Dreams
This last page is given over to fleshing out the psychological concepts behind the act of dreaming. While you will notice we fling about psychological terminology, you will find that we are not bound by standard psychological dream theory. At the same time, however, you will find in the course of your own studies that concepts you might initially think are the product of modern ways of thinking were actually fleshed out milleniae ago. Macrobius, writing on dreams in the Fourth Century, considered them in the same light as Freud in the Nineteenth Century: as manifestations of inconsistencies within the psyche, the source of which could be anything from imbalances in diet to frustrated desires.
Conscious and Unconscious Mind
Understanding this term requires an understanding of what we mean by the conscious mind. The problem with defining either of these terms is that the more attempts you make to pin them down, the more blurry become the boundaries between them. The conscious mind could be said to be the parts of you that are rational, deliberate, and controlled. These parts are controlled by the conscious 'I', which is the center of your wakening, the part of you which you refer to as 'me'. But how much control do you have over this part? You are constantly assailed by interactions, impressions, thoughts, and emotions. What elicits these perceptions, especially those emotions which you don't want to have? You cannot will them away. There are mechanisms within your mind that act and react to different stimuli, and these mechanisms are part of the unconscious simply because you do not necessarily have control over them. The unconscious could be said to be that which is within your mind, but which is nevertheless other than your wakened 'me'. The unconscious seems to possess motivations, and desires, and feelings-all of these are accessible to your consciousness, but sometimes they require digging.
The reality of the situation is that the conscious and the unconscious are not separate categories (they are, after all, terms created by the conscious mind to order things into conceptual categories), but are instead constantly drawing and redrawing boundaries between one another. By a certain stimulus, a memory which has lived deep within the unconscious can suddenly be brought to consciousness, and a memory which has preoccupied the conscious for years may be relegated to the unconscious. It's all a matter of what you're thinking about, what you want to think about, and what you're prepared to think about. The usefulness of these two terms comes about when you realize that the unconscious is not the same as forgetfulness. If that which was not conscious was therefore forgotten, then the repression of certain thoughts and memories would be a good thing (as so many people think it is). 'Getting over' a bad situation or a bad set of memories would simply entail finding ways to permanently banish them to the magical realm of forgetfulness. Unfortunately, little, if anything, is ever truly forgotten, even if you're sure it has been.
Here we are speaking obliquely of dreams, and if you pay sufficient attention to your dreams you will notice that when in the dream state you will remember incredible amounts of information that would otherwise not be accessible during your waking hours.
There is incredible activity within the unconscious, and that activity can go well or ill for your personal fortunes. Illnesses, be they mental or physical, can result from tensions and disturbances in the unconscious. Just as you might become nauseous at the conscious thought of speaking in front of a thousand people, so might you become nauseous if you have repressed that thought-and the nausea would become even greater because you are not taking on your fear and somehow working through it. Dreams are one of the best indicators of unconscious tensions.
Systems-Reality Frameworks
If you're practical minded, think of the conscious mind as a complex filtering mechanism such as you would encounter in a coffee machine. During your waking hours, you are constantly assailed by a reaving horde of impressions-colors, sounds, tastes, smells, emotions, interactions, etc. In order to make sense out of this disturbing mass of encroachments on your peace, it is necessary that you have a systematic way of deciding which of these interactions is important, which should be remembered, and which should be relegated the highest spots in your system's hierarchy of importance. The systems you use to filter your impressions have many names, and are usually a combination of systems, because to a certain extent you have the freedom to choose the way you interact with the world. World-view, reality framework, religion, philosophy, psychology, science, politics, culture, gender, race, sexuality, all of these words and more connote systems people take on and use to filter and analyse the millions of impressions they receive every day.
What is your system? What is your reality framework? It is very useful to find out, because a lot of systems are unconscious simply because as a child (or adult) you received them and took them on unexamined. It is a popular knowledge that a large number of children who were abused as children grow up to become child-abusers. Why? Under a certain modern rubric, we could say that the children were genetically endowed with aggressive tendencies. But if we looked further we would discover that adopted children without genetic material from the abusive parents would grow up to be abusers at roughly the same rate as genetic children. We would discover that in cultures where it is proper to hit an aberrant child, what we would term 'child abuse' is represented in a far greater portion of the population than in our own, and we would discover that at different points in our own culture's past methods of parenting have changed radically. Genetic determinism (one of the systems by which you can view the world) does not seem to support the evidence, or at best does so only partially. Instead, we could suggest that children who are subject to physical abuse learn that system of parenting and, when they become parents themselves, unconsciously adapt that system to their own situations.
The example of child abuse is especially telling for our purposes because most children who were subjected to abuse would promise themselves that they would not abuse their own children, and most parents who we would term child abusers would not call themselves by that term, even if they shared our cultural castigation of extreme physical discipline.
Psychology Analogy
In our view of psychology, a dream is a crucial avenue for the release of a thought that has been held apart from your consciousness, or, in other words, a thought that has been deliberately not thought about. Sounds oxymoronic, doesn't it? It is. Picture your self at the beach, kneeling in waist-high water (don't worry, your head is well above the surface and there aren't any pesky surfer-dude waves).You're holding a piece of styrofoam (or another extremely buoyant object of your choice) underwater, and your job is to hold it beneath the surface until it will never again arise.
Here we have a basic schematic of the act of repression, especially when it comes to the difficulties and tensions involved in the act of strenuously supressing a thought that, by its very nature, refuses to be forgotten. The thought you're repressing is the piece of styrofoam, and the ocean is your unconscious mind. The tension in the image lies in the questions you can ask about it. Would the styrofoam eventually get waterlogged and separate into little particles which you could no longer hold under? Why should a thought be styrofoam and not, say, a brick? What happens when you get tired and need to rest?
Why is a thought a piece of styrofoam and not a brick? That can be illustrated with a quick mental exercise. Concentrate hard on the banana on the screen. Think about its colors, its contours, or what it might taste like. Now, try your best to wipe it from your mind. Are you successful? Is the banana completely gone? If you're successful, you're very good at repressing things. But the very act of suppressing your thought of the banana takes effort some effort, and how do you know the banana is completely gone? And how are you to know that you won't think of a banana in the future? What if you see a banana in the supermarket, or lying on the ground, or what if someone offers you a banana? You cannot control all of those eventualities, though you can certainly try.
This is a silly example of the attempts everyone makes to not think about things that have happened to them, or about desires that they don't want to or are embarrased to conceive of. When something happens to you and you form a memory of it, or when you daydream about something strange or weird, and that memory or that daydream involves something you don't want to have happened to you, or an action you never want to perform in the future, or have in the past performed to your shame, you probably won't want to think about it and will do your best to repress it.
But it's the very nature of thoughts that they will rise to the surface, because a thought it not an entity in itself-instead, it is attached to something or several somethings (those somethings being literally everything you can or possibly can think of). Thoughts are attached to one another in a series of associations so complex that, try as you might, you will never have complete control over, because thoughts are also attached to the outside world. Suppose you hate the smell of fried bananas, because you got a blistery burn whilst preparing them? Suppose you hate that smell so much that you never want to smell it again? At some point in the future, you will probably encounter the smell of fried bananas, try as you might to avoid their odiferous presence. Or you will encounter a smell that reminds you of the smell of fried bananas.
Trying to forget the smell of fried bananas is like trying to hold a piece of styrofoam under the surface of the ocean-once banished, it will always return. Nevertheless, being a stubborn type, you will try your best, and perhaps you will actually avoid the nastiness by developing a complex banana-dar device which can detect bananas in any form from up to 500 feet. But what happens when your banana-dar runs out of batteries? What happens if your guard drops? What happens when you get tired and go to sleep? Can you ever have complete control over what happens when you dream?
Undoubtedly, you will eventually dream about bananas. Not because your unconscious mind is this devil trying to confront you with your sins, but because you will probably find the bananas in your dream somehow disturbing. The jury is out on whether or not there is meaning behind the making of dreams (whether or not there is a Stanley Kubrick in your head carefully preparing a passion play of your psyche to be screened every night), or whether instead a dream is a string of images and impressions placed into a more or less random narrative.
We are not here to answer ineffable questions for you (coming soon to a site near you!). Our way of interpreting dreams does not require that you agree with us and our theory of the world. What we are interested in is how your waking self remembers and processes the dream. Whether or not a dream has eternal cosmic meaning, or in other words whether or not each of us has a magnificent little Stanley Kubrick in the dream section of our heads, has little bearing on the fact that if you are afraid of the smell of fried bananas, then you will be disturbed if fried bananas appear in your dream, and you will not be safe from those fried bananas until you have dealt with why you are afraid of them and how you can alleviate the suffering that they (or the other thoughts attached to them) are putting you through.
Our ethos is that if you want to know why a dream is disturbing you, then there is probably something in that dream that is important. And, because dreams are what happen when you get tired and can't hold your little bits of styrofoam under the water, we feel that they are especially fertile ground for growing tools to identify the parts of you that you have, for some reason, repressed. The kind of journey we suggest is one which involves gradually letting down the guards of your inner selves, not to open your self up to the universe or to the Divine Ethos or the Mass Unconscious. There are plenty of New Age and Jungian websites where you can do that. We are interested in how you can make life work using tools that you have developed, not tools someone else might impose on you. After all, the reason you were messed up in the first place is that during your life you have been subjected to systems and worldviews which you might have been at odds with (and continue to be, if you're reading this with interest!). Build your own! Then no one but yourself will be responsible for your inner problems. Much tidier, but also a little scarier.
Repression
Why do you not know what is repressed and what isn't? Childhood was when you were surrounded by a system that told you what you could and could not think. You didn't know why you weren't supposed to do or think certain things, you only knew that you weren't supposed to. A lot of the system you were subjected to as a child you no doubt disagree with. Were there too many rules? Too few? Everyone has heartfelt opinions about what they like and don't like about their childhood.
What we're doing here is trying to answer the questions of what did happen, how it affected you at the time, and how it affects you today. So basically our aim is for you to put your opinions about yourself to proactive practice and decide how the person you are today was shaped by your experience as a child, and how the difference between the person you now are and the person you want to be has a lot to do with instincts and desires you've been withholding from yourself.
Conclusion
Have we been conflictatory? Most certainly! No good dream interpreter puts things together in neat little packages. Dreams themselves are rarely simple, after all. Otherwise, feel free to have us interpret your dream!