Dream-analysis

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Dream (As an example)
19-03-2003

I am in the town council, as a novice. The decision has been made that the Liberals will exclusively govern the Flemish, while the rest of the parties will come to power in Walloonia; the only unimportant thing that still has to be done is the voting, to make it a law. There is a lot of talking and laughter, and we make up to sit down at the table.

In one way or the other an MDF-board has been put upon the table, a board with some holes in it. The gentlemen sit down and manipulate me behind the board, at one of the corners of the table. I am allowed to listen and look through the holes. The openings are fairly high, and I have to stand up. I feel fooled by the others, put my head through one of the openings and shout: "I'll vote Against it!". Everybody looks at me, astonished and angry. 

Free Association (As an example)
19-03-2003

My town council apparently has ample competence: decisions are made for all the Flemish and the Walloons. In fact I am a member of the federal government. In the previous days I had a strong feeling of being stuck, and now the contrary comes up: it should give me some relief if I got my hands on an important position, and this night I stole it in the dream.

The Flemish, like myself, should be governed by the Liberals. The more liberal the better, live and let live, they say. We, inside my mind, will not allow anybody to tie us down or walk all over us, like my granddad always said. Everybody, within my head, apparently is satisfied, and the consensus only has to be ratified by the voting.

By means of the actual proposition in the dream I convinced the oppressing part of the folk, inside my mind, to give free rein to the more passionate side of the country. My grandmother forbade me to play with the naughty boys in the street, although I often played in the streets. Probably I always met the nice ones.

In a following dream-scene the feeling of harmony becomes a little bit clouded. In don't find my place at the negotiating table, while I am forced on a corner with a perforated board in front of my nose. I am on my own again, because I am new here, or for whatever other reason there possibly might be.

I try to keep quiet and act normally, for I can participate through the (loop) holes. But I have to stand up to see something, and it is very frustrating. The debate, or café-chat, sets up with great intensity: There is a smoking, drinking and laughing. I feel cheated and anger is coming up.

Because I am in the game, as a novice, I may vote NO, and then everything has to be done over again; then I throw a spanner in the wheels, as if it were a veto. I get the entire gang down on me and wake up.

I am surprised about the place of 'me' in my head. It looks like everything in me yearns for the safe harbor of my early nest, and everything else what I have learnt in the past 35 years is represented by a single guy : me.

 Dream-analysis

 12-03-2004

The central theme in the present dream is the MDF-board with the peepholes. We made a golden object with diamond windows to represent the symbol, an amulet to help catching the mysterious significance of the dream-element.

 In our previous dream session (Door) we tried to put some symbols together to define 'a symbol'. It looks like the forming of a crystal, within a soup of atoms and molecules, in favorable circumstances, when the moment has come to build a sort of unit-cell of the crystal, strong enough to resist the destructive movements of the surrounding matter. Just like we trace the history of a diamond by studying the stone : it contains carbon, and may be formed under huge pressure and high temperature, probably somewhere deep in the ground, and far in the past, we are able to reconstitute the circumstances prevalent at the time a symbol was born. Here we have to distinguish the firstlings from the afterthoughts, the former being the center of memory, the symbol as such, bringing together all the spatio-temporal contingencies of the initial aha-erlebnis (ah ha experience), the latter thrown in later on, resembling the original circumstances, containing some elements of the first blend, modulating a little bit the meaning of the symbol, and building up the overlapping vague borders between different categories, eventually resulting in a new core for secondary symbol-formation. We also mentioned words as being pointers to symbols, in essence being symbols themselves, but reserved for humans.

 On opening the door to the experiment of writing a book on dreams and everything else in our unconscious and conscious mental space, we probably installed a chain of instructions into our mind, concentrating on solving the problem, like lighting a running fire, burning out the whole region. While the fire is a visual symbol of what seemingly happens, a more biological one may be the move of a population into a new habitat, followed by the evolution of it towards a maximal equilibrium in adaptation, creating new individuals and a modern way of social interacting, speaking with novel word-combinations, pointing to underlying symbols. An interesting problem arises here, concerning the question where the most novelties are installed : in the blend of primary symbols, in the secondary soup or in the whirl of interlocking pointers being the word-game meant for the message to other humans.

 In our opinion the basic plan for the modern town formed in medieval times, when the city was born, is a good metaphor for the net of intertwined firstling-symbols, bound to the ground and to the inhabitants' claims on the parcels, representing deeper feelings and emotions : the real-estate with associated property taxes. When the writing of the book makes progress, new suburbs are built, houses renovated and modernized, lanes broadened and renamed, archeological sites explored and unearthed, say, history and evolution is replayed in a couple of months instead of the centuries needed for the town to grow. 

 William Calvin (Ref. 5) compares the formation of a sentence within our mind with the evolution of life from nothing to now, but just in some milliseconds instead of being spread over the millions of years we observe in biology.

Having a dream is like walking through our own city, sharing life's joys and sorrows with the citizens, not as a reporter for television, but as a participant, changing roles when consciousness focuses on something else or vice versa. In the dream we talk to each other with symbols and words, and I is the place in the town in the county in the country in the world ... where it takes place. I is the moment of reflection, bringing together memories old and new, with impressions and perceptions coming from the environment, intermingling the data to generate a useful coherent activity of the entire organism. When we are awake, this happens in real time, and when we dream, it occurs off-line to set up a novel schema to cope with circumstances generating trouble and a dream in addition.

 Now to enter some nightly townships, with a hangman lane, horse fair lees and gray friars, wee look at the symbols coming up in former dreams : an hour-glass, getting stuck and  peepholes.

The hour glass is a memory from an old dream, almost 40 years ago, and the associations from that time are lost, but there was something with a red light, shouting "stop, don't walk", and the reading of a book on psychoanalysis and dreams. The dream suggested the possibility to turn the situation to green, going through a narrow corridor. Looking at the symbol of getting stuck and the dream about Juul, associated with birth, everything suggests being born as the circumstances leading to the first firstling after awakening from hanging around in unconscious waters.

After picking itself into being, the chick apparently hasn't very much to be learnt to find food and shelter and all the rest of it ... . Everything seems to be pre-wired, genetically installed.

 Development of humans goes a little bit further than is the case for chickens, but in the beginning we have much in common, apparently. We want to emphasize the pre-wired part of human beings, without which no later development could be possible. Sounds a little bit silly to write it down like that, but, in view of our daily experience in psychotherapy, it should be said that many problems, disorders, find their origin in the disruption between the beast and the human mind, as if thoughts and words and feelings are written in thin air, detached from history, not evolved from past situations, pointers leading their own life, pointing to symbols without contents, emotional deserts.

 We, humans, don't pick our way out of the egg, but are squeezed out of the universe to be thrown on the floor of the earth, helpless, ready for warmth and tenderness, open for cooperation and commitment, prepared to be taught to join the club. In our modern environment, we seem to be learnt to pick our way to the top of the world, something we ought to know if we were chickens, isn't it?

 "Igloos are seldom used as primary shelter anymore but knowing how to build one can sometimes be the difference between life and death." (Ref. 14)

"Baka pygmies live in huts called mongulus. They are typically shaped one-family houses made of branches and leaves and almost always built by women." (Ref. 10)

 Chopping an egg into two pieces, and putting it top to top, we have an hour-glass, see. Putting one half on the north-pole and the other in the jungle, we have an igloo and a mongulu, there. In the human case something strange is happening. Imagine a baby is born in China, once upon a time, and we send it to the pole by special messenger, somewhere in the past where igloos and things like that were the only possible shelter for Inuit to survive. Our little Chinese will certainly grow up as a genuine Inuit, no doubt about that, completely adapted to the frozen world. The same if we sent it to the jungle, somewhere in Africa. If it were a girl, she would make mongulus as the need arose, and make food for the survival of the group. ... So what? So we are not as confined to genetic encoding as chickens are, but we are encoded as well! We could use the word 'programmed' too, but because of the transparency of things, and the illusion of freedom of thought, we tend to think in terms of 'encoding', so decoding is the word.

"MOVING IN: Charon Pierson, a nursing instructor at UHM, hauls one of her many boxes back into Webster Hall." (Ref. 15)

 The boxes we see here are not egg-shaped obviously. We are reading The Newsletter of the University of Hawai'i System, so some civilization is called for. But look at the label on the box : "Island Movers inc." which is a nice pointer to what we are intending to explain about the symbols inside the carton. Say, we bring up our baby pygmy in the virgin forest, to become a full blown virgin of twelve, put her in the box and blow her to the pole, then we expect her needing a couple of nightmares to fix the problem of household and building. When we move from one island to an other, with new habits and circumstances, we have no schema to make a living, but must adapt to the new situation. Because people can bridge large gaps in short times, it does not always work in real time, and so we dream to solve problems off-line, and organize memory. Of course practically all mammals dream, but we have most neo-cortex, and so the most beautiful dreams and the most ample zone of proximal development (Lev Vygotsky).

"Infinity, in Western culture, means endless or immeasurable. Infinity commonly inspires feelings of awe, futility and fear. The symbol for infinity is called the lemniscate ... And is often seen in art and drawing, for example above the head of the Juggler in the Tarot set." (Ref. 16)

 Juggling with eggs leads us to infinity, with two sides within which we can move back and forth, creating endless evolution from red to green : each time we turn the hour-glass upside down, the green turns to red and the red becomes possibly green with the time gliding through and with considerable effort, causing dreams.

"In the end, after many dangerous rites, the men come face to face with Jengi spirit who first kills them as part of the initiation rite, then makes them come to life again as adults and gives them some special powers. ... " (Ref. 13)

 After the time has begun, at birth and the creation of the hour-glass, youngsters are taught what they have to know in adult life in the group they belong to. With initiation they go through the constriction and die, but the spirit brings them back by turning the glass, inviting them to join the club until the end of the times.

Living in a primitive way is certainly no easy matter, but. To move once again to the Inuit, we just saw a program on TV tonight about youngsters having lost their meaning of life, somewhere in a modern chalet in the middle of nowhere, and having no whales and so to catch. Somebody invented a sort of therapy, sending a group of young people, guided and well insured, on the ice for a few months, trying to live a little bit like the ancestors, eating sharks and other dangerous beasts, finding shelter in snowstorms and so on, everything to regain a sort of pride and the for surviving necessary mutual commitment. The situation helped wonderfully, but without lasting effect, alas. Once home again, lethargy returned.

The story indicates the strange feature of changing colors when we fall through the narrowing in space-time, first hoping for a better life, then working and sweating to install the next generation's hope. As if there is an endless repetition of longing for, or dreaming of a better world, awakening in a process under construction, and then ending the day by falling asleep and unconscious again.

 Aboriginals have a remarkable view on dreaming :

'Dreamtime' or 'Dreaming' (Ref. 17)
"The expression 'Dreamtime' is most often used to refer to the 'time before time', or 'the time of the creation of all things', while 'Dreaming' is often used to refer to an individual's or group's set of beliefs or spirituality. ... 
'Ancestor Spirits' came to Earth in human and other forms and the land, the plants and animals were given their form as we know them today.
These Spirits also established relationships between groups and individuals, (whether people or animals) and where they traveled across the land, or came to a halt, they created rivers, hills, etc., and there are often stories attached to these places. ...
Once their work was done, the Ancestor Spirits changed again; into animals or stars or hills or other objects. For Indigenous Australians, the past is still alive and vital today and will remain so into the future. The Ancestor Spirits and their powers have not gone, they are present in the forms into which they changed at the end of the 'Dreamtime' or 'Dreaming', as the stories tell. ... "

 After having done our work in real time, time comes to an end when we get stuck in the transition zone, fall through the bottom and change color from evening red to grassy green, arriving at the great hunting grounds, off-line, in a sort of conscious unconsciousness.

 Getting stuck in a cleft of rock reminds us of course of birth, so has been told by the specialists, calling birth as traumatic. We do not think of it like that, birth being an interesting fact, noticeable and because of the novelty and emptiness down memory lane, the first photograph to remember, even when the picture is transparent and symbolized in a collection of consecutive sensations and impressions.

"The famous radiograph made by Roentgen on 22 December 1895, and sent to physicist Franz Exner in Vienna. This is traditionally known as "the first X-ray picture" and "the radiograph of Mrs. Roentgen's hand. ... " (Ref. 19)

 As far as we know, W. Röntgen was a physicist, and was not very happy with the commotion about his discovery of x-rays in the medical world. Even the reaction of Mrs. Röntgen, on seeing the bones in her hand, was not very enthusiastic : "As if I was looking at my own death!"

So, that's an excellent example for the feeling of getting stuck. We imagine Mr. Röntgen was interested in the fundamental features of a sort of radiation he was studying, and sent a radiograph to an other physicist to communicate about physics, the real stuff. In fact nobody was very interested in that stuff, until a picture of death fell into the hands of a publicist, who saw the possibility to make a living out of it. The whole flock of picking chickens rushed to the fat worm, leaving Röntgen holding the baby. After a while he got the Nobel Prize for it, when the child was grown up, but he just said : "Thank you!" on receiving his prize. 

We imagine that the fundamental questions of life are not satisfactorily answered on getting applause for some comforting words, being the side effect of the invention of x-rays. Perhaps we are aware of our being trapped in consciousness between birth and death, seeing time passing by, and then trying to stop it with the discovery of some theory of everything, or something like religion or psychoanalysis. Of course, Mr. Röntgen has nothing to do with this imagination, and more, is misused an other time here as an example of getting stuck.

 Where doors are, there are ins and outs. People inside has got it made, all the others are on the outside, neatly separated by the wall. Let's start with atoms. There is a nucleus, determining the nature, and the electrons, involved in chemical reactions. Then we have something like microbes, large assemblages of molecules, with a central legislative institute, the genome.

"Because of their small size, microbes can be sequenced relatively quickly. A bacterium's genome typically comprises 1 to 4 million base pairs of DNA, or pairs of chemical structures represented by the letters A, C, T, and G, most of which encode genes. At one-half to 1/100 the size of the smallest bacteria, viruses have even smaller genomes. In contrast, the human genome contains 3 billion base pairs of DNA, approximately 95 percent of which do not code for any genes." (Ref. 22)

A little bit much more complicated are cells, which contain a nucleus with its own envelope, looking as if it were a master bacterium in the middle of servants and utility material. One of the servants could be for example the mitochondrion, having something to do with energy.

 "Mitochondria replicate much like bacterial cells. When they get too large, they undergo fission. This involves a furrowing of the inner and then the outer membrane as if someone was pinching the mitochondrion. Then the two daughter mitochondria split. Of course, the mitochondria must first replicate their DNA." (Ref. 23)

The cell itself has a membrane, as we saw in Paramecium, with a lot of specialized systems for communicating molecules. (e.g. diffusion, facilitated diffusion, active transport, secretion, endocytosis, ... ). The things talk to each other, from the very bacterial beginning on (Microbes seem to talk, listen and collaborate with one another—fodder for the truly paranoid. ... MARGUERITE HOLLOWAY, Scientific American, Feb. 2004). The chat occurs internally, as if they were dreaming, and externally as if they were speaking. So we have ins, inside the membrane, and outs, within which the inside is situated and interacting with. Difficulties arise in tempting to describe the system as a whole. Where are the borders? Where does communication begin and where is the end?

In the dream we are trying to analyze, persons arise and speak to each other. The chat is certainly inside our head, but seems to be related to the outside real world. There is consciousness, easily forgotten, and a notion of "I" and the others. It seems obvious to place myself within the borders of my skin, the person I see in the mirror when I wake up in the morning. But at night, within the limitation of our skin, there is me and others and situations and things, linked to emotions and feelings ... . Are my cells talking to each other, or are the molecules acting and reacting, or perhaps larger structures are in the game, groups of neurons, circuitry. Where originates the dreamer, the awareness of dark consciousness? 

 Or stated the other way on, from what level of organization on can we speak of consciousness. We always place it within people, but perhaps a group of cells, acting together may be more conscious than a group of molecules doing the same on a smaller scale? And what with a group of people, say at a football stadium.

When people shout and jump all together, supporting the play on the grounds in front of them, should there possibly grow a sort of higher or greater or other consciousness. Perhaps the mutual dependency is not evolved far enough, but think of the possibility of a spacecraft, sailing to a far planet, where the crew lives for years, or generations, in a small shelter of titanium or something like that, completely interdependent. We will further elaborate this mental experiment in the future, to find some meaningful definitions of consciousness.

 Now we return to dreaming and symbols. Earlier we defined symbols as units of communication, and now we try to find the units using symbols to communicate with. It could be cells, using molecules, groups of cells, forming a circuit, people thinking with symbols, or humans communicating with words, and even countries fighting a war or multinationals conquering the world.

In the course of free associations following dreams we found it well working to use the name "kids" for crystallized clusters of memory installed in early childhood. Now we have to distinguish between the symbols labeling the categories and the interactions between them spread over time. Somewhat like buoys and ships, houses and kids, standing for the static symbols and the dynamics of communication respectively. 

When we run playing through the streets, as a child, simulating wounded soldier being rescued, having nice weather and bathing in love and tenderness, then the remembrance of this situation, engraved in our body and strongly coupled to the right emotions, may be named a "kid", and the blue bed, a couple of trees, or some other details of the happening, visual or not, or combinations of them, could symbolize it, like objects in a gallery. One of them could trigger some of the original feelings, good feelings in this case. If the same kids had to rescue a real wounded soldier, blue beds with a red spot would trigger fear or uncertainty, say. The example seems trivial, but most of such memories are unconscious after a while, in the sense of automatic. The more some situations are reinforced, the more they quietly become normal, and normal things normally are not noticed, and what is more, usually enforced onto the actual situation and interactions. Then we call it projection and transference. 

 Our "kids" are versatile and available on all levels of organization. If for example a group of cells receives a message from the rest of the human body, the group can be seen as the kid, communicating with symbols. Or scenes in a dream filled with signs and objects - the symbols - and persons doing things - the kids. E.g. the hour-glass could be the symbol and the sand a collection of kids running through the hole, constituting the action and consuming time. Or a group of people arguing about the real and only truth are like two kids fighting for the leadership of the club, symbolized by granny's carpet-beater. 

Thinking about the carpet-beater and dreaming about obstruction on holding the staff, we had a dream:

So this is a nice demonstration of the function of dreaming. We were wondering about the place of "I", holding the scepter, looking at the scene of consciousness, now, through the narrow slit of active real time interaction with the environment, the paper we are writing here to publish on the internet (examination).

All the actors of the scene are put in place on falling asleep. The gray friars in front of hangman lane, going to the Saturday market to mill the grains of sand falling through the funnel of time, in Leicester Medieval City, our personal history, from the beginning on.

The kids running in the streets, hoping to find a place in the community - if necessary passing ritual initiation - bump onto the sniggering face of surrounding destructive educators, constructing a wall with a spy-hole around our inner organization of cells and mind, not to look at us, but for us to look outside at the liberals having a nice chat about spending the money they earned by selling their share certificate. 

Words describe the feeling of being throttled as an inner transformation of the experience of boxing up the throat of the person representing the world on my entering it through her natural birth-channel, and reading afterward that the feeling of being stuck results from birth itself, birth-trauma. The dream puts it in a wide perspective, me being the symbol of all experiences leading to me at the actual moment, giving rise to the symbols of an hour-glass, getting stuck and an MDF-board with peepholes.

The old castle, symbolizing the black hole, encapsulated by modern communication wires, waiting to catch our attention, just like a spider in its web. If you have a good look, you will see they all understand it, and therefore the steel spider-web has been constructed next to the wall, to symbolize the explanation of the dream.

 Symbols
  20-10-2004

Town Council.
I am in the town council, as a novice.
When I were in charge, then, I would like to choose the liberal liberators to govern my head, and that's it. Everything has been done, and all we have to do is the official voting to initiate the needed action. The perception of the environment and the blueprint for the movement to undertake are ready, the general repetition was a success, and just the order to go has to be given. And, because I reckoned without my host, the intention is blocked from within, or say, an MDF board is placed in between.

MDF board.
An MDF-board has been put upon the table, a board with some holes in it.
The MDF board is directly linked to uncle Wise, with his carpentry, and his expression : "All we got here is nuts with holes in", meaning "bullshit", or "keeping up appearances". The board also represents the LP with the well known old grooves, the traces of my personal history, my education, mom and dad, the whole thing, and which is strange enough likely to be forgotten by me and many others. The influence of the 'past' is as strong as those of history on the evolution of democracy, or the formation of, say, Belgium. It is not possible to deny it as if it were nothing or not existing, and when you do it all the way, then they slide an other LP (CD, DVD) from within your own inner world of feelings, on the the turntable. Going full steam ahead without a backward glance, is not the right thing to do.

References

1. Hour glass : (http://www.woodywoodknots.com/hour_glass.htm)

2. -

3. -

4. Medieval Leicester :
   http://www.leicester.gov.uk/departments/page.asp?
   pgid=803&style=nonav 

5. William Calvin : http://www.williamcalvin.com/ 

6. Red light ... :
   http://www.blackant.net/other/images/archiveiv/page6.php 

7. Chick : http://www.stockportmbc.gov.uk/art1999/animal09.htm 

8. Embryo :
   (https://courses.stu.qmul.ac.uk/smd/kb/humandevelopment/
   stage1/lecturefiles/geneslecturefolder/embryos.htm)

9. Inuit great dreams :
   http://www.greatdreams.com/native.htm 

10. Baka Pygmies :
    http://www.maurocampagnoli.com/baka/women.html 

11. Medieval Kars :
    (http://www.virtualani.freeserve.co.uk/kars/kars.htm)

12. Graven castle : Syberg photo, 06-02-2004, Ghent, Belgium.

13. Baka initiation :
    http://www.maurocampagnoli.com/baka/initiation.html 

14. Building an igloo :
    http://flfl.essortment.com/howtobuildigl_rlbb.htm 

15. Moving in Hawaii :
    (http://www.hawaii.edu/news/kulama/1995/950825/moving.gif)

16. Infinity :
    http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/cosmo/lectures/lec18.html 

17. Dreamtime :
    http://www.dreamtime.net.au/dreaming/dreamtime.htm 

18. Dreamtime workshop :
    http://www.schoolsupplies.co.nz/workshop/Projects/
    aboriginal_art.html 

19. X-rays :
    http://www.xray.hmc.psu.edu/rci/ss1/ss1_2.html 

20. Röntgen :
    http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1901/rontgen-bio.html 

21. Nucleus :
    http://ridge.icu.ac.jp/gen-ed/eukaryotic-cell.html 

22. Genome : http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/seqmicrobes.htm 

23. Mitochondrion : http://cellbio.utmb.edu/cellbio/mitoch2.htm 

24. Football grounds :
    http://www.tschoepe.de/auktion47/auktion47_england.htm 

25. Kids : (http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~juliej/Julie/kids.jpg)

26. Carpet-beater :
    http://www.sloughschoolsonline.org.uk/Teaching/ICT/
    Innovation/marish.htm 

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