When the Dream is Not a Dream
Over the past few days, a close friend had a complex nonordinary experience that began in a hypnogogic para-dream. My friend’s dream is private, and it expanded, over the next few days, into a waking-world experience that involved aspects of what most of us would evaluate as madness. My friend was eventually hospitalized (briefly) due to this unfortunate situation.
I have been exceptionally curious about dreaming throughout my life; however, as an adult, and, particularly, over the past few years (due to changes in my dreaming experience) I have become aware of uncommonly examined features of these experiences. I have made some videos where I talk about some of them at length.
But the other night, as my friend shared her very complex experience with me, I became marginally aware of something that I would like to share about here, today, because I find it nearly irreconcilable with most of how we think in general, and not merely about dreams. This is another of my personal fascinations: how easily we are deceived by words, concepts and common ideas about ‘what things are’.
For example, we think that ‘a lifetime’ is one thing. A tree is one thing. Surely a dollar is one thing? Is not ‘a’ dream, then, a single thing?
No.
To begin with, there are endless different forms of dreaming experiences. Nearly none of them are encompassed by our common ideas about dreaming. Generally, this word dream is used to excuse us from having to pay much attention to the endless varieties and forms of experience this word encompasses. Most of us have heard the phrase ‘it’s just your imagination’. Similarly, many of us have been told ‘it’s only a dream’. Yet it is our imagination with which such statements are formed; or rather, the portion of our imagination we call the intellect. Primarily, the intellect is a knife-like tool that masquerades as the whole of the mind or intelligence, when, in fact, it is less than a single appendage of an affair with effectively infinite limbs (each with their own unique abilities and ways of seeing/feeling/knowing).
My friend’s experience began with a hypnogogic situation; this word indicates the twilight state between waking and dreaming. This is contrasted with hypnopompic experiences, which take place in the twilight of dreaming and waking. Each of these words have different connotations and denotations. They are not the same mode of state-change, and are even less similar than dawn and dusk in terms of the forms of awareness and kinds of experiences they refer to.
The topic is infinitely deep, however, I must try to restrict myself to the particular insights that arose for me during my conversation with my friend about her experiences and what she was inclined to make of them.
The beginning of her experience was magical; she met a cohort of unusual persons who were practicing forms of magical relation that were as compelling as they were beautiful. They began to teach her a specific form of whisper-language that also involved gestures and music.
There was a hierarchy in their circle; each person had unique powers and abilities that they contributed to the circle as a whole. It was made clear that they had known her for her entire life and that she had been selected for inclusion and was thus honored by their choice.
There was a sense of profound intimacy, beauty and beneficial magic involved. I mention these things by way of introduction, yet it is not my intention to detail her experience, but rather, what I was able to discover by following along with her very intently as she related what happened to me, and the transformations in the situation as it developed.
Eventually, her experience crossed over into her waking world in troubling ways. She began to hear voices, and was struggling to distinguish between what was going on in her mind and the actual world she was engaged with (at work, for example). The ordinary people around her could not understand what she was experiencing, and so, eventually, had her subjected to a 5150 order. This is where one is placed in a psych-ward for at least 72 hours to evaluate whether or not they are a threat to themselves or others.
While these are effectively facts, they are not deeply related to what I wish to discuss here. I have spent over 20 years trying to learn more about the relationships between madness and insight. Part of how I have explored this is by forming close relationships over many years with people who are unusually minded. This includes people who are blatantly schizophrenic, and others who experience other forms of what we might, in today’s climate of identity politics, call neurodivergent.
It is impossible to entirely tease these polarities (madness and insight) apart, but I will say a few things briefly in order to dispense with this conflict as I move toward what I actually wish to discuss.
Consciousness can be viewed as a complexly layered continuum. In actual situations, language and ideas, everything is a continuum. However, we are incorrectly trained to consider a continuum as a single thing, when, in most cases it cannot be so. This is part of the problem with a feature of thought we might call the ‘is’ of identity. Since we think of things as single states, we ignore something that wisdom traditions are at pains to remind us of: all things are transforming, always.
If we grant this perspective precedence in our thought and awareness, an entirely different world emerges to our thought and awareness. This world is not like our language or habits of thought as they relate to identity. Hopefully, we are all aware that a tree is not always the same thing. It is not one thing. It is many different things in different (relational) situations over time and perspective. Perspective is deeply informed by our purposes in the process of deriving identity from experience.
Time, it turns out, is the crucially important factor that is too easily dismissed by our common habits of language and thought. After all, if something is always changing, or essentially changeable then how can we call it this or that? Our experience of intellect effectively demands that we take one specific slice of temporal and relational experience as authoritative. And this is where, almost literally we lose our minds.
Madness and insight are deeply related. Most insight is tinged with madness, and vice-versa. This is why people who are in the grip of nonordinary experience are often convinced that they are messianic, or the most important human that ever lived, or have ‘discovered the great lie that underlies all problems’. In actual fact, a truly insightful person who is listening to the narrative of a person who has ‘gone mad’ can detect the seeds of insight in the other’s narratives and urgently held perspectives or interpretations. They are there. Similarly, some forms of deep insight are partly insane. We see this even in the history of science. Radical insights that defy current ideological fashion are almost universally declared to be insane, nonsense, or patently absurd.
One example of this is the ostensible founder of germ theory; Ignaz Semmelweis, who simply suggested that hands and instruments used in childbirth be cleansed between medical situations.
Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis’s observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.
Again, I must restrict myself to the matters presently on my mind. These have less to do with the situations described above, and more to do with an overarching archetype in human experience. I would like to suggest that we call this a metatype; since it applies, in fact, to nearly everything.
The problem here is that we think a dream is a dream, when in fact, a dream is something much more like a continuum that most commonly exhibits a sequence of state changes. There are a (some number) of different common sequences, most of which end with awakening (but some do not!). In this case, some features of the dreaming manifold bled over into my friend’s waking experience. While troubling, this is not the focus I intend to explore, so we will set that aside for now.
Things and situations are unlike the singular declarative nature that our language and thought unnecessarily imposes on them. A lifetime, a society… or anything at all if we include time and perspective (purpose) in the equation whereby we arrive at (or intentionally derive) identity — not only isn’t but cannot be a singular ‘thing’.
A common example of a continuum of state changes are those we associate with water. In the atmosphere, it is mist. When collected, it is liquid. When frozen, it is a solid. A tree may be be formed of living wood. When cut down, it is ‘lumber’. When ignited, however, it is thought of as fuel.
The seed is not the tree. The sprout is not the tree. It’s a sapling. I suspect my readers to be insightful enough to recognize state changes in the continuum of their own life experience. The embryo is not the infant. The infant is not the child. The child is not the teen. And so on. There are many state-changes in our lifetimes that are ignored when we decide that ‘a’ lifetime is a single thing rather than a transforming sequence of (often radical) state-changes.
And this leads to endless kinds of confusion, desperation, argument… and idiocy.
My friend wanted to know something relatively simple: what happened to her. The beginning of the continuum was heartful, inspiring, magical and perhaps empowering. However, the latter aspect was judgemental. In this phase of her experience, the previously encouraging ‘other people’ became judgemental, accusatory, and generally unfriendly. And here is where insight arose for me.
If we notice the narrative arc of dreams, we find something similar exemplified in their state-changes across the continuum from inception to conclusion. There are many different aspects of dreaming that are of interest here. One is that her ‘friends’ were teaching her something she described as a whisper-language. This is important, because, in dreaming, actual speech involves brain centers that incline the dreaming situation to collapse.
Like childhood, love affairs, or even common transactions in the waking world (imagine making a drawing, or song, or dance, or falling in love), the state-changes usually follow a similar sequence. The beginning is open, vague, filled with possibility and perhaps beauty. As this progresses, things become more structured, specific, and concrete. In general, the cycle of dreaming comes to an end when specific faculties intrude. These include judgements, evaluations, threats, conflicts and a variety of related features. Soap bubbles float in the atmosphere for a time, but are punctured or collapse when the ambient liquid variability that is associated with their origin acquires too much structure — and judgement or waking-mind evaluation is one of the kinds of structure that are too concrete to allow the dream to continue.
The end of dreaming is an apocalypse for the dreaming experience or mind. What happened to my friend in her experience is that she committed an act that was immediately judged by the dreaming-people she was involved with. This led to painful and confusing results. At the same time, all dreams must end… all lives must end… death is a relief from a situation that has become too complicated to continue within. And so death (or apocalypse) ‘resets’ the context of being in a way that allows for new possibilities and updated modes of awareness or embodiment.
The Bible can be seen (from one perspective) as an example of this. What comes at the end? Judgement. The entire book can be seen as a record of ancient people and their unsolvable problem of the transformation of a life that originally included dreaming faculties while awake, to one which became the throne of declarative or derivative faculties in which the dreaming mind could no longer survive. Our own lives as children exemplify the process of this kind of state-change: from ‘dreaming while awake’ (play), to subjugation to the rational, ‘survival has precedence’ pragmatism of the intellect and waking-world enculturation. This includes ‘static langauge’ (each thing is a distinct, knowable thing pointed to by a word) and static models of identity, function, context, and so on.
What I realized when talking to my friend was astonishing. It was simply this: that her experience was not a singular thing. Rather, it was an experience of state changes that occurred in a familiar sequence along the origin, development, and structured dissolution of a continuum. I explained carefully to her something it took some time to adequately communicate: I trusted the beginning of her experience, but I did not trust or authorize the appearances of its collapse. Specifically, when the dream-people became judgemental and critical of her. Those features of the experience are necessary aspects of its transformation into waking-world situations, but are not intrinsically authentic because they were more functional than real.
The introduction of judgment simply signaled the closure of the dreaming state and its natural transformation into waking. She was not ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ as she might otherwise have decided; instead, these were natural features of the state-change from dreaming to waking.
A dream, then, is not a single thing. The key take-away here is that the beginning, middle and end (so to speak) are distinct modes of the dream. And thus ‘a’ dream… is actually a variety of things which we can see as a single experience… or, perhaps more insightfully, as a process that is different in each of its manifestations and times… much like our own minds, the universe… or anything at all.
We are trained to think of ‘a person’ or ‘a lifetime’ as a single thing; there’s a sense in which this is relatively accurate, but most of the actual situation lies far beyond our common ideas, words, concepts… and judgements.
