Dreams and Dreaming- Tony Crisp

Chapter One

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· Regulating - In experiments where volunteers were woken each time they began to dream, a breakdown in the efficiency of mind and body soon became apparent. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung described dreams as compensatory. He was particularly referring to the way dreams help balance your conscious personality. According to this view, any extreme of feeling or attitude is compensated for by an expression of the opposite in your dreams. Apart from compensating in this way, dreams also appear to be essential in keeping the personality in balance and for psychological growth in general. Just as there are self-regulating processes in your body helping it to grow or survive, so dreams play a similar part for your personality.

· Personal Growth - The growth of your personality from infancy is a very complex interplay between largely unconscious factors in your body, your experience of your environment, and the way you integrate and deal with these different influences. Dreams appear to present clear indications of what you are facing in your present growth. They reveal past experience that through trauma may need to be met in order to live your life more satisfyingly or efficiently. This is why dreams are so often used in psychotherapy. Because your mind integrates experience, some investigators believe that during dreaming you ‘upgrade’ skills such as social interaction, speech, and creative action. This also produces personal growth. There is neurological evidence that brain cells undergo a learning process during dreaming. In the area of personal growth, inquiry into dreams such as recurring nightmares shows them to be an attempt to bring to consciousness and release past traumas such as abandonment in childhood, involvement in war environments, or car accidents. But most important, dreams can be a pathway to finding a greater sense of who you are in the world, and of discovering your relationship with the world around you. Through dreams you can be gradually initiated into the experience that your fundamental self is eternal and part of all life.

· Creativity - In 1912 Max Wertheimer launched Gestalt psychology in Germany by publishing a paper on a visual illusion called ‘apparent motion’. Wertheimer had noticed that when we view a sequence of still pictures, as occurs when watching a film, we have the illusion of seeing movement. This perception of movement was different to the perception of its components - the many static images. This led to the understanding that many of the perceptions we have of the world around us, and many of the concepts we build, are radically different to the countless pieces of information or experience they arise from. The sum is therefore different or greater than the parts. Sudden inspirations and creative leaps, when seen from this point of view, are usually a new ‘whole’ formed of many parts that previously had no connection. The symbols and drama of dreams particularly express this creative forming of new skills and new realisations - new gestalts - that arise out of the mass of separate pieces of experience or information.

· Imagination - This has been listed separately to creativity because they are not necessarily the same. Imagination has been described as the “ability of the mind to be creative or resourceful.” To be creative or resourceful is considered highly admirable, yet being imaginative is frequently put down as a time waster. Most of the greatest things in the external world arose out of imagination. Such things as vacuum cleaners and pictures that could be sent through the air - TV - seemed outlandish to logical rational people when they were first mentioned. Dreams are possibly the most powerfully imaginative experiences we can have. Through them we can break free of the restrictions and lack of perception our logical mind may have.

· Exercise For The Psyche - Freud believed that dreams express repressed desires such as sex and anger. Jung said that in dreams we compensate for what is not experienced in our life. Seen in a more positive light, we can each see that our daily life only allows us to live a small range of the things we would like or need to do or feel. The circumstances of our life may lead us to prevent ourselves from expressing openly the intensity of the love, the pain, the anger, and the creativity we have inside. In dreams such restrictions fall away to some degree, and our mind, our emotions and sexuality can unfold and we can discover our fuller range of expression and capability. Howard Roffwarg, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York, suggested that nervous activity during REM (i.e. rapid-eye-movement or dreaming) sleep helps to stimulate the developing brain in very young children, thus promoting the growth of neural connections necessary for learning. In adults, according to Roffwarg, REM serves, like physical exercise, to maintain tone in the central nervous system.

· The Supersenses – Sensitive instruments tell us that your eyes only see a small range of the colour spectrum, missing infra red and ultraviolet for instance. Your ears hear only a portion of the sound scale. But your mind, through your senses and emotions, can extrapolate from the thousands of bits of information you take in. For instance, if you look at a person for a few minutes you might have few thoughts about what type of person they are. But if questioned carefully, you will realise that you have very definite impressions about them from the way they dress, stand, talk and move. In fact you ‘know’ a great deal about them. In your dreams you not only browse through and build insight or knowledge from the huge amount of information you have taken in, but sometimes you leap right beyond what your senses have enabled you to gather, and arrive at true intuitive perception.(3)

Considering these many aspects of dreaming, what a waste of a wonderful resource, what criminal negligence it is if you fail to remember dreams and gain enrichment from their fresh and unique perspectives. What a loss if you do not discover their pungent comments on your relationships and their possible outcome, and the opportunities dreams present to explore new approaches to your everyday life. What a denial of your potential if you do not discover the many splendored facets of your own mind and consciousness. As Robert Van De Castle says - You were issued a lifetime pass to free dreams at birth. Why not take advantage of it? (4)

There is not space to give examples of the ways in which your dreams deal with the many different dimensions of your being. However, below are some explanations and illustrations of just how powerful and varied dreams can be.

You Dream Virtual Reality

Turku, a member of the Department of Philosophy in a Finish university, argues that both dreams and the everyday phenomenal world may be thought of as constructed virtual realities. Recent neurological findings show how the brain constructs a sense of, or a view of, reality out of your sense impressions and cultural/personal values. Reality is different to what you see or hear or believe. In your dreams you can create unlimited types of reality. The wonder of this is that you can explore experiences you might be too timid to experiment with in waking life. Some ideas about how the human mind interacts with reality suggest that you actually create the world around you similarly to the way you do it in dreams.(5)

While I was working for Teletext in the UK I received a number of dreams illustrating these ideas. This first one is from Sandra. She was 16 at the time of the dream.

I enter the pub from ‘Eastenders’ and see Sarha Mitchell, a US actor I find attractive. I fancy him and decide to attract him by adjusting my clothes to reveal plenty of cleavage. I approach him so he can ask me what I would like to drink. He is looking down at my breasts and is suddenly interested in me. We begin to chat and make a date.

Here is another one from Joanne:

I dreamt I was heavily pregnant and naked, lying on the floor of a dark room with one light directed on me. My ex-boyfriend was next to me, naked, stroking my hair, telling me everything was going to be alright. In the dream I felt physically sick but inwardly perfectly calm and at peace. But I am confused as I am only 15 and there’s no chance I’m pregnant.

Within the virtual reality of her dream, Sandra is experimenting with her ability to attract a man using her physical appeal. Having tried this out in her dream Sandra may or may not use this in her everyday life. The dream Joanne describes is common among young women. It involves either being pregnant, or actually giving birth. In both cases it is a way of gaining confidence and meeting anxieties about the possibility of pregnancy. It allows the dreamer to gain experience in an area that would be difficult, painful or dangerous to experiment with in waking life. In this and many other ways, your dreams allow you to explore without the risks you would meet in waking life.

You Dream Problem Solving

All of us face and solve countless problems each day. They include everything from how to open a cupboard door to wrapping a parcel or finding a telephone number. However, some problems you face are not easily resolved. Sometimes these difficult problems are only resolved when you access information or insights that are usually unconscious, or not reached by rational thought. Or perhaps you have apparently forgotten the piece of information that would solve the difficulty. Such necessary information, such new views, or totally different experience, can be reached in the virtual reality of your dreams. Here is an excellent example of this. It appeared in the June 27, 1964, edition of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The golfer Jack Nicklaus had a long period of bad performance. He had spent a lot of time trying to analyse what he was doing wrong, but this did not help. He then had a dream in which he was holding his golf clubs differently. This led to his swings feeling perfect. He told a reporter that, “When I came to the course yesterday morning, I tried it the way I did in my dream and it worked. ... I feel kind of foolish admitting it, but it really happened in a dream.” From that time on his performance improved rapidly.

You Dream The Body

ARE MY DREAMS DENOTING ILLNESS?

In considering your own dreams to look for signs of illness, it must be remembered that most people at some time experience awful dreams in which they are stabbed or bitten or are near to fire or war. Many of us dream of a part of our body being deformed or sick. In most cases these refer in some way to your own emotions, fears, personal growth or social life. Only when there is a very persistent and pervading quality about such dreams should they be taken to indicate the possibility of illness. At such time seek medical help to confirm or deny the message of the dreams.

In the early nineties a friend, Ken S., came to consult me in my capacity as a dream therapist. He had experienced a dream that troubled him and wanted to understand it. In the dream Ken was walking along the upstairs passageway of a large old house. He was in his dressing gown on the way to the bathroom. About halfway along the passage he felt a fine spray of water on his body. This drew his attention to a small leak in a large water pipe running along the passageway. At that very moment the pipe burst and a torrent of water poured out. Ken was then rushing around trying to deal with the burst pipe, but fire also started elsewhere in the house.

Ken and I approached the dream using a traditional psychotherapeutic approach in which each aspect of the dream represents an emotion or psychological state in Ken. We didn’t get any satisfaction with this and so ended with the view that we hadn’t discovered the associations and powerful feelings that would uncover the hidden parts of Ken’s psyche. Three days later Ken was rushed into hospital with a burst colon. Ken was near to death, but with surgical and medical help recovered. When I next saw him, still in hospital, our eyes met and we both said at the same moment, “The dream” - meaning the dream had been a warning of the burst colon. Despite having been involved in dreamwork with groups and individuals, and having read about how some dreams express physical conditions, I had never previously been so directly confronted by such a dream. Now I am much more alerted to this possibility. Dream dictionaries may have their limitations, but if this dream had been looked at in the basic way such dictionaries define, Ken would have sought medical attention sooner. For instance House can represent yourself or your body - Water-Pipe can depict your intestines or arteries - Fire means consuming passions, an emergency or illness. Because of the context of the different dream images, Ken’s dream points to physical breakdown.

Although Ken’s body dream is about illness, such dreams are not limited to showing what is going wrong inside us. They often show positive health changes, or may be about what foods best suit us or cause us harm.

You Dream The Supersenses

The question of whether we have supersenses is disputed in some scientific circles. Joseph Bullman, director of ‘The Secrets of Sleep,’ a recent UK Channel 4 TV series, gives an interesting comment on this. While researching the series Bullman travelled to America. Searching through the books on dreams in the Los Angeles Public Library he saw an entry called ‘Psychic Dreams’ that caught his eye. It was in a book titled The Encyclopaedia of Sleep and Dreaming, and the passage read:

“A woman who described herself as having frequent out-of-body experiences spent several nights being monitored in a sleep laboratory. One night she awakened from sleep and correctly reported a five-digit number that had been placed out of sight on a high shelf above her bed. She reported that she saw it while floating above her body.”

Bullman’s aim for the series was to report in a popular way what the experts knew and did not know about the subject of sleep and dreams. So in reading about a woman who was observed in laboratory conditions to read a hidden five-digit number while asleep, he wondered why the experiment wasn’t famous. Why wasn’t it seen as an enormous breakthrough, like Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA structure? After all, the implications of what the woman did are astonishing!

It took Bullman six months to discover who did the experiment and track him down. In visiting sleep-lab after sleep-lab nobody had even heard of the experiment. Then one of his researchers found mention of it in an obscure academic journal. The author was Dr. Charles T. Tart who wrote the book Altered States of Consciousness.(6) Tart had wired ‘Miss Z’ - the subject - to an EEG machine to watch her brain wave patterns as she slept. He had taken a random number, written it on a piece of paper, sealed it in an envelope, climbed up a step-ladder, and placed the envelope on a shelf high above Miss Z’s head.

On the first three nights Miss Z reported that she had not been able to leave her body to view the envelope. On the fourth night she said she had managed and correctly told the number - 25132. Tart had also instructed Miss Z to look at the clock on the wall when she experienced leaving her body, so he could check this against the EEG reading. He describes the reading as, “… unlike anything anyone had seen before. The brainwave recordings on the EEG appeared to show that when she saw the five-digit number, her brain was both awake and asleep at the same time.” (7)

Not only does Tart’s experiment with Miss Z show there is a physiological and neurological basis for an out of the body experience - OBE - but it also shows how, in Bullman’s words, “… scientists who come up with results that challenge conventional beliefs are ostracised by the academic establishment. This work, I discovered, did indeed have revolutionary implications for mainstream science. And, precisely because of this, it had been all but ignored.”

You Dream Self-Regulation

Anthony’s Textbook of Anatomy and Physiology uses the word homeostasis to represent the body’s ability to maintain and heal itself. It says:

“The principle of homeostasis is one of the most fundamental of all physiological principles. It may be stated in this way: the body must maintain relative constancy of its chemicals and processes in order to survive. Or stated even more briefly: health and survival depend upon the body’s maintaining or quickly restoring homeostasis.”

Without this self-regulatory or homeostatic process in your body you would be dead within a very short period of time. Perspiration is a part of self-regulation; without this process you wouldn’t lose heat fast enough and some of your tissues would fry. Your heart wouldn’t speed up as you moved, and your brain would be starved of oxygen; and so on and on. Dr. Oliver Sacks, after working with patients awakening from a coma-like state lasting for years, observed this self-regulatory process at work in their efforts to adjust to life once more.(8) He says, “We have to recognise homeostatic endeavours at all levels of being, from molecular and cellular to social and cultural, all in infinite relation to each other.”

What Sacks observed, and what some aspects of modern psychology often reject, is the process of self-regulation - SR - working in our mind, in our psyche, as well as in our body. Dreams are one of the main processes in the self-regulation of the psyche. My observation of this process over the past thirty years has led me to define the action of SR as:

• The major and natural process in us dealing with healing of physical and psychological problems.
• Through dreams and fantasy the self-regulatory process confronts us with experiences and information our waking personality may be avoiding. Experiences, such as resentments or grief, that have been suppressed, can cause illness if persistently denied expression. Through psychosomatic processes, and through unwilled movements and tensions SR presents information about our state of body or mind. If we fail to recognise thes consciously, our dreams will portray them.
• The main creative process of the unconscious. It can enrich our work and relationships. This is because SR underlies all our processes of growth, physical or psychological. For instance, it was the ‘hand at the helm’ when we gained weight to the extent of 27 million times as we grew from sperm/ovum to birth. Current psychological theory does not yet accept that such deeply cellular processes can be known consciously. Yet researchers have witnessed people able to slow their heart or change their body condition.
• A way of expresses or exploring all the levels of our being, including everything from physiological processes and physical movement, through non-rational feelings and concepts, to the emotions and rational thought that lead to insight.
• An initiation of our waking consciousness to experiences beyond the limitations of our senses and personality. It introduces us, when we are ready, to a sense of the huge collective and interlinked forces and living being in which we are an integral part.(9)

Dreams in which this process of self-healing or personal growth appear are sometimes similar to problem solving dreams. However, they usually deal more with emotions and attitudes. This following dream is an excellent example.

“My mother-in-law died of cancer. I had watched the whole progression of her illness, and was very upset by her death. Shortly after she died the relatives gathered and began to sort through her belongings to share them out. That was the climax of my upset and distress, and I didn’t want any part of this sorting and taking her things. That night I dreamt I was in a room with all the relatives. They were sorting her things, and I felt my waking distress. Then my mother-in-law came into the room. She was very real and seemed happy. She said for me not to be upset, as she didn’t at all mind her relatives taking her things. When I woke from the dream all the anxiety and upset had disappeared. It never returned.” Told to author during a talk given to The Housewives Register in Ilfracombe.

Dreams in which the SR process is evident usually attempt a change or give you experience of the change as in the above dream. Because of this SR is very much an underlying process in nightmares. Unfortunately, although the fears are met in a nightmare, they are often not fully felt, and so no satisfying conclusion is reached. In trying to complete unfinished internal business, SR attempts to deal with past traumas and personality traits that stand in the way of growth. The attempt may not always be successful as we might pull back from the disturbing emotions or ‘work’ involved. If this seems strange we must remember that as humans we are perverse. The very things that might be of greatest good, like stopping smoking, might be the things we least do. Our habits of pain avoidance or repression of emotions often stand in the way of SR completing itself. This is why a conscious decision to explore your dreams aids such healing.

These are just a few of the different areas of experience dreams take us to. Your own dreams will be even more varied and personally exciting. In the next chapters we will look at what a dream is, how to enter its world, and how to bring back treasures of insight.

Notes

(1) (REM or NREM dreaming . The initials REM stand for ‘rapid eye movement’. This refers to the fact, detailed later in the book, that in 1953 Aserinsky and Kleitman found rapid eye movements occurred while people slept. In 1957 the REM were linked with dreaming. Therefore sleep was observed to have two different phases, REM and NREM - non rapid eye movement, or non-REM. Later it was found that even during NREM sleep, a form of dreaming took place that is different to the REM dream with its pronounced imagery and drama.

(2) Tony Buzan - Lecturer in English, Communications, Psychology at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver - 1965-66. Postgraduate Research in Educational Psychology University of London - 1970-72. Originator of Mind Maps/Brain Patterns - revolutionary new method of creative thinking, memory, note taking, thinking, and the 'external' organisation of 'internal' mental constructs.

(3) The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines intuition as ‘immediate apprehension by the mind without reasoning’. I am using the word throughout the book to mean something slightly different. I do not mean intuition arising from feelings or fears without rational thought. The word is used to mean a direct knowing arising from a source beyond our senses or thinking. Sometimes writers use the word psychic to describe this, but the word psychic has associations I do not want to link with.

(4) Our Dreaming Mind by Robert Van de Castle. Published by Aquarian. London 1994. ISBN: 1 85538 070 6.

(5) Although at first sight this may run counter to common beliefs, if you look around and see that virtually every part of the world around you has been shaped and formed by human thought and effort, then it becomes more feasible.

(6) Altered States of Consciousness edited by Charles C. Tart. The book is now unfortunately out of print, but should be easy to get through a book-search facility such Booksearch.

(7) For the complete article on Bullman’s visit to Tart and his other research, visit the Electronic Telegraph and search the archives for Tart or Bullman. http://www.telegraph.co.uk - Tart is Professor of Consciousness Studies at The University of Nevada in Las Vegas.

(8) See Sacks book Awakenings.

(9) See Tony Crisp’s books Mind and Movement and Liberating the Body.

Tony's in print Books in the UK or USA

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