Analysis of Dreams and Projections- Debugging the Self

The Dream of the Beast
This is a dream I had years ago, about 1989 or '90. I was a Christian at the time, which is no longer the case.
I am standing in an alley or lane-way between some low buildings. I look down the alley and see a Japanese man in a business suit who is operating a video camera. He is filming something which is going on, out of my sight, inside one of the buildings on the left side of the lane-way. He seems deeply absorbed in whatever it is. I go up to him and look round the corner into the building. I am surprised and deeply disturbed by what I see. It is a huge, slightly hairy, pink pig vigorously f*****g a woman on a pile of human body parts! I know it is a woman underneath because her spread legs are sticking out from under the back end of the pig. My shock at this display of naked lust is so great that I wake up immediately.

My first thought when I was fully awake was that: "This is one dream I am not going to tell Tony about!" [Father Tony Gibbons, my dream analyst at that time] It was just so immediate, graphic and shocking and I felt unable to cope with the exposure that intuitively I felt was implied. I realised, however, that if any dream I had had before was important, this one was more so. I therefore wrote it down and started pondering its meaning but could not make any progress. I had no feeling of insight or enlightenment about any of it except that the image was really important - it haunted me through the following week. My wife, in whom I confide most things, was not able to enlighten me either. After a couple of weeks I finally decided that I had to confront this dream and get to the bottom of it. That evening, as I sat in the darkness of my baby son's bedroom after patting him asleep in his cot, I decided to employ what Tony called "active imagination". This involves talking directly to one of the characters of one's dream and it is not something which comes easily to me. However I did consciously recall the image of the pig and ask it, just in my head, what it was trying to tell me. Well the image of the pig became really clear momentarily and I became quite sharply aware of the word "beast". This word rang around my head and its various connotations dawned on me. In particular "The Beast" as one of the titles of Satan - The Evil One. I became afraid, wondering what I should do. I was sitting in the darkened room with my eyes shut, focussing ever more strongly on the possibility of the existence of the devil and that just maybe he was paying me a visit! I became "aware" of an evil presence in the room and felt very afraid. When I could not stand it any longer I opened my eyes to peek just a little. That stopped it. The dim room was just as it was when last my eyes were open. Little Lewis was snoring quietly in his cot and I was the only strange thing there. Then it dawned on me: I am the beast! The pig was everything about myself that I had been rejecting. I felt the "presence" of the beast in the room but, until I could acknowledge that it was me, it had to be "out there" (ie projected) in the room - an aspect of "SOMEBODY ELSE". As I thought through the implications it became clear to me that I had never completely accepted that I am really just an animal doomed to die like all the other animals on this planet.

Another amazing dream

11 November 2006

I was travelling northwards up the East coast of Australia, locations vague but reminiscent of places I had stayed at or passed through in my hippy days in the early '70s. At one place where I was 'staying' for a while, there were various people there resembling people I had known at that time or since and various women [amalgamations of several really] whom I had been friends with and very attracted to since the early '70s.

Then there was a general movement to leave the place and a feeling of some apprehension with that long lost feeling that 'the Fuzz are coming!' There was also the feeling of unrequited lust - a common feeling during that period of my life. So we left and I was following the others, the general idea was that we were going North but starting by going inland. Before I had gone far I became aware that I had forgotten something important – a combination my ID and my trousers! So I turned back to find what I needed while the others went on.

Various things happened while I searched for what I needed [but details forgotten] but had to make do with clothes and ID of lesser value/effect before I headed off after the others. Up the track I came upon them coming back with warnings that they had been apprehended, but they seem to have been released but that now we were all under close surveillance so we had to go North as quickly as possible to get away. There was some feeling of mild paranoia about this; there was a secrete that most of them knew about but I didn't. [Many of my dreams used to be like this but not so much in the last few years.] Before we got far however we were all apprehended and made to march in line somewhere near the coast. There was a feeling that 'the Military' were involved but it was unclear to me what was happening.

Suddenly that all changed! There was the appearance of bright lights streaking upwards into the sky from some place hidden over the hill, which were the tracer shells of silent anti-aircraft fire but looked very high tech, like the 'laser' cannon fire of the Star Wars type movies. As I looked up overhead I saw something outline in flashing lights which raced silently across the sky at great height which could only have been an alien space vehicle flying down to some place where they had been hoping to hide without being detected. The word 'UFO' came into my mind and I shouted out: 'Wow! Those are for-real aliens!' [or some such] and the whole scenario took on a much more emotionally direct and exiting tone, colours heightened and a sense of deepening mystery and urgency developed but without any increase in the level of paranoia.

What developed was a deepening feeling of ambiguity, that my friends definitely knew something that I didn't but that they were trying to show or tell me this truth without the military or police types finding out what it was. It seemed like the military also knew something was going on but they had a very different view of it from my friends and were very much opposed to whatever it was.

What then unfolded in a series of utterly mind blowing encounters was the 'truth' about reality. I became increasingly aware that in fact my friends were 'aliens' but that being alien as such was totally different from what I normally think of as being anything. Things both living and erstwhile non-living began to morph and exhibit 'consciousness' and some degree of personality, but this only when not observed by the soldiers and secrete police and so forth. At first I was apprehensive as all of the parts of the world I walked on, climbed over, leaned on, whatever, all seemed to want to 'merge' with me, and there was a deeply sexual, DNA-everywhere, pan-psychic, universal consciousness filled dynamism to each such encounter. I seemed to be picking up by intuition or telepathy the explanations my friends were trying to get to me, and the basic message was that this experience is REALITY whereas what the clearly fearful, military-macho personnel were in complete denial of this. And in the background I seemed to be aware of pan-psyche/pan spermia beings getting caught out and shot or otherwise greased by the military.

As I became more aware and accepting of what was going on it seemed like I myself was maturing and metamorphosing into an 'alien' like all my friends, and that we were the goodies. I became truly thrilled by this ability to unite with the rest of the universe. And, even though still a bit touchy about being sexually invaded at the point of contact by now very much animated pieces of wood [like gate posts, fences, hitching rails, verandah posts] just about whenever I touched them, I started to become empowered by a kind of 'hybrid vigour' as more and more of my body experienced union with the life of other things and people I touched. There was always the danger of being seen in the act by some soldier or other.

Part of this growing feeling of unity with all of the rest of the world was that the differences between people were really 'illusory'. I came to accept that the apparent differences between us were arbitrary impositions by those who asserted them and there was some kind of feeling that homosexuality was of this nature. There seemed to be one or two guys around who were interested in 'uniting' with me anyway. There were also women around who I was interested in but we all still were preoccupied with the idea of going 'North' for some reason so that took precedence over any dalliance. I was then confronted with the need to be able to fool the military types in order to procede on my journey. As I had become a part of the pan-psychist universe and so knew what was really going on, I had graduated in some manner and therefore had to be able to continue on my own if necessary, indeed that seemed to be the scenario that was developing anyway. I therefore started adopting, as a pretence, an extremely assertive macho persona when in the presence of military personnel while trying surreptitiously to fend off, but also inform of my good intentions, all the sentient and animated creatures I came across who were trying to unite with me as I went passed. The dream ended as a climactic struggle was developing between the pan-psychic seething sentient unity and the reactionary, individualistic, macho-defence forces.

It was a full bladder that woke me at about 5:00 AM, and I managed to stagger to the loo and then back to bed without completely waking up. During this ten or so minutes of wakefulness I stayed within a sleepy state of suspended disbelief and so was able to maintain the state of wonder to some degree. I was aware, during this awakening, that it had been all a dream and yet I was still enthralled by an acceptance that this pan-psychic unity was a feasible and very desirable state of being. I was also aware whilst still drowsy that what I had experienced while asleep was solipsism, which had been the subject of an email message I had prepared and sent to JCS-online the evening before.

In the email I had delivered what I considered were some really good reasons why solipsism is not a very worthwhile viewpoint. I had sent this in response to an email by Roland Cikerowski in which he reasserted his strong belief in the value of entertaining and maintaining [where possible?] some form of solipsism.

Anyway, in this instance I went back to sleep and woke again an hour and half later. The difference waking up this time was palpable. I was my 'normal' sceptical self and felt remarkably 'solid'. No superficial suspention of disbelief this time!

The apparently bizarre nature of my 'experience' in this dream lends strength to the Jungian approach to analysis of it: ie, what is the meaning of all these things and 'events' to me? As opposed to 'what might this dream say about the world outside of me?' Clearly all this stuff was going on inside my head, and nowhere else. Clearly also it was not particularly about the external world, because so much of what occurred in the dream simply does not, and to all reasonable expectation cannot, occur in the external world.

It is not hard to see a duality, an unreconciled tension between whatever is represented by the 'military' and 'police' in the dream versus whatever is represented by the 'pan-psychist' melting and melding with seemingly sentient gate posts, tree roots, and indeed the very ground itself. Within the dream I avoided both extremes and indeed was somewhat fearful of them. Yet both had their attractions: there was a strong feeling of the potential for great joy if not ecstacy in letting go and becoming completely at one with the 'alien', sexually potent, female [or hermaphroditic?] Earth-life-universe; there was also the potency of 'pretending' to be agressively macho which allowed the continuation of my journey 'North'. [to be continued ... ]

Some thoughts on sleep and Dreaming
Since time immemorial people have pondered the meaning and importance of dreams. The nightly disconnection of the brain in sleep, on the other hand, seems to have been accepted without too much comment as the time for resting and recuperation of the weary body. As part of the new paradigm however, our description of these processes is slightly different. The experience of dreaming can be seen as simply what it is like to be the model of "self" in the world when the brain is not receiving significant input from the senses. Also, we can easily understand that parts of the model of "self" and various representations of external things will be activated by association if the brain is sufficiently aroused. Major questions arise as to why the brain should need to be disconnected from the external world and why it should need to be periodically aroused whilst it is .
One way of answering this is to consider that the brain needs to be able to act as one integrated organ with all its various skills and descriptions available to activate in appropriate sequence and harmony when required. What the brain does as it learns however, is to create specific networks of association (singularities or patterns of interaction) which are so sufficiently distinct from any other patterns as to properly function as representations of unique features or relationships in the world [includes skills]. These new unique patterns may need some mechanism which isolates and protects them long enough to become properly encoded, that is until the synapses involved are sufficiently adapted. If this is the case the brain may only have a limited capacity for the storage of new information.
Another idea is that as the brain acquires useful new networks [patterns of interactions as noted above] it also creates other more random but weaker patterns which just happen in association with the "useful" connections but which are wrong, dysfunctional, useless, and potentially dangerous. If nothing was done about these they would become fixed into the structure of the brain like all the useful patterns rendering the individual prone to all manner of random errors of thought and action. The solution to this is that the brain is disconnected from the outside world every so often [sleep] and subjected to bouts of intense, internally generated stimulation. These waves of excitation which pulse through the system are considered to produce vast numbers of weak and transient networks which obliterate the weak "parasitic" networks without overwhelming the useful ones. In effect enough noise is introduced back into the system to render the parasitic networks no more prominent than other noise and thus unable to control it.
A side effect of this process is that other, more significant, networks are activated which follow their natural courses of interactions and stimulating associated networks. If the motor nerves were not prevented from activating the muscles the body would thrash around, get up and walk, sing songs, etc. This can actually happen of course and then the body sleep-walks, or sings, or laughs. If in the course of all this, networks making up representations of aspects of the self-model are activated then there will be a subjective experience of some sort and one may remember a "dream" when one wakes up.
"So what?" you say. Well, I think that a fairly strong reductionist approach to the relationship between brain and mind, can not just accommodate but actually *demand* a theory of dream analysis. Why? Because the human brain/mind is a massively parallel, self-programming, computational system that needs regular maintenance and debugging. A lot of this occurs through interaction with others, particularly the "significant others". We talk, touch, listen, and acknowledge each other, and this all works to develop, maintain and restore our self-image and the story which is our life. There are things which go on in us however, which we ourselves cannot see. Like trying to see the back of one's own eyeballs, it can't be done.
The self-model is a set of constructs. These constructs have formed through the interaction of the brain/body with its environment and to a large extent through copying of the actions and sayings of significant others. Thus my children do what I do and say what I say. (But they do not always do what I say because I do not either!) This process, which is in effect the acquisition of culture, inevitably involves conflict.
Children are not born good or bad, children are born *potent; they are designed to learn a world (create a model of the Universe) through spontaneous, active exploration and participation in whatever is happening around them. Young humans will try and do just about anything, in particular they will try to emulate those around them, depending on individual temperament of course. Different cultures, however, define what persons in general and persons of various social classes should be and do. Behaviour not in keeping with these definitions is labelled "bad", "naughty", "vulgar", "blasphemous" or whatever and the brain of the child must learn to suppress the impulses to do such forbidden things. In effect the brain of the child learns to legislate against itself in order to retain acceptance amongst the significant others. Just which* impulses must be suppressed is to a great extent culture specific so, for a trivial example, audible farting may be considered bad amongst Anglo-Saxons but not worthy of notice amongst Chinese. Or again: "boys must be tough", "boys don't cry" or "boys shouldn't be sissy" in some cultures but not in others, so that what may well be a genetically predetermined predisposition is magnified and stylized into a cultural stereotype
PROJECTION
Impulses which are suppressed do not cease to exist however, they just eventually cease to be acknowledged as part of the Self. Given that a great deal of what might otherwise "come naturally" is suppressed, the mind comes eventually to contain very many constructs that, whilst being really manifestations of Self, are systematically excluded from the self-model so they get allocated to things external to the bodily self. The individual subjective experience is that person or object A has feature x which "makes" me feel fearful/angry/disgusted/etc. For example: That dark-skinned fellow who looks like a (insert ethnic group here) makes me feel (insert negative emotion here) because all those (insert derogatory term here) never (or always) (insert good or bad activity here) so you can't trust them. Why does this happen? Because suppressed impulses do exist in the brain, they *are* excluded from the self-model, and they are provoked into activity by recognition of related things, people and events in the environment; a form of resonance if you will. The psychological name for this is *unconscious projection.*
Projection as such would seem to be a characteristic feature of the thinking and feeling of most people for most of their (that is *our* ) time. Failure to recognise the existence of projection, let alone its pervasiveness and power, is also a seemingly universal phenomenon. In particular, a profound lack of awareness of the reality of unconscious projection seems to me to be a feature of all types of mainstream religion where, (naively perhaps) one might have hoped to find such knowledge.
Perhaps we can consider lack of awareness of projection as a *defining characteristic* of popular religious belief although it would not necessarily be true of all practitioners of what are called esoteric or "hidden" teachings, and may not be true of a significant proportion of the followers of the Buddha. However, unconscious projection would seem to be the main driving force of much of what commonly goes by the name of religion and of much else that is associated with it, such as national chauvinism, male chauvinism, racism and colonialism; indeed just about any activity where "glory" is part of the pay-off. Emotional energy emanating from fear of death and the unknown and from greed and lust for power would appear to underlie these activities and attitudes. It is channelled into all sorts of social movements and structures which have a characteristic feature: they are "Immortality Projects". Difficulties recognising the process of unconscious projection Later interpolation: After much thought and argument with correspondents to JCS Online & other email distribution lists, I think that people find the idea of projection very difficult to understand because our natural state and folk psychology conspire to keep us believing in naive realism. If someone - a friendly psychologist perhaps - tricks us into seeing our projections then it easily becomes plausible. Apart from that only a confirmed theoretical understanding of the fact that *all* our experience is generated within our brains - our experience of three dimensional space and everything we believe to be around us - can allow us to realise that the creation of unconscious projections is no more difficult for a human brain than creation of the image of the food before you on the table. Click here to read a fascinating account of one person's discovery that his brain constructs all his experience.
Unconscious development or "evolution" of constructs within the brain
It is possible for ideas to develop unconsciously in the mind. In fact, if I push my view of how the brain works to a logical conclusion, all ideas develop unconsciously. What registers in consciousness is the experience of stages in the development of ideas where pieces of the puzzle come together. As I understand it, the fitting together of previously disparate constructs in a stable new construct entails a change in activity sufficient to affect the self model. This is because new pathways for thought are created and emotional attachments changed. A key concept is that of pattern recognition. As a chap named John Ball said on ABC Radio National once [on 'Occam's Razor'], the main function of the brain is the recognition, processing and production of patterns. He used the term 'pattom' to designate what he assumes to be the underlying brain activity feature which embodies this. Nobody has taken up his special word as far as I can see. Others use terms like cell assembly or repertoire but the underlying idea is the same: groups of neurons learn to act together in such as way as to embody the essential features of things in the external world or habits of thought and activity. If a person has a series of problems or intellectual challenges cooking away in her mind, what this means is that her brain is maintaining and growing a series of different neural networks which embody those constructs. During waking hours the global workspace is taken up with navigation through the physical and social environments and this involves invocation of networks relevant to this purpose and suppression of others which are not relevant. At night however, when the brain is mostly disconnected from the skeletal muscles and from sensory input, the global workspace is more or less free to arrange itself any which way as it is stimulated by an array of internal oscillators which flood the space with waves of impulses. [We can think of it as like an echo chamber with a set of broad spectrum noise makers humming, blaring and whistling away all night.] The patterns generated internally by these impulses are essentially random and erase all the new but dysfunctional wrong connections made during the day and leave the more deeply ingrained patterns. Over time there randomly occur patterns capable of invoking the problem constructs which associate and operate freely. This allows their development and constitutes a type of thinking which can be creative and useful. The discovery by Kekule of the structure of the benzene ring during a dream is an emblematic example of this.

Analysis of Dreams and Projections-
Debugging the Self

This Page:

The Dream of the Beast

Another amazing dream

Some thoughts on sleep and Dreaming

PROJECTION

Difficulties recognising the process of unconscious projection

Unconscious development or "evolution" of constructs within the brain

Continuous Development