I’ve recently had a “dream within a dream” that has become very compelling to me.

The phenomenon of a dream within a dream has been reported since antiquity and is typically afforded great respect in those traditional societies where dreams play a central cultural function. In the modern period and particularly in the West, dreams are quite marginalized and given little value. Except for traditions of psychological and psychoanalytical therapies, dreams are rarely heard and outside these domains are given scant attention if not devalued completely.

In my more than 50 years of tending to dreams of mine and others, I have probably seen or heard upwards of 100,000 dreams. Very few people have such a “database” of experience to draw on. In this range of experience, I find the phenomenon of a dream within a dream uncommon. The typical dream within a dream has three components: there is the interior dream, followed by what Freud called “false awakening,” in which the dreamer “wakes up” from the interior dream, but is still in the dream state, which is then followed by waking up as usual. A much less common dream within a dream is the type I had. In this dream, the interior dream is one in which I am being told to look at the first page of the Congressional Record. As I am contemplating this in the interior dream, I wake up in the dream, yet continue to experience the interior dream and my contemplating it. Still in my dream state, I begin to reflect on my reflections of the continuing interior dream experience, so I have a kind of double consciousness at the same time. Then I wake up as usual while still experiencing each component, a kind of triple consciousness at the same time. Extraordinary! I have never experienced this degree of simultaneity before.

Aside from the phenomenology of this triple consciousness, there is of course the “instruction” of the interior dream: “Look at the first page of the Congressional Record.” I do not recall ever having looked at the Congressional Record. I know there is such a thing, but I have no experience of it. I was intrigued by the idea of looking at the first page. Why the first page? I was able to find the first page via Internet searching and when I saw what was there I was stunned. There was nothing on the first page that stood out to me except the date: 1873. But from my long study of the history of financial markets, I was immediately filled with images from the Great Panic of 1873. This was the first “global” financial meltdown and one of the chief results was the breakdown of the hegemony of the British Empire (to be gradually replaced by the United States). It was the beginning of what ultimately led to the formation of the Federal Reserve bank and the final dissolution of gold- and silver-backed money. There are many crashes and panics and meltdowns and they are all both similar and have distinctive features.

I took being led to the Panic of 1873, as forming a task to work out the historic parallels to our present global financial condition. We are already seeing the collapse of many global markets in relation to all financial categories: equities, debt, commodities, and currencies. The question is: Is this the time point from which the hegemony of US power begins its decline, similar to what befell the British Empire?

In a future post, I may go into what my personal response to this question is.

For now, I use this experience to illustrate the dream as punctum and how it can lead one far afield from conscious intentionality but closer to what may be crucial to attend to.