Doing Some Dreamwork

If you hear that someone is doing “dreamwork” it can mean they are working on interpreting their dreams. Today, this differs from the classical dream interpretation that we associate with people like Sigmund Freud.

Freud and others explored the images and emotions that a dream presents and also evokes in order to come up with a meaning for this kind of dream or dream symbols that could apply to other people too.

When I wrote earlier about a dream I had and the symbolism that is associated with it, I relied on some “classical” interpretations, but modern dreamwork is more individualized.

A book on dream interpretation may tell you that dream of a pregnancy (yours or someone else’s) usually has nothing to do with pregnancy and is a symbol of something new being “birthed” in your life. It certainly could be about a new project but it could be literally about someone being pregnant. Dreamwork now is more about discovering each person’s own dream language. That pregnancy could be about an inner transformation or connecting to your inner child.

A book of dream symbols might suggest some interpretations and they might seem relevant but you need to write your own dream dictionary. A child dreaming of feeding a giant giraffe is not the same dream if I dream about a child giving some food to a giant giraffe. Maybe the child is feeling different from everyone. Maybe I am dreaming about exaggerated, oversized desires.

I have been keeping dream journals for many years and I now know that certain things reappear. After decades of teaching, classrooms are often the setting for my dreams. If you read common interpretations of classrooms in dreams, you won’t find what they mean to me.

A friend once compared dreamwork to doing horoscopes. She said that you can read horoscope websites or books about your sign and sometimes what’s there will make sense for you. But to those who believe in astrology, only a horoscope done specifically for you will make sense.

I think interpreting a dream is like interpreting a poem.  If you read a poem about a child exploring a basement, the basement of the poet may be quite different from any basement associations you have in mind. I looked up “basement” in several dream books and they say that it represents a deep level of your subconscious mind – your deepest darkest thoughts, emotions, and memories. But maybe your basement was where your recreation or play room was as a child. I had my workshop for building models and my little chemistry lab in the basement. There was nothing deep, dark or secretive about it.

Many years ago, I gave a poetry reading and afterward a woman came to me and said that she enjoyed the reading and particularly my poem “Weekend with Dad.”I really identified with it because I am a divorced parent too.” I thanked her, but I am not a divorced parent and the poem is not about a custody weekend with my son. Or is it? For her, it was definitely about that kind of weekend, and looking back at the poem I realized she was right. That interpretation is valid. For her.

Any place, person, or object can differ in its meaning for different dreamers. The meaning can even change throughout your life. The classroom in my dreams when I was 11 is not the same one I saw when I was in college or is it the classroom I occupied as a teacher. Dreamworkers consider a dream to be alive after it ends and that it can have a variety of meanings and that those meanings may change.

Can’t a dream “just be a dream?” I have many dreams I have recorded that I cannot interpret. They seem to be just brief stories that are unconnected to my life – at least at the time I had dreamt them.

Freud’s theories are frequently dismissed today by modern science and psychology, but what he wrote about dreams is still influential. He didn’t know anything about REM and the NREM sleep cycles. His theory that dreams are wish-fulfillment partially came from his time spent analyzing children’s dreams. Freud also believed that dreams are very much about sexual or aggressive nature and that is why we repress them in our waking life.

When I started my first dream journal t age 13, I bought Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. It was way beyond my comprehension but it got me thinking about what my dreams might be telling me about myself.

Freud’s student, Carl Jung, became a successful and famous psychiatrist too. Building on Freud’s ideas about the unconscious, he took different views about the meanings of dreams. He believed dreams express aspects of our personality that we haven’t developed in our waking life. Jung believed dreams were the way to see into our unconscious mind and provide us with guidance for our conscious life.

There are those now that dreams are not encrypted and don’t require interpretation because they have no other meaning. But they’re not useless because they are the way the brain attempts to convey information to its conscious self.

Freud called the dreamwork “the essence of dreaming.” They are “a particular form of thinking.” Dreams are very much about images created from abstract thoughts. In dreamwork, you reverse the process and turn the images into language.  Freud compared dreams to picture puzzles like rebuses.

One thing I have not found to be true in my dreams – though I wanted it to be true at times – is that they predict the future. They are all about the past. Oneiromancy (Greek oneiros = dream, manteia = prophecy) is the practice of using dreams to predict the future. I think it is a superstition, but it might only take one or a few coincidental dreams that accurately seem to predict the future to make you a believer. Dreams foretelling the future appear in the Bible, Homer’s Odyssey, and in Shakespeare’s plays.

Before you go to sleep tonight, consider keeping a dream journal near your bedside and immediately recording any dream you recall upon awakening. Dreams dissolve quickly.

There are plenty of websites and books about interpreting dreams and even dream journals with suggestions about what you should try to record. But all you really need is a pen and notebook and to develop the practice of recording dreams and then considering the people, places, and objects that appear in them in the context of your own life experiences.

The Jungian Shadow

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

The shadow is your unknown side. In analytical psychology, it is called id, shadow aspect, or shadow archetype. In simple terms, it is everything of which a person is not fully conscious – the unconscious.

According to Carl Jung, the unconscious may be positive or negative. Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. He felt that the personal qualities we deny, repress, or ignore do not go away, but are relegated to the unconscious.

Do you know your Shadow side? This archetype is often described as the darker side of the psyche, representing wildness, chaos, and the unknown. Why repress these things? Desires or qualities that are frowned upon by others are generally repressed. We may do it to protect ourselves from emotional or even physical harm.

I’ve written about dreams before and I am fascinated by them and their interpretation. Jung believed that when we repress desires or qualities, the Shadow may begin to show up in our dreams. It might appear as a snake, a monster, a demon, a dragon, or some other dark or wild figure. In waking hours, you might be drawn to shadow figures in films and literature.

Encountering the Shadow archetype be a sign that you are ready to begin a new cycle in life. According to Jung, integrating the Shadow aspects of our psyche is the first step in our spiritual growth. You might resurrect positive qualities that you have been repressed and put them to use. A man may have repressed his nurturing nature because he felt that showing something that was seen as “feminine” would be unmanly. Confronting the Shadow and moving that part to consciousness might happen when a man becomes a father.

 

Memory Wonderland

Alice

One of Carl Jung‘s favorite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. In a conversation between the White Queen and Alice:

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday–but never jam to-day.’

‘It MUST come sometimes to “jam to-day,”‘ Alice objected.

‘No, it can’t,’ said the Queen. ‘It’s jam every OTHER day: to-day isn’t any OTHER day, you know.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Alice. ‘It’s dreadfully confusing!’

‘That’s the effect of living backwards,’ the Queen said kindly: ‘it always makes one a little giddy at first–‘

‘Living backwards!’ Alice repeated in great astonishment. ‘I never heard of such a thing!’

‘–but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.’

‘I’m sure MINE only works one way,’ Alice remarked. ‘I can’t remember things before they happen.’

‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ the Queen remarked.

“What sort of things do YOU remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.

“Oh, things that happened the week after next,” the Queen replied in a careless tone.

So, the White Queen is being foolish, right? Maybe not.  She seems to be claiming that she has a kind of foresight. That may be close to what neuroscientists in this century started to believe – that memory is not really about the past. Memory works to help guide your future actions.

Eleanor Maguire at University College London, uses the White Queen as an illustration, “You need to project yourself forward to work out the best course of action.”

People with damage to their hippocampus can’t remember their past but also struggle with forward-thinking.

The White Queen may be prescient. Or maybe Lewis Carroll gets credit for prescience.

FURTHER READING
the-gist.org/2015/07/its-a-poor-sort-of-memory…
Does Alice remember Wonderland as a dream or did she forget it?

Synchronicity and Significant Coincidences

Carl Jung was a pupil of Sigmund Freud but they were quite different in their views of the world.

Jung was very interested in Eastern spirituality. He  also recognized the existence of some psychic phenomena which he called “significant coincidences.” You’ve probably experienced a coincidence such as thinking of a friend who you rarely see or speak with and suddenly the friend calls on the phone. But Jung was thinking about ones that were not so random. One example he wrote about was when he was taking notes about a patient’s dream about a particular type of beetle when at that moment that exact beetle came in through his window.

Jung and Pauli

One of Jung’s patients in 1932 was Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer in quantum physics. Their relationship helped lead him to his concept of synchronicity. Jung’s theory was that sometimes events attract each other without any obvious connection. Why? Because they are connected on a level deeper than normal reality.  Their attraction is not a coincidence but more like something described by quantum physics. For example, Jung was interested in entanglement which is when a particle can influence another instantaneously even if very far from it. This has been verified in tests a number of times.

Pauli and Jung combined quantum physics and psychiatry to explain things like déjà vu.  Jung was convinced that these significant coincidences were connected at some deeper level. He also believed that mankind had created a huge common library where the oldest symbols resided, which he called archetypes.

He believed minds could be connected because everything in the universe is connected. In his Jung’s last major work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, which was completed in his 81st year, he wrote about the synthesis of the opposites in alchemy and psychology.

“We do not know whether what we on the empirical plane regard as physical may not, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be identical with what on this side of the border we distinguish from the physical as psychic. Though we know from experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a position to say in what this relationship consists or how it is possible at all. Precisely because the psychic and the physical are mutually dependent it has often been conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience, though this certainly does not justify the arbitrary hypothesis of either materialism or spiritualism.” – Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy

Shadow Work

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow?
I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.” — Carl Jung

Shadow work is a term coined by Carl Jung. It refers to acknowledging and understanding the dark side of our personality which Jung felt was essential to having a fulfilling life.

How well do you know yourself? The flippant answer would be that I know myself better than anyone. Jung said that there are parts of your personality that you despise so much so you hide them away. This is your shadow self.

“There is no light without shadow and
no psychic wholeness without imperfection.” — Carl Jung

But, if these things are repressed, how do we acknowledge that they exist? Wouldn’t you rather focus on your strengths rather than your weaknesses?

In order to grow, you need to address your flaws. Can you acknowledge that you might be jealous, selfish, or even racist?

This might sound like therapy and like therapy, shadow work can reveal parts of your personality you might not be ready to acknowledge.

So, I would say right here that I don’t recommend trying to do some shadow work based on just this post or the links at the bottom.

Shadow work means confronting some of the worst things about your own personality and character. I learned about it, unsurprisingly, in therapy. I don’t know if Dr. F. was a Jungian but he introduced it to me.

If you’ve ever read or studied Jung in a course, you probably learned about archetypes. I kept a journal for my sessions which is part of the shadow work and two things we looked for were recurring themes and patterns.

“Everything that irritates us about others
can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” — Carl Jung

We talked about things that “trigger” me. Is there something that pushes you to anger? How do you react to angry situations?

I won’t get into my own flaws here. That’s something you work out privately. Did the shadow work help? Yes. Did it free me from those flaws in myself? To a degree and in some ways, but not completely. This is lifetime work. I wish I had started earlier.

I did learn that it is not about just uncovering repressed thoughts or desires that make me feel uncomfortable, but more about being aware of what I feel a need to hide and pretend that those things don’t exist in me.

MORE READING
books on shadow work
www.psychologytoday.com
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
theoryf16.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu
learning-mind.com/shadow-work/

The Answer to Life Is 137

When Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he wrote that “The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42.”  He was joking, but I wonder if the answer really might be 137.

Take a look at one thing about 137 in mathematics: Using two radii to divide a circle according to the golden ratio yields sectors of approximately 137° (the golden angle) and 222°.

In physics, 137 is the approximate denominator of the fine-structure constant. Being a dimensionless physical constant, it is approximately 1/137 and has the same numerical value in all systems of units.

Physicists have postulated for more than a hundred years that 137 might be at the center of a grand unified theory, relating theories of electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and, especially, gravity. It’s the DNA of an atom.

As the inverse of the fine-structure constant, it is related to the probability that an electron will emit or absorb a photon (Feynman’s conjecture).

Some physicists has suggested that if the number that unified the relationship between all these concepts turned out to be 1 or 3 or a multiple of pi, that would make more “sense.” But why 137?

Leon Lederman thought that because the number 137 “shows up naked all over the place,” that means that scientists on any planet in the universe using whatever units they have for charge or speed, and whatever their version of Planck’s constant may be, will all come up with 137, because it is a pure number.

But it shows up frequently outside of math and physics.

In mysticism, the Hebrew word קבלה (Kabbalah) has a Gematria (numerical value) of 137.  It describes the “corresponding loops” which clasped together enjoin the two sections of the Tabernacle’s ceiling. These loops divided the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies – the physical dimension and the spiritual dimension – and at the boundary line of the physical world, the number 137 emerges.

Moses’ Tabernacle, the earthly dwelling place of God, was 13.7 meters long. NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has taken the best measurement of the age of the Universe to date. and ”scientists now have the best estimate yet on the age of the Universe: 13.7 billion years.”

Some people have connected the science, math and mysticism. 137 refers to electrons and the odds of an electron absorbing a single photon. In simple Kabbalah language, 137 is about Vessel and Light. It is about the physical body of man (Vessel) and our ability to ignite the Light in the soul.

One of the important physicists of the 20th century, Richard Feynman, wrote about the number 137:

“It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the ‘hand of God’ wrote that number, and ‘we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.”

According to the Bible, Abraham died at age 175, but when he was commanded by God to offer his son up as a sacrifice, he was 137. According to the Torah, Moses’ father lived to 137, and so did Ishmael and Levi.

Physicist Leon M. Lederman numbered his home near Fermilab 137.  He tried to unite the Ancient Greeks’ earliest scientific observations, Einstein, and the Higgs boson, which is nicknamed the God Particle.

“One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the fine-structure constant. …The most remarkable thing about this remarkable number is that it is dimension-free. …Werner Heisenberg once proclaimed that all the quandaries of quantum mechanics would shrivel up when 137 was finally explained.” 
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer of quantum physics, died in a hospital room numbered 137, a coincidence that disturbed him.

Physicist Pauli and psychoanalyst Carl Jung were both obsessed with the power of certain numbers, including 137. They were fascinated by the atom’s fine-structure constant and its Kabbalistic significance. They formed an unlikely friendship and began a mystical quest that led them through medieval alchemy, dream interpretation, and the Chinese Book of Changes.

They were two people who believed 137 was at the intersection of modern science with the occult, and that it was a mystical number with a meaning beyond physics.

In 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur I. Miller, it is reported that Pauli once said that if the Lord allowed him to ask anything he wanted, his first question would be “Why 1/137?”

Is there a primal number at the root of the universe
that everything in the world hinges on?