Understanding dreams without interpretation

The (un)meaning of dreams

2012-01-19T00:05:00.003+02:00

There are no meanings in dreams.

Meanings are aspects of waking consciousness. Meaningsmean and signify something for our intellect. To mean something is tofind an explanationfor intellect. Meanings and explanations are post festum, secondary, later processes. They are born afterwards, in retrospect, inthe dreamer's head. Everyone of us has a unique meaning dictated by ourindividual and collective life histories, brain structures, personalities. This simplified,pruned, impoverished construction we call meanings, gluing them on the dream,believing that this label construction has something to do with the dream. All various meanings are merely externalformulations without any corresponding content in reality.

In the very moment you think that you have understood what the dreammeans, you have put it into the prison of your intellect. What does a beautifulsunset mean? What does love mean? It is easy to understand how by thinking thatyou have understood their meaning, you have missed the living essence of them.

Every dream is an infinite ocean where you can see waves rising. You candiscern the wave; the dream born from the ocean, being at the same time anintegral part of the ocean. The more you see the wave being only a very shortterm, very small movement in the living ocean, the more possibility you have tofeel the whole invisible ocean of your soul, roaring even deeper than the dreamwaves.

To interpret dreams with theoretical classifications is like classifyingsnow flakes. The classifier's mind has invented these classifications, these"meanings", but we know that the variations of flakes are infinite.Classifications are projections of the observer's own mind, not realities.

The relationship of meaning to living contents in dreams is like therelationship of an Earth-centric worldview to a heliocentric one. TheEarth-centric model was comprehensible, logical, yet fallacious. The same is validfor dream interpretations. In life, as in dreams, there is more than meets theeye. A meaning given to some dream may seem very logical, explaining it nicely,but still leave the dreamer unconcerned, unmoved, untouched at the emotionallevel, which means that it has not yet touched the real contents of that dream.

To evaluate dreams with yardsticks of meanings is no more fruitful thanto judge people from their shadows. When we succeed in tuning ourselves awayfrom the shadow level of meanings towards the experiential, multidimensionalvisions of dreams, they rush through our whole being, creating impressionistic,truthful paintings of our life on the dream canvas. Only then are we able tosee that meanings are only shadowy, frozen snapshots of ever-dancingsilhouettes on the surface of our waking consciousness, originally created bythe flame of life, but petrified by interpretations.

Meanings may be related to dreams as a view through a keyhole is relatedto an unrestricted view of the whole landscape. Many consider a keyhole view tobe the widest view possible. But peeping is better than nothing. Perhaps the dreamdoor may later open for the earnest seeker.

(More detailed treat of this topic is foundon pages 37-39 in my book UnderstandingDreams - The Gateway to Dreams Without Dream Interpretation)

The difference between archetypes and archetypal symbols

2012-01-10T00:01:00.005+02:00

In 1912 Jung turned away from Freud and his individuallevel standard symbols. According to Jung, individual symbols cannot actuallybe given any standard meanings, and that even sexuality itself wasnot the ultimate final point where interpretations could find their fulfillment, but only one of the manifestations of forces of existence,higher than all our instincts and drives.

But even Jung had his standard symbols. They were notindividual, but collective symbols, so universal that they apply to allcultures and across all generation gaps. He called them archetypal symbols andthey have a central position in his thinking. They are symbols that have nodependence on the individual and his life experiences. They appear in dreamsand fairytales, mythologies, religious traditions, fantasies, confusionalstates, and illusions.

Almost everybody knows some of them, usually Animus (male archetype in woman) and Anima (female archetype in man), Persona (our personality, our face, our exterior towards others, like an actor’s mask), Shadow (unpleasant things in ourselves, which we have pushed aside into the shadow, away from the daylight of our consciousness), and Self (the essence, the central core of us).

Archetypes are not archetypal symbols, however. Archetypesare not images, but transcendent, totally beyond any conscious perception, evenbeyond dreams. They are like mirrors, which do not contain any images inthemselves, but are essential prerequisites as reflectors of them. They arelike the “idea” of salt solution with salt crystals that have not yet begun tocrystallize. The salt solution contains thus an invisible prerequisite, whichdoes not manifest itself in the realm of perception until the crystallizationprocess has begun. In the same way, respectively, archetypes are manifestedonly through archetypal symbols, which appear in forms conditioned byindividual and cultural characteristics, most clearly in dreams.

Jung considered his archetypes to be universally real, but they are not. Despite their seemingly all-embracing, elegant nature, they are only Jung’s own constructs born from his personal experiences. In the vortices of capricious history, it just happened to be now, in our time, Jung's turn to create this kind of explanatory classifications for the ever-present mystery beyond our consciousness.

(More detailed treat of this topic is foundon pages 44-47 in my book UnderstandingDreams - The Gateway to Dreams Without Dream Interpretation)

The difference between Freud and Jung

2012-01-09T22:48:00.000+02:00

Theories can bebuilt beginning from building blocks of concepts. Additional blocks arearranged onto the collection of these base blocks in order to erect as generala theory as possible. Freud built his theoretical system this way, fromobservational details towards a more and more general psychoanalytic theory. Hetried to see the wholeness with the help of combinations of details, piecing themtogether to give rise to a higher system. His construction can be compared tothe Tower of Babel, which was built more for the praise of man’s intellect thanfor forces beyond.

Jung’s theory wasborn in an opposite; top-down way, from the general to the specific, contraryto Freud’s bottom-up approach. When Jung was 37 years old, he was plunged intoa very intensive four year long flood of images, for which he then searchedappropriate expressions for decades. He writes: "All my works, all my creative activity, has come from thoseinitial fantasies and dreams, which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago.Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them".Images, experienced in both his nightly dreams and his daytime fantasies,were the fiery lava from which his conceptual rock of scientific work wascrystallized. His material gushed out spontaneously and vividly from sameinternal sources, where also dreams rise to the surface of wakingconsciousness.

Freud, on thecontrary, was unable to perceive the inner visions spontaneously, that's why hehad to approach dreams from the angle of scientific analysis, and was compelledto erect his analytical construction with his own work. He had only three oflife’s four dimensions in his own consciousness and in his theory of dreams; theindividual, biological, and later in his life, increasingly, the socialdimension. However, what he was lacking, was the fourth dimension, which has nospecific name but can be called transpersonal, cosmic, transcendental, etcexperiences. He considered them to be religiously colored fantasies and primitiveremnants from early babyhood experiences. This lack made it possible for him toleave psyche in the animal-like state, where primarily lower drives andinstincts reign and rage. Jung considered this Freud's view about unconsciousas a trash can that collects all the refuse of the conscious mind.

The rigidness ofFreud's negative attitude manifests itself in a conviction expressed in Freud'slater life: "I am firmly convincedthat the most careful elaboration of the material upon which the problems of religion are basedwould not shake these conclusions [of psychoanalysis]. He saw religion "asa parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through onhis way from childhood to maturity".

(More detailed treat of this topic is foundon pages 51-54 in my book Understanding Dreams - The Gateway to Dreams Without Dream Interpretation)

Dream groups' tremendous advantage

2012-01-07T17:46:00.000+02:00

Once upon a time there was a wise emperor who sent emissaries to take care of his country which was too wide for him alone to rule. His cleverest emissary began to see his Master's gentle wisdom as a weakness, and finally dethroned his Master, bringing the kingdom eventually to ruin.

This tale is told in Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and his Emissary. The introduction of the book is found here.

According to him the Master is our right hemisphere and the Emissary our left one.

The book is not an oversimplified popularization of the functions of hemispheres but largely based on extensive neurologic and neuropsychologic research, especially among split brain and brain lesion patients. McGilchrist projects his interesting, thorough analysis of the main differences and similarities of our hemispheres onto the canvas of poetry, music, human body language, in fact onto the whole evolutional and cultural history.

The modern Western culture reflects the unbalanced overpower of the left hemisphere's narrow, theoretically based, self-consisted model of the world, which is tremendously powerful in mastering the physical world, but which does not understand the infinite world outside of all theories.

Typical for the right hemisphere is the ability to grasp intutively what is going on, but it needs the left hemisphere to express itself. It knows that it needs the left one, but the left one does not know that it does not know, thus thinking it is self-sufficient, needing no one else, thus eventually collapsing the whole kingdom in ruins.

McGilchrist's allegory is remarkably suitable to demonstrate the most important task for dream groups: by reviving the right hemisphere, helping the Master return to the throne from exile, restoring the equilibrium between both hemispheres; finding ways where both knowledge and understanding, analysis and intuition, science and art can work in unison, recognizing their deep dependence of each other, and their importance of their united teamwork for mental health of human beings for the well-being of the whole community and culture.

Dream groups have in this task a tremendous advantage: they have the most powerful tool in their hands: the product of (predominantly) the right hemisphere; our dreams, illuminating the innocent, authentic depths of the human soul. If we are wise, understanding what we have seen with the help of dreams, allowing them to speak with their own voice, our emissary may understand better its proper place, serving the Master, spreading around the wisdom of our innermost being, helping the kingdom of humanity to prosper in human relations.

Deceptive dreams

2012-01-06T13:15:00.002+02:00

Perusing my own dream book I just now found that this sentence in myFinnish dream book had fallen inexplicably away from its English translation:

Dreams are not the most authentic manifestations about us, but distorted reflections of what we reallyare. Dreams appear to be most authentic onlyin the limited viewpoint our day consciousness is capable of.

I hesitated to include that sentence in my book because in a wayit pulls the rug from under the whole book, which from the beginning to the endconsiders dreams to be the most authentic phenomena of our true soul state.

Yes, most authentic, but only from this narrow standpoint. Realizingthat there is nothing absolute, nothing which is undeniably and unambiguouslytrue, is a necessary antidote against any orthodoxy, among them any dreammovement which promotes dreams as our most important tools for understandingourselves and others. Yes, dreams are very important, but not most important tools for understanding ourselves. Dreams are not the true state of our soul, but filtration products, conditioned and constricted by our individual brain properties.

The second dream distortionphase takes place in our imperfect daytime memory, and the third when they are shared with other people because of limitations of spoken language and other individual and societal factors. But fortunately, despite this multiphase dilution process during the dreams' journey from beyond our consciousness to the sharing phase with other people, they still contain a substantial amount of their original potential, which may be unveiled with dream exploration processes which help to create a safe, intensive, non-restrictive, non-interpretative (=nonviolent) atmosphere. Thus far I have found only one process which meets all these conditions; Montague Ullman's experiential dream group process.

As much as I appreciate dreams and as much as dreams anddream groups are now the most important activities of my life, there is alwayssomething more to learn, something more what any dream can ever contain. "Thereare more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in yourphilosophy." Despite the fact that thereare still deeper, albeit rare, insights into the nature of reality than dreams areable to afford, the main idea still holds: dreams are most authentic expressions of ourselves in our everydaylife, and exploring them carefully and sincerely always brings us more near to our authentic self.

Many kinds of dream groups

2011-11-21T16:06:00.001+02:00

Many forms of dreamgroups are ones which do not listen attentively to dreams but using them onlyas stepping stones to broader psychological, philosophical or religiousreflections. Dreams become displaced by group members' opinions not originatingfrom dreams but from our daily waking life. This means replacing the mostinfluential elements with less important ones.

There are innumerable orientations, whichhave rigid basic assumptions (be it scientific, religious, based on diverse psychotherapy schools etc.) about the meaning of dreams. I call them confessional. The more strictly one hasadopted some interpretative theoretical system, the less one is able to seeanything which is not concordant with his theory. One type of groups blindfoldedwith their theory can be found in religious and occult circles, where dreams are seen asexpressions of higher wisdom, as conscious, autonomous entities, belonging tothe realms of guardian angels and spiritual teachers. Typical for this kind of idealizedapproach is a strong need for dependency, need to become subjugated by somehigher authority. The majority of dream literature reflects this viewpoint.

There are ways to work with dreams,which are not to such an extent ideologically limited that they would always twist dreams intoa standard predefined pattern. Nonetheless, many of them limit the dream process insome other ways. They may predefine the process by being too restrictive inadvance, for example by having rules which define which parts of the dream thedreamer is allowed to choose, for example only the three most impressivesubjects or the three most obscure subjects in the dream, which are then usedas starting points for subsequent work. A dream is thus chopped and chained upand tied to a leash of a predefined format.

Dream group as spotlights and a magnifying glass

2011-11-20T15:33:00.001+02:00

Dreams, the works of art of nature, are best understood through united action of small-group members. Their dedicated immersion into the dream work as spotlights, illuminating the piece of art from many angles, many life experiences, revealing more complete associative matrix and societal roots of the dream than the dreamer alone could create.

When the group is focusing their mental energy completely to the dream, they function like a magnifying glass, reflecting their energies onto one burning point who is the dreamer, who, with the help of this additional energy charge, is then able to drill through the surface of thewaking state, acting as a medium; as a bridge to the unknown, amplified by the group’s contribution.

If the magnifying glass is dirty; all kinds of interpretations and theories blurring it, the focusing power of the group decreases, diminishing the possibility to understand the dream.

The art of understanding dreams is not to interpret them. It is the question of setting up the non-interpretative atmosphere; the sheltered surroundings suitable for dreams to open up as flowers; giving to them their own voice instead of masking them by any outside interpretative clatter which contaminates our understanding of them as authentic expressions of our soul.

Understanding Dreams: The Gateway to Dreams Without Dream Interpretation

2011-11-13T14:16:00.000+02:00

How to understand dreams without interpretations, explanations, theories?

We tend to think that dreams...

have messages
mean something
can be interpreted
teach, guide or warn us
are symbols of something else
are separate from our waking life
can be understood by means of religious, spiritual or scientific explanations

BUT no...

...dreams are like fish. When you lift them up from their own element,
they may still seem like fish but they lose their life.

If you really want to understand dreams, you must take a deep,
experiential plunge; dive deep into their own element.

HOW?

It is what this book is all about