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.
