantled them for meaning as per the analysts, how I once sought the lucid experience, as per LaBerge. My footsteps were heavy in those days. Indeed, I could easily say I trampled all over my dreams, when I think the thing is to tread lightly, as per Hillman, or at any rate just settle back and enjoy them. If they’ve anything serious to say, they’ll say it, and you’ll know. Not all dreams are the same in tone or depth, and you know them by the way they feel. With important dreams, you wake not only with a memory of the dream, but also a definite feeling. A dream that triggers an emotion is not one that is easily ignored, and it requires nothing more by way of analysis than that we do it the honour of dwelling upon it as best we can, but without tearing it apart.

As for actual dreams, Last night I was walking along a road in the village I grew up in. It was an area I never knew very well, on account of it leading to what we always believed were the rougher estates. A kid from my end would only get roughed up there by the gangs of territorial scallywags. Anyway, of a sudden, there I was, and much to my surprise it was a pleasant area, rural, with a deeply bucolic air about it. I was so taken aback, I chided myself for never having had the courage to explore this way before. I mean, just look what I’d been missing!

I rounded a bend and found myself in a scene that could have been from the sixteenth century, with ancient white-washed buildings, all in perfect repair. It was like a sprawling farm, but it also had the air of something monastic, about it. And there was this guy, in monk’s robes. He was working a patch of land with a hoe. As I drew level with him, he asked me kindly to mind my step, and take care of the moss on the path. I asked him if it was all right, my being there. Oh, yes, it was perfectly all right, he said. I had simply to mind the moss. The way was soft, and easily worn away by busy feet.

Through tall pines, I could see a tower with a red-tiled roof. It had a clock, but I could not see the time. The time was held aloft for decoration, but, actually, not as important as we ordinarily believe it to be. The sky was a deep blue, with puffy clouds, the light was honey-coloured, and beautiful. I was thinking I could spend hours here with the camera, checking out perspectives. For now though, many of the ways I might have explored were impassible due to floodwaters from heavy rains, but I had the feeling these would subside, as the season matured, and I could return. I would find my way around all right. I looked back at the scene, half farm, half monastery, whitewashed walls, red-tiled roof,… there was something numinous about it, vivid contrasts, and its details easily recalled. This place exists, I’m sure of it, if not in material reality, then as a fixture in a realm more ethereal, at least in the symbolic sense.

I was welcome there. We all are. Not all ways are open at once, but with patience they will be. Time is not important. Above all, we should tread lightly, for the way is soft, and easily worn out by feet that are too busy. Oh, and we need not fear getting duffed up by gangs of scallys. Those were just stories put up to frighten away the children.

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A boat into the west

I’ll take the ticking of my father’s watch

And the tales my mother told,

And I shall pack them safe with fragrances,

In the pocket of my soul.

There shall be sandalwood and cinnamon,

For days beneath the sun,

While for the moon I’ll ride on lavender,

Until the dreaming has begun.

And there I shall encamp myself,

In a meadow by the sea

And from the shore I shall take pebbles,

As round as round can be.

And I shall plant them in that dreaming earth,

A dreaming circle wide,

And wait upon the morning,

And the coming of my guide.

I shall know him by his wisdom,

And the feeling I am blessed.

Then we shall wait upon the sunset

And a boat, into the west.

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Can’t sleep? Can’t dream? Ask the English.

Dreaming – Jozef Israels 1860

The way of the West does not suit the dreaming life. Indeed, we do everything we can to suppress any intrusion of unconscious influence into waking experience. Instead, we work, we party, we spend long hours in front of our devices, numbing our minds with junk images, junk tasks, and junk narratives. When a dream does pierce the blank wall of our materialism, we dismiss it. It was just a dream, we tell ourselves. But what if that dream could tell us something useful we didn’t already know? It would make sense to listen, wouldn’t it?

When the analytical psychologist, Carl Jung visited Africa in 1925, he was interested in studying the dreams of isolated tribesmen, but to his surprise he was told by a medicine man he didn’t dream any more. After the Colonial powers came, he said, everything changed, “that dreams were no longer needed, because the English knew everything.”*

That a people could use their dreams to guide their lives seems primitive to the rational mind. Yet anyone who has sat down with a big dream, say the morning after they have dreamed it, cannot help but be affected by it. A big dream can colour the entire day and provide an emotional undertone that’s hard to shake. Some dreams we remember all our lives. That they can be so powerful suggests that to dismiss them is to lose our connection with important aspect of living.

The art of dreaming is not taught. You have to listen to other dreamers, read their books, sort the wheat from the chaff, and just do the best you can. But it’s inevitable, when we do stumble into a dream, we no longer have the sophistication we once had to deal with them properly. It is difficult to accept for a start we did not create the dream ourselves, that we are the dream’s guest, that the dream is the landscape on which we walk, its characters the fragmentary but autonomous denizens who can help or hinder us on our way. Only by accepting this can we play our proper part as pilgrim and, come morning, reflect usefully on the experience.

It’s natural for one interested in dreaming to want to push the boundaries. To whit, the Rolls Royce of dreaming is said to be the lucid dream where we enter the night-land fully conscious. Then we can make of it a playground, and all the characters we meet there our play-things. But my intuitions warn against the lucid path, and I consider myself fortunate I have never been able to dream lucidly.

Enthusiastic reports from lucid dreamers tell us we can take the dream over and have a hell of a time, flying about and having the best sex ever with whomever we can dream up. But that’s like colonizing the dream world, and then, like the bushmen in Jung’s day, our dreams become mere husks and psychologically useless, because the Ego, like the Englishman, knows everything.

Still, that the lucid dreamers have established such doors are open to human experience suggests a greater role for the dream than we give credit for, but we should tread carefully. The dream is no place for the crass, hedonistic tourist. But if we have lost our way with dreaming, or worse, if we have lost our way with sleeping, the techniques of the lucid dreamers can help enormously.

We close our eyes. What do we see? Do we see nothing? Look again.

The darkness behind closed eyes is not complete. It is grainy, speckled with colour. There are pale areas, like clouds, and they drift in the midnight blue. Deprived of visual stimulation, the mind idles with pattern. But if we can focus the inner eye upon them, the patterns will take on more recognizable forms. We do not willingly imagine these forms into being. They are entirely spontaneous and will show themselves if we allow it. They will be indistinct at first but, with practice, we can develop an inner vision that is capable of staggering clarity and detail.

At some point, say the lucid dreamers, the entire field of vision becomes active and detailed, and we can simply step into it at the point consciousness falls away. This has never worked for me. I am asleep long before this happens, and that’s fine. I prefer to lose my self-awareness and be of the dream rather than consciously in it. But as a way into sleep when the mind is otherwise resistant, this is a powerful method. I also find the dreams more vivid, and more easily remembered on waking.

We are alive at a time of deepening world crises. Without the counsel of dreams our mental well-being depends upon whether we really do trust the English to know everything. And if not, then where do we turn? We each have access to a wise, inner voice, through our dreams, but it’s been forgotten, and it’s rusty. It has forgotten how to speak to us, as we have forgotten how to listen. Few are interested anyway, and willingly join the downward spiral of our culture, presided over by the joker archetypes, and all the strutting demi-gods of chaos.

Chaos is inevitable, but it’s also a bad place to be. It is an indeterminate period of transition, and with no guarantee it’s leading us to a better place. When the ground is shifting daily, and reality is frozen out in a blizzard of lies, the rational mind is of no use to us any more. Only a keen native instinct, born of the dreaming life can tell us where best to place our feet, so we’re not constantly unbalanced by whatever damned thing is coming next.

*Jung – Memories, dreams, reflections (Kenya and Uganda)

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On the eve of May

Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.com

It’s said we’re dreaming more. This may be true, but I suspect not for everyone – just those no longer woken to the call of the alarm, no longer rushing out into the dawn-light for work.

Waking should be a gentle thing, granting time for us to reel in the dreams we all dream every night. When we respect the dreams this way, they lend the day their feeling-tones, adding another layer to one’s experience of life. Except, I read it’s anxiety dreams and nightmares we’re reporting, and that’s not so good, though understandable under the circumstances. I’m perhaps more fortunate but my dreams seem kinder.

Last night, I took a taxi into Manchester. I knew the driver, though I knew it was only the dream telling me I knew him. I rode with his friend, a beautiful and well-dressed woman with a serene disposition, who never spoke. The three of us visited a cafe-bar. It surprised me that it was open. Perhaps then, this wasn’t Manchester after all.

The feeling of the dream was optimistic. It was something about my companions, but it was also in the sheer human buzz of the bar. Outside, the streets were lit as if for a festival, the shops were open, the pavements busy. Everyone looked prosperous, and happy.

I sat with my new friends, drinking coffee. They seemed other-worldly, but wise and courteous. I felt perfectly at ease, confident again of my own future in their company. There was a brief, anxious moment when I sneezed. I froze then, expecting the whole of the bar to be looking daggers at me. But no one cared. No one noticed. It was okay to sneeze now, to be oneself again.

Then I was alone. It was dark, and I was walking home along country lanes by the light of a head-torch. It’s beam illuminated the way, bright as day. The meadows beyond the hedgerows remained mysterious, but the power of the light gave me confidence. Like a third eye, it granted the power of sight and light, whichever way I turned my head.

In the small hours of the morning, I came down to a sleepy dell where there was a public house. It was open, and there were women at the bar icing cakes. There was no beer, but plenty of tea. I sat at a table with a fine-China cup and saucer, Earl Grey tea, slice of lemon, and a jam bun. Everyone was smiling, all strangers, amiable, chatting.

When I woke it was to the drone of a neighbour’s chain-saw. It was a little after eight. I made coffee, sat a while in bed. I have bought some industrial grade EP5-standard ear plugs for such eventualities now, and popped them in. They’re small, comfortable to wear, and block out everything except one’s own heartbeat. They are used in the most extreme environments. Thus, while my neighbour doggedly reduced logs to sawdust, I drifted back into a semi-conscious state. I was seeking out the threads of the dream, and found myself walking again, this time across the moors at dusk on the eve of May.

There, I came across a woman, dressed in a ball-gown and seated primly by the wayside. She was of the Faery, plain as day. I knew because the dream was telling me so, reminding me also it was not a good time for mortals to be about – the eve of May. Or it might be auspicious. It all depends. On what? Who knows? This was the day and the time the Faery reserve for themselves after all. Only the most profane among mortals would not know that. And they would pay the price. According to lore, the Faery are a strange lot, sometimes helpful, sometimes cruel but always easily offended.

It was too late to choose another way and it worried me that to surprise the Faery is certain to get their temper up. So I doffed my cap in respect, made ready to give her a wide berth. It’s the best one can do with the Faery. That and hope they’re in a good mood.

She rewarded my respect with a smile, tossed me an uncut diamond the size of a robin’s egg. It was for luck she said. I understood this was not for me, personally, more for all the mortals, like me. It would bring peace, and prosperity, she said, unless, I was ever to sell it. Then it would bring only a transient wealth, and eternal misfortune thereafter. It was for me to work out where I could hide it, so others never found it. Because if they found it, selling it is the very first thing they would do. And then we were done.

So I woke a second time, now with a lovely, rounded though enigmatic sequence of dreams to ponder. My neighbour had finished making sawdust by mid-morning, so I settled out in the garden with notebook and coffee. It was a beautiful day, warm, sunny, and everything seemed charged with an aura of optimism.

My neighbour cranked up his beat-box, kept it up all day – Hi way of celebrating VE day, I suppose. I reached for the EP5s, settled down to the beat of my heart, put pencil to paper and reeled back the dream. All I have left to do now is work out what the diamond symbolizes, and why I should hide it from the hands of the profane.

 

 

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Dreaming of the dead

Unless we’re keen on recalling our dreams, they leak away on waking. But even if we teach ourselves to hold onto them for long enough to make a note of them, I find most still fade from memory eventually, so when we come to read back on them months or years afterwards, we have no recollection of ever having had these extraordinary dream-experiences.

Thus it was I did not recall dreaming, in April 2011, of a long business trip and winding up in a bland corporate hotel, climbing the stairs to my room – unremarkable, except on one of the landings I encountered a girl I used to know at school.

Our relationship is a long story, romantic, but more one of missed opportunity than happy endings. She was sweet natured, and bright and I was in awe of her but we never dated, and for some years after leaving school, it was something I regretted never acting upon. I last saw her in the summer of ’77, and at the time of my dream, some thirty four years later, I had not thought of her in a long while. We’d both married, had kids and lived lives entirely oblivious of one another.

We did not interact much in the dream, other than to acknowledge each other as if we were familiar colleagues, used to seeing each other every day – a smile, a nod, and that was it. But the encounter did trigger a powerful welling up of emotion, sufficient for me to write about it on waking, and to wonder where on earth it had come from after all that time.

Unknown to me, she had died, suddenly, two years before. I didn’t learn of this until much later, in 2014, when, by chance, I came upon her obituary in the online archives of a local newspaper. The news of her death affected me deeply, that one so lovely from my past was no longer with us, but why she should have popped up in my dream is a mystery. More startling though was this morning, reading through my dream journal and realising that I’d dreamed of her.

Dream figures are either strangers or familiar. But the familiar ones tend to be people we interact with on a daily basis – friends, colleagues, family. The strangers are more archetypal. People we have known in the distant past and not seen or heard of for decades, such characters hold a special significance, and are most striking in their linking us back to the earliest of our days.

I have always believed dreams use these various avatars as characters in a mythic play, which can then be interpreted for personal meaning. While I still hold this to be the case, a deeper reading of psychoanalytic theory suggests the phenomenon is more nuanced, that dreams are windows on a wider psychic life that goes on even when we are unaware of it, rather than simply nightly shows put on for our personal development. But how broad the realm of the dream is, I don’t know, whether it’s a purely personal thing, or if it takes place in a collective psychical field, and can encompass the dreams of others, or indeed if the essence of departed personalities can seek us out.

What’s puzzling is there are people I have known all my life and lost, relationships that ended mid-sentence, so to speak and with whom I would have welcomed an exchange of post-mortem understanding, and fare-well. But these close ones have never sought me out, which makes me wonder why this girl felt the need to reacquaint herself in passing with an old face like mine from her schooldays. If it’s true and she did, she learned the breadth and the depth of me in that brief encounter, because we cannot hide our selves in dreams.

Do we dream of the dead? Well yes we do, but are they truly the discarnate essence of the dead, or just thought forms of the way we remember them, even though we have not thought of them for a long time. It’s impossible to say for sure of course, but one cannot help wondering.

And either way, it’s a mystery.

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When dreams disturb

I was about to spend my first night in an idyllic holiday cottage by the sea. I had arrived weary after two hundred miles of roaring roads, with broken air-con and in a steam-heat that had sucked the energy from my bones. But as I took a brief stroll around my new home for the week I knew I was in for a treat: a quaint old harbour, a clean sea, a good weather forecast and porpoises leaping in the bay. What more could one ask?

I went to bed early, looking forward to a refreshing night’s sleep, but I found it hard to drift off. This sometimes happens after a long journey and a strange bed, but when I did finally eventually slip away, I was assailed by horrific dreams of violence, torture and mutilation. This was not normal, my dreams being for the most part benign and enigmatic. I wondered then where such powerfully gruesome imagery might have come from. Dreams borrow from waking life, but I don’t watch that type of movie or play the computer games that might contain it, and my actual waking life is as tame as it gets.

It was a mystery, then.

According to one theory I was sleeping in a psychical space still contaminated by the previous guest, that I had literally laid my head upon the same pillow and immersed myself in a persisting cloud of fear and knife-slashing violence. The more rational modes of thinking will not allow such ideas of course, and mostly I resist them, but the more mystical forms will and since I was desperate for sleep, I was prepared to entertain them. For help in such situations, we do no better than turn to Tibetan Buddhism, and the yoga of dreams and sleep.

These teachings are concerned with cultivating a lucid awareness during the dream; effectively waking up in the dream, and becoming consciously aware of ourselves within it. This is not something I’m capable of, but the subject interests me as do all studies on dreams and dreaming. Lucidity has been verified by experiment in sleep laboratories, and it seems many of us are indeed capable of it spontaneously. What we do with it varies. In Western culture, according to the books I’ve read by self styled oneironauts, it boils down to wanting to fly, or having sex with strangers and other fantastical, escapist adventures, in other words to use the dream-space as a kind of narcissistic playground. In Tibetan Buddhism however, the goal is to achieve a state of meditation, in the dream. Also, if we are able to become fully aware of ourselves in the dream space, the Buddhists say we are more likely to become fully awake in the awakened state as well. This is something that takes a great deal of discipline and training, but other aspects of the technique are more accessible to the lay person, such as how we prepare the ground for lucid awareness in the first place.

Obviously if we are to meditate in the dream, we need a clean psychical space, untroubled by demons and their drama. So, as we seek sleep, the yogis teach the cultivation of personal, protective archetypes. For a man these are most easily imagined as female warriors of extraordinary beauty and prowess. We conjure them up by a process of active imagination as we seek sleep, then deploy them around our sleep-space to watch over us. We station them in doorways, around the bed or patrolling the garden, wherever we feel a vulnerability. They are infinitely patient and devoted to our protection and by their mere presence they chase away the troublesome demons as sunlight dissolves shadows, or as the presence of a cat will deter mice.

Fanciful as all this sounds, I do find the technique effective and have deployed my personal “Amazons” on many an occasion when unsettled and struggling for sleep. Sure enough, on this occasion too, my later dreams found a more even keel; the gore dissolved to something more wholesome as I sailed through into a placid space and woke refreshed, ready to begin my holiday.

I was not troubled again.

Sweet dreams.

Ref The Tibetan Yogas of Dreams and Sleep

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The life of dreams

Dreams are mysterious things, too often dismissed as unknowable, and denigrated by materialists as being little more than brain-burp, as bubbles of waste psychical-gas, rising from who knows where to break the surface of who knows what. We can forget them then; life is troubling enough, they say, without bothering our minds with the nonsense of dreams.

We all dream, every night, though we don’t always remember. Indeed some of us never remember our dreams, lending the impression we do not dream at all, which reinforces the point: if such a faculty as dream recall can so easily be lost, how can it be considered important? Well, perhaps it isn’t, unless of course the dream performs a function that can be usefully fulfilled outside of conscious awareness, that we need not be aware of the dream in order to live it, or be informed by it.

But what about those of us who do recall our dreams? not only that but treat them as a meaningful phenomenon? Dreams reveal themselves as beguiling, deceptive even mischievous yet it may be that for all our most earnest efforts we can come up with nothing more informative regarding their nature than if we were to close our minds to them completely. And yet,… there is still something about the dream that rewards us if at the very least we grant it our attention.

Recording our dreams is even better. This allows them to inform our conscious awareness more intently, night after night, revealing aspects of our lives we were perhaps unaware of. We might note then our dreams are, to a degree, coloured by waking life, even by aspects of our waking life we are at first pass unaware of. Looking then more closely at our dreams we can see echoes of our insecurities, and if we are honest about them with ourselves – by no means an easy thing – we can help our soul grow in the direction it most needs to grow. The content of dreams can also colour our waking day. So powerful they can be, they draw attention to themselves and challenge us to take stock, to own this thing we are again perhaps unconsciously avoiding.

I hesitate to describe dreams as “tools” for “self development”, for that would be to dishonour them. Certainly they have always been used in psychoanalysis, as messengers from the unconscious, but sometimes this can be confusing when we neglect to see the dream as having its own existence within us. Indeed we have only to turn our attention to them to realise they can become as much a part of life as our waking experience. Yes, we can get by well enough ignoring our dreams, but that is also to live a life lacking depth and colour.

One of the most remarkable things dreams reveals to us is that our concept of space and linear time is incomplete. We dream of something, a striking image, an event; usually such things are informed by happenings in our recent past, but occasionally a dream will show us something we have yet to encounter. The more materially minded will struggle with this concept, and if you are indeed vehemently opposed to it, I suggest you follow your instinct and dismiss it as bonkers or it will seriously disturb your frame of reference. But we have only to make a record of our dreams to find that it is so.

It needn’t be a dramatic glimpse ahead in time, indeed my own experience suggests it rarely is. For me it happens with places I’ve visited, or images I’ve seen on screens. I dream the image, the place, and then encounter it. True, by all rational reckoning, such a thing is impossible, yet it happens – admittedly not very often and never in ways that are helpful, like revealing ahead of time the number of a winning lottery ticket, But then it does happen, it’s always startling.

It’s as if a par of us has passed that particular way before, just a little ahead of ourselves, and the dream has found the imagery we encountered useful for its own purposes, careless of our line in time – as if indeed we might be following many life-lines simultaneously, some similar, others not. The writer JB Priestly made a study of this oftentimes eerie phenomenon and wrote a book on it: “Man and time”. This is a classic of the genre but he was careful to avoid drawing any rigid conclusions regarding what this might actually mean, I mean regarding the temporal structure of universe, and I shall be careful to follow his lead.

Indeed what we do with this depends very much on our nature. If we are highly egotistical and equipped with a smattering of scientific knowledge, we might want to formulate an explanation, but therein lies madness and the loss of friends as we become too shrill. The wiser ego is chastened by the phenomenon, softened and becomes more accepting of the mystery of life, though nonetheless amazed and inspired by the apparently multi-dimensional nature of consciousness that’s implied.

At best it enables us to step back when the arch-materialist pontificates and sucks out all meaning from life, leaves it as a dried up husk, because we know it’s not like that. Indeed establishing a rapport with our dreams suggests that in addition to the waking life we are aware of, we are also each engaged in some form of psychical existence beyond the bounds of space and time, whether we know it or not.

And that’s interesting.

 

 

 

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The fractured shore

In this last settled hour before the dawn,
I dig my heels to slow the flow of time,
And with each measured breath,
Embrace departing ghosts of dreams,
Until at length, and with sad smiles,
They waste into the thinning night.
And the sun rises,
Ignites first light of trembling day,
And burns to clear blue,
Somnambulant mists of sleep,
From whence souls crash their dancing flight,
Become flesh again,
Fallen in this deep befuddled mess,
Of pillow, sheet, and creaking bed.
Then here am I once more,
Slow ache of a man, rising,
Washed back upon this fractured shore,
Of life.

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The way of the dream

Don’t worry, I know there’s nothing more boring than listening to an account of someone else’s dreams. Our own dreams interest us of course, but then I think they’re meant to. Me? I take them as the surface of a sea of unconscious currents upon which the vessel of my ego floats. It’s a temperamental vessel, at times leaky, and it has a tendency to become unstable in stormy weather, skittering all over the place, lacks ballast perhaps, or sufficient steerage. Reading ones’ dreams then is like listening to the shipping forecast – you know when to venture far out into calm water, and when to put back into safe harbour.

Or maybe not. Dreams are funny things.

We seem to get by well enough if we pay them no attention. Indeed to analyse them sometimes only confuses us, and we’re taught by the materialists to forget them anyway, even though materialists have no more idea than you or I what dreams are, exactly, or if they’re important,… or not.

If we pay them no heed, we forget them on waking, perhaps even lending the impression to some they do not dream at all. But everyone dreams, every night, if we remember or not. Dreams can be embarrassing, frightening, or simply puzzling. They can have us waking with feelings of foreboding, or regret, or a deep bliss, or even with the cryptic understanding of the answer to a question we’ve not asked yet.

I suspect anything that affects our emotions should be taken seriously, because emotions influence our physical well-being too. Thus an awareness of one’s dream life can lend insight and depth to one’s waking reality. We must take care though not to allow the ego to get wound up when the dream turns its back on us, when it becomes inscrutable to analysis.

Sometimes dreams are subtly nuanced, contain no obvious nuggets of meaning, as if in our dream life we sometimes simply tread water. Sometimes there is meaning aplenty, messages we can take back with us into the waking world. And these messages will speak to our emotions, speak of balance.

To remember our dreams, we simply ask it of that inner part of ourselves before we sleep, and eventually, we rediscover the trick of keeping hold of them, otherwise they leak away on waking. But even then there is a strangeness to these kept dreams. My journal is filled with accounts of dreams I no longer remember, as if even once firmly recounted and committed to print, there is a sell by date on them, and when we read them back, perhaps a year later, it is like reading the dream of a stranger.

Not all dreams are like that, and perhaps the ones that aren’t are the ones of most importance to us, even though we do not know why.

Freud talks of dreams as wish fulfilment, and its true I have experienced many a fulfilment in the dreaming that was denied me in waking life – whether this be compensatory or not I do not know, but also what is denied in life, I spend a deal of time chasing fruitlessly in dreams as well, so the dream also mirrors, or caricatures waking reality oftentimes to a cruel degree.

On waking the ego then writhes in agony, or rails in frustration at its inability to shake some sense out of the dream world. And sometimes the ego can break in. Just as we can teach ourselves to hold on to our dreams, we can also arm ourselves with the keys to the kingdom and drop the ego into the dream world. Then we are no longer passive as the dream unfolds around us. We are conscious, as if awake in the dream.

This called lucid dreaming.

It’s relatively rare phenomenon, but commonly enough reported, though I have mixed feelings about it. It’s not a thing I’m able to indulge in, nor am I advised is it wise, like trying to see the bottom of a pool of crystal water while splashing about in it. Ego assumes dominion, like it does over everything else, bending all to its will, flying about, having sex with strangers, or worse: sex with people you would never dare proposition in waking life, and all are suddenly putty in your hands, or rather in your mind, your thoughts manifested in apparent form. Oh, the ego can have a ball all right, but then the dream itself becomes shy, loses meaning, serves not its natural purpose.

That said, I know the techniques, and sometimes ask the keeper of dreams to grant me lucidity, “if it would help”. But I have yet to be trusted, and perhaps just as well.

Jung shows us the dream as an expression of the unconscious, sometimes personal, sometimes collective. He teaches us to recognise the subtle players of the dreamscape and the masks they wear – anima, shadow, trickster, peur, senex. From a study of their manifestation in the dream over time we can chart the development of our personal myth, our very own hero’s journey to wholeness.

And then we have Hillman who likens the dream more to the underworld of classical learning, its archetypes, like Jungs, proxies of the gods. And Hillman, rather than emphasise the importance of analysis and understanding the meaning of the dream, speaks more of submitting ourselves to the experience of it, to ask not what does this dream symbol represent, for then we lose the dream. Remembered dreams are thus less messages from the unconscious as memories of preparations for death and permanent residence in that place.

Or not, maybe.

Sweet dreams.

 

 

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