mr. mxylplyx

What is the relevance of our dreams? What significance do these journeys into the mysterious world of our own subconscious hold for our lives, and in what way can we, in our conscious existence, make sense and use of the oneiric visions that visit us in sleep? We all dream many times throughout the night, and many psychologists have shown that those dreams relate in a meaningful way to our daily experiences. The things we see and experience in our dreams may be reflections of parts of ourselves, representations of memories and feelings related to the situation the dream is dealing with. The latest research in the field of neurobiology is able to give us insight like never before as to what is happening in the brain during dreaming, and the current research being undertaken to help uncover the purposes of dreaming is allowing scientists and theorists to understand dream content, showing us how dreams might be created, why they appear so bizarre to the waking mind, and ways to use this knowledge to better understand our own dreams.

When we dream we think in the language of association. To speak in the language of one’s own dreams, one must pay attention to the emotional associations of the actual content. Dream images are in large part metaphors for the underlying emotions that the subconscious mind is trying to express and work through. Are dreams then simulations of social experiences? Ernest Hartmann, in his book Dreams and Nightmares: The Origin and Meaning of Dreams, discusses the nature of dreams and nightmares, as well as emotions and feelings associated with dreaming, and the ways in which, as a social species, we enact scenarios in the dreamscape that have meaningful implications for social life. Hartmann is a neuroscientist and author whose studies on dreaming and sleep stages in laboratory settings have helped him to evolve the theory, now widely accepted in the field of neuroscience, that dreams are the vehicle to memory and learning in both human beings and animals. Hartmann claims that emotionally salient dream content plays a part in resolving our daytime emotions, and suggests that dreams make connections between traumatic and other new material and older material in the mind by engaging in visual metaphors guided by the emotion of the dreamer. He illustrates in his book how modern brain imaging techniques have shown that the limbic and paralimbic systems of the brain, which during waking life are responsible for emotional processing, become actually more active in dreaming than in waking, and suggests that the level of unconscious or subconscious emotional processing that takes place beneath the surface of our conscious minds is actually that which is most responsible for shaping and defining who we are. In terms of the formation of the neurological connections that give shape to our personal characteristics, desires, and fears, Hartmann suggests that “Dreaming connects more broadly and more widely than does waking” (80) and that dreams make use of metaphors in such a way that parallels are drawn between images from the conscious and the unconscious mind, which are connected together in the dream world.

Hartmann’s theories lend support to earlier theories of psychology and human development first proposed by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, the great early-20th Century psychologist and the great mid-20th Century mythologist and anthropological scholar, whose works have been the inspiration for some of the most powerful myths of modern creation, including most prominently, George Lucas’ Star Wars saga. Campbell, following the psychological studies of Jung, believed that on some fundamental psychological level we as human beings all share similar traits that define us as such. Human beings are born, like other animals, with certain innate instincts which allow us to exist and thrive in the world. Dreaming and the related mechanisms of the unconscious mind are cases in point of the principal biological functions that allow the human mind to cope with and survive the forces that play upon it naturally as a condition of our existence in the particular physical reality in which we live. Human beings, like baby chicks, are born with certain innate paradigms ingrained into their subconscious, paradigms which register and resonate within us without the benefit of prior experience. These paradigms are the Jungian archetypes, and they manifest themselves continually and repeatedly throughout the stages of human collective and individual evolution. They are present in our dreams, and, as Campbell explains repeatedly throughout the body of his work, formulate the underlying basis for all mythology, the parts that go into the making of the Hero’s Quest, a story of ritual initiation to the cycle of death and rebirth which in thousands of different mythological literary and religious forms tells the one fundamental story in human existence—the story of the fall from innocence into experience of the world. This is the human story: the story of how we move from our sheltered and infantile experience of timelessness and immortality to a realization of time and change. It is the story of what it means to become aware of the real world. Ironically, it has always taken, and must take, the form of symbolism, manifested in our mythology, and dreams.

In a collection of four of Carl Jung’s seminal texts analyzing the general aspects of dream psychology—including Dreams and Psychoanalysis, Dreams and Psychic Energy, The Practical Use of Dream Analysis, and Individual Dream Symbolism in relation to Alchemy— the eminent psychologist takes us through an exploration of symbolism and archetype, with a focus on the practical uses of dream-analysis rooted in the relationship of dreams to the primal energies of the body. Jung lays out dreams as the very fabric of the analytical process in human psychology, and grounds his expositions of dream theory in the research and analysis of hundreds of individual dream accounts. Here in these four treatises, Jung posits that the investigation of dreams, as a well as a wealth of visual impressions and associated material dealing with the imagination of religious symbolism throughout different epochs and cultures from all over the globe, can furnish the necessary material needed for a probing investigation of the mechanisms of the human psyche that in the analysis of “normal” or conscious waking states remains elusive. Because of the fact that the deep roots of our psychic situation lie deep within the recesses of our consciousness, in what Jung dubbed the “unconscious,” he suggests that only through an examination of the effects of the unconscious, exhibited commonly in such states as dreaming and religious transcendental expressions, can we come to a fuller understanding of the nature of our inner and fuller selves. Jung was a student of the teachings of the great Oriental philosophies and saw that the spirit was not something truly, as it has been conceived of in the Occidental religions, which was breathed into life, but something, rather, that comes out of life. It was not thus something over and above the natural life, but something that flowered forth from it, in a mystical experience of our inherent natural condition. The mysteries of life and death, our relationship to the plant and animal world, the elemental world, and our own developmental transformations, he showed, were the first things to find expression in human art, because these were the first things that came out of the nature of human beings, before the introduction of a deliberate aesthetic or a supernatural conceit that was separate from nature and the body. The first art that came into mythological existence for human beings then was one that was an almost pure expression of the joy, fear, and wonder of the natural forces of the human environment.

In his various dream essays, Jung elucidates how a human being may be influenced, and indeed convinced in the most effective ways by innumerable things of which one has no (conscious) intellectual understanding, through the conveyance of archetypes and religious symbols. Both Sigmund Freud and Jung have maintained that unconscious contents of the human psyche continually project themselves out onto the real world. However, though Freud tended to see all of the myriad forms of human art and religion as sublimated forms of infantile sexual projections, Jung saw that art and religion were both archetypical representations of how the human soul, or psyche, experienced this world, and so posited that the archetypical images themselves were in fact projected onto the real world as well. Jung's discussion in his “Structure and Dynamica of the Psyche” of how the final standpoint of interpretation of dreams needs necessarily be adopted in conjunction with the causal (that method of interpretation that Freud so heavily, and egregiously, overrelies on to make the case for his theory of universal infantile wish-fulfillment as the overarching purpose of dreams) is truly enlightening and intriguing, and helps to make sense of the implications behind the previous assertion. Jung's explanation of symbolism under this conception—that symbols in dreams have an intrinsic value, and not, as Freud believes, one that derives from a uniformity of meaning—was something that modern science has found to be a much more plausible and scientifically apt explanation than Freud's. This is because of the fact that dreams convey meaning to us in the figurative language of an older phylogenetic mode of thought which expresses through a diversity of symbolical expressions the things important for the maintenance of our conscious health unconsciously, so that the mind in sleep deals with rather than conceals overlooked, underappreciated, and even disturbing stimuli, and also the consequent subconscious thoughts they engender.

Jung’s conception of archetypical significance is rooted in the hard-wiring of the human brain itself. It is an understanding of the way in which the universally shared perceptual and developmental experience of creatures manifests itself in the nature of their understanding of the forces in the world around them. Yes, there are specific cultural contexts at play, but underlying those is the nature of how the being is hard-wired to perceive—the capabilities inherent in its biological makeup which delimit its range of choices. All creatures formulate archetypes based on a combination of their hardwiring, perceptive abilities, and the universal forces and figures present in their world. The archetypes are what exist in what Jung calls the collective unconscious of the species, embodying the experience of these universal forces. These archetypes are interpolations of those forces. We can even look at other species to see this. The archetypal image of the chicken-hawk to the chick is not the literal chicken-hawk, but the image of what the hawk meant and felt to the chicken in its soul. It is the essence of the chicken-hawk in terms of the chicken’s psychological and biologically instinctive reaction to it, which perforce makes a demagogue and a devil out of the chicken’s natural predator (through experimental research, chickens have been shown to instinctually fear even the shadow of a chicken-hawk from the moment of birth). Such archetypical formations exist in human beings as well, as a naturally instinctive reaction to the preexisting conditions of the world around us and within us, that is, our fundamental and biologically determined perception of what we call the world. The human being, unlike almost all other creatures of this Earth, is a rational creature, capable of self-awareness, but that awareness is built over time, in developmental stages which progress from infancy through adolescence and later adulthood. The passing of each of these stages is necessarily the crossing of a threshold into a new existence, a cycle of death and rebirth which, as the consciousness of the individual grows, calls for ever more intricate forms of ritualistic initiation to transition that individual between the new stages of awareness. The changes are inevitable, and it is the realization of change, the loss of innocence, the death of the timelessness and immortality of the infantile understanding of the world, and the progression into the realization of change, time, and mortality that in the case of human beings forms the impetus behind ritual, storytelling, and art. As numerous literary theorists have shown, it is the “collective unconscious that is largely responsible for the existence in this world of all art, for its relationship to art is that art is the spontaneous emergence from the depths of one’s soul of the universal archetypes” (Campbell, The Power of Myth).

This is the abridged version of a longer project. If you'd like to read this essay in it's entirety, click on this link:
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Also, for more suggested reading, check out:
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. New Jersey: Anchor Books, 1991.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989.
Hartmann, Ernest. Dreams and Nightmares: The Origin and Meaning of Dreams. New
York: Perseus Publishing, 2001.
Jung, Carl G. Dreams. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1974.
Ratey, John J. A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain. New York: Random House, 2002.
Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Benjamin Sher, trans. Illinois: Dalkey Archive
Press, 1990.
Discoveries: Fifty Stories of the Quest. Schecter, Harold and Jonna G. Semeiks, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

All images used are the original work of Fred Tomaselli. The following is a list of their titles in order of appearance:

FRED TOMASELLI HIM, 2006. Photocollage, Acrylic, Gouache and Resin on wood panel, 12 X 12 inches.
FRED TOMASELLI, Halo of Flies, 2006. Mixed media, acrylic and resin on wood panel, 18 X 18 inches.
FRED TOMASELLI, Glassy, 2006. Mixed media, acrylic and resin on wood panel, 12 X 12 inches.
FRED TOMASELLI, Untitled, 2000, Photocollage, acrylic, leaves, pills, insects, resin on wood panel, 84 x 120 inches.
FRED TOMASELLI, Toytopia, 2003, mixed media, acrylic paint, resin on wood, 30 1/8 x 24 x 2 inches.
FRED TOMASELLI, Breathing Head, 2002, Leaves, photocollage, acrylic, gouache, resin on wood panel 60 X 60 inches.
FRED TOMASELLI, Head Spreader, 2003, photocollage, gouache, acrylic, resin on wood panel, 24 X 24 inches.
FRED TOMASELLI, Airborne Event, 2003, mixed media, acrylic paint, resin on wood, 84 x 60 x 1 1/2 inches.