They say breathing will remain free
And there will be no charge for sleep
The call of nature will be untaxed
except in public facilities
There will be no tuition for mandatory
courses in Newtruth
So I've been told
Hard to know what to believe
Except what has been ordered
By the PDC, the Provisional
Declaration Committee
Authorized in Tweet 767
In the Year of Our Trmp 1
The crowd's hands are not tied
But well sat upon
The crowd's eyes are not blindfolded
But no one is seeing
The crowd's ears are not plugged
But no one hears
The crowd's mouths are not gagged
But no one utters
The crowd's memory
Is not remembering
The crowd's imagination
Is cowed
The crowd's dreams
Are no more
The crowd's soul
Has departed
The crowd's ruler
Tweets in tweetspeak
A recent dream pictured a stack of manuscript pages with the title page showing. This dream, like several other dreams in the past, came with a sense of task, as if I was being presented with something to do. I am used to this feeling, and quite a number of my articles and books have had their origin in such dreams.
These dreams arrive from somewhere outside my conscious intention, but obviously having their origin in the intentionality of “something other.” I don’t need anything else on my plate just now, yet I cannot ignore what has been presented to me by what I have called the “presentational psyche.”
I have decided to post this dream on my blog as a way to publicly commit to the project because it feels crucial to me.
Here is the image from my dream.
The dream image shows the title, the subtitle, my name and my press, along with the publication date. What was startling to me was that the image was presented in the typeface of the 1956 Olympia portable typewriter I just received for my birthday. I realized that if I was to fully follow the intention of the dream, I would have to write this “book” …if that is to be what it is… on this typewriter.
Here is my “provisional” introduction. I say provisional, because what I will be posting in this blog is my original typescript pages. I trust you will tolerate this reversion to older technology, without the modern convenience of automatic error correction and other such wonders. I encourage feedback. I will use your feedback later on when I begin to edit whatever this project turns into.
Please feel free to comment on the blog or by email.
I graduated from high school in late spring of 1956. My graduation present from my parents was a new Olympia SM3 portable typewriter. It was the first in a long series of typewriters I collected—just as my Esterbrook fountain pen acquired a year earlier was the first of scores of fountain pens in my collection. I still use that old Esterbrook and it remains my favorite pen.
I've given away all my typewriters, replaced now by an endless string of computers.
My first experience with computers was in the spring of 1958. It was my sophomore year at USC, and the computer was a Honeywell—their first entry into the computer market. I learned programming, card punching, and how to deal with large computer printouts. I also learned how to ferry all those cards and all that paper on special carts without spilling it all—a computer user’s nightmare in those days.
All this has come back to mind because my wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday. What sprang instantly to mind was a manual typewriter!
As I began to research this desire, I was surprised to find that typewriters were still being made. But I could tell they were all plastic and cheap and unlikely to last long, as is the ethos of the modern consumerist culture. What rose up in me was the desire for "the real thing," a typewriter made of metal, a typewriter that was built with precision, a truly crafted typewriter.
In short, I began to lust after my original typewriter—that O1ympia SM3.
A few quick pecks into Google and I was linked to an excellent refurbished model of the Olympia SM3. I learned it was one of the best manufactured typewriters built to high standards, of high quality materials, design and craftsmanship in post-war Germany—a kind of Mercedes or Porsche among typewriters. The proprietor had just decided to sell it because he had found an earlier model for his permanent collection. He gave it one last work-over and in a few days it was on my desk.
As I typed this blog entry, I experienced wonder that my fingers remembered how to strike the keys to make them work properly—nothing at all like the soft silent touch of the computer keyboard.
I love the touch, the sound, the slowness, even the errors. The machine needs no electric power and no connection to the Internet. It feels "right" in some way I cannot articulate. I don’t think this is the romantic nostalgia that so often grips people of my age (I will be 78 later this month). The closest I can come to expressing this inchoate feeling is that more and more we seem to be serving the machine, rather than the machine serving us. This echoes the much-neglected thought of Lewis Mumford (see for example, his Art and Technics published in 1952). He argued for the primacy of the person and it is personhood that is being "replaced" by the machine (robotics, artificial intelligence, and the mechanisms of commodification).
Hey, Mr. Thomas Wolff, maybe we can go home again. I do feel "at home" with this machine. And I have company. Though I am not a fan of any of Danielle Steel’s 100 novels, I do like the fact that she typed them all on her 1946 Olympia typewriter!
There are three great intertwined denials, ubiquitous in their reach, hegemonic in their power, and life-destroying in their structure and dynamics.
First, is the Denial of Truth. The first level is our full reality. We are unconscious of much of who we are. Becoming conscious is the great dream of psychology, depth psychology in particular. But the degree of humanity working to become more conscious is miniscule to the point of vanishing. The degree of unconsciousness underlying the great bulk of individual thoughts and actions is vast beyond imagining. Unconsciousness pervades our relationships, from those most intimate to those of only passing interest. It pervades our involvement in the groupings we become part of, and our unconsciousness multiplies with other’s unconsciousness to maximize the corrosive potential of collectives at all levels of cultures, nations, and all else. What passes for truth in the public consciousness is grasped after as if such could function to bring individuals to consciousness. Dreams are the great “truth tellers,” but how many among us billions of humans listen, let alone bring such truths to manifestation in life?
Second, is the Denial of Risk. Unconsciousness cuts us off from the fundaments of life, not only in our own body, mind and spirit, but in the body, mind and spirit of all life around us, including the life of our planetary home, the earth. Unconsciousness breeds the denial of risk inherent in separating human life from its rhizomic necessities. Chief among these risks is what functions as the life-blood of our contemporary life: money. Money has become our operative religion. More than any other single factor, we have become unalterably attached to money, as if “In Money We Trust,” would sum up every department of our lives. The powers that be that operate the world’s financial system know this, count on this, rely on this “belief” system, and operate as grand priests of the money temple. What we are not told, what is kept from view, is the degree of risk building up throughout the world. The risk is denied. Yet, the collapse of all great powers and empires has been triggered by risk gone wild and triggering the collapse. Because money has become more foundational in our lives than any other factor, this coming collapse poses catastrophic risk for everyone’s welfare. And, sad to say, most everyone is denying this risk.
Third, is the Denial of Love. We can only do to others and so much of what is happening in the world, when we deny love. We can only do to the life of the world, what we are doing, when we deny love. We can only do to our habitat, our home, our earth, when we deny love. As unconsciousness persists, as money invades and pervades every facet, love disappears. Freud spoke of the great battle between Eros and Death. Without love, death of most everything of value will be what we live. That is our present future.
It is not clear there is sufficient human will to say no to power and money and the commodification of desire.
Dreams are raising this issue as a great question mark.
[To be continued…]
PACO MITCHELL’S REPLY TO RUSS’ CATS ACCEPTING CHRIST BLOG POST
Hi Russ,
When I first read that you’d had a dream instructing you, point-blank, to read a Wallace Stevens poem every day, I was not in the least surprised that you planned to accede to the dream-mandate. How could you not? After all, to refuse such a dream-hatched directive is a most foolish thing to do.
So, when you next announced your plan to respond to each daily Wallace Stevens poem in whatever poetic way came to you, I thought: “Harrumph! Well, that’s certainly an interesting project, old boy! Eminently sensible. Stands to reason.”
Then I read your first “Stray”:
Gods and Tuna
A little-known secret:
Cats accepting Christ
Buddha and all the others
Like so many tuna
Humans could learn
From cats—but don’t
Wait for that to happen
It’s hard for me to describe what happened when I read the second line—“Cats accepting Christ.” I was like one struck by lightning—a commonplace phrase unless it happens to you. I’ve read a lot of wonderful poetry in my life, but there was something about those three words that “electrified” me.
Knowing the danger of explanations and interpretations, which can drain the precious life-essence out of a poem or a dream, I’m reluctant to say too much about my experience, besides scrabbling for a handful of superlatives. Perhaps I can make a couple of comparisons, though.
Anyone who would like to get a feeling for the quality of my “Cats Accepting Christ” experience, might consider looking up Jorge Luis Borges’ marvelous story, The Aleph. An aleph is a “point that contains all points,” and whoever sees one can see every point in the universe simultaneously. Such was the rush of images that flooded my mind when I first read that little line, that the experience reminded me of the aleph!
Another way to think about my “poetic” experience is to imagine spinning together—as in an immense ball of yarn—the entire history of Western religion from the most primitive animal ancestors, the archaic shamanic cults, through the Egyptian cat-goddesses, to Dionysian blood-rituals and mystery-cults, to Christ and the Christian Mass—the body and blood of Christ—all the way up to the present, the New Dispensation and the Coming Guest.
As you can see, this kind of experience does not readily lend itself to explanation, unless one is willing to emulate Philip K. Dick, who spent years of his life, writing 8,000 pages, in pursuit of his visionary exegesis.
Needless to say, I was dumbstruck, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was being affected by that simple spontaneous line. Not being Philip K. Dick, however, and having been afflicted with an annoying series of Mercury Retrograde misfortunes, I did manage to compose this little poem in response:
Cats may accept Christ,
Buddha, and all the others,
In the form of tuna—
So solemnly addressed
With licking tongues and gnawing fangs,
Whiskers quivering over the sacrificial bowl.
“This is the body of Christ, my child,
Take and eat."
Alternatively, cats may also accept roast beef, lamb, pork or kibble
As Christ, et al.
But what about water from the tap?
“This is the blood of Christ, my child!
Take and drink."
I’m just skimming over the surface with this little poem, of course, but it will have to do for now. Besides, it keeps me in the flow of your poem. Thanks so much for posting your “Strays.”
Paco Mitchell
Recently, I had this dream: Read a Wallace Stevens poem each and every day.
I call this sort of dream a “task” dream. Many of the things I have written had their origin in such task dreams. Since Wallace Stevens is one of my favorite poets, I took up this task with enthusiasm. I decided to read a poem a day from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954). As always, I don’t just read a poem, but I read it aloud. To hear the “voice” of the poem, one needs to hear it, not just see it.
A few days into this new “discipline,” something began to happen that is now ongoing. To give this some context, those of you who know my book, Psyche Speaks, may remember my describing a dream I had the night that I heard Robert Bly read Lorca’s Casida of the Rose. In the dream, I was leafing through Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections when a piece of paper fell out. On it was written, “The poem wants a poem/the dream wants a dream.” This dream began to change not only how I experienced dreams and poems, but also how I related to them.
That was three and more decades ago. So this sense of desire on the part of dreams and poems has been bubbling for a long time. It’s still hard to come to terms with this. But here is what began to happen in present time when I followed the instruction of the dream and began to read a Wallace Stevens poem every day.
As I was speaking the lines from Stevens' poem, “Infanta Marina,” a line burst into my experience that was not in the poem. The line was: “cats accepting Christ.” This is not a line I “made up” in any typical sense. It simply presented itself spontaneously. As far as I could tell, it had no relation whatever to Stevens’ poem. But the experience was so strong, that I had to stop and attend to the line and, as I did so, the line became part of a poem. It was not so much that I went into some composing mode. More exactly, I simply opened myself to a kind of “flow” of lines. It was a brief experience and afterward I gave the little poem a title, “Gods and Tuna.”
Gods and Tuna
A little-known secret:
Cats accepting Christ
Buddha and all the others
Like so many tuna
Humans could learn
From cats—but don’t
Wait for that to happen
What is most intriguing to me is that this has now become a regular experience. Sometimes it begins as I open the book to read the next day’s poem. Sometimes, it occurs as I’m reading the poem aloud. And sometimes it occurs after the poem. It has the feeling of a channel being opened, a channel from which words stream into my awareness. This is very similar to what my experience is like when I am writing fiction.
One of my favorite poems by Stevens is his “Mountains Covered with Cats.” I have not gotten to that poem in my daily reading yet, but it came to mind when I wanted to begin putting these little poems together. I call them “Strays.”
STRAYS
Like stray cats,
these little poems
visited upon reading
a Wallace Stevens poem
every day
Here is another:
Advantage
The cat looks at me
Not for praise, or love
Or any such a dog would
The cat looks instead
To brew some advantage
Calculating all the while
The cat looks satisfied
Advantage weighed
Curls up to sleep on it
For now, I just want to report that this is happening and that I experience it as a gift.
I wake from a dream in the middle of the night and scratch out this note to help me recall the dream in the morning:
Dancing ladle/tef >silver>gold…alive
In the morning, fully awake and far from the dream state, I use my note to draw back as much memory of the dream as I can. I recognize that the memory of the dream is nowhere near as “substantial” as the dream itself, more a simulacrum of the original. But remembering is better than not, so I work my sketchy note into a narrative of sorts. Here is the text of the dream I wrote in my dream book.
I see a ladle hanging in midair as if held by some unseen hand. It's moving about, twisting this way and that. As I look into the Teflon bowl of the ladle, it changes to bright silver. Its movements are ever more a graceful dance, balletic even. As I watch, I see the silver change into bright gold. I realize the ladle is alive! I am awestruck.
I am aware to the point of pain how inadequate my written text is in relation to the dream experience itself. As text, it fails to capture the palpable reality of the dream, the awe in realizing the ladle was alive. Like my camera capturing David,[1] the resulting two-dimensional images were only reminders of what I experienced with the living sculpture itself. Even with uninterrupted moving images (film) I have seen, the framing was so focused, that the enveloping contextual reality within which I experienced David was missing.
It is common to refer to a dream as “my” dream. This is similar to the proprietary aspect of capturing a photograph that is the subject of Susan Sontag’s masterful critique of photography.[2] The “appropriating” she decries applies as well to how we relate to the dream. We appropriate the dream and call it “mine.” As I have written before,[3] when we photograph, we milk reality for its truth.[4] Likewise, we tend to “milk” the dream for our own ends, our own needs, our own intentions.
I realize that milking the dream to serve our conscious intentions is a perdurable activity that is not going to change—its history is too long, its utilitarian value too embedded, its “obviousness” too obscuring of any other approach. I know that most anything I say here is going to fall on the ubiquitous “deaf ears” of the standard approach to dreams, which leads to seeking meaning, interpretation, and analysis, all of which leads “away” from the dream itself.
Nonetheless, I want to look at the dream differently.
The dream presents itself to us. It comes as a visitor. Perhaps instead of “capturing it,” we might treat the visitor as a guest. Then we would be host to the dream. I’m thinking of Baucis and Philemon, and how they invited the beggars in, something no one else in the town did. While the townspeople who rejected the beggars paid a steep price (drowning in a flood), Baucis and Philemon were rewarded. The disguised gods (Zeus and Hermes) made it possible to grant them their wish: to die entwined together as an everlasting tree.
Freud made it a fundamental principle that dreams are disguises, disguises for the dreamer’s unconscious desires. Jung disagreed and felt the dream was “just so.” But Jung did emphasize in many ways that what was crucial was to welcome the dream as a guest. But contemporary attitudes toward the dream tend to forget this. The common mode is to “use” the dream for its utility value in serving the ego.
The dream, however we recall it, comes to our experience already crafted with exquisite precision, or impressionistic flux, or fleeting but impressive impact, or eerie vagaries. Consciously, we could produce none of this. So how are these experiences we call dreams crafted?
We don’t know. Probably the best answer is that dreams are crafted by something other, certainly something other than our consciousness. We might argue that at some point brain science will unlock this mystery and we will have a more complete picture of how the brain crafts dreams. Still, it will be how we relate to these experiences we call dreams that will be crucial.
The dream exhibits artisanal forces at work in the making of the dream, already worked, already crafted, already smithed into the forms we see by an unknown dreamsmith.
We can approach the dream as critics and form an opinion of it, try to discern its meaning, attempt to assess its value, and otherwise try to understand it. But as Baudelaire observed, “the only proper criticism of a work of art, is another work of art.” In Psyche Speaks, I wrote of a dream that pictured me leafing through Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. A piece of paper fell out and when I looked at it, there was written, poem-like:
The poem wants a poem
The dream wants a dream
Notice how this dream shifts the emphasis from the dreamer’s desire, to the dream’s desire. This dream had a powerful effect on me because it radically shifted my own way of working with my dreams as well as those of others—wherever that is possible.
Jung’s “active imagination” way of working with dreams, now made clear with the publication of his Red Book, is clearly one way of satisfying a dream wanting a dream.
I think that almost any artisanal approach to a dream carries this same spirit. As an example, I have lately taken up approaching my dreams poetically before textually. What I mean is that I steep myself in the memory of the dream and while in this experience I write a haiku.[5]
Here is the Haiku I wrote following the dream:
The Teflon ladle
turned bright silver, then bright gold
dream ladle: alive!
In my experience, working on a dream haiku within a kind of meditative state, brings forth spontaneous memories. For example, in this instance, what came is the memory of Kandinsky’s reflection I had quoted in Psyche Speaks:
Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street…Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.
At once I knew what to do. I went to the kitchen drawer and fetched the Teflon ladle. This everyday mundane object now took on that quality of Kandinsky’s trouser button. Could my consciousness see into the ladle as deeply as the dream? One thing I know: I can no longer pass by anything as if it is a lifeless object. When things become “alive” in this way, it is not the rational mind that will be moved; it will be the artist-soul that will want to dream this aliveness into new forms.
This I believe is a key to understanding the principle of eros that underlies the nature of the Coming Guest. More about this in the next post.
[1] See the previous blog post on “Dreamsmithing.”
[2] Susan Sontag. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977.
[3] See my “Afterword” to Jeff Jacobson’s My Fellow Americans… Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. The relation between the photograph and the dream has yet to be fully essayed. This afterword was my initial attempt to do so and remains my favorite piece of my own work.
[4] I used J. Robinson’s 1658 lines as an epigram: “My wished end is, by gentle concussion. the emulsion of truth.” In exploring the etymology of emulsion, I found that emulsion derives from the root melg-, which means “to milk” hence its relation to photography. How this changed when photography became digital and lost its connection to the emulsion of film, I will explore later.
[5] Haiku is a Japanese form that is not readily transferred to English. The standard English equivalent is a tercet (3 lines) with 5, 7, and 5 syllables. The “art” of haiku is rich beyond what I can articulate in a brief note. But I encourage your exploration of this form as a way of “distilling” the essence of a dream. I don’t mean to limit this approach to haiku, but I do like the way the form forces one to an unusual effort. More on this later.
Smithing, in its most limited sense, is the art of working metals into useful objects or forms with aesthetic value. This sense of the artful use of something takes the word beyond the province of metal work and into forms such as “wordsmithing” and “songsmithing.” In this post I want to focus on the idea of “dreamsmithing.”
In metal smithing, the “work” consists of various activities such as forging, smelting, refining, hammering, filing, in addition to more specialized processes (e.g. robotic machine tooling). Hard work, and what is “worked” is always the metal, or stone, or whatever material the artist—the smith—happens to be working on.
The first thing to consider about dreamsmithing, as I want to use this term, is that it is an art. It is an art that works with what a dream presents. Dream as metal, dream as materia.[1] Most people who pay any attention at all to their dreams, generally focus on trying to discern the meaning of a dream. Often this search for meaning takes the form of seeking the help of a professional dream worker whose work comes in the form of interpreting the dream to achieve the sought-after meaning. Hard work of a different kind.
Interpretation and meaning are like the utility function of metal working: the making of useful things like knives, swords, plates and cups. It is useful to get the message of the dream in the form of meaning. This utility serves the ego in various ways: bringing insight, motivation for change, a sense of personal growth, relief from suffering, a sense of purpose. Most people who relate to dreams at all use dreams in relation to these conscious intentions. This is natural and cannot be gainsaid.
What then of the aesthetic aspect of dreamsmithing?
Some years ago, while in Florence, I visited the Galleria dell’Accademia, intent on seeing Michelangelo’s David. As one enters the main hallway, one sees David standing resplendent in the yellow light of the rotunda. The statue was a magnet drawing me to it. Like others, I took pictures of David from all angles, all the while feeling that my obsessive gestures were covering over a deepening anxiety over something not done. Michelangelo had brought this magnificent figure into the world out of stone. I was reduced to taking its picture, an uneasy dependency on his creation. The more I clicked, the more I appropriated his creation, the more I felt I was doing something inappropriate.
As I was leaving the Galleria, feeling more despondent than elated, I finally saw what I had neglected to see upon entering. Lining the entrance hall were a number of Michelangelo’s unfinished statues. I was transfixed to the point of forgetting, forgetting to capture them with my camera. They were rough figures, struggling for existence, as if trying to escape their stone prison. I sat down next to one of these figures and touched it, touched what Michelangelo had touched and chiseled. I felt an overwhelming urge to kiss the stone! I was feeling love.
If we take seriously what Michelangelo said of his sculptures, then we must conclude that a piece of stone carries within it an image which is revealed through the artist’s imagination and then “freed’ into existence by the sculptor’s chipping away the stone prison. It is as if the image in the stone calls to the artist through the imagination and sets the artist on a quest to bring the image into existence.
Are these elements of Michelangelo’s “stonesmithing” applicable to the aesthetic aspect of dreamsmithing?
I believe so. In many ways, the dream as such is like Michelangelo’s raw stone. We are not satisfied with the dream itself either from the perspective of utility or of art. This dissatisfaction is what motivates the search for meaning, the seeking of interpretation, as well as “something else.”
For Michelangelo, there is something within the stone. Likewise, there is something within the dream. This something, whether in stone or in dream, is revealed through the imagination. This is what led Jung to discover what he came to call “active imagination.”[2] When imagination leads the way (in contrast to conscious intention), something is revealed that could not have been anticipated by conscious expectation. Then, “working” with these revelations, like Michelangelo’s chipping away stone, becomes the task of the dreamsmith. The hidden something within a dream can be missed. It is often little more than an inchoate “call,” and is often lost altogether as one pursues meaning.[3] It is only through imagination that this call can be “magnified” to form the substance of a “quest.”[4] The quest, inherent in the dream, cannot be arrived at from the more utilitarian aspects of dreamsmithing. It can only be revealed through the process of imagination, brought to bear on the dream.
Another difference between the utility and aesthetic aspect of dreamsmithing is that utility tends to keep one rooted to what is already known, while the aesthetic aspect always brings something that orients to the future. Jung’s collected works and seminars, are good examples of the utility aspect of dreamsmithing. His Redbook is an extraordinary example of the aesthetic aspect of dreamsmithing. As Jung noted, his prolific public work had its roots in the imaginal experiences of his aesthetic dreamsmithing. This is a good example of how the future is born from the imagination.
[1] One might argue that the dream is already “crafted” in its presented form, that we are already seeing the results of artisanal forces at work in the making of the dream, already worked, smithed into the forms we see by an unknown dreamsmith. This aspect of dreamsmithing will be the subject of a future post.
[2] In principle, the use of imagination as a way of discernment of the hidden, has a long history in many traditions and can be found at work in all areas of human endeavor, albeit at the fringes rather than at the center where the application of rational modalities and conscious intentionality is privileged.
[3] A good example of the “call” of a dream can be found in my essay, “Words as Eggs.” In Words as Eggs. Everett: The Lockhart Press, 2012. See the way I approach the utility aspect of dreamsmithing (p. 92-94) followed by the results of more imaginal dreamsmithing.
[4] As an example of a quest induced by a dream, see “I am your grandfather…”: Dreams, Synchronicity and the Future. http://www.ralockhart.com/Morpheus/I%20am%20your%20Gradnfather.htm
When I first began writing about “keys for the future of dreams,” I had reached four key words when I had a dream that told me I had to add a fifth word. Furthermore, the dream insisted, it had to be a fifth “C-word.”
Having learned that there is more wisdom in obeying the orders of dreams than in refusing them, I consulted the I Ching “dream gourd” that has become part of my daily practice.
The dream-gourd answered my query with Hexagram 3 (Zhun, tr. “beginning”). From the etymological pictograph, I discerned that the best C-word to convey the sense of this image was “cultivate.” This led to my question: What do we do in our own lives and in relation to the lives of others to cultivate dreams?
In this post I intend to explore this question, as I promised.
One way to deepen any exploration is to begin with an analysis of the etymology of the words one is using. In the previous post, I showed how tending to the etymological image in the I Ching produced the idea of “cultivate.”
So, now, let’s look at this English word. Most of the time, a word’s dictionary definitions do not add much to the word itself that one already knows. For example, one definition of “cultivate” is “to improve or prepare land, as by plowing, for raising crops.” But another definition, “to nurture, foster,” when applied to dreams, adds a nuance: to nurture and foster dreams. So does another definition: “to seek the acquaintance.” “To seek the acquaintance of dreams,” is likely a phrase one has not heard of before. We might even put these two ideas together: To nurture and foster dreams, seek their acquaintance.
The Indo-European root from which cultivate (as well as culture and many other rich words) derive is kwel-, which has the basic sense of “circling with.” (imagine oxen turning, back and forth, ploughing the field). Circling with a dream. Note the “with” here, the sense of something done together. None of these phrases carries the idea of something “done to” the dream. Nor is there any sense or emphasis on possession, as when we say “my” dream. The dream is of something “other,” and our proprietary clutching is not warranted. This otherness may be experienced as threatening, pleasing, numinous, nonsensical, shrouded in mystery, or a hundred other such cognitive and emotional sequalae that follow awakening from the dream. If one is interested in dreams at all (probably a different kind of 1%), one’s interest seems to focus primarily on what does this dream mean and how can I profit from this meaning? I don’t believe that this common mode of relating to dreams is what is meant by “circling with a dream.”
How then to cultivate dreams in ourselves and in others?
At this point, I’d like to ask each of you reading this post to read the chapter entitled, “The Dream Wants a Dream,” in Psyche Speaks. Just mentioning the chapter’s title is sufficient to give a sense of this cultivation: a dream wants a dream. This idea itself came from a dream, and to take it seriously is to seriously consider that dreams themselves desire. Freud developed the idea that dreams mask and hide our true desires and that this hiding and masking helps us to maintain some degree of sanity. Jung rejected the idea of masking, but accepted the idea that dreams are expressing our desires in plain sight. But my dream (“A dream wants a dream/A poem wants a poem”) asserts something else: that dreams themselves (as well as poems) desire. This echoes Baudelaire’s assertion that the only proper “criticism” of a work of art was another work of art.
As I argued in Psyche Speaks, this wanting, this desire on the part of dreams, poems and art (and, of course, much else as well), is eros in waiting, waiting for us to act in return.
In Jung’s most important letter, written to Herbert Read in 1960, Jung writes:
We have simply got to listen to what the psyche spontaneously says to us. What the dream, which is not manufactured by us says is just so…It is the great dream which has always spoken through the artist as a mouthpiece. All his love and his passion (his “values)” flow towards the coming guest to proclaim his arrival…What is the great Dream? It consists of the many small dreams and the many acts of humility and submission to their hints. It is the future and the picture of the new world, which we do not understand yet. We cannot know better than the unconscious and its intimations. There is a fair chance of finding what we seek in vain in our conscious world. Where else could it be?
Just about everything that is important to me in Jung’s psychology is embedded in this letter and its implications. Some implications: every dream is carrying the future, every dream is an aspect of the coming guest, every dream desires us to act on the “hint” of the dream.
Yet, look at the present world, so devoid of being informed by the unconscious and its intimations, so demanding of everyone’s consciousness to be focused on and tethered to “out there.”
Pokémon Go, in a few days’ time, has already “captured” the attention, the frenzy, and the actions of more people than are relating to their dreams. Think about what this future portends.
…to be continued…