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#31
05-25-2007, 09:09 AM
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Re: A Poor Read
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Hi Folks, The quote is from the previous page. The funny part about the previous page is how two of the four posters there are talking here on this page. J indicates nothing more here than something said there [and by one of the jargon speakers, myself] (!) What J provides on this page amounts to a poor read on his part. Nay, J goes beyond that by claiming something quite preposterous. J claims "The physiology of the brain has no relevance to the meaning of dream ". Said simply, without the brain itself there is no brain 'function' i.e. record of the dream. One can argue the point of what a dream is, but the dream itself requires the brain to archive the dream as 'memory' for it to be recalled upon waking. Blue from the page before ID's correctly that the language the dream speaks is "image" or "eidola" (boggie , boogie, J, & get use to it!) and the realm of image as an astral plane or dimension of experience in which images appear and disappear. But, one can also say this is the mental body D.D. ID's. And, one could further, the dream or mental picture is the moment images are caught sight of in memory like a snapshot caught sight of in a family photo album. "Who is that white-haired old woman?" you will ask of the dream. The dream interpreter will say something strange to you like, "Oh, that is our great, great grandmother who as a young girl fell from the sky," Her name is SkyWoman and that is where you come from. Poetry is made by going between these spaces. Here is how the story will look the way a poet tells it... Where is it now, the glory and the dream? Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: -William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality "You are the stuff of which dreams are made," the late mythologist Joseph Campbell has said. The mythologist will retell you the myth your dream is dreaming. Psychology (pre)tends your dream as well, psychologists do not interpret dreams anymore because that is the wrong direction to take the dream. Freud and Jung would be speaking this way about the dream were they living today, many now suppose. Science and technology will repicture the dream and tell the story of dreaming another way. The point is the telling is always nothing more than a story we tell about how something has come to be the way it is. Many Blessings, mythopoet     
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#32
05-25-2007, 10:36 AM
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JENNINGS :
There is not much that I would disagree with in what you have said. Personally I have over time been compiling my own dream dictionary. But its application is not really in any simplistic manner. I do beware of any approach that simply lists one interpretation of a given symbol. In fact try looking at an ordinary dictionary. If you get a very good dictionary then sometimes ten or more different listings will be offered per word. Every different context in which the word is used is applied. That’s what I have tried to achieve in my own dream dictionary. A dream will use any given symbol in a variety of different ways. Some would say that the vast variety of ways that a dream uses a given symbol mean that any dream dictionary is pointless. I understand that view but do think that this is a little extreme. There is some value to be had in one in some cases. You just need to be aware of the limitations. My own dream dictionary seeks to explore the various different symbolic meanings and so gets you to think about possible meanings. It’s the dreamer who holds he key. Many symbols can be very personal. A clown for instance can be seen as a happy and childlike sense of happiness. But some people are actually quite creeped out by clowns. So the meaning for them may be different. Dreams are not easy to understand but they do have a variety of different meanings. I do for instance believe in premonitions. I do not think that we fully understand such dreams. Many people them as warnings or advice. I tend to think that they are just flashes of what is going to happen. They show us the future as it is. In such dreams we can access events before they have happened. Personally I have always tried to understand my own dreams. I soon became aware of the very strong link between dreams and the previous day. I indeed always start off trying to make a dream fit some recent events or situations. If something big happened the day before then I will try to see how the symbolism fits into such thoughts and feelings. Yet sometimes the process does not seem to work very well and there is an unsatisfactory outcome and link. Then I noticed that actually the dreams meaning seemed to fit very well the activities of the day to come. Premonitions I believe will tend to come true very quickly indeed - usually on the actual day of the dream. They will tend to capture your thoughts on some surprise event. They will capture strong emotions. Jennings: I understand what you say about the dream minds need to keep itself occupied. I can understand that view but do not really hold it. Personally I think we need to seek a variety of explanations because dreams perform a variety of functions. They can be linked to intellectual and emotional issues. They can seem to capture future events and telepathy. It’s rather like trying to understand the meaning of TV by watching an episode of the Simpson’s. Instead it’s best to understand that the uses that the dreams we have are pout are quite different. We may need to seek a variety of explanations. Your own belief that the brain needs to keep itself occupied maybe one of those explanations. That’s true to a certain extent. A dream may seem to home in on some deep issue. Yet dreams can also be about trivial issues. We look after the variety of issues that are within our lives. Of course if we are undergoing certain life changes then dreams may capture those important issues. Yet if the big issues are all sorted then the dream mind may wander off in all sorts of directions. We also need perhaps to differentiate between the words THOUGHT and FEELING. Dreams can be about ideas and concepts and so we may be using the brain to develop THOUGHTS. But other dreams are distinctly linked to FEELINGS it maybe simply capturing and playing out some FEELING that we had the previous day such as sadness or happiness. Such dreams maybe therefore link to your own belief about dreams playing out emotions and the need of the dream mind to stay occupied. ------------------------ Many dreams simply link to very immediate urges and problems which demand attention immediately. If you are sexually aroused when you wake then interpret the dream in that sense. It is likely to link to involve sexual and fleshy emotions. It will include a real sense of excitement. Dream symbolism and dream dictionary interpretation - How to interpret dreams Interpreting dreams Dream symbolism - How to use dream symbols Triggers for dreams A dream dictionary that explores the variety of meanings in a dream symbol Dream dictionary The pages above all help you to learn the basics of dream interpreting
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#33
05-25-2007, 04:28 PM
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Why?
Hi,Quote from DrmDoc:
*****Some sleep and dreaming researchers are now beginning to understand that dreaming is a form of consciousness; i.e., our sleeping brain has to wake-up to dream. When our brain awakes amid sleep, dreaming is how it interprets the influences it perceives upon arousal. The images in our dreams—the language of our unconscious mind—are interpretations of influences. So, what are these influences?***** In the above paragraph DrmDoc goes about half way towards the reason for dreaming. The other half concerns the Laws Of the universe we live in. Everything in this universe is hurtling towards Equilibrium. Consider life as a pebble infront of a moving steamroller that soon will flatten it and make it part of a shiny, even surface. This is a new century. Most of the studies and teachings of the past are irrelevant in this age of the Quantum universe. Dreams are a very sophisticated control system, more akin to a super computer than any psychological state or condition. Dreams use bits of energy to keep up or raise the level of consciousness. Dreams do the waking up. Dreams keep you alive! Perhaps DrmDocs theory that dreams were useful for the primitive animals holds true at present. If a person or an animal gets a brain injury that prevents it from waking up it gets eaten by a bear or a lion. However the level of consciousness is a critical factor in waking life as well. Everything around as is made up of quantum energy – light, colour, heath, art, commerce, family, emotions and ideas. Everything we do and create is a form of quantum energy. I am afraid many of the old things have to be jettisoned into the dustbin of history. A few words about the interpretations of dreams: Symbolism is limited to persons who use the same symbols. Even then there are different levels- national, racial, regional, and personal. One symbol can mean different things to different dreams. One of the most important points in interpreting dreams is to understand what the dream is trying to do. Anyone who is trying to find a meaning for any dream is living in the past. However a dream often indicates its cause and its aim. Sometimes it gives away clues to the character of the dreamer. Cheers Wolfjk
__________________
Dreaming is a vital function of life
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#34
05-25-2007, 06:33 PM
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Re: Telling the Dream
Hi Folks,
This has been a good strand for the way it is allowing the individual positions and ideas to come in and to represent themselves via your own thinking about them. Bravo! I for one can see how varied and specific are the ways that people think about dreams, dreaming and dream images. Another important step will be to evolve consensus. This will be important to prevent polarization and splitting off. I for one cannot discount the various positions and find I must take the images -images like "super computer"- into reversion to see where they lead. What the conversation opens for me, it deepens for me. I appreciate that. I also took some of my words from my posts here and rewrote them into an essay. Since I am a cultural mythologist and a poet and I work and publish on line as well as in print journals, I thought I would provide you with the url to the published essay. Although, I will continue to follow the posts here, I will refrain from further contribution because so far people are still talking past each other and not really to each other. BTW, I am trained in a wide variety of dream-tending methodologies (There is no such thing as dream interpretation anymore, it is called tending the dream.) and enjoy the active imagination and the images in play that are very much at work as well. You may read my essay by going here. Dream Interpretation: A Rant on Dreaming by Stephanie Pope for mythopoetry.com Many Blessings, mythopoet
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#35
05-26-2007, 04:14 AM
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Quote:
Sorry you are so disappointed. The world moves on old regions mythologies and their followers slowly dwindle. *****Another important step will be to evolve consensus.***** There has never been concensus about dreams. However the new sleep medicines will probably bring practitioners closer to each other as the realisation downs that dreaming is a vital life function, probably as important as the heart or the brain. It is high time the dreamworld emerged from the dark ages of ignorance. However once the scientific community realise how the ubequitous dream does the job of keeping us alive while we sleep, bringing us back from the oblivion of deep sleep and finally waking us up, there will be a need for completely different philosophy of life and universe. I predict that the misunderstood little dream will bring a great change in human understanding of our place and purpose in the unverse. Understanding the mechanics of dreaming should also bring with it a new component material that is hidden to science at present. UNderstanding dreams will bring a new mystery to humanity. ****BTW, I am trained in a wide variety of dream-tending methodologies (There is no such thing as dream interpretation anymore, it is called tending the dream.) and enjoy the active imagination and the images in play that are very much at work as well.**** Perhaps knowing that dreams do their work while they are being dreamt is the salient factor. Imagining this or that - tending the dreams - is perhaps just muddying the waters. I kindly implore you to look at dreaming from a different angle. Look how dreams use memory, experience, creativity and the quantum energy forces combined to regulate our level of consciousness in sleep. Look how love, hate, creativity and ideas shape our waking life. Cheers Wolfjk
__________________
Dreaming is a vital function of life
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#36
05-26-2007, 09:07 AM
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BO25, the term symbolic that is banded around so liberally by interpreters of dreams is a misnomer that confuses. Symbolic simply means described in allegorical terms, and allegory is a universal language. The term faeces does not translate into money or wealth. This interpretation arises from an old publication that was inaccurate. If you stood on faecal matter you certainly would not feel especially good! Allegory is a metaphoric method of describing an episode of life and it is not difficult to understand metaphor; it is taught in primary education. The interpretation of the symbolic language arises from within the dream itself; it does not involve concrete terms so dictionaries are misleading. Interpreting is an art and not a science. All fiction is allegorical but how many readers see beyond the written word; very few indeed! Some dreams are self-evident while others require the agitation of grey matter to comprehend them which is like puzzle-solving. There is no religious connotation to dreams. Does this help in answering your query?
Last edited by Jennings : 05-26-2007 at 09:14 AM.
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#37
05-26-2007, 10:54 AM
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Re: Looking
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Hi Wolfjk- Scholars working within various disciplines around dream and dreaming are indeed talking cross their disciplines to each other. I know this for sure. I talk with many of these folk. Building consensus about what dreaming does happens by staying in what holds you interested and talking with kinds who understand dream and dreaming differently from yourself, just as you and I are doing now. There is a difference between what we are doing now and posting ones position in a dismissive way of what others see and know and don't know as they approach the unknown in dreaming and dreams. That is the first thing I want to address from the excerpt of your last post I quote above. The next thing has to do with old mythologies. Many people thought the milennium would turn on Y2K and everybody was gearing up for that. But, the real turning over of the "fin siecle" occurred on 911. This spot where the Twin Towers once stood is called Ground Zero. Ground Zero marks the presence of the absence of the Twin Towers of WTC. Joe Campbell use to say it is the image that does the initiating not what we say about the image. This is the one at work. And the myth activated is the one you are speaking. It is called the absence of myth today. You see, Wolfjk, you do not have to believe in the myth for it to operate. YOU do not have it; it has you. That is also what the dream is like. You do not have the dream. It has you. Of the various posts, the strand only became interesting to me in two places. One was Blue's comment around Buddhist thought. The other is D's interrogation. I like D's question about the mental body very much. D, who comes from a different position than I and who is interrogating the text as I, is helping me to think past my own thinking through his thinking and forward into -not his own position- but into a new one that I never knew before! The dream happens in minimal space and that space is like zero. It represents nowhere in space and time. Thinking about the be of the dream is thinking about how it comes to presence from no where and is what it is -a reality of its own, a dimension that creates an effect upon our own but does not intersect it. Quantum physics speaks about such dimensions that become nothing. They are never "here". But, they help to teach us how to be here. How to be here is what Heraclitus knew way way back some long time ago when there wasn't the kind of tech and science nor word like quantum physics that we have today. That is the kind of mental body Nature hid (with love). Physics and philosophy have never not talked back and forth to each other from the inception, you see. As they continue to build consensus I predict we will see more and more myths of zero or "absence" for the very reason that we live in an age where the absence of myth is the myth we are living. For D I have a little thought. I took the image of the hero as poet back into poetic language around the nowhere of the dream. I thought about the mental body of the dream in the moment it appears. The moment of the dream, the hour in which the dream happens is a kind of fiat lux. The poet me suddenly understands the mere time-word "hour" cannot mark this space adequately to open it. This space requires a poetic word to name it. To mark it as a certain hour—as our hour here and risen, I shall write it h’our. H'our is a heroic word in as much as it stands for no meaning at all. It is metaphorical of this other space and marks it: "X"/ unknown. Now Jacques Derrida suggests the contribution such a word makes makes "differance" in an undeciphered, nether and unsoundable sound. It does this by not adding anything more by way of sound to the word hour. The impression this leaves ghost another one of the ineffable, inaudible dimension that marks a space in time and space for becoming. This could mean that it marks the imaginal dimension as that space in which metamorphoses in Nature occurrs within the specie (any specie). Philosophy called this dimension (or perhaps, quantum) that of becoming. We say of this space, "everything changes". It is the space of "I change". Derrida taught we will have to "read" a text (dreaming is one such "text"), to experience the becoming space in time. You will have to turn it over into language to experience it. There is an "urge" or instinct in us to tell the dream turning it over to experience ourselves changing. H'our marks this way; the way of an unknown becoming that is while becoming itself. The poetic language makes in a way that ‘makes-up’ what meanings are actually present and at work through their very loss in showing through in h’our’s impressionable expression "as" the literal word-image in which it appears. What "AS" is is an intricate evasion in as-form, i.e. a metaphor that allows the fantasy h’our to articulate itself in mystery. As is. As dream. Dreaming is like as and like h'our. Dreaming marks a becoming space in time and space. Just as h'our marks this expression in language through a poetic word without meaning to mean. I am, of course, only in a waking dream. I am thinking out loud. But in closing I leave behind a mental picture: A dream is a becoming space in time and dreaming is a becoming time in space. Like a poetic word. Like metaphor. Like h'our. Many Blessing, mythopoet
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#38
05-31-2007, 09:14 AM
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Re: A Metaphor Wants A Metaphor
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Your sense for metaphor is simplistic and I am glad to see you qualified the statement nominally with a variation on "simple." Your picture presents metaphor in positivism and fails to honor the poetic nature or soul of words. No wonder your sense for dream shuts out the depth nature in dreaming. A dream does not want interpreted. It wants to express a dream nature; a dream wants a dream like a poem wants a metaphor. I once read a book titled "Words as Eggs" by Russell A Lockhart. Great metaphor! The metaphor taught me how to understand the depth-value/meaning hiding in the core of words; hiding the in-visible of the sensate, visible word-image...and, hiding in both senses of the term at once, as covering and as core value the as-statement, i.e. "metaphor"! Saying a word both reveals it and hides what the word wants. Just as a word wants a metaphor a dream wants a dream. And, hopefully, you are seeing metaphors talk to each other more than by allegory.  Here is a link to an essay by R.A. Lockhart, a well-honored Jungian analyst, writing on his sense for the failure of dream interpretations to get at the metaphor in the dream when it is a "big" dream mattering humanity's communal life. Dream Network Blessings, mythopoet
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#39
05-31-2007, 11:45 AM
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Mythopeot; do try to avoid being so pompus with your views and you might also gain the respect you desire by not underestimating others. Almost everyone can read English in sentences yet opt not to set themselves up as authorities or at implying that they possess the monopoly of knowledge. Your presumption is your failing. This thread is about the interpretation of dreams so why not focus on the subject rather than pontificate about your own feelings of inadequacy. As someone who claims to possess knowledge of psychology in mentioning Jung and, of course, there is his mentor Freud, who recognised that overt behaviour is compensatory, which, if given some thought, will be recognised as being similar to dream interpretation. Whenever anyone dismisses generalisations it is probably because they seek to feel important. To put this into today's allegorical terms, then, my dear, your slip is showing! Personally, I am happier sharing the views of other interpreters of dreams rather than to be told didatically that it is no longer called 'dream interpretation'!
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#40
05-31-2007, 06:47 PM
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Re: A Thought on Interpretation (no actual interpretation
Jennings-
I do not mind my failure or yours for that matter. But, I am sorry you do not want to know what people who are working in dream theoretics and in practice are thinking and saying. Keep in mind my response is to the text and not to you. I do not know you. I have a highly studied background in dream "interpretations" and a background in the various schools of psychology. My grad degree is in mythology. I live and work as a poet and essayist and I continue to study the currents in post post modernism literature and life. Such currents take me into theopoetics, psychopoetics and mythopoetics all of which have to do with metaphor. I am speaking to you from that ground in understanding logical life. Even still, I am not presenting to you my own perspective but calling to mind here something your post reminds me to share with you. I do not require your respect to convey these thoughts. It seems to me I like the posts by folk who say they are speaking from their own opinion and not as an expert. If you would qualify your own comments this way as others are, that would suffice and the "interpretation" would rest upon that awareness. It is when you narrow the ground of experience in dreams and in understanding metaphoric value as 'nothing but' I find I wish to fail once more and make comment about such negligence within your response. Also I know this thread invited thinking about dream interpretation and was never to be about actually interpreting a dream. That is why I am posting here and not over thar. mythopoet Last edited by mythopoet : 05-31-2007 at 06:53 PM. Reason: dyslexia
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