Notes on Healing Dreams by Marc Ian Barasch
Chapters
1. What is a Healing Dream?2. What Does the Dream Want?
3. The Dream of the Body
4. Dreams of Personal Calling
5. Dreaming Together
6. The Dream Society
7. The Invisible Community
8. Binding the Wound of Time
9. The Otherworld
10. Healing the Shadow
11. The House of Dreams
Epilogue
My Personal Notes
(page # - para #)
1. What is a Healing Dream?
- [in dreams] symbols tend to be extraordinarily multilayered - exaggerated cases of what Freud referred to as "overdetermination", where an image seems to be "chosen" by the unconscious for its multiplicity of associations. Language itself reveals a dense richness. A key dream word may yield half a dozen definitions, each with a different or even opposing nuance. (21-1)
- New meanings emerge over time. One lives, as it were, into the dream. (21-2)
- Most important, Healing Dreams, if heeded, can be transformational - creating new attitudes toward ourselves and others, magnifying our spiritual understanding, deepening the feeling side of life, producing changes in careers and relationships, even affecting society itself. After a Healing Dream, one may never be the same again. (21-3)
- Healing Dreams... thrust upon us realities obscured by our propensity... to sell ourselves short (25-3)
- Healing Dreams offer few outright prescriptions. They often require us to live our questions rather than furnish instant answers. (26-3)
- Think of it as a window that enlarges our perspective, freeing us of a certain tunnel vision. (27-1)
- What a dream says and what it means are often two different things (30-1)
- If one doesn't do what a dream has directed, one won't be able to dream well anymore. (35-0)
- It is their residue of mystery that gives them enduring power, making them touchstones we return to again and again. (38-0)
2. What Does the Dream Want?
- Making sense is not always paramount. Healing dreams want us to stop making sense, not just to crack the case, but to enter the mystery. (39-2)
- Terms: clairvoyant reality, nonlocality, one mind, totality, mind-at-large, morphogenetic fields (43-3)
- Analogy of a TV set: our brains act as a receiving device for images, an invisible field of info that continues to exist even if the "set" is junked. How can dreams: draw upon unfamiliar myths and icons, know archaic meanings of words, display images of the future? (43-4)
- Talmud dream interpretation: a single dream is said to have at least 24 possible meanings (45-2)
- As in all good literature, everything is there for a reason. (47-2)
- Spillover words ... words that "reveal a surplus of meaning", that "contain more than they contain". Freud: "overdetermination" (48-2)
- ... reminding us of unattended emotional issues (49-2)
- Jung's "active imagination" (51-1)
- The dreamer's first challenge is to accept the dream as it is - take image as given and completed (i.e. acceptance), rather than something to rework and finish. Implies that you shouldn't interpret or analyze it at first; instead seek the emotional center of a dream. (51-2)
- Dreams generally point to our blindspot... The trouble with interpreting your own dreams is that you can't see your own back. (i.e. you should share your dreams with others who are sensitized to such things) (52-3)
- A true dream cannot be bottled up without expression (53-2)
- You gotta test your dream - the simplest way is to tell it to the person you dreamed about (53-2)
- A strange aura surrounds any symbolic enactment of a dream. Anyone who tries this, even if just to make a crude drawing in crayon, will feel the energy of two worlds bumping against each other (54-0)
- A dream's visitor (not necessarily a person; could be a thing) proposes novel arrangements and sometimes, radical departures (54-1)
3. The Dream of the Body
- Prodromal dream: one that anticipates a medical problem not yet clinically detected (largely ignored but author sees this a lot) (62-3)
- Changes in dream content often preceded clinical diagnoses and illnesses seemed to enhance dream recall (64-2) Note, 3/14/11 I had a cold and remembered dreams more easily and they were more interesting)
- Sometimes dreams get fed up with the bobbing and weaving of metaphor, opting for a gloves-off punch in the eye. (65-0)
- Could be immune system signaling the brain about a subliminally perceived change in body's condition. But others seemed weirdly predictive, even precognitive. These are not ordinary dreams but big dreams, archetypical dreams so laden with powerful emotional affect that the dreamer is forced to take them most seriously. (66-1)
- Example dream about "malignancy" (including name symbolism) (67-0)
- Whether we are sick in soul or physically ill, Healing Dreams may show us a vision of wholeness at a time when we feel most imprisoned, trapped, mortal... a powerful vision of health can itself have the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy (70-1)
- It has often been suggested that the imaginal realm is the meeting ground between the physiological and the spiritual (74-6)
- It seems clear that dreams can produce strong physical sensations that persist even upon awakening (76-1)
- We might speculate that in dreams the mind-body connection is more direct, more able to slip past the routinizations of waking thought. Perhaps the currents of the psyche become, as it were, more "hot-wired" to the engines of the body during dreaming. (78-1)
- Dreaming of a childhood house is a frequent symbol for the body (84-5)
4. Dreams of Personal Calling
- Dreams rap on the window at night, drawing us from the comfort of our abodes, or bide their time, keepers of the flame, awaiting the right moment to ignite the souls and set our life ablaze (92-0)
- Franc's dream (or not?) of golden harp - he attributes his "intuitive powers" to this early vision (98)
- "You always have a choice. If you have a a big dream and don't want to follow it, well then you can leave it alone. But that's when you start to go blind." (106-2)
- Author's experience in boring job, detached from dreams etc., contrasted with his later experience "in alignment": "while I was busy nurturing my illusions" (107)
- It is not easy to listen to our dreams when they call for wrenching change. (109-3)
- Healing Dreams change our lives not merely by showing and telling but by making us viscerally feel the truth, unbuffered by the ego's "wiggle room" (113-4)
- The Buddha predicted that a dark age would arise when people's thoughts became so torrentially fast, overlapping one upon the other, that there would be little room for inner stillness. (116-1)
- Healing Dreams... speak for the innermost when no one else will. (118-1)
5. Dreaming Together
- A dream, we are told... If we dream of someone else, it is because he or she is a symbol of some interior push and pull, a self-palpitation of our emotional pulse... But... our appearances in each others' dreams can be personal... our dreams may not be entirely our own. (119-1)
- In Healing Dreams, we dream of each other, to each other, even for each other. (121-2)
- We live in a sea of "unconscious and unobtrusive interaction" with our intimates... "we have thick skins to continually ward off" the thoughts and feelings of others which moment-to-moment "bombard us". (123-1)
- To tell another person about their guest appearance in a dream can have catalytic effects. (124-2)
- The revelation of what has been concealed from one another is a frequent feature of such dreams. Merloo has written: "A telepathic dream is often a cry for help, or a breaking through a formerly existent communicative inhibition, as if the sender wants to say 'I have been silent for such a long time, now finally you have to know what I have been hiding from you!"
- "A dream is like your hand, it has two sides. If you can't understand what you see, turn it on the other side and see what is written there. Ask it, Are you fake, or are you genuine?" (127-4)
- Dreams are like a medicine we don't want to take, even though it is best for us. (128-1)
- After a big dream, you must talk to it... you ask the dream in a sacred place what it wants, let it turn itself over and over. When you figure it all out, it's like putting a car in the right gear - you feel a click. (128-1)
- It is not uncommon for a dream at the outset of a relationship to prefigure its course - revealing the spiritual purpose of coming together, the emotional dynamics that will become themes, even the denouement, whether a crash-and-burn parting or eternal wedded bond. (129-3)
- The French expression le coup de foudre has a literal and a figurative meaning, though the latter is a bit more common. Literally, un coup de foudre is a "bolt of lightning" or "thunderbolt". Figuratively, it indicates "love at first sight"... as that feeling is like a huge shock to the system. (131-4)
- The enactment of a Healing Dream often affects, almost magically, other aspects of life. (132-1)
- We come to each other, says the Healing Dream, not just in the name of love, but transformation. (hierosgamos - a sacred marriage that brings each person to his or her highest spiritual potential.) (132-3)
- Rita's dream - she dreamt of him before she met him: "I knew this was a very important person to me, I just didn't know who." When she woke up, he vanished. Stunned, but not knowing how to wrap her arms around the vision, she mothballed the memory. A few years later... "My breath just whooshed from my lungs! I was instantly transported back to this dream. He was identical - same face, haircut, build... Shocked and off guard, she refrained from telling him about her dream. "Well, I didn't like him at all. I basically had to have dinner with him, and I remember feeling, I'll just be so glad when this man leaves!" Over a year later: ...he stopped her, apologizing, telling her they needed to talk. He was feeling, he said, a close connection with her that was mystifying, disturbing, exciting. The conversation continued long into the night, and, Rita says coyly, "something shifted". It was still six months before they owned up to a growing mutual certainty they were meant to be together, and a year before she told him about her dream. By literally stepping out of her dream, Dan forced Rita to wrestle with every aspect of her life. Divorced, she had determined to avoid getting romantically entangled for the forseeaable future. "But something whispered to me, 'You'd better change your mind.'" Before she met Dan, she had been a well-known lecturer "with a respectable reputation, considered to be of sound mind." But she'd also been, she says, "a closet healer" who kept her intuitive talents on the back burner. Dan, who had produced a detailed, two-volume academic study of purported psychic healers, changed all that. "He forced me to come out," she says simply. "He'd say, 'you're seeing more than you're saying.' He's a noodge. I think he's in my life so I don't need to be ashamed of the intuitions that first tempted me into the healing arts. Our meeting was life-changing from the get-go. We've had our ups and downs and crises, but the voice inside me hasn't wavered: 'This is the man you have to be with to serve your purpose in this life.'" (133)
- Sometimes a dream image carries such weight that the entire equation of relationship shifts as if in the twinkling of an eye (136-2)
- "The dream was so absolutely real, ... something informed me, and I just followed it in an uninformed way!" (137-3)
- Healing Dreams know we are creatures of habit. In the sometimes numbing regularity of our lives, we rationalize away our pain. It is left to the dream to provide feedback - to amplify the low, near inaudible hum of chronic unhappiness into an acute screech of anguish. (138-3)
- 1960's NY Maimonides Dream Research Lab - dreamer dreams 2/3 times of someone in next room viewing a painting (140-5)
6. The Dream Society
- A dream once loosed, becomes a living presence with unpredictable effects upon the destinies of all whom it touches. (163-1)
- But a dream, once shared, does not die. It becomes a living seed, putting down roots in the world. (169-1)
7. The Invisible Community
- Tibetans consider the hours leading up to dawn as the domain of prophetic dreaming. (184-3)
- "I was no longer my body, there was just this sense of the vastness of the universe. I felt I was completely connected with everything around me, yet at the same time, just a little speck in this enormous creation." (this is mysticism's term: the mysterium tremendum = absorption in the grandeur of the cosmos) (191-3)
- "I know you know all about this. How can you?" (193-5)
- The scenario is akin to a Zen archery demonstration: the target is beside the point. The point is to lose the point, to be immersed in a moment with no past, present or future - a moment that emerges from nothing, disappears into nowhere... there is no goal... only the journey. (197-2)
- People speak of the lost sensibility conveyed in their dreams - of sociability and simplicity, the conferral of a blessing they didn't know they ached for. (207-3)
8. Binding the Wound of Time
- It is fairly certain that if you watch your dreams closely, you will find occasional instances of outright prediction. These are basically odd bits of trivia - you dream about a friend you haven't seen in 10 years, and she calls the next day. Or an image from a dream shows up in a movie you see a week later. (You're sure it wasn't in the previews). Most often the dream portrays some happenstance that will stand out from normal routine. (209-1)
- "I've never been able to figure out what it is I'm supposed to do with them, if anything. I guess they're there to show me there's more to life than meets the waking eye." (210-0)
- ... more indeed: If such dreams are real, they batter down our usual ideas of time in a hailstorm of paradox. They force us to revise our most hallowed axioms about causality itself. It is generally assumed that if cause A (an event) produces effect B (a memory), then A must have preceded B in time. But in such cases, B precedes A - the law of cause and effect is mocked by what amounts to "backward causation". (210-1)
- (about the author's helicopter ride) Had it been a completely free choice to go over to him, thus triggering the enactment of the dream? Or did I only think I had chosen, while both the opportunity and my decision were somehow foreordained? After a few more such incidents, I found myself faced with an ancient bugaboo - the notion of a non-negotiable and inadvertent Destiny. In an era of limitless options, the very idea sounds archaic. But these early encounters subtly altered my sense of orientation in time. I no longer felt anchored in the safe harbor of the present, but adrift on a horizonless sea, my temporal compass spinning. (211-1)
- There is certainly a place for scientific skepticism, which holds that all foreknowledge is folklore, it's supposed instances mere confabulation, fraud, coincidence, self-fulfilling prophecy, or faulty memory. (211-4)
- "I didn't say it was possible, I only said it was true." - Charles Richet (211-4)
- If, as quantum physics tells us, time is an illusion, it should not surprise us that Healing Dreams could contain images whose "payoff" might not occur until days, weeks, months or even years later... But this raises a troubling issue: There may be aspects of our dreams we cannot possibly understand until some future event reveals their meaning. In fact, it is often the very element in a dream that, indigestible as a pebble, steadfastly resists all interpretation and later manifests in waking reality. (211-4)
- "Strong dreams" about the future... "When a dreamer sees his dream very clearly, as if he were actually awake, with the result that when he awakens he recalls every detail without the slightest omission, this is to be taken as a sign the dream will be quickly fulfilled. Modern researchers intrepid enough to take the phenomenon seriously have made similar observations. Professor Robert van de Castle, who performed a study of the hundreds of precognitive dream reports, has consluded that in 90% of the cases, the imagery "would be most accurately described as realistic" rather than symbolic. The vast majority pertained to events within a 24-hour period after the dream. They tended to impress themselves upon the dreamer by being more vivid and colorful than other dreams. Details would refuse to fade away, no matter how hard the dreamer tried to put them from his mind. Such dreams often repeated themselves on consecutive nights, even several times in a single night. Most seemed to be nightmares warning of personal danger and sometimes, collective disaster... Twice as many women as men have such dreams. (212)
- "If prevision be a fact, it is a fact which destroys absolutely the entire basis of all our past opinions of the universe." - JW Dunne (213-1)
- The nature of time itself - Dunne even speculated that the experience of deja vu could be the result of having actually seen something before - but in a dream. He noted that unusual life events were more likely to be precognitively detected by dreamers. If a person were living a monotonous life, in which each day's events resembled the next, the phenomenon was less likely to occur. (213-2)
- I have been struck, for example, by how often precognitive dreams are almost myopically literal, showing the dreamer only the exact visual perspective they will have when the future event occurs. (214-1)
- Perhaps there was an evolutionary advantage conferred on those who could foresee a situation in the exact way it would unfold, gaining a critical margin of readiness. (215-2)
- This cognitive function becomes more active when one is in unknown and possibly risky surroundings. (215-3)
- Memories of the Future... Dunne: "Integration" - a precognitive dream's tendency to blend together images of both past and future (216)
- It was as if his dream had taken a "day residue" from the past and seamlessly woven in elements from a future perception. Dunne speculated that this meant that a dream's "associational network" stretched backwards and forwards in time". (217-0)
- "It is a poor sort of memory that works only backwards." - Lewis Carroll / Alice in Wonderland (217-2)
- Who can say that our psychological equilibrium is not affected by memories of both past and future? (217-2)
- Both are subjectively distorted versions of an objective experience... in both, an event occurring at another time causes the formation of a mental trace. (Deja vu theory again) (217-3)
- It sometimes seems as if precognitive elements are as much attention-getting devices for difficult emotional issues as outright prophecies. (218-2)
- If you have a big dream... You may not be able to prevent it, but you can enact it symbolically by yourself or with a friend in a very minor way, and may thereby prevent its serious occurrence. (but sometimes) The act of trying to escape the dream had, as if in folktale, caused its fulfillment. (219-2)
- "Will"... = future conjugation and an expression of inner resolve. We toss the grappling hook of our intention forward in time, hoping it catches on an outcropping so that, testing the tautness of the rope, we might pull ourselves up toward our goal. But what if it is only a fishing hook, our climbing rope an angler's line - and though we think we pull ourselves up, we are instead being reeled in by our fate? (220-1)
- I once asked my Cree friend Sylvia if she thought a future event seen in a dream could be changed. She'd never been able to do it, she tells me... "They just give me time to prepare. They give me the strength to deal with what is about to happen, because I already have some familiarity with it. It's like a replay - you know what to watch for."
- Contrast: The Lacanon Maya of Mexico say that dreams are "a kind of lie", foretelling the future "but not as a face value". From this standpoint, dreams are not inescapable fate but more like extrapolations from a current balance of forces, where a change in one variable can yield a different result. If we choose ot learn by paying heed to a dream, could that not alter the equation and produce a new answer? (220-4)
- Many spiritual teachings say our possibilities become circumscribed when our lives are shaped by habitual actions, patterns, and mental attitudes. Healing Dreams often bid us to decisively break those habits, to pay minute attention to what we normally overlook. The grip of the accustomed is a firm one, and the task of change always wrenching, but it may be better than some invisible, looming alternative. (221-5)
- We rarely bother to interpret our dreams. It is an omission akin to leaving a letter containing a vital message unopened on the breakfast table. Even when we do open it we too often read it through a filter of preconception that edits out key words. In dreams as in waking, we hear what we want to hear. (222-1)
- The Jewish Zohar: "When one dreams of good, he is meant to strive after its fulfillment. We might argue that a dream heeded is only a self-fulfilling prophecy. But what of those instances in which we seem to set out in no particular direction yet arrive mysteriously at our dream's doorstep? ... We have been in some mysterious way following our own footsteps." (223-1)
- Pastor who dreamt friend John Chapman killed someone - when it turned out Mark Chapman killed John Lennon (with other characteristics matching too) (228)
- She'd been taught by both her church and her parents that "only God could do this stuff, psychics were witches and the next thing to devils." (229-3)
- Do events on the world stage cause, in Star Wars-speak, a disturbance in the Force - a sympathetic resonance that sets hundreds, thousands, even millions of minds vibrating like tuning forks as a titanic chord is about to sound? (231-1)
- JB Priestly estimated that just under half of dreams that came true concerned death and tragedy, while the other half were predictions of trivial, seemingly insignificant events. Both types, on opposite ends of the spectrum, seemed to possess a certain inevitability. He suggested that it is in the large space in between these two extremes where most of life is enacted, that we can exercise the greatest free will. (232-1)
- Is there a "soft future" and a "hard future", one written in sand, the other carved in stone? (232-2)
- Titanic: 19 precognitive dreams / physicist Fred Alan Wolf (232)
- Alongside this apparent world, the shaman said, is another one, which can be penetrated through a radical emptying out of our preconceptions and a suspending of analytic thought. Explaining that the veil knows no time, Grandfather insisted that ancient events could be experienced in the present by one who knew the technique. (233-3)
- (With some indigenous cultures) most dream experiences are believed as implicitly as physical ones (234-1)
- (Physics) Healing Dreams may be a glimps of a greater "nonlocal" reality passing through our usual plane of existence - some 4th-dimensional hyperspace where past, present and future are all at once. (235-2)
- (Jewish Sufi) In our tradition, fate is not immutable. But if you don't do the right thing with a dream - or worse, do the wrong thing - your fate gets locked in. If you continue as a slave of past habits, the dream will come true. (235-3)
- Story where the first person to interpret a dream has the power to "change or even deter its meaning. The act of interpretation itself is a creative event. You can't unread the letter once it's read. Maybe in its unread state, it has more possibilities." But this is the paradox of Shrödinger's cat! (236-2)
- Einstein adamantly opposed the notion of precognition. John Wheeler's "delayed choice" experiments imply that a choice made in the present determines what the past had to have been. (236-4)
- Wolf's analogy of a river with 2 currents past and future - Our present moment is not separate from the past and future - it is a confluence of them. Dunne: was it possible that dreams - dreams in general, all dreams, everybody's dreams - were composed of images of past experience and images of future experience blended together in approximately equal proportions? Wolf: Quantum waves moving from present to future can clash with waves moving opposite - if the waves "match" and produce a combined wave of a certain strength, then "a real future is created from our present point of view, and a real memory of sequences is created in the future." Is it possible a ceremony - or a dream itself - sends a wave toward the future so complementary in pattern as to mitigate the one roaring toward the present? Wolf postulates that our present is "broadcast" to many possible futures, while many potential futures are broadcasting back in time to us. Which ones link up to create reality depends on factors he calls, somewhat mysteriously, "resonance" and even "meaning". (237)
- The idea that time is a circle, not a line is characteristic of traditional cultures. To experience time as the dream reveals... for it is the ego that is time-squeezed, haunted by the might-have-beens of an irretrievable past; by a present that sifts away like sand, ungraspable; by a future of nerve-wracking uncertainty. Tibetan ritual of Kalachakra (the Wheel of Time) - "black" time - clockwise like ordinary time; "white" time is opposite direction. (238-1)
- In our culture - we are pleased to view ourselves as commuters along the time line on the sleek monorail of the present, leaving behind an unencumbering past, free of a preordained future. ... one foot in the past that is still alive and even in some strange way malleable. (239-1)
- The author: My future dreams have come to seem less like inescapable fate than trajectories that reach their end point only in the absence of a course correction. I think often of the question posed by Scrooge to the Spirit of Christmas Future: Why show me this if I cannot change? (239-2)
- The plausible notion that only the present truly exists, while the past is reimagined and the future conjectured. (240-0)
9. The Otherworld
- Roger's dream - sense of larger "concurrent reality" (sounded to me a bit like the Matrix... or a bit like a parallel universe) (246-4)
- Are we surrounded by multiple other worlds? (makes sense if we have multiple parallel universes) (248-3)
- Idea of a middle dimension, "The Land of Nowhere" = a plane of existence born from the collective imagination of many people over time (249)
- (From a woman who had a "Black Year" of depression, and was walking 10-15 miles/day) The vivid dream "just snapped me into a brand-new perspective." It seemed to effect a near-instantaneous cure... The Black Year, it now seemed to her, had had a secret, higher purpose all along... "Before that dream, all I could think about was dead treas, winter coming. Then, suddenly... it was spring." (254-3)
- Psychology / psychotics: Many spiritual traditions, too, have recognized how razor-thin the line is between delusion and illumination (261-1)
10. Healing the Shadow
- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: If we cannot "eat" some of our shadow, it will eat us. Ignored, it becomes a leech, and finally a monster, gorging on our life's blood. (Political and religious examples abound here as well) Denied, the shadow becomes ever more deformed, growing in power, projected irrationally upon others, while its host becomes anemic, a pale reflection of full human potential. (277-1)
- We usually allow ourselves only the most narrow range of options for dealing with our shadow material. We may try to hide it from those around us; diminish it through mockery; deny to ourselves that it even exists; determine, futilely, to battle it to the death; try to outrun it by speeding through life, hoping it will never catch up (though it remains firmly attached to our feet). Ironically, all it may take to come to terms with the shadow is an unprejudiced gaze. We may see, to our surprise, it is not the pure evil we thought it was. The closer we look the more its seams show and, through them, glimpses of something quite human, merely costumed as a devil. (277-3)
- "Shadow upkeep": When we feed our demons a little food, we may find that something very peculiar happens - they stop trying to devour us. (278-1)
- To receive the gifts offered by our own shadow people requires a willingness to embrace paradox. Lyndon Johnson: Perhaps his fate was an example of the psychological proverb - that the shadow denied is projected outward as destiny. (284-1)
- Transformation often demands the downfall of our self-image (286-2)
- Here, again, we see the archetypal function of the shadow - to show us not only our limitations but our hidden possibilities and to suggest that they are mysteriously linked (289-2)
- a dream account that is a lot like my operation dream (291-4)
11. The House of Dreams
- They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (297-0)
- There came a time in my life... when dreams and reality drew closer than I could ever have imagined... The literal became symbolic, the symbolic literal. (297-1)
- Many societies have recognized a realm of awareness between waking and dreaming. (298-5)
- The 4th state of awareness: half-sleep - in western cultures it's really only linked to theory and practice of art. French poet André Breton called for "the future resolution of these two states, so contradictory in appearance - dream and reality - into a kind of absolute reality, or surreality." (299-1)
- Zulu refer to the House of Dreams, a period in a shaman's initiation when the dreamworld stakes an insistent claim on the waking one, and the 2 seem increasingly commingled. (299-2)
- Another life is right beside us... if you look, it will show itself. (301-0)
- The brain is a sort of virtual reality generator, providing us with a convincing sensorium, whether the input is from the outer world or the inner one. (302-2)
- We insist waking perceptions are more real. But how objective are they? (302-3)
- Lucid dreaming: "waking up" within their dreams and regaining the power of conscious action. In this lucid state the dream is abruptly exposed as a fiction, a magical stage where we are free to step outside our assigned role, even to deliberately change the plot and characters. (303-2)
- There is debate in the dream community over the value of lucidity... medieval sage Almoli: "true dreams are the result not of one's choices but of the will of God," and those that impose their own will, whom he labeled "sorcerers", have unreliable dreams because "the contents are self-determined". (304-1)
- "Regard all dharmas as dreams" - (dharmas are things) means that although you might think that things are very solid, the way you perceive them is soft and dreamlike. Mental projection: we name and label things before we really know what we're seeing. (306-4)
- "dream yoga" prescribes that we regard the dreamworld and waking world alike as mind-stuff. (305)
- root of the word Buddha means awake. Waking up to dreaming... Regard the world as if it were a dream and see what happens. If we imagine the world differently, the world will return the favor. Pick any person in your life, invest them with a new fantasy, and watch how over time, even instantly, their behavior and very appearance seem to change. To be sure, the response we get stems from subliminal cues (a benign look creates a different effect than a hostile glare) but perhaps our perceptions themselves are reality-generating fields. Perhaps our vaulted selfhood is process and flux, subject to subtle emanations. Perhaps, when we allow our imaginal world and this world to interpenetrate, we engage in a sort of co-creation. (310-2)
- Synchronicity = one peek into the mystery of how reality itself is constructed. Jung defined synchronicity as "an acausal connecting principle" through which internal states - dreams, fantasies, or feelings - seem to be tangibly linked with events in the material world. Such occurrences can feel jarringly surreal. According to Marie-Louise von Franz, "Synchronistic events constitute moments in which a 'cosmic' or 'greater' meaning becomes gradually conscious in an individual; generally it is a shaking experience." (321-2)
- Example of Jung's Kingfisher: Here a synchronistic event acts as an amplification - almost a confirmation from heaven - with respect to a dream. [Things in your dreams show] that the hard-and-fast boundary between the imaginal life and our life in this world could act like a semi-permeable membrane. (313)
- Here lie dragons... Others would label this viewpoint pure solipsism (the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist) and superstition: what a paralyzing way to live, if even random coincidence were an omen - as if the world revolved around us, pointing out things for our edification. Jung... later decided that they (such events like the Kingfisher, i.e. synchronistic events) implied a hidden principle more likely to be explained by science than psychology. He collaborated with Wolfgang Pauli and began to wonder if such occurrences didn't suggest something about the very composition of the universe. He remarked that it often seemed to him that "matter is only a thin skin around an enormous cosmos of psychical reality", or even, "psyche and matter are two different aspects of the same thing." His colleague C.A. Meier proposed the idea of a 3rd aspect, tertium, an unknown factor beyond mind and matter that synchronistically produces affects in both realms. (314-1)
- Many native peoples claim that the dream is an active force, walking in this world, leaving visible footprints. (315-1)
- Hypnagogia = the unique state between waking and sleeping... Images seen in this state tend to be exceptionally sharp, detailed and life-like... vividly colored, luminous and solid-looking, "like a movie in 3-D". They often induce "feelings of heightened reality". Even subjects who realize that such fantastic sights are internally generated, and who know their eyes to be shut, report that the visions appear to be "projected 5 or 6 feet in front of them, impinging upon 'real' space". In this form of consciousness, as one writer describes it, "metaphors are experienced as actualities". (315-6)
- Dream of opera singer ghost heard by author (317-8)
- The medieval mystic and physician Paracelsus cautioned against confusing the true imagination that sees into the hidden nature of things with pure fantasy (the "madman's cornerstone"). (on crazy people: they are "victims of the dreamworld") (321-3)
- The dreamworld is beneficent and healing only if we have a dialogue with it but at the same time remain in actual life (322-0)
- Humanity risks becoming the lonely sovereign of a world from which the psyche has been banished (about how imagination put down at an early age) (324-1)
- Healing Dreams show us that this world is golden (325-1)
- Just as a Healing Dream may come to us in crisis to restore balance to the psyche, might such phantasms from the otherworld appear when society is afflicted with what the Hopi call koyaanisqatsi: life out of harmony? (327-2)
Epilogue
- Big dreams... give voice to what we have hidden from ourselves, with all the risk and potential that implies. (331-1)
- A dream will help us if we are willing to dwell for a time within its ambiguities without resolving them, to sink into its depths without always knowing when - or where - we shall surface. (332-1)
- Image of a strange fish emerging from the water, a symbol of a dream's emergence from the watery deaths of the unconscious (332-2)
- The purposes of the Healing Dream may not be entirely knowable. It reveals the universe as it is. It is not here to make it all better, it is here to make us more true. (335-0)
- He must face the unknown, as we all do, with some confusion how to proceed... no easy answers (335-2)
- He cannot force the fish/book/dream to precisely fit his conscious purposes. Its very existence is a provocation, a challenge that demands some kind of response, yet it offers no guarantees whichever choice he makes. Perhaps this is why dreams do not just come out and simply tell us what we need to know: they wish us - our soul wishes us - to embark on the journey without knowing the destination. It is not given to us to arrive without ever departing. Perhaps the path, a sincere striving to understand more, is the goal. In the end, the task of an examined life - the task Healing Dreams set vividly before us - is ours alone to reject or embrace; which way we choose makes all the difference in the world. (235-3)
My Personal Notes
- a sense of subversive mischiefs (100-128 somewhere?)
- 'nurturing my illusions'
- premember
- there's a dream described in the book that sounds like my watercolor of the tree woman (246-1)
- Quotes from Kahlil Gibran and Raymond Chandler
- "From beneath it devours" - Buffy quote that just sticks with me for some reason, and I'm reminded of it by (278-1)
- Operation dream of (291-4) compared with mine: I wonder if the meaning of mine was the opposite - my new-found electronic guts are really a part of me and as important as my real physical guts?
- (303) dreams outside REM, outside sleep
- Waking up to dreaming... Regard the world as if it were a dream and see what happens. (310-2) -- my idea / quote of "just let go and see what happens"
- Jung's Kingfisher (313) - a LOT like my black widow spider in the pool? What on earth was that doing in the pool? And how symbolic - at first you expect it's a bad thing, but it's not really!
- My big dream and the 'look' - if the dream hadn't happened, would the look not have happened? i.e which came first or which was a cause?