Sleep and wakefulness are not as easy to tease apart as you might expect or hope for. They sometimes seem to invade one another. In lucid dreams you find yourself awake in another world. Sometimes ‘reality’ can seem entirely dreamlike. Why is there a Christmas decoration in the bathroom soap dish? Or goons on the streets?
‘And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?’ DJ Trump.
How would it be to live as though you weren’t all that sure if you are awake or not, to shift the emphasis from the assumption you are awake to the more immediate challenge of addressing whatever you are facing without asking for its credentials. This seems to be the essence of Chuang Tzu’s parable about whether he was a butterfly dreaming a man or the other way around. Man and butterfly dreaming each other perhaps.
I once owned a narrowboat with a snug wooden cabin at the stern. I woke up one night from a dream that a great light was breaking through a copse of ancient oak trees. It was a stupendous sight. I got up to write about it at my desk further down the boat, tripping over discarded shoes in my half sleep. As I began to write, I woke up in my bed. Again, I got up and stumbled down the boat. This time to make tea and try to understand what had happened. Then I woke up again but this time in my flat in Streatham where I had lived for ten years. It was dawn. I felt exhausted and confused. I got up, dressed warmly for the chill October morning and headed up to Baldry Gardens to clear my head with a brisk walk. The early sun cast a brilliant light between ancient trees. At the top of the road the tarmac was strewn with five pence pieces….
This dream exercised me for decades because it seemed to pose a greater question than what the various symbols ‘meant’. It was more like an awkward blind date, which I could integrate no more than I could swallow down a person.
Asking what dreams ‘mean’ can be a good way of keeping them at arms length, implicitly colluding with the hegemony of Consciousness which wants to incorporate and intellectually triumph over Dream rather than introducing yourself nicely and tipping your hat, all of which relativises ego’s place in the scheme of things from being the house manager to having a short-hold tenancy agreement. Such deflation, however, does come with some perks….
Once, I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming so I searched about for some clues. It made sense that if this were ‘mere’ dream I would be able to see the sutured seams of something cobbled together. I searched the pitted surface of a brick wall, testing the abrasive surface with my finger tip which I then turned over to study the perfect whorls of my finger print. Then I picked up a sprig of three red leaves and followed the veins in it against the light. I still couldn’t tell if I were awake or asleep and concluded that it perhaps didn’t matter as much as I thought it did. It all felt real, regardless. At that moment I felt a tickling in my throat and coughed up a kilo of broken glass.
Better out than in…
You can spend years trying to digest things which are actually not yours, other people’s opinions, their projections and prejudices. Some things are to be spat out rather than swallowed down, the broken mirror of an unseen childhood, the clinical shards which divide us from mystery and wonder. The predominant opinion in our culture is that we are some how at some pinnacle of civilization. Yet the ruler of the Free World has the mental age of a three year old, whilst the rest of us, also three, bask in the omnipotence of ego jelly so freshly constellated it hasn’t quite set. Our monotheism of Consciousness is about as evolved as my son, aged three, running down the garden yelling to the sheep, ‘I am Jack, I am here.’
The Senoi people of Malaysia tell their dreams to one another every morning but no-one ever ventures an opinion. Its rather done in the spirit of an unfolding narrative, bearing witness to a journey beyond our ken. The emphasis in our culture has shifted from participating-in to knowing-about; the one step removed and somewhat schizy experience of believing you can examine, as if in a petri dish, that which has you on her lap.
The challenge is not to understand but to be curious and awed in the face of the unknowable with its stream of images and stories from which understanding may trickle down in the fullness of time if sufficient sacred space can be created to contain it.
‘If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water. For consciousness is just as arid as the unconscious if the two halves of our psychic life are separated.” C.G. Jung, The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, CW 10, p. 163
The sleep of Reason produces monsters because its denigration of the Unconscious forces the latter’s use of guerilla tactics in order to keep its seat at Psyche’s table. One way or another it will be represented. Our task, it seems, is not to understand but to enter into a fresh partnership with the Unseen from which meaning may be found as well as made, meaning which might be something objective to stub your toe upon as well as something subjectively ascribed. Perhaps some of the figures in your dreams are not part of you at all but rather a glimpse of transcendent reality of which you yourself …. are a part.
