=kit007.txt

KIT 7 - Dreams

Throughout the States, people are getting together in groups to
discuss and interpret their dreams.  This is a symptom of our
times.  People have become more realistic than before and seek to
harvest aspects and dimensions of ourselves that we know nothing
about or prefer to overlook.  They sometimes send a pressing
message across the borderline from the uncharted reaches of the
unconscious into the pigeonholes of our mental constructs.  These
have a disquieting effect upon our projects and challenge our
rationalizations, for the unconscious harbors an entirely
different mode of thinking from the usual, encompassing wholeness. 
Here, that which is deemed as incongruous by the middle range of
thinking of our day consciousness, acquires an abstruse
meaningfulness.

Interpreting these with our commonplace logic, particularly
considering the temptation of tendentious thinking, may prove
dangerously misleading.  Freud's attempt to haul unconscious
elements to the surface is not without its drawback.  A deep sea
fish emerging at the surface would be bloated and could not
feature or function any more according to its nature.  Therefore,
I would discourage the layman from playing the apprentice
sorcerer, and leave the skillful task of interpreting dreams to
the trained professional therapist.  However, we have a more
constructive recourse:  dream therapy or, better still, promoting
creativity in our dreams as a complement to diagnosis.  I am
referring to a technique explored and applied in Vedanta and also
Sufism.  Rather than draw unconscious motivations to the surface
of the conscious, one thrusts the light of consciousness into the
nebulous unconscious depths.

One of the many activities of our sleep life is simply digesting
or regurgitating the residual impressions of the day.  No doubt
the unconscious can accomplish most of this work more efficiently
than conscious volitional action.  In like fashion, the motions
required to type or play the piano or drive a car are automated. 
Nature always seems to find a way of insuring an economy of means. 
But where one makes a mistake, one has to deautomatize the process
in order to imprint a correction.  Clearly this could be applied
to the dreaming process.  But could there be a way of exercising
an impact on one's dreams?

How about reverie?   We call reverie the state in which we are
suspended on the threshold between diurnal (day) consciousness and
paradoxical sleep (sleep with dreams).  We know that if we shift
slightly into sleep, we have no impact on our imagery and if we
slip back into diurnal consciousness, we have some handle and
incentive in the exercise of our imagination.  We can steer it. 
Depending upon how close we are to the threshold, we may enjoy
having more sway over the flow of imagery or find ourselves
overwhelmed and willy-nilly invaded by it, not unlike steering a
ship in a heavy sea.

Nidra Yoga is the art of maintaining oneself at the threshold,
which means that one is keeping the door open between the diurnal
and the sleep state.  One remembers one's daytime mode of thinking
and how things appeared when one was conscious of the material
world, while on the other hand, one is aware of one's dreams.  By
maintaining the continuity of the Ariadnian thread of
consciousness, one is able not only to remember the pictures
projected in one's dreams, but the multi-dimensional personality
that one assumed.  What is more, one is able to influence one's
dreams and so sow seeds in the deep recesses of one's personality
that will eventually germinate in a tangible way.  This would
offer a means of fostering creativity under cover of the
unconscious, whereas our conscious mind would have discounted the
possibility of developing superlative qualities and therefore be
blocked.

A new technique teaches people to learn languages while listening
to music.  The language curriculum is imbedded in the music
subliminally so that the pupil is never consciously aware of it;
yet when the same words are said aloud, they are recognized. 
Besides residual impressions of day experience, one may recognize
several tiers in the dream world:  unconscious or unavowed fears
or wishes, features about oneself that the unconscious seems to
aim at pointing out or resolutions of problems one failed to see. 
Probing into the elusive layers of our dream world, we will
discover vestiges of impressions that tell us of other spheres of
reality in which our psyche is immersed, but yield a cryptic hint
of what they could be like.  Among these, one may spotlight the
emergent process of self-creativity.  To grasp this eruption of
unconscious elements, it is useful to intuit the way the soul sees
itself projected in our personality, rather than try to glean
something of the nature of the soul as viewed from the vantage
point of our personal self-image. 

Under the label "soul",  I earmark that (or those) little known
dimension(s) of our psyche which appear(s) as more stable than the
better known aspects of our psyche - perhaps even eternal.  The
secret of effecting this is first in reversing time, then
inverting time; that is, first a retroactive mode of thinking,
recalling reminiscence further and further back in time, then
shifting one's thinking into a dimension of time not generally
understood.  One shifts the setting of one's consciousness from
thinking of events viewed in their sequence to grasping the know-
how gleaned from the events and deleting from one's mind the
contingent circumstances.  This is called in computer language,
"input processing:"  the substrate of the experience is
eternalized as information.  One likes to refer to these levels of
our being (and of the universe) to account for such phenomena
transpiring in dreams as premonition, hunches, visions of
celestial beings, or landscapes of the soul described by
numberless mystics.  These impressions of a non-verbal, pre-
logical, spaceless and timeless nature, appear to evidence an a-
priori level of knowledge, where the soul grasps archetypes whose
exemplifications constitute the subject matter of our middle-range
mental activities.  Here is the level of meditative activity
taking place in dreams. 

The parallel between the cryptic psychic activity conducted in
sleep and meditation has been painstakingly elucidated in the
Mandukya Upanishad and descriptions of visionary experiences left
by Sufis viz Shahabuddin Suhrawardhi (maqrul), Avicenna, Najmuddin
Kubra, Farid-du-Din Attar, and numerous others.  Imagery presents
the advantage of bypassing conceptualization.  The self-actuating
formative processes originating in the deep sleep state transpire
as special forms in the dream state.  The dream process projects
aspects of one's self into landscapes, and even into beings who
appear as other than oneself in the dream scenario (sometimes
animals, even cars or planes).  Inversely, the prevalent
circumstances are sometimes so much part of one's self-image that
one fails to detect the fact that these are circumstances
impacting one from the psychological environment.  Hence the
ambiguity of our dream experience calling for skilled expertise. 
Reverting to therapy or creativity rather than diagnosis, one may
train oneself to work with these landscapes, even as an artist
might be given an unfinished painting to complete or even alter
drastically.

How does one proceed?   Let us remember that all creativity is a
crossover between 'listening in' to the birthing process of the
universe emerging in oneself and the way one customizes this
universal trend by dint of one's own incentive, inventiveness and
exploratory drive.  An example of this would be found in a group
of musicians improvising.  If each were expressing his/her
fantasy, without listening to the others, it would result in a
cacophony.  If each were to toe the line to a leader, they would
not be personally creative.  But if each would be sensitive to the
overall mood of the group as such, and at the same time contribute
personally to the richness of the whole, they would be
demonstrating a creative model.

Now, let us see how this would apply to working creatively with
the human personality.  It would involve one thrusting the
searchlight of consciousness into the dark unconscious - like
Orpheus - to intercept the tender shoots of qualities still in the
formative process before they emerge into the personality as
idiosyncrasies.  Then reverse the process and apply one's will to
auto-suggest to the unconscious will to shape these as one would
like to have them, rather as one might cultivate flowers or breed
animals by bending the formative process so that they depart from
their state in the wild.  This is culture:  where the human
creativity acts as an extension of the divine creativity, carrying
it a few steps further in the evolutionary drive.

In order to effect the first step, one needs to learn how to turn
one's consciousness within, as it were - discover an inverted
space.

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