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...can provide map of possibilities, with which we learn about the future that we are evolving to. They are a portal into the underworld, the land of soul. We dissolve and release our attachments through dreams. We review three primary levels of interpretation for our dreams: Freudian, Jungian, and shamanic. We examine several paths to working with and understanding dreams: analytical psychology (Carl Jung and James Hillman); neuroscience (Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili); lucid dreaming (Stephen LaBerge and Jayne Gackenbach); anthropology (Barbara Tedlock); and cognitive psychology (Harry Hunt), as well as indigenous technologies: Tibetan Dream Yoga, Senoi dream psychology, Mayan dream traditions and Kabbalistic dream practices. We utilize Viktor Frankl's concept of the "spiritual unconscious," and Roberto Assagioli's conception of the Lower Unconscious, Middle Unconscious, and the Higher Unconscious. We review ego development based on the work of Susanne R. Cook-Greuter, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Robert Kegan, Jane Loevinger, Abraham Maslow, and William Torbert. We map out the relationships between the ego and the other intrapsychic components: the persona, shadow, anima/animus, mana personalities, and Self as described by Jung. We explain the Dream Journey process as preparing to dream, preparing to share, and preparing to receive a dream-teller's dream as a midwife receives a baby.
"If you want to find your way, first close your eyes and walk in the dark" (St. John of the Cross, pp. 85-86).
The Dream Journey
Martin Prechtel: If this world were a tree, then the other world would be the roots the part of the plant we can't see, but that puts the sap into the tree's veins....
The Mayans say that the other world sings us into being. We are its song. We're made of sound, and as the sound passes through the sieve between this world and the other world, it takes the shape of birds, grass, tables--all these things are made of sound. Human beings, with our own sounds, can feed the other world in return, to fatten those in the other world up, so they can continue to sing....
Derrick Jensen: There's an old Aztec saying I read years ago: "That we come to this earth to live is untrue. We come to sleep and to dream." I wonder if you can help me understand it.
Martin Prechtel: When you dream, you remember the other world, just as you did when you were a newborn baby. When you're awake, you're part of the dream of the other world. In the "waking" state, I am supposed to dedicate a certain amount of time to feeding the world I've come from. Similarly, when I die and leave this world and go on to the next, I'm supposed to feed this present dream with what I do in that one.
Dreaming is not about healing the person who's sleeping: it's about the person feeding the whole, remembering the other world, so that it can continue. The New Age falls pretty flat with the Mayans, because, to them, self-discovery is good only if it helps you to feed the whole....
A new culture will have to develop, in which neither humans and their inventions nor God is at the center of the universe. What should be at the center is a hollow place, an empty place where both God and humans can sing and weep together (Jensen, 2001).
Dreams allow access to that hollow place, and technologies exist for exploring it and growing closer to the empty place where both God and humans can sing and weep together. We will examine several paths to working with and understanding dreams: analytical psychology (Carl Jung and James Hillman); neuroscience (Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili); lucid dreaming (Stephen LaBerge and Jayne Gackenbach); anthropology (Barbara Tedlock); and cognitive psychology (Harry Hunt). Many indigenous cultures and esoteric systems teach us how to use those technologies: Tibetan Dream Yoga, Senoi dream psychology, Mayan dream traditions and Kabbalistic dream practices, and many more. We also find useful the Heart-Centered technologies of hypnotherapy, age regression, and Kundalini meditation. What conditions allow access, and once accessed how do we best honor our discoveries? What do our dreams want from us, what do they mean, and what are we to do with them? That is the investigation we are about to undertake.
Our primary interest in this article is dreamwork. However, to understand dreams sufficiently, we must study the general states of consciousness within which dreams fall. The category of these states might be called purposeful dissociation or directed dissociation, indicating a purposeful tuning out of external sensory stimuli and a focus on internal experience. In these states there is also a simultaneous balanced activation of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system usage. Examples of such states are flow described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990), those of a mystical nature described by Stan Grof (1985), and that of the transcendent function described by Carl Jung (1958). And, of course, the dreams that occupy our sleep every night.
Dissociation, Detachment, and 'Softening of the Boundaries of the Self'
When people thoroughly enjoy themselves, when they experience the best moments in their lives, they tend to describe the experience as including concentration, absorption, deep involvement, joy, a sense of accomplishment. Csikszentmihalyi (1993) has compiled a list of eight distinct dimensions of experience common to most people. "These same aspects are reported by Hindu yogis and Japanese teenagers who race motorcycles, by American surgeons and basketball players, by Australian sailors and Navajo shepherds, by champion figure skaters and by chess masters" (p. 178). Those eight dimensions of experience are:
1. Clear goals--an objective is distinctly defined--and immediate feedback--one knows instantly how well one is doing.
2. The opportunities for acting decisively are high, and they are matched by one's perceived ability to act, i.e., personal skills.
3. Action and awareness merge: one-pointedness of mind.
4. Concentration on the task at hand; irrelevant worries and concerns temporarily disappear from consciousness.
5. A sense of potential control.
6. Loss of self-consciousness, transcendence of ego boundaries, a sense of growth and of being part of some greater entity.
7. Altered sense of time, which usually seems to pass faster.
8. Experience becomes autotelic, i.e., worth doing for its own sake.
A central key to achieving the state that Csikszentmihalyi calls flow seems to be transcendence of ego boundaries, an expansion of one's sense of self that is at the same time not self-conscious. It is, in a very real sense, not conscious but rather unconscious.
Other descriptions of such transcendent states of consciousness which allow a person to transcend everyday, ordinary reality are: transcendence beyond mundane thoughts and concerns of the day; the perception of the universe as a unified whole; a humble appreciation of everything as an interdependent aspect of that unity; a sense of profound meaning and purpose; the ability to dissolve the usual boundaries of time and space; a feeling of awe about life; a noetic quality to the experiences in which knowledge, insight and revelation are accepted as beyond the grasp of the intellect.
These are, in fact, the distinguishing attributes of transcending self-actualizing individuals that were described by Abraham Maslow (1994/1970). Maslow's term "unitive perception," or the "fusion of the eternal with the temporal, the sacred with the profane" (p. 79), captures the essence of the state. There are also what Maslow (1971) called nontranscending self-actualizers. He described such people as "more essentially practical, realistic, mundane, capable, and secular people, living more in the here and now world ... 'doers' rather than meditators or contemplators, effective and pragmatic rather than aesthetic, reality-testing and cognitive rather than emotional and experiencing" (p. 281).
In fact, Maslow noticed that there was a relationship between a person's needs level on his Hierarchy of Needs (Physiological, Safety and Security, Love and Belongingness, Self Esteem, Growth Needs, Self-Actualization) and the kinds of dreams he had. "Unconscious needs commonly express themselves in dreams ..." (1970, p. 141), and thus a person's current experienced position on the hierarchy could be assessed from his/her dreams.
These transcendent states are what Carl Jung called numinous experiences which, whether interpreted as pathological or as divine inspirations, derive from an overwhelming breakthrough into consciousness of unconscious material from the 'psychoid' realm where the archetypes reside (Capobianco, 1993). This provides access to the imaginal world, the realm of the soul. For this reason, with Jungian psychology "many of its philosophical and spiritual roots are planted firmly in the soil of the 'wisdom path' of the Western mystery tradition (May, 1991; Charet, 1993), a tradition which emphasizes a sustained regression into the unconscious for the purposes of individual and collective spiritual transformation" (Young-Eisendrath & Miller, 2000, p. 77).
However, consciousness is not capable of preserving opposites in their original unity, since the "essence of consciousness is discrimination, distinguishing ego from non-ego, subject from object, positive from negative, and so forth" (Jung, 1953, vol. 6, para. 179). "We must," he argues, "appeal to another authority, where the opposites are not yet clearly separated, but still preserve their original unity." This 'authority' is the unconscious: "Where purely unconscious instinctive life prevails, there is no [conscious] reflection, no pro et contra, no disunion, nothing but simple happening, ... where everything that is divided and antagonistic in consciousness flows together into groupings and configurations" (paras. 179, 181). And the process for accessing the unconscious he termed the "transcendent function", which, through a dialectical synthesis, brings together opposites in a reconciling attempt to regulate the psyche, or the self. Jung held that if a person can hold the tension between the conflicting opposites, then eventually something will happen in the psyche to resolve the conflict. Jung calls this the transcendent function, because what happens transcends the conflicting opposites.
An example of the conflicting opposites is Sun and Moon, solar and lunar perspective. Solar thinking is intended to shed as much light as possible on what lies in the dark.
Lunar focus is diffuse, attentive but without a goal, makes us aware of what knowledge is absent, what we don't know, what we aren't capable of knowing through the solar light of the waking world. This is the consciousness of contemplation, and its answers are felt as inklings, images that ebb and flow in waves of feeling rather than discreet particles or facts. Lunar attention is playful as well as serious. We feel the answers to our questions in our body rather than in the mental space of our head Lunar consciousness is what we need to unfold the meaning of a dream (Gordon, 2007, p. 93).
An example of the transcendent function, the dialectical synthesis of opposites, is the Chinese concept of ming. The sun's light and the moon's light are generally mutually exclusive, since direct sunlight renders the moon invisible, so that we see the sun's light during the day and the moon's at night. Combining the light from both solar and lunar orbs results in a word that expresses a luminous totality; 'ming' conveys a brilliance whose qualities are both diurnal and nocturnal, conscious and unconscious. It is an ideogram that combines two polar opposites into a union whose new symbolic power transcends the sum of its parts. Illumination from both sun and moon, conscious and unconscious, is brilliant, bright, and enlightened.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] sun, day
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] moon
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] brilliant, bright, enlightened
Bridging the yawning gulf between the two, which occurs in dreams and visions and other numinous experiences, allows one to become conscious of the unconscious, to recognize the vast influences on beliefs and behavior in ordinary rational reality. It is what we call enlightenment. Most people "can hardly conceive how much his inclination, moods, and decisions are influenced by the dark forces of his psyche" (Jung, 1969, p. 254). The longer they are ignored, the darker they become. And "those people who are least aware of their unconscious side are the most influenced by it" (Jung, 1960, p. 79).
The process of coming to terms with the unconscious is a true labor, a work which involves both action and suffering. It has been named the "transcendent function" because it represents a function based on real and "imaginary," or irrational and rational, data, thus bridging the yawning gulf between conscious and unconscious. It is a natural process, a manifestation of the energy that springs from the tension of opposites, and it consists in a series of fantasy-occurrences which appear spontaneously in dreams and visions (Jung, 1966, p.100).
What are the practices aside from dreaming that produce, or allow access to, these states? Physical relaxation accompanied by mental alertness, such as meditation, prayer, ritual, sensory deprivation, visualization, mantra repetition, employing the breath, music, chanting, or drumming; surrendering to absorption in an unfolding process; shamanic journeying. One element shared by all of these practices is the employment of deliberate intention. Another is a significant diminution in awareness of the mind-body unit, tuning out external sensory stimuli and focus on internal experience; thus, these practices all fall within the definition of a dissociated state, yet one that has been deliberately created and focuses awareness purposefully. This is purposeful or directed dissociation as distinguished from either pathological dissociation or nonpathological spontaneous dissociation (Edge, 2001, 2004).
The state depends on the willingness and capacity to detach from the external world and one's self in it (Bartocci & Dein, 2005). These authors suggest that the peek-a-boo game in which the baby covers his or her face to make the external world disappear and then uncovers the eyes to make it reappear, and similar 'being gone' fantasies of children, represent a primitive way to detach from perception of external reality. Trance states represent the capacity to voluntarily make use of detachment as a technique to gain a 'suspended state of consciousness' rooted in a momentary dissociation. "To bring about this sense of self-loss we need to consider the existence of dual physiological mechanisms for neutralizing the external world and one's self. The first is achieved by thickening the 'wall' between the self and the external world; the second mechanism enhances an illusory lack of barriers between the self and the external world, through the creation of a fictitious mystical undifferentiation between the self and an external world that becomes being and nothingness, death and love at the very same time" (p. 552).
The dual physiological mechanisms can be conceptualized as the two directions in which consciousness can be altered: the ergotropic pathway of increasing arousal through sympathetic nervous system activation, culminating in the extreme of mystical ecstasy, and the trophotropic pathway of decreasing arousal through parasympathetic nervous system activation, culminating in deep trance (Fischer, 1971). Newberg and D'Aquili (2000, pp. 255-256) note:
During certain types of meditation ... We have proposed that as the hypertrophotropic state creates a state of oceanic bliss, the ergotropic eruption results in the experience of a sense of a tremendous release of energy ... activity is so extreme that 'spillover' occurs ... This may be associated with the experience of an orgasmic, rapturous or ecstatic rush, arising from a generalised sense of flow and resulting in a trance-like state.
Newberg, D'Aquili and Rouse (2001) used SPECT (single positron emission computerized tomography) scanning to show that, during meditation and prayer, there is a marked decrease in activity of the posterior superior parietal lobe and marked increase in the activity of the pre-frontal cortex predominantly on the right side of the brain. They attributed the sensation of absorption of the self into 'something larger' to decreased activity of the posterior superior parietal lobe, the brain's 'orientation' area responsible for defining the boundaries of the self. A lack of stimulation of the left lobe results in an individual's loss of sense of self. A lack of stimulation of the right lobe enhances the individual's feeling of unity with the world, as the brain no longer creates the perception of physical space. As a result of hyperactivation of the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus inhibits the flow of signals between neurons in the orientation areas which become 'deprived' of neuronal activity and can no longer function to maintain a sense of self. This results in what Newberg calls a 'softening of the boundaries of the self'.
Some of these practices are amenable to group participation; most are individual experiences. Those that can be shared by a group tend to incorporate universal stimuli and symbols. An example is accessing the collective unconscious and its inhabitants, the archetypes. I suggest that dream-telling, and in particular the group ceremonial activity referred to here as dream journeying, is a highly productive practice that incorporates the foregoing qualities in a group context. The Dream Journey process will be described later in this article.
Big Dreams and Little Dreams--Layers of meaning
Dreams can be personal, and they can be collective. At some point, our personal Shadow becomes so large it is more accurate to call it a Collective Shadow. Many of our dreams already begin at that level of expansion beyond the personal. These dreams Jung classified as 'collective dreams', and he noted that primitive people instinctively recognize the difference between these two kinds of dreams, personal and collective, and describe them as little and big dreams, prizing the latter because they often tap sources of knowledge which would otherwise be unavailable.
One way to conceptualize this difference is to classify dreams into types. After examining the full spectrum of different types of dreams, the common and the rare, Harry Hunt (1989) offers the following classification:
* Personal-mnemonic dreams: relating to ordinary, daily matters in the dreamer's personal life.
* Medical-somatic dreams: relating to physiological processes of the dreamer's body; these dreams occur frequently during an illness or following an accident.
* Prophetic dreams: presenting omens or images of the future that may come true.
* Archetypal-spiritual dreams: involving vivid, powerful encounters with seemingly transcendent forces; these dreams often also include extremely strong physical or "titanic" sensations.
* Nightmares: involving terrifying, deeply upsetting images, themes, and emotions.
* Lucid dreams: involving a consciousness within the dream that the individual is dreaming.
Personal dreams. The content of some dreams is mundane, rehashing events of the day. Those events as portrayed in the dream are only thinly disguised, if at all. Such a dream may reveal one's uncensored feelings about those events or people, but they are clearly relating a personal narrative. "One doesn't always have big dreams or visions, one must dream the small ones, too" (Wolf, 1994, p. 151).
Somatic dreams. These dreams provide a means of expression for what may be otherwise inexpressible. The body speaks to the ego through symptoms, and also through dreams. Louise Hay (1988) has famously catalogued the messages from our bodies expressed as symptoms and sensations: knee trouble represents pride and ego; back trouble signifies feeling unsupported; we may have a "pain in the neck" irritating us in our life. We can look for similar messages, expressed in the same language, in our dreams.
Prophetic dreams. Dream consciousness exists outside of time. Events in a dream may be a reflection of past events portrayed in the timeless now of dreamtime, or they may be a reflection of future events. Dreams certainly offer opportunities to research the consequences of potential courses of action, like a chess player mentally playing out all the possible moves each time before he selects one move as the best one. And since the cosmic forces that influence us silently, unconsciously, energetically exist in that very timeless now of dreamtime, they may be sending us messages about the future, from the future. Indeed, "your dreams are the school ground where you learn about the future that you are evolving to" (Wolf, 1994, p. 183).
Archetypal dreams. We will be studying the source of these dreams at depth. Suffice it to say here that "What walks through my dreams is not actual, other persons or even their soul traits mirrored in me (ikons or simulacra of them), but the deep, subjective psyche in its personified guises. A dream presents 'me,' subjected to 'my' subjectivity. I am merely one subject among several in a dream" (Hillman, 1979, p. 98).
Nightmares. These dreams could be any of the other types of dreams in Hunt's schema, but with a negative emotional intensity that sets it apart.
Lucid dreams. These dreams are special in that they offer a unique interface combining conscious and unconscious mentation. The lucid dreamer is aware of being in a dissociated state, and may be actively or passively participating in the dream, but in either case is aware of the capacity to choose.
Research by Don Kuiken and associates (2006) differentiates between mundane dreams and impactful dreams, revealing three types of impactful dreams: nightmares, existential dreams, and transcendent dreams. Impactful dreams can be either relatively "little" dreams (moderately...
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