What Dreams are to people?
Dreams are all things to all people. While some people dismiss dreams out of hand it is worth bearing in mind that the structure of the benzene molecule came to someone in a dream, that the Iriqouis people view dreams as being more important than waking life and certain muslims have a special practice of Istikhara whereby they intentionally incubate dreams to help them with life’s major decisions.
In Navajo culture if one tells you their dreams they tell you their path. One author Reichard cites a case where a Navajo transvestite is ‘eager to talk about her own sexual experiences and sorcery, yet was afraid to discuss dreams.’
The way I would like to approach dreams today is by talking about their social aspect. This will include a brief discussion of notions of relatedness amongst the Amerindian Hoti tribe. Then contemporary Icelanders.
I would then like to bring us back to the West with some material that more specifically relates to shared unconscious material. Finally, I would like to open the topic up to the group and encourage you to relate your dream experiences.
Dreams and different ideas of relationality
In reading different ethnographic and cultural accounts I have come across a number of concerning beliefs. One tribe leaves sickly babies to ‘turn into monkeys’. Probably just die of neglect. Following bear mythology in more Eastern-y Shamanism one finds a set of bear incest stories that prohibit women from eating the parts of the bear that they can reach while embracing one aka. the tasty bits of the bear.
This chauvinistic streak can be seen again in another tribal notion that a baby is formed from multiple intercourses and paternity arises as a result of accepting paternity. All that being said the dreaming cultures still offer us a new way to look at our dreams.
The first source that I would like to draw on is: -
Equivalence, personhood and Relationality: processes of relatedness among the Hoti of Venezuelan Guiana -by Robert Storrie
The Hoti are an isolated group of Amerindian hunter-horticulturalists living in Central Venezuelan Guiana.
They do not have any notion of incest for they do not have genealogical notions of relatedness. Relationality for the Hoti is experiential and rests upon cosmological knowledges that appear to underlie the Hoti’s distinctively egalitarian society. Their notions of relatedness are in fact underpinned by dreaming.
Accessible through dreaming, their notions of humanity that define and generate persons are inclusive of the whole environment.All elements of the environment are not merely alive, but are alive in the same way. They are all animated by and share the same life giving substance. A substance that manifests in the dream or shamanic environment. These are the animating principles or hodï (singular, ho).When the Hoti sleep the Ho is free to leave the body and do what it likes. Visit the dead or whatever.
Another important feature underpinning Hoti relatedness is generosity.The Hoti suggest that through sharing and commensality they can grow to share substance. Generosity is not just an appropriate behaviour between kin, but is also the defining moral characteristic of ‘humanity’ itself. What then could be better than sharing dream experiences?
‘Relating through Dreams: Names,Genes and Shared Substance’
In Adriënne Heijnen’s (unpronoucable surname’s) article in the Anthropology and History journal a link is again drawn between dreaming and relationality this time in Iceland. This is despite the fact that there is a seemingly widespread willingness to donate genetic material to create a health database and the consequent recognition that this has given genetic relatedness a renewed, supreme status allowing little room for cultural and social construction.
Adriënne argues that parallel to the idea that substance is shared between two genetically related persons, there is another way whereby substance is thought to be transmitted in Iceland, without genes being the main criteria. Here, dreaming plays a central role. She talks about the process of name giving by the dead and outlines a number of accounts of dead friends appearing to pregnant women urging them to name their children after them.
She heard many stories where deceased friends, distant relatives, local sailors who had died in accidents, and also hidden beings, who are supposed to live in rocks and hills called huldufólk or álfar, desired to pass their name to an unborn child.
Dreaming of beings and their essences
We learn another lesson from the Hoti and Ojiwbwa dreaming cultures. They treat the essences of objects as being the only stable aspects of objects. Therefore they identify things not on the basis of what objects appear to be but on the basis of the consequences of any interaction with objects.What I am saying here, albeit in an extreme and comical way, is that dreams offer us a chance to look beyond appearances and take a new perspective on people and places.
While the Hoti and Ojiwba Cultures might go overboard with this I thought it would be fun to take a quick look at what they both do . In the Hoti culture this leads to a rather humorous situation where one has to go through a lengthy checklist of ‘what it could be’.
A jaguar encountered on the forest path might be a human shaman in the form of a jaguar, or an other-than-human person – one of the forest guardians – or it might be ‘just’ a jaguar. The last possibility is actually the least likely, according to the Hoti.
Now for a short digression. I also read that a dream of a hammock in another dreaming culture indicates a jaguar because of the weave of hammocks which was in some way similar to some jaguar feature. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that throughout all of my reading I confused the jaguar with the panther. Panthers are normally black and jaguars are rarely black. After google image-ing jaguar I now learn it is not black. The hammock stuff makes a lot more sense after realizing that they look like Jaguars. The weave pattern of the hammock matches the pattern of the leopard's spots.
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At another point in Storrie’s article he quotes the following segment from Black relating to Ojiwbwa material: -
What are the rules for recognizing encountered phenomena and assigning them class membership? If some ghosts have appeared in the form of birds, and some birds appear in the form of people, and some people can appear in the form of bears, and no one has really described the form of windigo.
Dreams and the self
Dreams offer a chance for groups and people to enhance their interactions through sharing otherwise unavailable unconscious material. Within limits. So we are back in the west and now we are treating dreams as containing unconscious material.
The source I would like draw on for this section is:-
August J. Cwik, ‘Associative dreaming: reverie and active imagination’ Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2011, 56, 14–36
Now it’s talking about day dreaming but this applies to dreaming.
August talks about Jung’s ‘fundamental insight’ being that a ‘third thing’ is created in analysis. He talks about Reverie, formulated by Bion and used clinically by Ogden, as offering access to the unconscious nature of this third. Reverie is described in terms of covering a continuum of contents of the mind, ranging from indirect to direct associative forms described as associative dreaming.
In this article our August who fancies himself as a bit of an In Treatment Gabriel Byrne spends some time talking about his ‘daily miracle’. This miracle is:-
to be able to monitor the analytic interaction in such a way as to be able to understand and/or say something to the patient which deeply conveys that we grasp what is happening in the interaction.
Effectively what he talks about is countertransference. Wiki defines this as:-
redirection of a psychotherapist’s feelings toward a client_or, more generally, as a therapist’s emotional entanglement with a client.
The way our Gabriel Byrne looks at this this, in this article, is in terms of being able to mine from his wealth of unconscious associations about his patient, reduce them all to breakthrough tears through sheer force of his imagination and fix all of the problems in their life, in one sitting, through relating a single daydream.
He talks about Ogden and this analytic third. The analytic third being used to refer to:-
[...]a third subject, unconsciously co-created by the analyst and analysand, which seems to take on a life of its own in the interpersonal field between analyst and patient.
I will now use examples from this paper to suggest that dreaming as a method of accessing unconscious material can be very helpful in terms of ‘ego receptivity’. I am sure that this would extend to interactions in a group setting such as the Exchange. August seems so enamoured by the whole process that talks of it as a silver bullet.
In a section headed ‘clinical vignettes’ August wows us with his skills. He refers first to an overweight woman who presents in a hypomanic fashion. A ‘big kid’ who was unwilling to participate in therapy unless it was explained to her. We are told the following of attempts to explain it to her:-
Of course any attempt to do this only confused her more.
She often struck me as a ‘big kid’ as she tumbled into the room.
August however comes to the rescue as he keeps getting the image of Edvard Munch’s figure in the Scream - across a gulf in his mind. He relates this idea of a silent scream to the patient and describes its therapeutic efficacy in modest terms.
This frenetic and chaotic woman immediately slowed down and began to cry. She moved into talking about how distant she felt from her Germanic mother who did not seem to understand her in the least bit throughout childhood.I seemed to be able to dream some aspect of her experience into existence, allowing her a different form of communication and way of being in her body,at least temporarily.
August again uses his magical powers while daydreaming about the Pete Townshend’s, ‘Let my love open the door’ when he his listening to another patient. He describes that encounter in a similarly humble fashion :-
This man who had been escalating in his angry emotional intensity suddenly
stopped, and cried intensely. He had never cried during a session before,
anger seemed the only accessible emotion. It seemed that my comment named
something just below the surface. I think that the song also may have conveyed
an aspect of the transference relationship by expressing the hope that my
acceptance of the relationship, and somehow the fight itself, would make
everything all right.
On yet another occasion August starts daydreaming about the film Pan’s Labyrinth and he decided to relate this to his patient:-
As it turns out, he had seen the movie and remembered
the scene quite well. He found it quite disturbing and it struck him particularly[...]
He began to see how this echoed his own struggles with the reality of his own inner life and emotions. The primacy of his rational cognitive abilities became relativized by some awareness of the depth of the terrifying affect. This man could ‘dream’. What he could not do was trust and allow validity to those dreams. He gradually became more open to his feeling life and allowing feeling values to impact his decisions. He became
more capable of ‘dreaming himself into existence’.
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