Dreams of reality
Do you remember your most recent dream?
According to Bernardo, it could be significant in both content and substance. Not to be taken literally, but if interpreted with care, dreams can point to a layer of objective reality from which the waking mind is restricted.
Imagine you are the snowy peak on a mountain range. When you observe a neighbouring peak, you are seeing it from the outside. From this restricted view, it can seem like it is separate from you. Feel deep within, however, and you and all your neighbours emerge from the same ground. The neighbouring peak is you, taking a neighbouring perspective.
Dreams are a dialogue between different layers of your mind
So whilst waking perception is like looking out at neighbouring peaks, dreaming is a dive deep within.
Sure, many dreams are incidental. Reorganising and evaluating experiences you had that day. But some contain emotions or experiences that are otherwise repressed. Whilst the waking ego has some advantages, (metacognition and discernment, for example) its lens is restricted and its capacity is narrow. There are layers of the mind with access to deeper content and greater intuition, and "the dream state is where those two levels find common ground for legitimate communication."
This is how Analytic Idealism accounts for dreams that turn out to be instructive, healing, and even prophetic.
Several examples were shared by participants during the meeting.
Archetypal dreams
Some dreams go deeper still, bringing up archetypal content from the shared ground, the collective subconscious, from Mind-at-Large.
This content might show up in different forms, dressed in imagery that is most relevant to the person experiencing it; the Christian may see Christ when the Hindu will see Krishna. But the experience the image evokes is the same. In fact, that is all the images are there to do, to evoke a certain state, realisation or recognition.
As such, dreams are a primordial language that speaks for the same objective reality that waking life does.
The dangers of rampant literalism
The danger is in taking the images in dreams or waking life literally.
"That's where it can go wrong, if we start thinking that the dreams are literally telling us the truth, and the truth is literally what the dream is carrying, as opposed to a symbolic hint, a suggestion, a metaphor."
A dream of losing your keys might not literally mean you have lost your keys. Perhaps there is an experience you cannot access, or a meaning that will arrive after many years reflection.
"Sometimes symbolism, a symbolic message, is conveyed using a symbolic language that unfortunately can be taken literally, like, the Bible."
Before the sophisticated edifice of language and abstract thought comes the simple recognition that one thing has aspects that are similar to another. The meaning of one experience is evoked by another, and this is primordial language of mind: analogy.
Interpret your life with the same care as your dreams
So if dreams contain significant content, perhaps more importantly, so does your waking life. Remember, the agency behind archetypal dreams and the physical world is the same agency. Imagine again your waking ego like the snowy layer of a mountain peak; you surround and are surrounded by the collective subconscious.
In dreams, the archetypal communication arrives in symbols, in waking life, as synchronicity. In both cases we are dissociated from Mind at Large which means the communication is intermediated by symbols.
Previous cultures took the symbolic significance of reality for granted. That waking life is as richly symbolic as dreams.
It is "perhaps the greatest tragedy of our time" that we have withdrawn the deep symbolic meaning from life. Reduced the meaning of life to what we achieve, rather than the magic of what we are.
Consider instead that life is not a test, but a journey of self-discovery. Less like a grind towards a goal, more like music to be moved by.
So live your life as a mystery novel. Look for the clues. Become a metaphysical Sherlock Holmes, learning to spot the patterns and to read the deeper significance in life's events.
The fact that a story is already written doesn't diminish its meaning, its intrigue, its fascination. The images are not flat. There is a whole universe behind everything you observe, rich with meaning.
Every event has significance. Perhaps not the significance you project, desire or fear. Not even a significance you can always understand; Bernardo suggests paranoid schizophrenia might even be an inability to tolerate this mystery - imposing an interpretation on observed patterns that follow a very narrow narrative.
So let go of needing to know the end whilst still in the middle. Instead, learn to live in the mystery, the curiosity, the thrill of the front row seat of the greatest show in existence: conscious life.
As always, I look forward to hearing the perspective from your personal snowy peak!
Until next time,
Amir
Time stamps
0:00:00 Why even spiders dream
0:02:00 Why we don't debate physicalists
0:05:00 Significance of recurring dreams
0:17:00 Parallel universes = other dreams in MAL
0:20:00 Dreams vs Out of Body vs Near Death vs Lucidity
0:25:00 Depth of lucid dreams restricted by metacognition?
0:36:00 False awakenings: dreams within dreams
0:49:00 Prophetic, instructive and healing dreams
0:55:50 Danger of taking dreams literally, not symbolically
0:58:00 Analogy is the primordial language of mind
1:03:00 Signs you are having an archetypal dream
1:13:00 Limits of ego's intentions
1:17:00 Possibility of shared dreams
1:18:30 Astral projection / OBE: a challenge to analytic idealism
1:21:00 Power of liminal states: drowsiness, travel, death
1:25:00 Types and meanings of hallucination, and how to induce them
1:38:00 Waking up from the dream of reality: time doesn't exist
1:41:00 Nothing is purely the ego
1:48:00 Dreams are a nested dissociation with less ego
1:54:14 We are immersed in collective subconscious
1:57:00 Both waking life and dreams are surrounded collective unconscious
2:00:00 Waking life is as richly symbolic as dreams
2:07:00 Living life as a mystery novel; staying with the curiosity
2:17:00 Determinism can be full of meaning
2:20:00 Archetypal dreams appear with individualised imagery
Articles and papers mentioned
Bernardo Kastrup
Giovanni B Caputo
✉*Giovanni B. Caputo: giovanni.caputouniurb.it Academic Editor: Pietro Pietrini
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