Thread: Maintaining Balance While Interacting With Dream Characters

I would still be curious to hear your side of things in further detail, though! How DO you know for sure that it's not your own expectation for them to be mere constructs that makes them so?

You had to post that right as I was gong to bed.

I'll explain tomorrow.

Ok. First to address the charge of being narrow minded. Everything I learned about dreams has come from shared dreaming. 2 people entered my dreams and trolled me for weeks until, rendering everything I thought I knew about dreams useless. It was only by watching what they were doing to me that figured out how dreams work. I think the waking world is a huge shared dream, and that the basics of dream control work in the waking world. I think magic and dream control are the same things, and my knowledge of dream control allows me to jump into any magical discussion, because they are the same thing. Hell, just the other night, I figured out the secret to invisibility!

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

How DO you know for sure that it's not your own expectation for them to be mere constructs that makes them so?

Because it's not based entirely on my own dreams. I've been reading other people's dreams since there have been dream websites, and this model works for everyone regardless of their personal belief system.

90% of dream control advice is based on an individual's personal paradigm. I like to think the dream control advice I offer takes a step back and helps people work with these paradigms and belief systems. ALso to give them the freedom to not limit themselves to their routine focus points, what Castaneda called fluidity.

The subconscious can be mundane, amazing, mysterious, scary. Each one can be absolute truth for the individual, but that doesn't change anything for anyone else.

The way I see the subconscious is just the total sum of your personal archetypes. Archetypes being the sum total of associations you gave to any given topic. There are going to be associations we didn't know we formed, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the only mystery the subconscious holds. I tend to view this sort of programming my brain has picked up without my knowledge or consent as malware, and I sure don't go seeking wisdom from a computer virus.

I just think you're expecting too much from your DCs. There's a thread on here somewhere about the things DCs says. It's pretty funny.

That's not to say you couldn't get something deep out of them. There's a video lecture by the God Helmet guy, where he talks about people who think they have been told the secret to the universe in a dream. It's so deep, so profound, so mind blowing, so simple. So then the person wakes up and writes it down so as not to forget it. The next morning they check what they wrote and it's complete meaningless nonsense. He explains that the brain can release chemicals that can make anything seem profound.

Here's an example of the subconscious being useful in a dream. in the 18th centure, Emmanuel Sweedenborg was trying to figure out the cause of tooth decay. He had some hypnogogic imagery which started off as a tooth because he was so focused on the probem of tooth decay.

This HI of the tooth decayed, and then it morphed into curdled milk. Upon rousing himself he realized that milk goes bad because of bacteria, and concluded bacteria is what causes tooth decay. His subconscious was useful in this situation, but the archetypal structure that revelation took is glaringly apparent.

Originally Posted by Sageous

... Only apparent, though, because I still believe that commiserating with DC's is not the best route to the core of your unconscious... I was hoping that the Cusp would address your question above first, though, because I have a feeling he'll be more clear and less abrasive than me.

Fair enough. What I have read, the things that describe DC's as fairly versatile, also suggests that there ARE deeper ways to explore the unconscious. I suppose I'm not ready to give up on DCs just yet

Originally Posted by The Cusp

There are going to be associations we didn't know we formed, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the only mystery the subconscious holds. I tend to view this sort of programming my brain has picked up without my knowledge or consent as malware, and I sure don't go seeking wisdom from a computer virus.

It's not necessarily about seeking wisdom. Whether or not you consider it malware, it is still present (repressed/hidden) in your psyche and affecting the operation of your mind. If you uncover and reconcile the repressed content, you free yourself from its influence. This was the mechanism of much of the self-change I have undergone in my life (primarily with the help of entheogens that allowed me to delve into my own unconscious and begin mapping its hidden contents.

I think maybe I should clarify or restate, that I leave open the possibility that external wisdom can come to my dreams without coming from my unconscious, because I do not necessarily believe dreaming occurs entirely within my own mind and nowhere else. The dream I quoted high above about emotions and vibratory levels, in my eyes, could have come from some kind of external source contacting me through my dreams. I suppose I lumped this in with 'the unconscious,' but it doesn't necessarily have to come from my own mind.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

Fair enough. What I have read, the things that describe DC's as fairly versatile, also suggests that there ARE deeper ways to explore the unconscious. I suppose I'm not ready to give up on DCs just yet

...

I think maybe I should clarify or restate, that I leave open the possibility that external wisdom can come to my dreams without coming from my unconscious, because I do not necessarily believe dreaming occurs entirely within my own mind and nowhere else. The dream I quoted high above about emotions and vibratory levels, in my eyes, could have come from some kind of external source contacting me through my dreams. I suppose I lumped this in with 'the unconscious,' but it doesn't necessarily have to come from my own mind.

That, ThisWitheredMan, is a horse of a different color -- and may be worth its own thread. Sure, there are better ways, I think, to tap the wells of your unconscious mind, but DC's are without a doubt the point men of communication with external sources!

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

I think maybe I should clarify or restate, that I leave open the possibility that external wisdom can come to my dreams without coming from my unconscious, because I do not necessarily believe dreaming occurs entirely within my own mind and nowhere else. The dream I quoted high above about emotions and vibratory levels, in my eyes, could have come from some kind of external source contacting me through my dreams. I suppose I lumped this in with 'the unconscious,' but it doesn't necessarily have to come from my own mind.

I won't disagree with that. You just have to be very good at identifying your own dream content before you can start spotting the outside influences. Plus your own personal psyche can still flavor the outside stuff. Say different people encountered some outside entity. One might see it as an angel, another as a wise man, another as an alien. There is a lot of that in shared dreaming where both parties see something different that is sort of the same on an archetypal level.