If you treated your dream, not as property but as guest--

What a difference!

--Arlan Condon

When Dreams Become Real

Melville’s initial publication of Moby Dick was in three volumes released in London in October 1851. The text had been subjected to considerable censorship, and many manuscript changes had been made unseen by the author. In addition, Melville’s Epilogue had been lost and was not published. The Epilogue had made it clear that Ishmael had survived. Without the Epilogue, readers raised a chorus of protest. If there was no survivor, who was narrating the novel?

In November 1851, the novel was published in New York with the Epilogue intact.

The error in London, whatever its nature, is interesting from a psychological point of view. Readers experienced a complete disaster without the “comfort” of a surviving narrator.

As we enter the Sixth Extinction, with the distinct possibility that humans will not survive, the “error” edition of Moby Dick begins to add depth to a question I posed back in 1979: What whale does America pursue? 1

That article began as a review of Edward Edinger’s Melville’s Moby Dick: A Jungian Commentary. I said at the outset that Edinger’s commentary was “definitive,” meaning that nothing further need be said. Everything was clear, explained, understood. While I understood and practiced interpreting art psychologically, I was more interested in what art contributed to psychology. Edinger’s analysis, while brilliant and definitive, left me feeling “high and dry.” I wrote in the margin: …why am I so thirsty while reading this commentary about such a story of water and passion? I asked a lot of people about Edinger’s analysis. Except for one or two, all had read Edinger but not Melville. I found this dispiriting because analysis does not excite the imagination in the way art does. What happens in your imagination while reading Moby Dick, is the “fruit” of the artistic seed. That is when psyche gives birth to images that will guide and nourish.

Melville’s Ahab puts everyone in peril as he pursues revenge on Moby Dick for having injured him. If we think of much of the world as embodying Ahab’s revenge, what does this lead to? We can clearly see that profit and power are leading to the destruction of much of life in various forms, in its mad passion for “more.” If we think of Moby Dick as much of the embodying much of the spirit of life, then if we try to “do in” life, life will do us in instead. Thinking this way suggests that what underlies the massive juggernaut of profit and power is an injury, some form of trauma. This is no doubt why profit and power become severe addictions and seemingly incurable.

What is at work in the world today is incurable which is why it cannot and will not change course as it adds to the inevitable consequences of climate change, economic inequality, and a threat to life itself.

Like the London version of Moby Dick, there will be no Epilogue, no survivors to tell the story of our demise.

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1. Russell A. Lockhart. “What Whale Does America Pursue?” Los Angeles: Psychological Perspectives, Spring 1979.  

Yesterday, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year old climate conscience spoke to the world "leaders" gathered at the United Nations. She spoke the truth of what humanity faces more clearly than anyone: extinction, pure and simple. Listen to her:

In response, president Trump mocked her:

"She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!"

Here is what I felt after hearing her:

For Greta:
“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
The calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
Isaiah 11:6
As you know, this has nothing to do with a child leading adults as is often assumed. It has everything to do with leading the animals. Only the child has the wisdom to do this and in the coming time, it is this that will be crucial as a way to face the end.

I'm not expecting anyone to get what I am saying here. That's OK. I'll elaborate on this theme later. For now, let it be.

Belief overwhelms all; not just belief in God or any other

divinity--divine or human--but everything becomes mere opinion

while mere opinion becomes belief and belief supplants knowing

and unknowing turns its back on knowledge.

No way to test belief, nor any desire to.

Belief marries power and the offspring's smile

send chills among those who can see what's coming:

the Inquisition reborn, Torquemada lives again!

Reality, Susan Sontag observed, is ineluctable
But ineluctable has met its match, and the fire is lit
Ubiquitous addiction to hope prays for the Phoenix
But no one yet knows what rises from reality absconded
No one prepared for what is now creeping from the ashes
Look out for dreams without blindfolds, without earplugs
So you can see and hear what Yeats foretold long ago

There were no images, no voices, only awareness, an awareness that correction was underway, correcting all the damage that had been done by the world’s leaders in recent time. It was clear that this correction was not being carried out by persons, but by some implacable force. I did not have the impression that this dream was conveying this awareness in any personal sense. The dream startled me awake—a rare event. The experience was stunning, the impact leaving me breathing hard, disoriented.

The next night, the dream repeated, only this time with an insistence that the correction would be complete.

The sense that this was some personal “wish fulfillment” dream was ludicrous on the face of it and most every orientation I came up with toward the dream felt much the same way. All minor potatoes in relation to the intensity and breadth of the dream experience.

Finally, I felt that what I was being made aware of was a vast enantiodromia now underway. This felt as close as I was going to get to an “understanding” of the dream, though even this seemed paltry in relation to the experience itself.

To understand the meaning of enantiodromia, one needs to understand the meaning of dominant.

On a personal level, Jung used the term dominant primarily in relation to the psychological functions. If, for example, the thinking function was dominant in consciousness, then its opposite would be dominant in the unconscious. Over time, as the personality is urged onward in development, the conscious function resists this, seeking only further development of the dominant function. However, what happens is that the dominant function in the unconscious grows more powerful and eventually breaks through and overwhelms the conscious dominant. This is an example of enantiodromia, where the thinking function gives way to its opposite. This forces a struggle between these dominants to achieve a necessary balance and greater wholeness that is the hallmark of the process of individuation. Anything less subjects the personality to breakdown, reversals, illness, debilitating neuroses, addiction, or worse.

When applied to groups, culture, nations and large-scale processes, Jung used dominant to refer to the “spirit” of the time. Ordinarily, there are multiple spirits of the time, keeping the aggregate in some state of uneasy balance. However, periodically in history, a particular “spirit” will become dominant. This is marked by extremity of one sort or another, that goes way beyond the usual and normal. Extremity is psychologically dangerous because it unleashes unconscious processes in vast numbers of people that fuel further extremity. This is a cycle that builds up to explosive potentials that usually are catastrophic. History is the story of such catastrophes.

The trigger for enantiodromia cannot be predicted, but it always relates to extremity increasing to some point. The dream indicates that a process of correction, complete correction, is underway. The fact that such a process was not the result of persons, but some impersonal force, points to the potential for an archetypal shift, a change on dominants, is underway. If so, I want to be on the lookout for evidence of this. Such evidence will be the subject of my next post.

Cesar Sayoc sent crude pipe bombs to major Democratic figures. His aim was to threaten and intimidate, not to injure. He will serve 10 years in prison for domestic terrorism. A straightforward case.

In commenting on attending Trump rallies, Sayoc said, “It became like a newfound drug.” This struck me as a significant insight into the nature of Trump’s “appeal” to a large segment of the US population.

A new form of addiction.

Trump addiction.

Trump as drug.

Most anything can become an object of addiction, even a president. All forms of addiction begin in finding pleasure in something that relieves pain. This phenomenon of pleasure associated with the relief of pain develops craving. Because the relief from pain is short-lived, the craving becomes intense. Seeking the object becomes overwhelming and consuming. The addiction becomes entrenched when the person cannot stop the seeking. Increasing negative consequences do not break the cycle but increase the addictive process.

Most everyone has some degree of addictive process. Those most vulnerable to full-fledged addiction are those subjected to severe trauma. Trauma can occur at any time, even before birth. Pregnant women experiencing high degrees of stress will bear children that are vulnerable. Childhood trauma increases susceptibility to addiction. On-going life trauma of any form ensures that addictive processes will manifest.

If a Trump rally is a new-found drug, as Sayoc says, then the high frequency of Trump rallies serves as a drug supply. What Trump does at rallies becomes what Trump does in Twitter Tweets. The dailyness of this supply ensures ongoing addiction.

Rational attempts to dissuade the addict from the addictive process fail. The pain an addict seeks to relieve derives from the absence or loss of love. This is the root of the vast reservoir of trauma in our society and is why addiction of all forms is epidemic. The same is true of Trump addiction.

There is important reciprocity between Trump addiction and Trump's addiction. Trump had a severe traumatized childhood and the absence of love was striking. This serves as the basis for Trump's glaring addictive processes.

It is easy to have little or no compassion for the addict. It is easy to blame the addict. It is easy to criminalize the addict for crimes committed as an addict. It is easy to seek punishment for the addict. But we all know that none of these "easy" things will help the addict become free from addiction.

As far as I can see, there is no process at work to free Trump from his addictive behaviors. Nor is there any process at work to free those caught in Trump addiction. As far as I can see, everything at work at present only serves to strengthen the grip of these addictions.

The ravages to our system, to our institutions, to equality and to truth itself will continue. In one way or another, we are all caught in this web. Addicted or demoralized by the addiction of others we and everything we value is at risk.

In 1996, IBM’s chess computer (“Deep Blue”) beat world champion chess master Gary Kasparov in the first game of a match. It was the first time a computer had beat a grandmaster. Kasparov went on to win the match and a re-match was set for the following year. In that match, the computer beat Kasparov. Kasparov complained that the team managing the computer had violated the rules. He refused to play the computer again.

In 2006, “Deep Fritz,” beat grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, the world champion. With this loss, Kramnik and other observers felt that the world of “human” chess had reached its "end"

Computers and programs benefited from two factors. The computer's memory contained massive databases of historic games. The computer analyzed the current game position up to 200 million times per second. The resulting games played by the computer were indistinguishable from master games. A human could not tell which side human and which computer. In this sense, the computer’s intelligence had passed the Turing test. Thus, computers could play as well as and better than grandmaster level humans.

In 2016, Google’s “Alpha Go” computer played a match with Lee Sedol, the world’s top GO player. Go masters felt that computers would not be able to beat them. They asserted that GO required more "intuition" to reach master's level play. Alpha Go beat Lee Sedol. In the following year, an improved version of Alpha Go beat Ke Jie, the reigning grandmaster.

Alpha GO integrated “artificial intelligence” with “machine learning.” In recent time, these computers have far surpassed human skills. But the most important thing is this. Given only the rules, with no database of games, the computer was set to play itself. There was no human intervention. Within 40 days, the computer not only beat all human players but also all lesser machines. Moreover, the resulting games showed play no one had ever seen before. Grandmasters did not recognize the intelligence that led to the winning outcomes.

AI is well on its way to becoming not "artificial" intelligence, but "alien" intelligence."

When computers beat grandmaster humans in chess and GO, the machines are intelligent. They pass the Turing test. But what we are looking at now is that humans may not be able to pass what I'll call the Lem Test. Humans may not be able to understand the intelligence machines are now producing.

This is the point of the recent posts on Solaris.

This "revolution" is coming to all fields of human activity. Be ready!

Since my initial post on the SOLARIS dream, I have re-read the novel and watched the two major film versions.

I first read Lem's novel around 1973, This was the Kilmartin-Cox translation from French. From Polish to French to English left a trail of incongruities. For example, the Freudian interpretation of the novel is based on the English text, but, as Lem noted, the Polish idioms in no way support these interpretations. Lem rejected most criticism of his novel, just as he rejected most science fiction which he considered drivel. Ultimately, Lem was banished from the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1976, following the withering criticism of Lem’s work by Philip K. Dick, accusing Lem of being at best a functionary of the Communist Party, while conjecturing the book no doubt was written by a committee. Dick was in the midst of his own "alien" encounters, being in a psychotic process at the time.

My most recent reading of the book (in Kindle format) is in the translation from Polish by Bill Johnston, which has been lauded by Lem's family. I saw the Tarkovsky film adaptation most likely in 1973, following the film’s winning the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1972. By then I knew that Tarkovsky was a great director, but I was not taken with the film. To my mind, he missed the essentials of Lem's novel (the utter alienness of Solaris), and focused instead on the human relationships of the characters, and did so in dramatic ways (his genius at work to be sure) that further backgrounded the main intention of the novel.

 I saw the 2002 film version, directed by Steven Soderbergh in 2003. Although Soderbergh later commented (2010) that he intended a fresh version of the novel, one closer to Lem, and not a remake of Tarkovsky, I was disappointed in the film. To me, Soderbergh missed the main point even more than Tarkovsky, and made a film amounting to a Hollywood cliché. In response, Lem said: "...[Solaris] cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images. This is why the book is entitled "Solaris" and not "Love in Outer Space."

I have been a science fiction fan since the mid-forties when I first read "Out of the Silent Planet" by C.S. Lewis. I read this in 1945 when I was nearly 7 years old. I was working on a project to read literature in different forms published in my birth year (1938). I was a very serious, avid-reading kid, already driving my teachers a bit mad.

The above amounts to little more than ephemera, but all related to a point I want to articulate about having my present attention drawn to Solaris by the dream voice. I could not help but feel that my attention was called to Solaris in the context of writing about climate change and human extinction. The essential theme of Lem’s novel is the complete failure of human beings to understand extraterrestrial intelligence—if for no other reason than that it is humans who impose the requirement that all such things be understood only in human terms. This amounts to a kind of hubris—a hubris that might prove fatal in actual encounters with aliens of whatever form. What has this to do with the focus of my writing at present? Well, it suggests that humans may be incapable of understanding their own extinction. Even among those direst in their warnings about this, tend to mitigate their warnings with various intensities of hope, in the form of redemption, regeneration, or rebirth. These factors seem almost hard-wired into the human view of any future. It is as if the final extinction simply cannot be. My earlier dream of celebrating the final Ragnarök is more in line with Solaris. The dream source “gets it.”

Celebrating extinction. Imagine that!