The Relationship of Myth and Poetry to Dreaming and the Unconscious
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. This begs the question: Are dreams then simulations of social experiences? Ernest Hartmann, a theorist working on this question, 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, and claims that emotionally salient dream content plays a part in resolving our daytime emotions, suggesting 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 minds when sleeping 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. Human beings, just like baby chicks and other animals, 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.
Read more:
The Relationship of Myth and Poetry to Dreaming and the Unconscious
The Role of Jungian Archetype
Archetype and the Monomyth
The Shadow Archetype
The Function of Religion, Folk Myth, and Art
The Power of Myth
Credits, Links, and Suggested Readings
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