Working with Dreams and Dream Symbolism
The prescription that we should sleep upon problems is well known. Although the conscious ego is inactive while we sleep, some part of the mind continues working on the problems that beset it during the day, so that when we awake the solutions may be already in place.
We can sometimes obtain a demonstration of the problem-solving power of the dreaming mind if we visualize an unsolved anagram or mathematical puzzle while drifting to sleep. Instructing the mind to work on the puzzle, just before sleep descends, can often stimulate a dream solution.
At this point, it is interesting to question the effects of trauma on the patient as it would seem logical to me that trauma can block the creative mind. Certainly, manipulating the brain with electromagnetic frequency signals, as a form of assault, may reduce dream frequency and interrupt creative problem-solving. If we were to analyze this from a scientific standpoint we might begin by analyzing the hallucinations suffered by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or medical cases of insomnia. Since, to my knowledge, there is little known or written about the amount of dreaming when it comes to new techniques in medicine that utilize electronic stimulation of the brain.
Intellectual Insights and The Creative Mind
Sometimes answers are actually given in dreams. A famous example is that of the German chemist Friedrich Kekule who claimed that his ground-breaking discovery of the molecular structure of benzene, in 1961, came to him in a dream. Working hard on the problem, he fell asleep and dreamed of molecules dancing before his eyes, forming into patterns, then joining like a snake catching its tail in a dream representation of the so-called “benzene ring”.
The answer may come literally, unfiltered by symbol. The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, after many fruitless attempts to tabulate the elements according to their atomic weight, dreamed their respective values and subsequently found all but one to be correct, a discovery that led to the publication of his periodic law in 1869.
When dreams offer symbolic rather than literal solutions, interpretation can be more difficult. the scientist Neils Bohr identified the model of a hydrogen atom in 1913 after a dream in which he stood on the sun and saw the planets attached to its surface by thin filaments as they circled overhead. Numerical solutions, in particular, may be conveyed in symbolic form, perhaps using associations lodged deep in the personal unconscious. For example, the number 3 might be indicated by an old three-legged stool from the dreamer’s childhood.
One of the most astonishing of all dream discoveries, involving visitation by a dream ghost, is that of H.V. Hilprecht, Professor of Assyrian at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1893, Hilprecht was trying to decipher inscriptions on drawings of two agate fragments believed to come from finger rings, dating from c. 1300 BC and excavated from ruins of a temple at Nippur in modern Iraq. Discouraged by lack of success, Hilprecht retried to bed and dreamed that an ancient Babylonian priest appeared before him to inform him with a wealth of background detail that the fragments were not separate rings at all but part of a cylinder that the priests had cut up to make earrings for a statue. If they were put together, the priest told him, the original inscription could be read with ease. Hilprecht awoke and confirmed the truth of his dream, receiving final proof when he examined the fragments in the museum at Istanbul.
The Nightmare
Psychological, as well as intellectual problems, can be solved through dreams. Anxiety dreams, for example, can help us recognize important truths about ourselves. In stark contrast to the modern view of “nightmares” is the original meaning of the word as an evil spirit that visited people in their sleep to seduce and so gain possession of them, body and soul. The “mare,” or “demon”, came to women as an incubus (shown in the 18th-century painting by Henry Fuseli, above) and to men as a succubus, leaving the dreamer feeling oppressed and overpowered, as if something heavy was pressing on his or her chest. Recent psychology suggests, but may not prove, that “nightmares” are dream symbols of unconscious sexual desires (especially repressed passive and masochistic aspects of sexual instinct). The only connection of support I can give for this suggestion would be to compare dreams to creative perversions of sexual deviance. If all sexual perversions are creative solutions to a problem by which they are encountered in our conscious reality through phantasy, then dreams may be the creative solutions to problems experienced in our waking reality through the realm of unconscious language or phantasy. That is to say, through symbolism.
Dreams of Mortality
The collective unconscious takes the long-term rather than the short-term view, associating death with change rather than with finality. However, at an individual level, death has always vexed, terrified, and fascinated us, and the Level 1 and 2 dreams that lie not far below the surface of our conscious minds may be filled with anxieties about our own death or about the ultimate loss of loved ones or close friends. To explain what these levels are remember the collective unconscious is a vast historical storehouse of the human race containing ideas, symbols, themes, and archetypes that form the raw material of the world's myths, legends, and religious system. There are three subconscious levels of the mind:
Level 1 is the most superficial class, drawing primarily on the material in the preconscious mind. Dream images from this level can often be taken at face value.
Level 2 deals with material from the personal unconscious, using predominantly symbolic language, much of it specific to the dreamer.
Level 3 contains what Jung called “grand dreams.” These deal with material from the collective unconscious, operating only in symbols and archetypes.
Fearful dreams about our own mortality may indicate the need for us to come more to terms, in conscious life, with our inevitable fate. Dreams about the death of others, though, may depict more abstract fears — for example, a concern about the annihilation of the personality or the self, or dread of judgment or divine retribution, or of hell, or of the manner of death, and so on.
Death in dreams sometimes carries precognitive warnings about the future. Abraham Lincoln dreamed his own death only days before he was assassinated, seeing his corpse laid out in funeral vestments in a room of the White House. Many dreams of death, however, have no association with mortality at all. Some may relate to aspects of the dreamer’s own psychological life, or to a change in life circumstances. Symbols of death may also draw the dreamer’s attention to forthcoming irrevocable events, such as retirement, losing a job, moving house, or ending a close relationship.
Reading the obituary of someone during a dream, or seeing their tombstone, or attending their funeral, may suggest the dismissal of that person from a job, or their relegation from the dreamer’s affections, or their fall from grace in some other way. I don’t believe the corpse of the woman in my eruption of the Real dream is really “unknown” to me. I believe she is someone I encountered during my waking life at some point in my history. Perhaps in a bar, or a grocery store, or as a person visiting a neighbor of mine.
Dream images relating to the dreamer’s own death can carry similar meanings, although The Golden Dreamer, a dream handbook published in 1840, saw such images as denoting speedy marriage and success in all undertakings.
In light of this new information highlighted above, my analysis regarding my dream of another person’s death may suggest the abstract fear of annihilation of the personality or the self. This may provide supportive evidence that remote experimental medicine may be utilizing electronic targeted assaults to harness and/or change/control personality and behavior. Or the inverse possibility of a clandestine criminal conspiracy. Since there is no pharmaceutical drug that can correct a personality disorder or even cure addiction. Since personality disorders can be connected to sexual orientation and sexual deviance, it makes sense this may be an explanation for the electronic targeted assaults of certain individuals. That is, electronic targeted assaults of the Targeted Individual as a result of fear of Other whether it be because of their mental illness, sexual orientation, or some other aspect of the Self. All personality is like glass glued to a table and the prevalence of the Histrionic Personality Disorder connections to homosexuality can be supportive evidence.
In the work of Michael Foucault, The History of Sexuality (Vol. 3): The Care of Self, Foucault takes us into the first two centuries of our own era, into the Golden Age of Rome, to reveal a subtle but decisive break from the classical Greek vision of sexual pleasure. He skillfully explores the whole corpus of moral reflection among philosophers; Plutarch, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and physicians of the era, and uncovers an increasing mistrust of pleasure and growing anxiety over sexual activity and its consequences. How does this connect to the phenomenon known as the Targeted Individual suffering electronic targeted assaults in the age of non-essentialism?
This concept of non-essentialism was famously expanded upon by Foucault in his History of Sexuality, in which he argues that even gender and sexual orientation are contrived formations and that our concept of essentialist notions of gender or sexuality is flawed. For example, he argues that the entire class of homosexuality is in fact quite recent, built up by cultural norms and an interplay between different groups in society, but with no more essential a quality than, for example, the idea of beauty.
