Psychic reality

 

 What is real?

The dream offers one the opportunity to see what a life without fear can be like. A friend once told me ,(in response to my concerns about violence and aggression), that in "Adultland" if somebody hits you it's assault and the police can be called. I found that very interesting because he was right. The fear has an irrational component. In fact, so much of what we fear  exists only in the world of our imagination. This in turn leads me to the notion that one's imagination to a large extent determines one's own reality.


The interesting thing about dreams, following this train of thought, is that dreams are treated (at least in Jungian analysis) as being psychic facts.  Jung spoke of someone who imagined that they visited the moon as having had the psychic reality of having visited the moon.

 After a series of false awakenings in dreams one can begin to see that there really is not too much difference between the dreaming and waking states at times. Indeed, the model that we use as we go about in the world is laden with projection, introjection and can be very like a dream. On the other hand dreams can be like real life. I have had lucid dreams in which I have felt it socially unacceptable to proceed up my neighbour's driveway and other dreams in which I push on through that barrier and walk into a neighbour's house because I know it is a dream. When one asks what separates dreams and imagination from reality one has to answer not a lot.

 The people that we carry on our relationships with in our everyday waking life can be just as imaginary as if they were created by our sleeping mind. Our imagination then can provide all the ammunition needed to empower or cripple us. We have all the tools to succeed or sabotage ourselves. A nice illustration from my dreams helps to illustrate the point. In one of my dreams I am climbing about in the dense tree canopy and tangle of vine along a jungle path and I want to get down to the jungle floor. Unfortunately I cannot get down because I am too afraid to do so because  of the roaring of a tiger down below. Upon encouragement from a guide I climb down only to discover that the tiger was only a tiger cub. There was nothing to fear because the mind had created the other tiger; the one I was actually afraid of.

Some more real life examples should serve to demonstrate the powerful grip imaginings can have on people.

In and around the chapter entitled '1914: Artic Sex Comedy' Joseph Stalin's exploits in exile are detailed. He was sent to the Siberian region of Turukhansk. He was later moved to Kureika.

This place was an even more desolate and hellish place where he lived amongst Tungus tribesmen. He would forever remain a lone hunter in his politics. This little village of eight huts and three families was to enter Stalin's imagination and remain there for the rest of his life. He maintained the nocturnal hours that he kept in Siberia, he continued to eat fish nuggets and depicted his imagined political enemies as  howling and circling wolves. What is important here is that this brief and lonely period of exile when Stalin shacked up with a thirteen year old mistress and did a bit of hunting was to shape the way in which he viewed the rest of his life and political career.


Our reality is in large part shaped by the products of our imagination. Abraham Lincoln provides another example of how some ideas can steer the course of a man's entire life of actions. Lincoln was obsessed with the Shakespeare play Macbeth and with its theme of perverse ambition. It was through this lens of moral imagination that he viewed his political career. Again and again his mind would return to the nature of ambition as posited in Macbeth. He was willing to admit that he was an ambitious man but he was very defensive about the nature of that ambition. It seems though that through Macbeth and his relationship with that play that he was able to examine the darker side of his character. 

Lincoln had tried to suggest that the civil war was foisted upon him and that his 'paramount object' had been the preservation of the union. This, however, does not seem to reflect the reality. It seems to have been that Lincoln had an opportunity to avoid civil war in the form of a committee of thirteen Senators headed by Senator Crittenden of Kentucky. Lincoln was in large part responsible for the ending of this committee's negotiations at a time when they were likely to succeed. Lincoln, however, did not have as his paramount object the preservation of the union but to prevent the extension of slavery into the Western territories. Now although this was an eminently moral decision the rhetorical sleight of hand and disingenuity it entailed was connected to his expression of Macbeth-ian qualities.  After a visit to the army  headquarters at city point Virginia in 1865  Lincoln returned to Washington on the River Queen steamer and read aloud from Macbeth. Lincoln's whole moral imagination and meditations on the nature of ambition was inspired by this work of fiction.

What is the self?

Our imagination then can shape our lives in the most drastic of ways but there is more to this world of the unconscious/ states other than normal consciousness. If the imagination can alter our course in the world can it also change the shape of our self. In the Jungian conception of the self, (represented by the mandala or some notion of squaring the circle), the idea of a centre of the self more core than the ego as a  centre is discussed. The notion of compensation is discussed and it is suggested that the unconscious attitude and the unconscious attitude operate in equilibrium. It is interesting to think in this expanded way about the self and it makes me wonder just how broad this notion of the self can stretch.

Winston Churchill had an interesting feature to his governance during the war. He instructed that his orders only be followed if they were written down and also especially built his apparatus of power to protect against his decision making. I think that with leaders such as this it is arguable that there extended apparatus of power represents a manifestation of their extended selves.

Self-Control

It is interesting to see the way in which the symbolism of cars in dreams. Cars seem to represent the self but in a more physical way like the actual actions of a person. In certain of my car dreams in the past either I was driving under the direction of my brother or he was driving. He was being used by my unconscious to represent the sensible. In another dream I had  a person who is quick to anger and lacking in emotional self-control at the wheel. In that instance the car was put into reverse, banged off a car in the drive way and then crashed into another car on the other side of the street.

My interpretation of this dream leads me to believe that there is a part of myself like this person I know. In another dream I am saving this person from a rioting crowd. It seems to me that what I am saying to myself that if I let that side of me do the driving I am liable to crash and it is a side that if exposed will need protection from mobs of people. Other dreams seem to present a different, slightly broader idea, of embracing that emotional/ wild side. In one dream in which I am presented with a giant hat as the symbol of my authority and I am in a restaurant. In that restaurant which is in a sort of open almost Grecian ruin type backdrop I learn that this is a site of some historical importance. It is also a location where extremists of all shapes and sizes are allowed to be extremist but only at certain special times of the year.

In the process of looking at ourselves we are liable to label some of what is within us as 'not me' and some of the forces tend to produce their opposites. I also had a dream in which it is with a mixture of terror and delight that I roll balls down a hill onto a promenade where they could potentially do damage. It is interesting to speculate as to where the me begins and ends. In the new TV Show boss the unscrupulous mayor of Chicago Tom Kane has a degenerative illness that causes myriad effects including hallucinations and disturbances of cognition and judgement. Some of the effects prove extremely useful for the Mayor in retaining his grip on power and so the question presents itself. Where does the person end and the illness begin?