Chapter 14

 

Dream Evidence

During the period from June 1998 through 2000, I was a senior scholar in residence at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in the San Francisco Bay Area. There I had a very enthusiastic research assistant, Laurie Simpkinson. She needed a project for research. Although I am a theoretician, I saw an opportunity there. I have always been interested in dreams and have done much analytical work with my own dreams. When I found out that Laurie shared a similar interest, I chose dreams as her research subject. Naturally, for collecting data, we set up a dream group at the Institute. Most of what is reported in this chapter is the result of our collaboration.

Most of our knowledge about the science of dreams comes from two sources: neurophysiology and psychology.

Neurophysiologists tell us, for example, that dreams mainly happen during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep that has a specific brain-wave signature. Neurophysiologists also make a good case that we make our dream pictures from the Rorschach of white noise that the electromagnetic activities of the brain provide (Hobson, 1988). However, neurophysiology is a materialist ontology where the meaning of dreams can never be reached. In this absence of a complete theoretical framework, the specter of dualism hangs over the neurophysiological picture.

Psychologists, beginning with Freud and Jung, have discovered a great amount of therapeutic value in dream analysis with their clients, because of the rich meaning embedded in dreams. According to Jung, dreams tell us about the great myths that run through our lives. Many others believe that dreams help formulate and perpetuate personal myths that we create and that we live by.

But why should dreams carry such deep meaning? Many scientists are openly skeptical, insisting that dreams are “nonsense” and “without meaning.” Some scientists go further, claiming that dream analysis may be detrimental to our mental health. Biologists Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison (1983) write, “We dream in order to forget.” (Later, Crick and Mitchison (1986) revised their position slightly: “We dream to reduce fantasy and obsession”—dreams are a way to forget things that might otherwise intrude in our lives.) They explain (1983), “Attempting to remember one's dreams should perhaps not be encouraged, because such remembering may help to retain patterns of thought which are better forgotten. These are the very patterns the organism was attempting to damp down.” Nevertheless, our fascination with dreams remains, because there is evidence not only of their therapeutic importance, but also of their importance in creativity.

The undeniable fact remains: we dream. But why? What function do dreams perform? How should we go about understanding them? What are they proving to us?

Although there is agreement that dreaming is a state of consciousness just like waking, there are philosophical problems with taking dreams seriously—or at least as seriously as our waking experiences. One issue is continuity. We take our waking life seriously because there is an ongoing continuous character to it. The same objects appear repeatedly; we wake up from a dream and find ourselves in the same bed in the same room where we went to sleep. Also, a cause-effect connection is clear between events of our waking experience. Dreams, on the other hand, seem to have no continuity: you dream, wake up, and go back to sleep and dream, but ordinarily you won't return to your previous dream scene. Seldom can one find any cause-effect relationship between dream episodes. So, how can we take dreams to be real in the same sense that we consider our waking life to be real?

In contrast to this way of philosophizing, the mystics of the world take an opposite view. They agree that dreams are unreal, but they claim that our waking life is also a dream and unreal in a sense. Dreams are the creation of the “little me” and the waking life is the dream of the “big dreamer,” or God within us. Mystics say that when we realize that there is no difference between waking and dreaming, that they are just different states of consciousness with similar values, then our perspective of living shifts to God-consciousness and we become liberated from the shackles of worldly boundaries.

The mystics' point is at least somewhat corroborated by the recent discovery of lucid dreams (LaBerge, 1985), in which we are aware that we are dreaming and have the ability to guide the dream to reveal solutions to problems in our waking lives. This raises the question, if we are sufficiently awake to realize that we are dreaming, why can't we realize we are dreaming while we are awake?

Then there are data about telepathic dreams and precognitive dreams that further complicate our attitude toward dreams. If dreams can tell us about “real” physical events distant in space and time, how can we not take dreams seriously?

MATERIALISM OR SUBTLE BODIES?

The earlier mentioned neurophysiological models of dreams are only able to respond to questions relating to the physical data (EEG report) gathered from measuring brain activity. Since physical matter for materialists is the ground of all being, the brain activity measured on the EEG report is the final and only reality. The person at home experiencing the dream sensations, feelings, and thoughts that correlate with the brain state is secondary to the physical brain state, as are the experiences. In materialism, consciousness is either an epiphenomenon of matter (brain) or (implicitly) a dual body. If you subscribe to epiphenomenalism, all explanations consist of finding a deeper, “objective” explanatory realm; such an explanation makes the question of the subject of an experience a “hard question” (Chalmers, 1995).

Furthermore, if epiphenomenalism is the case, then meaning cannot be accounted for, because with finite physical symbol processors such as the brain, one cannot arrive at meaning. Who makes meaningful images out of brain noise? There is no homunculus sitting in the brain looking at a TV screen. Something, a subtle body—namely, mind—must lie outside the material world to establish meaning.

The materialist model also fails at explaining telepathic and precognitive dreams, because such nonlocal qualities cannot be explained in materialist science, where locality reigns supreme.

In the materialist view, since dreams are epiphenomena of the brain, there is no causal potency in them, let alone causal potency as strong as the waking state. Therefore, if we are to understand the meaning of dreams and their nonlocality and causal potency, we must look outside the materialist view.

To introduce a proper science of dreams, we must consider consciousness as the ground of all being, consisting of five levels or worlds of being: the physical, the vital, the mental, the supramental, and the bliss ground of being. The most important objective of this chapter is to prove the veracity of a fivefold classification of dreams, thereby establishing the validity of our five bodies in consciousness.

What do dreams prove to us, then? They give quite definitive evidence that we are not one material body, but five bodies within consciousness.

WHO DREAMS? THE ANSWER FROM QUANTUM PHYSICS

Who dreams? This question presents a conceptual quandary in materialist thinking, because an objective explanation of a subjective experience (of the dreamer) is an unsolvable paradox. Quantum physics gives us the way out.

Who dreams? Consciousness dreams by converting waves of possibility into the actual events of the dreams and in the process dividing itself into two parts: one part, the dreamer, sees itself separate from the other part, the dream objects.

One reminder. How is the ego-individuality created? The answer, to repeat, is that experiences create memory; this memory feedback modifies the dynamic of quantum movement in favor of our past responses to stimuli. In other words, we become conditioned to respond in a certain way, albeit an individualized way, rather than retain all the freedom we have when we are naÏve. These conditioned patterns are what creates our individual ego, along with the history contained in the memory.

Thus, it would be incorrect to assume that the continuity of a body over time comes from the actual world. Rather, the continuity in the actual world is an effect caused by the conditioned way we experience it.

THE STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Human experience corroborated by brain-wave data allows us to enunciate the three types of states of consciousness:

1. The waking state. Here we have both external and internal awareness.
2. The dreaming state. Here, only the internal state of awareness exists.
3. The deep sleep state and other nirvikalpa states. Here there is no subject-object awareness at all, no collapse of the possibility waves. The Sanskrit word nirvikalpa means “no separateness.”

Can we say that the waking state is any more real than the dream state, just because when we are awake we have both external and internal awareness? We should not be too hasty. There are data suggesting that occasionally even in dreams, we have objective (therefore external) awareness.

In yoga psychology, consciousness has three defining aspects: existence, awareness, and bliss. We can easily see that these qualities are equally available in both waking and dream states. The case for existence and awareness is obvious, but it is valid even for bliss. Just as we can enhance the bliss level of our waking lives through spiritual practices and quantum leaps, similarly we can also enhance the bliss level of our dream time through methods developed in esoteric traditions called dream yoga—practice of awareness while dreaming.

But how about the philosopher's contention that dreams do not have any cause-effect continuity, that they jump around from episode to episode without any apparent causal continuity whatsoever? In contrast to the apparent fixity of waking awareness (needed for a reference point to communicate with others), where quantum uncertainty is camouflaged, dreams retain their quantum nature to a much larger extent, only yielding somewhat to Newtonian fixity because of conditioning. So in dreams, we have a conditioned continuity; this gives us the story line of a particular dream episode. But when the episode changes, we have the opportunity to experience the causal discontinuity of quantum collapse. In truth, however, very often there is a subtle continuity even in episodic changes. But you have to look at the meaning to find it.

This brings us to the other question that philosophers ask. When we wake up from a dream, we return to the same waking reality (perhaps with minor changes that are easy to explain), but when we go back to dreaming, we seldom encounter the same dream reality. So how can dream reality be taken seriously? The answer to this question is that dreams speak to us about the psyche—their concerns are feeling, meaning, and contexts of meaning. So we have to look for continuity not in content, but in meaning and feeling. When we do that, we can readily see that most often, especially during the same night, we do return to the same dream reality in terms of meaning or feeling. The contents and images change, but the associated feelings and meanings remain the same.

This way of looking at dreams can also resolve another question that people sometimes ask. In our waking state, we can and do talk about our dreams. Why can't we similarly talk about our waking life while dreaming? But we do! Except the language of dreams is made up of feeling, meaning, and the contexts of meaning (archetypal symbols). This language is a little hard to penetrate. When we do penetrate the language, we discover that in our dreams we do indeed speak about the problems of our waking life, that we reenact them in this way and that way and sometimes even find creative solutions.

So psychotherapists who encourage their clients to engage in dreamwork mainly at the meaning level are helpful. It is good to see that, beginning with Freud (1953) and then Jung (1971), Adler (1938), and others, psychotherapists assume that the meaning the dreamer sees in his or her dream symbols is most significant. The gestalt psychologist Fritz Perls (1969) summarizes this attitude best when he says, “All the different parts of the dream are yourself, a projection of yourself.”

The new quantum science of dreams agrees: a dream symbol is a projection of yourself to the extent that it represents only the personal meaning that you attribute to that symbol in the overall context of the dream, with proper attention given to the feeling aspect. Especially important are the other human characters in your dream. When you see your mother in a dream, she is you, or that part of you which mirrors your perception of her. Of course, there are also universal contextual symbols (that Jung called archetypes), representing universal themes that appear in dreams in which we universally project the same meaning. One such theme is the “hero's journey,” in which the hero goes in search of the great Truth; the hero finds the truth, is transformed, and returns to teach others.

So dream analysis is not only a science but also an art, since one has to look for the personal meaning within the context in which the symbol occurs. Some therapeutic schools suggest taking the dreamer through the feeling experiences that occur during the dream and doing the analysis only when the proper feelings are re-experienced by the dreamer. This is good strategy.

The meaning level of life also plays out in waking events, but we get so sidetracked by the clamor of the fixed symbols in waking life that we seldom pay attention to their meanings. For example, suppose that one day you have an unusual number of encounters with stop signs while driving around town. Would you stop to think that this might be some kind of synchronicity? Dreams give you a second chance. The same night you may dream that you are driving your car and then you come across another stop sign. Upon waking up, you may easily realize that the car is representing your ego and the stop sign is attracting your attention to put a stop to your rampant egotism.

THE NEW CLASSIFICATION OF DREAMS

There are many classification systems for of dreams. One of them is to label the dream by the particular school of thought that most easily explains it: thus, we have Freudian dreams (for example, wish-fulfillment dreams), Jungian dreams (in which archetypal symbols appear), Adlerian dreams (that reveal the dreamer's private belief system, its logic, prejudices, and errors), and so forth. But this kind of classification seems quite arbitrary and ambiguous.

Can the new science within consciousness explored here lead to an unambiguous classification system for dreams? The answer is yes. Most dreams can be better analyzed and understood from the viewpoint of the five bodies—the physical body, the (vital) energy body, the mental body, the supramental theme body, and the bliss body.

 

1. Physical body dreams. These are the so-called day-residue dreams from the physical body, in which the memory of the physical is role-playing in the dream.
2. Vital body dreams. These are nightmares, in which the dominant quality is a strong emotion, such as fear.
3. Mental body dreams. These are dreams in which the meaning of the symbols dominates, rather than the syntax or content, such as pregnancy dreams and flying dreams. Many recurring dreams (not nightmares) also fall into this category. These dreams tell us about our meaning life, the ongoing saga of the mind.
4. Supramental dreams. These dreams contain objective universal symbols, the Jungian archetypes. They tell us about the ongoing exploration and unfolding of the archetypal themes of our lives.
5. Bliss body dreams. These are rare dreams in which the affairs of the physical, the vital, the mental, and even the supramental are transcended. The dreamer wakes up with a deep sense of bliss, grounded in being. Here the dominant body involved is the unlimited bliss body, the eternal in us.

 

However, there is one caution. Sometimes, dreams play out simultaneously at more than one level. Sex dreams, for example, have not only physical dream typology, but also that of the energy body—sexual energy. Creative dreams take a problem from the physical life (symbols stand for what they are) and bring archetypal images to suggest a solution.

Let's now illustrate the classification with some examples.

My collaborator in dream research, the psychologist Simpkinson, had a dream that she was in bed and her cat was scratching the carpet. As she was about to get out of bed to stop the cat, she woke to find the cat on top of her, scratching and clawing at the blanket. This is a physical body dream, where the dream of the cat scratching the carpet came from the influence of the cat clawing at the dreamer. Physical body dreams also include those that simply repeat the day's activities, especially those that leave a mark in the muscle memory of the physical body.

Next is an example of a predominantly vital body dream. “Nancy,” a member of the Institute of Noetic Sciences dream group, talked about a recurring theme of many of her dreams. As an example, she shared this emotionally charged dream with the group:

I was walking up the driveway and my sister said she was leaving, and then I walked into the house and nobody was there. I looked and looked in every room and nobody was there—they had all left me. And at the same time it is scary because I feel like there is a ghost or something in the house.

Driving this dream is the emotion of fear—fear of being left alone and fear of the ghosts, etc. From that perspective, the symbolic images are those of the dreamer's psyche (the house), and she is fearful that she'll be left alone with the “ghosts” there. This fear was relevant to her waking life as well, since her lifestyle precluded any opportunities to spend time alone with herself.

After sharing this dream, Nancy went on to tell of an early childhood experience when she was playing with her siblings outside her house. At some point, she ran back inside to quickly change her clothes. Her siblings then played a joke on her and hid so that she would think they had left without her. She remembered looking around the outside of the house, thinking she had been abandoned.

The mental body had taken this early experience as a personal archetype for Nancy, in the sense that when the feeling of isolation came up in her life, it manifested itself with this familiar story. Thus, the recurring dreams around this theme were communicating the sense of isolation in her emotional life that needed attention.

When we look at the dream symbology, we can take the house to mean Nancy's psyche. The fear of ghosts indicates that being alone in the psyche is a scary experience for her. Nancy did spend a lot of time alone, but further investigation revealed that it was usually doing something, such as reading a book or cleaning the house. The issue here was the lack of time spent doing nothing—just being with herself. Both in her waking life and in this dream, there was fear around this idea. This nightmarish aspect is based in the vital body of feelings, which is also the area of the psyche that was demanding attention.

This dream revealed the need for solitude and calm. Two weeks after this dream, Nancy unexpectedly had to find a new living situation and moved into an apartment by herself. However, it wasn't until she mentioned her move at the next group meeting that she was able to connect the story of the dream to the manifestation of her actual situation. Although the move into a solitary place was not the entire solution, as she still needed to use the space to spend time by herself, it was another important symbol suggesting the need for being alone in her psyche. It is very important to see how both her waking life and her dreaming life manifested symbols that were relevant to her personal growth.

Although the following dream (contributed by another member of the Institute dream group, “Julia”) has the vital body characteristic of a disturbing emotion, it can be primarily understood as a mental body dream where the meaning of the symbols dominates.

I was on a boat with my husband and sons. We reached the first destination and then the boat started to sink. I went downstairs to where my purse was upturned in the water and tried to collect my belongings. I was angry that my sons and husband didn't seem interested in helping me. The boat had then changed into a canoe. I was very concerned about gathering my belongings because we all needed to catch a plane that was leaving soon. I finally realized I just couldn't make the plane, but upset that no one would help me or cared to.

In analyzing this dream, it became apparent that Julia's psyche was adjusting to newfound solitude as her youngest son was graduating and leaving home. This dream reflects going down into her psyche (down into the boat) where none of her other ego identities (her family) are interested in joining her. There she collects those things that have fallen out of her purse—her driver's license (literally her ID), photos of family (how she identifies herself), her wallet (money being a symbol of value), etc.—in order to pull together who she is. The canoe, which is a self-powered vehicle, showed that her psyche had changed from the communal boat excursion since now she was on her own. She then realizes that they will not all be able to continue together, as she “just couldn't make the plane.”

Here's an illustration of the supramental body dream. Simpkinson had a simple dream the first night out on a vision quest. She dreamed of walking around the wilderness where she and several others were on their vision quest. As she met up with them in warm camaraderie, it began to rain. The rain showered down, washing the entire hillside where the vision questers were staying.

This was a purification dream, initiating her into the vision quest. Water, in the form of rain, is the archetype of the unconscious. Since it was the unconscious she was hoping to learn from during her quest, this came as a significant blessing. Not only was the rain cleansing her, but it also was touching her, coming down to where the unconscious and the quester could meet. In this way, the unconscious was agreeing to be open and “shower” her with its presence.

The following is an example of a bliss body dream, in this case arrived at through lucid dreaming (Gillespie, 1986).

If conditions permit me to concentrate for long without [disruptions in the dream], I gradually lose body awareness and approach the total elimination of objects of consciousness. Mental activity ceases. I have reached this point of pure consciousness, but have not held onto it that I know of Inasmuch as sense awareness and mental activity have ceased, I have transcended my physical and mental self….

The final phenomenon is the fullness of light…. It usually appears like the sun moving down from above my head until all I see is brilliant light. I become aware of the presence of God and feel spontaneous great joy. As long as I direct my attention to the light, I gradually lose awareness of my dreamed body.

To lose dream imagery and awareness of myself in the evident presence of God is to experience transcendence of myself. This is the experience, whatever the explanation. Fullness of light, awareness of God, gradual loss of awareness of myself, joy (often called bliss), and uncontrollable devotion are phenomena mentioned commonly in mystical literature.

This example describes the loss of the ego identity as the emergence into light and great joy take over. All previous classifications of dreams dissolve, since there are no constructs of symbolic meaning in the bliss state. There is only pure bliss—absence of separateness.

MORE ON DREAMS AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

Why are dreams useful for psychotherapy? Freud had it right when he realized that there are mental processes going on in our unconscious, but we are not consciously aware of them in our waking life. Memories of trauma are activated in possibility whenever a similar stimulus presents itself, but the repression dynamics prevent us from recalling and manifesting such memories. So these memories affect our actions via unconscious processing and lead to behavior for which we cannot find any rational explanation. This makes us neurotic. In the dream state, the physical component of the ego, the body identity, is missing. This weakens the ego, so the usual ego guard against repressed memories is weak. Therefore, these memories can resurface in dreams. And this is a boon to psychoanalysts and, in fact, psychotherapists in general.

Dreams also tell us about the mental and emotional ego more directly than our waking experiences. Through analyzing dreams, therapists can get a sense of the meaning structure—the mental ego—that is part of each client's personality. And the same is true about the emotional structure—the mentalized vital-energy ego. The job of therapy is often to break up these rigid structures, so knowing about them can be invaluable for the therapist. And this knowledge is quite available in the vital body and mental body dreams.

CREATIVITY IN DREAMS

There is much anecdotal evidence of creative breakthroughs in dreams.

The most famous perhaps is August Kekule's dream about snakes gamboling together in a circle, giving him the insight that electron bonding in a benzene molecule is circular, a radically new concept. And Niels Bohr is supposed to have developed his atomic model inspired by a dream. Werner Heisenberg discovered the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics in a dream. And it's not just scientists who get their ideas in dreams: Beethoven got the idea of one for his canons from a dream. There are many such instances from other musicians, artists, writers, and poets (Goswami, 1999).

So why should dreams facilitate creativity? The creative process consists of four stages: preparation, unconscious processing, quantum leap of insight, and manifestation. In waking, we are identified with our bodies and physical stimuli dominate our waking life. In dreaming, the body identity is missing; we are wholly identified with the psyche. As a result, many things that are normally relegated to unconscious processing in our waking experience, we now release and collapse into experience in a dream. We cannot precipitate a physical event. But with the help of the noise/Rorschach available in the brain, we can experiment with making images of our ideas at the level of feeling and meaning and, once in a while, we are rewarded when a quantum leap occurs in the context of meaning upon waking, based on the dreaming expedition.

The English Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge graphically described the dream journey through symbols that helped him compose his famous poem “Kubla Khan” in this way : “What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed? And what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand?” Well said.

THE EQUIPOTENCY OF WAKING AND DREAM STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Now we come to the important question. Are dream states as potent as the waking states? Is our dream life to be taken with equal seriousness (or with equal levity, as mystics do) as our waking life? There are quite a few phenomena, some old and some new, that point to an affirmative answer. Among these phenomena are dream telepathy, precognitive dreams, crossover dreams, shared dreams, and lucid dreaming.

As this chapter suggests, dreams use symbols of the waking world to create not content, but the feeling, meaning, and context of meaning. However, telepathic dreams (the nonlocal transfer of information across space by our nonlocal consciousness collapsing similar experiences in two correlated people), precognitive dreams (nonlocal transfer of information across time), and crossover dreams are exceptions to this general rule. In these dreams, certain objects of waking reality do literally represent and mean those objects. It often happens that a telepathic or precognitive dream predicts the death of a close relative in this way; that is, death in these cases means the death of a physical person and is not a symbol for something else. Thus, in this kind of dream, the external physical world and the internal world of the psyche become equivalent. This suggests that at least these dreams are as “real” as the physical world.

In connection with dream telepathy, the research of psychiatrist Montague Ullman, parapsychologist Stanley Krippner, and psychic and editor of Psychic, Alan Vaughan (1973), carried out at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, over a decade is definitive. I will give more detail in chapter 16.

Shared dreams are when two people dream the same basic dream or when they sometimes appear in each other's dreams (Magallon and Shor, 1990). Dreams are ordinarily internal, but if two people share a dream, they are being elevated to a consensus reality through nonlocal correlation. How then can we deny that dream reality is in the same league as waking reality?

The best proof of this equipotency of dream and waking life would consist of finding the answer to this question. We use dreams in our waking life to solve problems of our waking life. Do we similarly, while dreaming, use the material of waking life to solve problems of the dream life? The prediction of the present theory is that we can. This question should be experimentally investigated by engaging the symbols of dreams as “real” objects in your waking life. For example, if you see the recurring symbols of clocks in your dreams, I suggest you engage with physical clocks in your waking life and see what that does to your dreams.

Lucid dreams—in which we are aware that we are dreaming while dreaming—are another vehicle for investigating the equipotency of dreaming and waking life. I mentioned earlier that it is a good hypothesis that in dreams all the characters are in some way the dreamer himself or herself. According to the present theory, it should be possible, with some practice and with creativity, to realize this even within the dream, while lucid dreaming—that the dreamer is privy to the “inside” of all the dream characters. This realization is the mystical realization of oneness of consciousness.

When we realize that we are all that is in the dream reality, that realization should carry through to the waking awareness as well. We see that the waking reality is also a dream created by us and that everything in the waking reality is also us. This answers the mystical question “Is the waking reality really a dream, a dream of God?” affirmatively. Thus this kind of lucid dreaming should be a grand subject of experimental investigation.

In this way, dreams not only give definitive scientific evidence for the subtle bodies, but also have the potency to directly reveal to us the nature of the entire reality.