I Am Here Dr Who, Thanx to You.
:banana:
I Love this DreamViews site. I am from Saltcube. A guy (or gal) called Drwho popped-up on saltcube to tell me I was a loon (ha, ha, ha). Then proceeded to praise this site.
I have a little hiptop mobil to tune in and post but I mostly use internet cafes cos I don't have the internet at home. I am at Netzone Internet Cafe right now and it is 9pm Saturday here in Adelaide, South Australia (20 March 2010)
I have copied HEAPS off here to my flashdrive (memory stick) so I can look at it at home on my stand-alone computer and I have printed out the rules and all the introductory stuff on the left of the Home Page so I can relax and read it lying on the couch.
hope to get to know you all. all 7,000 of you (ha, ha, ha)>
Happy I found you
Thanx again Dr Who
:banana:
(Part 1) Robert Van de Caslte on Freud & Jung
Robert Van de Caslte on Freud & Jung (Part 1)
(9:59) 17 views so far
YouTube - Robert Van de Castle on Freud & Jung (Part 1)
YouTube address above.
Uploaded by notesfromadreamer on Mar 21, 2011
Robert Van de Castle, PhD, author of Our Dreaming Mind, compares Freud and Jung as a guest lecturer at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA in August 2010. (Part 1 of 3)
(0:05)
Well basically we have two quite different kind of people:
Freud really started out just trying to be a neurologist. (…)
(0:25)
And then he actually tried to develop a big scientific project on that but there just wasn’t enough available information he could utilise in terms of neurology and biology and so forth. And he gave it up and later moved over to dreams.
(0:43)
Where, when looking at Jung:
He comes from a quite different background.
Most all of his family had been ministers, his father, his grandfather, and on his wife’s side had all been ministers. So he came in with a much heavier orientation towards religion it that sense. (…)
There has been some speculation, in fact, that Freud was Jewish was also an important concern for him because he always felt ambivalent about his Jewishness and in some ways he tried to sort of, not exactly renounce it, but keep his distance from it. And some authors have speculated that this was really a terribly important dynamic of Freud because he wanted to try to prove that he was somebody sort of special.
(1:44)
So there was a strong need on his (Freud’s) part to try and indicate just how special “he” was. He was very concerned that we had his “Hermit” dream which supposedly helped him to understand the meaning of dreams, he had this curiosity as to whether some day there would be a tablet set-up that on this particular place Freud, at this particular time, finally, the whole meaning of dreams was revealed to “him”.
So
He had this single handed event, that now the world would come and there’d be a big tablet there, to consecrate how his special involvement, was.
(2:24)
Jung
Kind of became more of an anthropologist or an archaeologist.
So, again, a big difference between them was that Freud had never travelled widely that much. He had gone to Italy a little but. He had made one trip over to the States here, he and Jung together came over for a brief visit to Park University and that was kind of it.
Jung had much more wide ranging curiosity:
He had gone down and made some trips to Africa, trying to live with the natives down there.
He came over here to the US and went and spent some time out with the (?) out in the South West and so forth.
He made a trip to India.
So he is much more interested in larger kind arenas, in (?) people, interacting in those, sort of areas.
(3:24)
So,
Freud was more of a linea thinker … like what nerve is connected to what nerve. That’s how he basically came around to working with his dreams. On how one thing is connected to another, to another, to another. And the suggestion I give you in the book is this. It is almost as if he’s doing kind of (?) where association “A” which goes to association “B” to “C” (?).
For Jung it’s kind of a much more (?) (…)… ball of string. It’s all kind of intertwined and there are all sorts of multiple levels going on, in a sense, at the same time.
So, it’s very difficult to just pull any one thing out because as soon as you start to pull the string you get this and this and this. You can’t just snip out just one more piece of the string. The whole ball-of-wax is sort of all connected together. So it is quite a different way of looking at dreams.
(4:28)
They also had some serious disagreements over the role of the paranormal
Freud was very ambivalent about it. He wrote about 5 papers and said if he had his life to live over again he might do it as a parapsychologist, as a psychical researcher. Then he had several other papers where he discounted that and said, “No, that’s a bunch of Whooee”. And he was concerned about if you get too much involved in it, it could hurt (?) psychoanalysis. And he was very protective about psychoanalysis. It was his baby and he wanted to make sure that nobody messed with it and contaminated it because he wanted that to be his lasting legacy. (…)
(5:15)
Jung, he actually did his dissertation (…) on being psychic. So he did his dissertation on trying to do some investigations about their psychic ability.
So they had in their correspondence back and forth some big difficulties to reconcile those.
They eventually split because Freud was really pushing very heavily the idea of sexuality and that was the main stream of what was involved.
Jung was basically saying that sexuality was relevant but not, there also were also many, many other things besides just that.
So They were really close, Freud had kind of appointed Jung to be his successor to carry on his tradition but then they had this break-up and once they split then they never had any further contact after that. (…)
(6:28)
The ways they worked will people again was quite different:
Freud would have the patient come in, sit down and lay down on the couch and he would be over here, not facing them. So there is an entire sense of “isolation” where the patient is here and you’re here and you don’t see them and they don’t see you. So you really got a kind of “invisible screen” between the two of you. So you’re really kind of isolated.
When Jung would work with people they’d be sitting up and he’d be facing them and talking just as if you were having a cup of coffee it was a much more social kind of thing.
Jung was much more interested in trying to,.. He had a different kind of sequence. It wasn’t the sequence within the individual dream but was concerned about the general “upthrust” of your life.
So that for him because of his background with religious issues and spiritual issues, he basically came to the conclusion that we went through stages we kind of marriage, maybe, along those lines and getting your career early on and then, the critical thing was by midlife.
So from his point of view until you got to be about 50 years old you really weren’t in a position to know what it was all about. You kind of had to had kids yourself, see your kids have kids, see the seasons go, and then you could get the big picture of the cycling around (…). So you could get this much bigger Cosmic View.
(8:10)
That was not of any interest to Freud.
Freud was more of a (?) one, in that you got to a certain point in life and then you kind of stayed in what he called a “repetition compulsion”. You just keep acting out again, over and over your early childhood conflicts. And so for him all of the important things were those childhood conflicts which frequently then dealt with sexual issues.
For Jung it was more your going onward and upward.
So he was saying at midlife you kind of reach a crisis, a sort of spiritual crisis, where you would sort of have to figure out, in your own way, (.?.), but that you had to get into alignment with all the larger forces in the universe.
(9:03)
and unless you could do that, and in order to do it you had to have some sort of larger, kind of, Cosmic view of things. Until then you are just kind of continually always going “Onward and Upward”
His analogy might be the “dream” of an acorn would be to become a mighty Oak.
So that within that acorn everything is possible, if you got the water and you got the sunlight that little acorn would spring up (..). So everything was within it, all the potentialities waiting to come forth if you could just nourish it through your life experiences.
(end of Bob’s part one 9:58 minute vid)
the link at top takes you to YouTube
the link below takes you to Bobbie Ann Pimm’s blog.
Notes From a Dreamer ... on Dreaming
(1,424words)
Part 2 (first 2:40 of 8:35) of Van de Castle's Class on Dreams and Freud and Jung.
Part 2 of 3 Robert Van de Castle on Freud & Jung
YouTube - Robert Van de Castle on Freud & Jung (Part 2)
(8:35) 12 views so far
Jung went through a period of time when people felt he became perhaps psychotic.
When he was in his early 30’s he went deep, deep within himself.
He’d been having certain dreams that were troubling to him. He felt he really needed to figure these out. Unless he could figure those out he was going to remain “stuck” down in these deeper levels.
So he had to work himself out of that and did a great deal of work on himself. He did a lot of painting. So you’ve heard a lot about “The Red Book”. (…)
It’s a Big Book, big heavy book, beautifully, beautifully illustrated.
So Jung spent this time trying to do all his drawings and paintings and there’s some magnificent artwork in there. Trying to express those goals. In my book I have a little bit of that. I have his drawing of “Philemon” who for him was a “Higher Self” that came to him and spoke to him and gave him guidance.
(1:14)
I also have a little one in there of a “Mandala”.
So because, for Jung, he wanted the goal to be “Individuation”. You had to become that best Oak Tree you could possibly become. (…) Oak Tree personified. So that’s what he talks about in the process of “Individuation”.
You had to become who you were destined to be as an individual in all of your (…). So it was always upward, upward, upward and trying to become more and more the individual the “Individuation” process (…)
(1:52)
So it’s a very optimistic view or personality that … It’s all out there ahead of you and the older you get the better it is because the more wisdom you accumulate the more you can see how things work as part of your scheme.
Where for Freud is was very much more that, you kind of “topped-out” almost in late adolescence and there wasn’t much more to experience after that because all you had to do is go back and deal with those childhood issues.
(2:40) Sorry folks I have to go now but I will transcribe the rest of the 8:35 when I can.
Part 2 (last 2 minutes) of Van de Castle's Class on Dreams and Freud and Jung.
Wordsworth was using it in English back in 1796, so it wasn’t like suddenly Freud came along and discovered the unconscious. (…)
(6:00)
To continue …
(6:00)
like I suddenly discovered TV. TV didn’t exist before I walked into this room, now I’ve discovered TV. So there’s a big difference in how they would operate there.
So with dreams and … Jung is going to get you to try and “amplify”. So he would use imagination in a sense to try and think of something and let it grow. So, try and take a symbol and to focus on it and sort-of creatively allow it to expand. Because he feels it will go then in a motion of greater clarity and greater understanding of what’s involved.
So again, He states that “acorn” kind of analogy that the amplification proceedure would allow that image your focusing on to grow.
And so again, (…)
He felt if you looked at a dream (…)
How the dream starts out is like, that’s kind-of what you’re dealing with. The beginning of the dream is where you’re stuck. That’s what came-up, that was your day residue, (…)
So
(7:34)
The first part of your dream is about the (…) you know, whats going on for you that day.
Then
You move on and then try and see what’s going on in terms of possible difficulties, lack of resolution, conflicts going on. And that would be setting the stage for the next (…).
And then you would go through and try and flex-it-out, get more details with it.
And then see, how did it wind up.
Because how the dream wound-up is pretty much where you’re at with it at that time.
So, you start out in the beginning, that’s where you’re at, that day.
You go through the dream.
And by the time you’re dream closes-up, that’s where you kind-of are at NOW with moving forward and getting a better handle on that.
(8:17 video finishes and credits roll in silence.)
Thank you Bob Van de Castle and Bobbie Ann Pimm
I got a lot out of that.
All my LUV
DebraJane
(it is noon here Wednesday 6-Aprill-2011)
“The Once and Future Dreamer" by Ed Kellogg, Ph.D.
Dream Viewer’s
I woke out of an interesting dream. Then found this posted on IASD. I am excited so I will put it here and on saltcuber. Ed wrote:
Hi all -
FYI, now available online on the IASD website:
“The Once and Future Dreamer" by Ed Kellogg, Ph.D. ©2008. Presented at IASD's Seventh PsiberDreaming Conference, September 23 - October 7, 2007.
The Once and Future Dreamer - Ed Kellogg, PhD 2008
The presentation has a lot of material in it on the subject of past life dreaming, and I tried to make it as clear and concise as possible without leaving out any essential points. Hence the four long appendices, including some of my own dreams. <g>
Ed
List of other past PDC Presentations also available through IASD:
Selected articles from pasd ASD PsiberDreaming Conferences
***The Once and Future Dreamer
by Ed Kellogg, Ph.D.©2008
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana (1863-1952)
***Summary
In this workshop we will discuss and explore “reincarnation dreams” of different types, focusing on four different kinds of reincarnation dreams:
1.Classic;
2. Ancestral;
3. Cosmic; and
4. Metaphorical.
Participants can also fill out a “Cosmic Dreaming Questionnaire,” and try out a “Tuning into a Past Life” dream task.
***Introduction
Have we lived before, in different bodies and at different times?
After our physical bodies die, will we live again, reborn into new bodies and new lives? Many major religions and cultures have accepted reincarnation, in one form as another, as a given. For a long time, this subject remained outside the domain of science, but that situation has recently changed through the accumulation of evidence that both indirectly, and directly, supports this hypothesis.
First,
research in parapsychology has produced solid evidence that mind can transcend the space-time limitations of the physical body and senses. (See Dean Radin’s ***“Conscious Universe” for an in-depth discussion of this research, and its implications.)
Because of a skeptical reception from many in the scientific community, as a rule these studies take place under the most stringent and rigorous scientific standards, far more so than research studies in just about any other discipline.
In respect to dreams, a series of controlled scientific studies in the 1960’s at Maimonides Dream Laboratory demonstrated that subjects could repeatedly tune into randomly selected external targets through both dream telepathy and dream precognition. A meta-analysis of post-Maimonides studies of psi-dreaming by other researchers confirmed this effect.
(…)
He, (Dr. Ian Stevenson, a specialist in psychiatry) summarized his findings in less than 200 pages (but with enough in the way of details and photographs to give you an idea of the quality of his research) in a book titled *** “Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect”, but also published a more complete and detailed report of his findings in a two volume monograph of well over 2,000 pages. After his death in 2007, The Journal of Scientific Exploration devoted an entire issue to Ian Stevenson's life and work. After reading through his monographs, and getting a better idea of the quality of his work, I think he deserved it.
***Some Different Kinds of Reincarnation
Ed now briefly describes the 4 kinds of reincarnation.
(…)
***Different Kinds of Reincarnation Dreams
By their very nature, even dreams about our waking lives often present information in distorted and fragmentary forms. The same will of course hold true for dreams of past lives as well. A vivid and emotionally compelling dream about a life in the Middle Ages, might incorporate anachronistic elements such as cell phones and automobiles, just as an incongruent elements often show up in a mundane dream about going to work in your office. The appearance of such elements does not invalidate the possibility that you may have tuned into a past life, anymore than they invalidate the existence of a waking physical reality office.
Of course, not all reincarnation dreams will prove as evidential as others. Even dreams rich in detail may remain unverifiable, in that historical documentation of specific details may prove hard to come by even today, when given the wealth of information available online, verification of details has become easier than ever before for the non-specialist. Still, you might well uncover generic matches in respect to clothing worn, tools used, the style of buildings seen in your dreams that matches historical information of the period. Matches to unexpected elements have greater evidential value than to expected elements. If your dreams include the names of people and places this can also help, but unless they seem well documented, confirmation might well prove impossible. However, even when evidential confirmation proves elusive, some reincarnation dreams have elements – the vividness and realness of the experience, the depth of emotions felt, etc. - that can make them personally compelling, and even unforgettable.
(…)
***
How this workshop will work:
First, to get a feel for how your own dreaming style relates to potential reincarnation dreams, fill out this short questionnaire:
(…)
If you feel comfortable doing so, after you have filled out this questionnaire please post the result on the “Once and Future Dreamer” workshop thread.
Also on this thread, we will discuss in greater detail the four types of reincarnation dreams, as well as different methods for effectively incubating reincarnation dreams and working with them. If you have already had a reincarnation dream, and would like to share details, please post your dream reports and comments.
For the first three days of the workshop, I request that participants to focus their reincarnational dreamwork efforts at night on the dream task described below.
***Dream Task: Tuning into a Past Life
Incubation Instructions:
Before going to sleep, request that your dreams present information on a past life in which you will see or relive an event in which you learned an important lesson, relevant to your present life situation.
Use an affirmation and a visualization to make this request.
(For example, “Tonight in my dreams I will clearly see / a past life of mine with a lesson for me”)
If you awaken during the night, repeat the affirmation, but use your last dream to set up a "hot off the press" visualization.
(For example, see yourself in the dream you just had, but imagine that you find a doorway or gateway. Imagine walking through that gateway to another time, and another life . . . fade out.)
When you write your dreams down, pay attention to unusual dreamscapes that show up, especially if they represent a historical time and place. Record as completely as you can what you looked like, clothing worn by yourself or others, tools used, the style of buildings, etc. As accurately as you can write down the names of people or places, and of unusual words. Record your experiences and/or the information that you get in your dream journal in as much detail as possible - use illustrations to depict your experiences if appropriate. Act on your dreams by seeing if you can find any evidential matches through an online search with respect to specific details, such as place names, etc.
Lucid Dreamer's Variation:
When you next gain lucidity in a lucid dream (where you know that you dream while you dream) look for a doorway that you can use as a portal to the past. Once you find one, stand in front of it, and set up the intention that when you walk through the doorway, you will walk back into a past life, where you will see an event in which you learned an important lesson, relevant to your present life situation. I suggest that you chant an affirmation to help you focus your intent. (For example,“When I walk through this door I will clearly see / a past life event with a lesson for me.”) Then walk through the doorway . . . Alternatively, instead of looking for a doorway, find a dream mirror (or any other reflective surface, like a pool of water, or a polished metal surface) and use it as a scrying tool to show you an event from a past life. Again, I suggest that you chant an affirmation to help you focus your intent. (For example, "Mirror, mirror that I see / Show a past life event with a lesson for me!") Record your experiences and/or the information that you get in your dream journal in as much detail as possible - use illustrations to depict your experiences if appropriate. Act on your dreams, by seeing if you can find any evidential matches through an online search with respect to specific details, such as place names, etc. Also, look for the appearance of possible past life selves in all of your dreams. Often, after rehearsing lucid dreaming tasks before you go to sleep, relevant information will show up even in your “ordinary” dreams - even when you do not succeed in becoming fully lucid.
A Note on the Presenter’s "Reincarnation Dreams"
In my dream groups I've noticed that while many participants report that they usually dream of themselves in ways that closely match their waking physical reality experiences, that even these people occasionally report dreams in which they became someone else, or even something else, and experience the world from a very different perspective than in their waking lives. In my own case, I've experienced myself in dreams as many different beings - age, sex, race, and even species. Often not only does my dreambody differ from its waking physical reality counterpart, but so does my dream personality and memories. However, through all this, my essential sense of self somehow remains the same - "I" remain "me", my dreambody, personality and memories seem no more "me" than does the clothing I wear or the car that I drive. I’d estimate that in 80% of dreams my dream self differs significantly in some way from my waking physical reality self.
Although I believe that some “reincarnation dreams” present aspects of one’s present personality, for others this explanation proves inadequate. Instead I favor different interpretations, in that I experience while dreaming parallel selves, past lives, future lives, and even other dimensional lives, and that tuning into different locations and different beings throughout the Multiverse just seems a routine and normal activity for my dreaming Self. And after many years of such experiences, I've finally come up with an answer to the perennial "Why do we dream?" question that rings true for me. Dreams provide "food for the soul", reconnecting us to our greater Selves and allowing a therapeutic release from the constraints of a time-space bound existence that reminds us, if only unconsciously, of the illusion of separateness.
Here is the link again:
The Once and Future Dreamer - Ed Kellogg, PhD 2008
Osama Bin Ladin was killed during the Royal Weding
Click link in post above this one for more info.
Call for Dream Art
Attention dreamers who would like to participate in the 10th Annual PsiberDreaming Art gallery.
Deadline: September 10th, 2011
Hello DreamViewers
Please submit your artwork early to ensure inclusion in the PsiberDreaming Art Gallery.
Submissions after the deadline of September 10, 2011 cannot be considered.
Children under the age of 18 must have a parental permission & signature to be included.
Dream text MUST accompany all images. Images without dream text will not be considered.
See post above and click link.
Then click *Dream Art* button on bar along the top for all the information.
Another presenter at the 2011 Psyber Dreaming Conference (pdc)
Robert Bosnak
Will present in the online conference. Here is an interview he gave with Natasha Mitchel on the Australian Radio program called All In the Mind last year.
Here is the All In The Mind page with the transcript (and audio download):
All In The Mind - 2 January 2010 - Dreams: the body alive! (Part 1 of 2)
Jungian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Robert Bosnak is a dream worker.
Transcript:
Robert Bosnak: While you're dreaming, you're in a real place. At the moment that you're in a dream you actually believe firmly that you're awake. And so as you are in that world everything around you is embodied. When I am in a dream where I'm sitting at a table and I knock on the table, the table will give me sound and it will give me the feeling of hardness. So in a dream the imagination presents itself as embodied.
Natasha Mitchell: We are channelling your dreaming mind and body on All in the Mind over the next two shows here on Radio National Summer. A warm welcome to you, I'm Natasha Mitchell. Next week a leading neuroscientist probing the connection between memory and dreams and his work is conceptually staggering as you'll hear.
But today, the therapeutic potential of dreams, my guest is well known Dutch psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Robert Bosnak. After 25 years in the USA he now lives and works here in Australia. He also runs an internet dream network called Cyberdreamwork. In his most recent book, called Embodiment:Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, Robert explains a compelling idea that dreams are a sort of ecosystem of imaginings, powerful bodily experiences—and the body is key—that are populated by characters with their own intelligences, and that curious idea really forms the basis of his work.
Robert Bosnak thanks for joining me on All in the Mind this week.
Robert Bosnak: Thank you very much for having me again.
Natasha Mitchell: Look, some scientists think of dreams as having no real biological purpose, they are just our forebrains trying to make sense of what some people dub cerebral white noise that's generated by our brain stem when we sleep. It's a live debate isn't it?
Robert Bosnak: At least for the last few years it was mainly fought out between people that adhere to the notion that we dream mainly during REM sleep and the other people who say yes, we dream 95% during REM sleep, so during REM sleep when you wake a person up during rapid eye movements they will report a dream 95% of the time. But 70% of the awakenings for instance with sleep onset when there is not REM sleep also give you dreams. And therefore the brain is doing different things than we thought initially, because REM sleep comes from the brain stem and there are now people who say (and I agree with them), that the whole brain is involved, also the cortex. So that there is meaningful information coming that is not just noise out of which the forebrain, the cortex, makes information, but information that is inherently meaningful. That's the debate at the moment.
Natasha Mitchell: Still though many scientists see dreams as essentially devoid of meaning, that they are simply the neuronal flotsam from our waking lives. The jury is still very much out when it comes to neuroscience, less so for psychoanalysts like yourself.
Robert Bosnak: One of the interesting things of course about dreaming is that it will present the face that you look at it with, so if you think that dreams are utterly meaningless, then you will get dreams that are like a jumble of information. If you believe however that dreams are meaningful, that they contain intelligent information, then you get dreams that are more intelligent. It's very strange about dreams because for instance people that are in Jungian analysis after a while will report dreams that fit with Jungian theory; people in Freudian analysis will get more dreams that fit with Freudian theory. So it seems that the creative imagination of dreaming very much presents the face that you face it with.
Natasha Mitchell: Well that's human nature in a sense isn't it, we find meaning where we look for it and how we look for it?
Robert Bosnak: Absolutely.
Natasha Mitchell: Let's climb inside this idea of embodied imagination that you've been working with for some 30 years now. Before we unpack how you use it with clients, where did the idea stem from?
Robert Bosnak: The idea has been around for a long, long time, I would say thousands of years. In my life it comes from a scholar of the visionary tradition in Islam and his name was Henry Corbin. And Corbin said that these entities that we encounter are intelligent, they carry their own intelligence, and that creative imagination is inherently intelligent. And this was a way of looking at the imagination that was particularly strong up until about 800 years ago, and then slowly imagination became the opposite of reality. And that's where I started.
Natasha Mitchell: In a sense from the point of view of the dreaming mind at least you suggest that dreams are real events in real environments.
Robert Bosnak: Exactly, that's the point of view where I start, because I think that the moment you wake up you wake up into your particular culture. Now my interest has been to go to many different places in the world and see how people dream. They dream very similarly, but when they wake up, they wake up into their culture so if you wake up as someone who believes that dreams stem from the ancestors, then you've heard ancestors. If you're a psychologist and you believe that dreams relay parts of yourself, then you see dreams as part of yourself. If you believe the dreams are meaningless you will see them as meaningless. So I am trying to go back before the culture makes its judgments, I'm trying to go back to the dream as it was being dreamed.
Natasha Mitchell: Let's just go back to your inspiration from the French philosopher and professor of Islamic studies, of all things, Henry Corbin. You met him and he had a sense that the west had come to misconstrue the imagination.
Robert Bosnak: Yes, he always was talking about the great cataclysm that happened about 700, 800 years ago when we moved from a philosophy that was based on the fact that there were three realms of reality: the physical reality and the spiritual reality which now we would call the mental reality or the mathematical reality. There was a third reality in between and that was the reality of imagination. Then in about 700, 800 years ago that realm of the imagination as reality dropped out and it became just mind and matter. It moved from imagination being one form of reality into imagination being the opposite of reality—and that he found very tragic.
Natasha Mitchell: You know, Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung certainly conceived of dreams as sort of sub-personalities. In Freud's case I guess a whole bunch of repressed sub-personalities. Instead you describe dreams as forms of intelligence, and even alien intelligences, and I wonder if you're taking us into the realms of gnomes and flying saucers here.
Robert Bosnak: Absolutely not. They are alien to what I call the habitual self, what we habitually think about ourselves, so when I have certain feelings, certain responses, then I say that is my response. Now in dreaming you see that there is not only an intelligent I, the one that walks around, for instance, down the street, but when you see in dreams there are other people walking also on the street that display intelligence. And what I'm going from is, as Corbin did, from a radical form of phenomenology, I'm just trying to look at the phenomena. As I look at the phenomena the person who comes towards me in the street appears to be a carrier of a certain kind of consciousness. It's not the consciousness that I'm identified with, it's another kind of consciousness. And what I'm trying to do in my work is to see if we can partake of that consciousness and learn something about non-ego, non-habitual forms of consciousness.
Natasha Mitchell: Now this really challenges are core sense that we are a singular self, a single identity contained within a singular skin.
Robert Bosnak: Yes it does completely. Actually it is becoming more or less recognised within many sides and fields and schools of psychoanalysis that we are a very dissociable collection of states. This used to be seen as abnormal psychology but we begin to see more and more that that is more or less the norm. If it becomes extreme then you get people with what used to be called multiple-personality. So then the states are completely disassociated, they have no contact with each other. In the normal way the states are relatively independent and autonomous and there is contact between them, but it is not that I am a single self that over/during my life fractures. No, I am as far as I can see it, a multiplicity of states that is in a constant state of interaction.
Natasha Mitchell: Your suggestion is that if we rehearse the images we encounter in dreams: the characters, the images, the landscapes, that may help grow our bodies into new ways of being in the world, as you put it. I mean can you unpack that for us with an example?
Robert Bosnak: Yes, a man from Japan he had a dream in which he was sitting at a table in a restaurant and there were several other characters who were very different from him also sitting around the table. And as he began to identify with each of these characters and began to participate in their state, all these different intelligences at the table, he began to feel his body very different. His body was entirely different, he felt. He said, 'This body I don't recognise, it's like a rental body.' He was a very slim, thin kind of man and I said, 'Well keep on rehearsing this.' And as he was rehearsing this body, that was much bigger than his body was at the moment, he realised that he needed to expand his body and that he had to get into a bigger kind of body, and he started swimming. And a year afterwards his body was considerably larger because he had been swimming every day, and from a rental body, as he called it, it had become a permanent body.
Natasha Mitchell: You often work in groups, and I'm interested in where you start, how does it work?
Robert Bosnak: It begins with just regular conversation. And then somebody presents a dream or a memory—I now very frequently also work with memories—and we ask the person now tell us the dream as much from the moment that you were dreaming it as you can. So really get into the dream and when you're fully in the dream start talking, tell us what is happening to you. So for instance this Japanese man says, 'I am going into a restaurant and I see a table, and the table is round, and there are chairs.' And then we ask, 'What's the light like?' And he says, 'Well, it's very bright inside and there are other people sitting at the table.' I ask, 'Are there any smells?' He says, 'Yes, there are smells of fish.' And after a while he begins to feel emotionally what is going on with him in the restaurant, and then we go from the emotions to the physical sensations. He says, 'I feel very tense,' for instance, 'and I can feel the tension in my stomach.' So we focus on the stomach, really stay with that stomach until he can fully feel the whole mood of that place.
Then we move to the next moment, so on my left he says, 'There is sitting a man in a green suit and he's very strong and he can take initiative, he's very different from the way I am because the way I am is I cannot take any decision, I've graduated from my psychology masters four months ago and I have not been able to make any moves. This man has get up and go.' And so we begin to focus on how that looks.
And in the meantime everybody in the group is beginning to ask him questions that will focus him on this man in the green suit. Then he begins to feel into that man in the green suit and suddenly he feels. oh, this man has really strong in the legs, and so he begins to feel into the legs of the man and then that's how we move throughout the dream. Then in the end he will be able to hold a variety of states in the same time in his body and that creates a change.
Natasha Mitchell: Now the key here is that you're working with people in what you call a 'waking hypnagogic state'. They are not actually lucid dreaming, they are not in an actual dream, consciously narrating what's going on, they are not wide awake either, are they?
Robert Bosnak: They are in the state of consciousness that we pass through as we are falling asleep. What we are doing is we are artificially staying in that state between waking and sleeping which is called the hypnagogic state by the dream laboratory academics, and in this hypnagogic state there is waking consciousness present and also the image can once again be an environment. So the man can feel himself fully in the restaurant and at the same time he's fully aware that he's sitting in this room working on a dream. So that is what is called a dual consciousness, so we are in a dual consciousness in a hypnagogic state.
Natasha Mitchell: On Radio National Robert Bosnak is my guest. A Dutch Jungian psychotherapist now based in Australia, Robert helps people work with the emotional and physical content of their dreams in very physical ways as we're hearing.
In fact, Robert Bosnak, you've especially worked with a lot of people over the years who are very ill, or have a terminal illness, I mean this is a very different sort of bodily experience that you're negotiating here and you find some interesting universals in their dreams.
Robert Bosnak: An unusual amount of animals, I find. That just maybe my way of seeing it, and I don 't know if the people who study dream content have the same experience and when you then in the work begin to identify with those animals you get a very strongly different experience of body. I'll give you an example that also stems from my work in Japan: this is a man who has a tumour on his anus that is about as big as grapefruit and he cannot sit up anymore, he has to lie down, he's in constant pain, he has decided that he doesn't want to live anymore and doesn't want to communicate with anybody. He's very withdrawn and isolated. He has a dream about a cat and this I did with a colleague of mine, Dr Kishimoto in Shizuoka. We help him identify with that cat and begin to feel in his body the movement of the cat. And suddenly he's in a body that is much more supple than his body. After we work and we help him get into that supple body of the cat his relationships begin to change: his relationship with his family changes, his relationships with the nurses on the palliative care ward change, he now is no longer stiffly frightened of death only. I don't know if it made his life longer, he died about three months later, but he was much more elastic, much more supple.
Natasha Mitchell: I can imagine though you're dealing with people who could be quite resistant to suddenly trying to climb inside the bodies that populate their dreams when they are facing death.
Robert Bosnak: Yes, and I am not in any way suggesting that this should be done with everybody. I learned to do this work in the 1980s when my practice was flooded with people with AIDS, so I found that they were very receptive to feeling into all these different elements of the dream that was being presented. And they got a great deal of solace from it. It suddenly changed from being a totally meaningless attack, and a meaningless suffering and a sense of intense guilt and all those kind of things, into something that they could make contact with. Something that was not so foreign, not so alien, they are in their body differently.
Natasha Mitchell: In all this, this is still our imagination that you're working with and you're guiding your clients' imagination with your own biases, your own training, your own templates, your own symbolism and even your own baggage, your own history. I guess is there a fine line here between cultivating a sort of true, fluid, imaginative process for someone and simply a sort of guided storytelling, an interpretive session.
Robert Bosnak: Yes, so what we are trying to do is we are trying not to suggest anything. So we are asking questions that as much as possible don't lead the witness. So when the Japanese man walks in to a restaurant we don't say what is that restaurant for you, what does that restaurant mean for you, we ask what is the light like? When you sit on the chair what does your butt feel like? So we strive to stay as close to the phenomena as we can without as much as possible not making any interpretation. And as you do that the phenomena begin to reveal themselves, and I don't think that that is a story that then we are making up. I think there is a significant difference between creative imagination and fabrication.
Natasha Mitchell: What is that difference, because I guess the brain, we have a tendency to always be searching for meaning, to always be trying to attach meaning to an observation that we're making, whether it be a dream or a real life scene, and people are selecting the dreams that they decide to share with you in the very first place.
Robert Bosnak: Yes, I'll give you an example. This is a dream of a man who is a therapist and is working in a hospital, he's in the nurses room and suddenly he is stumbling down the stairs and there is a huge bear that runs down the stairs, runs through the hall and out the door. We worked this dream in a group and somebody in the group, the person asked, what is the bear feeling. And the man says, 'Oh the bear is really curious, the bear is really curious to what is happening.'
Now at this moment I feel absolutely nothing in my body, so I begin to assume that he's talking very mentally, and that he is fabricating a story about the bear. So we stopped the work at that point, have him look at the bear again, look at what the front paws are like, begin to sense those front legs, and he begins to sense this enormous amount of power in the bear, this enormous amount of energy. And as he slowly begins to through a process of interior miming become like the bear, suddenly he's identified with the bear and he feels this enormous thrust in the hindlegs and is pushed through the hall and out the door and out, out, out, this bear just wants to get out. This bear is totally claustrophobic and you can feel it throughout the body. Now that is embodied imagination, very different from fabrication.
Natasha Mitchell: So what happens?
Robert Bosnak: What happens is that this man is in contact with the claustrophobia of the bear, and in a body that is much more powerful than actually it's allowed to be. The intelligence in this bear is an intense sense of claustrophobia and a need to get out, that is the meaning that is fully present in a visceral sense and he has now participated in that.
What it then—from there on, what that physical sense is like in his life, where in his life he feels that kind of claustrophobia—it may be in his marriage, it may be in his work, it may be in his studies. That we can then explore, because we have a visceral sense of what it is like to be so claustrophobic. And then from that moment on a whole lot of questions begin to arise that are questions of psychotherapy.
Natasha Mitchell: You work with clients who have all sorts of traumas in their lives, some very serious. And in effect dreams can sometimes rehearse those traumas. This is very delicate work, isn't it, encouraging people to relive, re-experience traumas as they manifest in their dreams? This is dangerous, in fact.
Robert Bosnak: You have to be really careful, because people are very easily re-traumatised. The way that I work with trauma is I don't go to the traumatic experience directly. Like, for instance, a woman who has been raped, I don't go to the memory of the rape directly, but maybe I might go to what the room was like in which it happened, or what the door was like that she entered through. So we don't get directly to the direct experience of it but we stay in the periphery of it and feel the images in the periphery of the event and that then can bring up a whole new series of awarenesses that are not re-traumatising. So the danger of working with trauma is re-traumatisation.
Natasha Mitchell: A big risk.
Robert Bosnak: There are always risks in working with trauma, but what I have seen is the outcomes of working with trauma and dreams is a very positive one, because we have found in the research that dreams themselves are constantly integrating trauma. That was research done by Ernest Hartmann about how dreams integrate for instance the great fire in San Francisco, that you first see dreams of the fire and then you see dreams of floods and then you see dreams maybe of car accidents, so it becomes increasingly personal and slowly gets integrated through the dreaming into the general system. So the idea is that dreaming already is part of an integrative process of trauma.
Natasha Mitchell: Well I must admit that over the last two weeks I've had a number of dreams involving fire and bushfires, given what's happening in Victoria.
Robert Bosnak: Absolutely, but I think that what you would find as you are aware of these dreams, that the content will become increasingly personal, because it moves out of this totally overwhelming collective event, it slowly becomes increasingly again a personal event.
Natasha Mitchell: They were undoubtedly personal, actually, but fire, bushfire was part of it.
Robert Bosnak: Yes, so Hartman would say that is a part already of the integration processes of this overwhelming experience that you've all gone through.
Natasha Mitchell: You talk about this idea of sense memories; it's interesting because other neuroscientists are investigating how dreams might in fact be a part of the brain's way of consolidating new memories formed during the day. And I wonder if we were to bridge science and your psychoanalytic thinking about dreams—is this getting closer to your thinking about how dreams work in the body?
Robert Bosnak: Much closer, they have done studies with rats in certain mazes that would run all day in the maze and then at night they find exactly the same thing happening in the brain ,so that the rat is integrating what they've learned from running through the maze at night. So there is some kind of a process of bringing something into the system of the embodied psychological system from the day, and I would say it also goes through a meaning process, especially for humans. And so you get a combination of learning the event that you've gone through and consolidating that, but there is a mixture of meaning because that event had a certain meaning to you. So yes, it becomes very similar to what we are talking about in psychoanalysis.
Natasha Mitchell: And in fact I've got that research on the program next week.
Robert Bosnak: Oh, interesting.
Natasha Mitchell: In a sense, even though you are a Jungian psychoanalyst, I do get the sense that you don't rely heavily on interpretive Jungian archetypes like the shadow, or the ego, in order to sort of interpret your client's dreams. You are much more fluid, in fact you've described the landscape that you are trying to get them to occupy as an ecology. Are you abandoning your Jungian heritage In some ways?
Robert Bosnak: Oh not at all, I'm trying to go back to the preconceptual Jung where Jung was a phenomenologist himself and he just looked at what he saw and what he experienced. Because, for instance, for me, it is crazy if a woman enters into my dream and in my dream she comes in the door and I say to her, 'You are my anima,' I hope she would slap me in the face, she's not an anima, she's a person that is entering the room. And so that is what I am trying to get back to, the visceral direct experience of the phenomenon. The difference in my work and Jung's work is that I slow down the process of being inside the image environment to the point that it goes so slow that it suddenly jumps into the body and becomes an embodied experience.
Natasha Mitchell: There are fracture lines, aren't there, between neuroscientific approaches to dreams and psychoanalytic approaches to dreams? I wonder if they're ever reconcilable.
Robert Bosnak: Oh yes, I think they are being reconciled as we speak. For instance we're finding in neuroscience that cognition and the neocortex is involved in dreaming and that therefore meaning can come from dreaming itself. I think that more of these connections are going to be found. You have to see that neuroscience is very, very young. MRIs started in 1993, so we've been doing MRIs for 16 years and the resolution on MRIs is about as good as photography in the 1820s, so it is just beginning. And I think neuroscience as it matures will find more and more connections between their field and ours.
Natasha Mitchell: Robert Bosnak, thank you for joining me on ABC Radio National.
Robert Bosnak: Thank you very much for having me.
Natasha Mitchell: Dutch psychoanalyst Robert Bosnak, now based in Sydney. Details of his book called Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel on All in the Mind's website. So, what do you think. It's a curious interpretation he offers of your dreaming mind, popp your comments or read others on my All in the Mind blog there too, now directly on the All in the Mind website too. Just look for the words 'add your comment'.
All at the All in the Mind where you'll find transcripts, streaming audio. Thanks to coproducer Anita Barraud, studio engineer Tim Symonds, I'm Natasha Mitchell. Next week in our summr season of highlights, we're dreaming just one neuron at a time.
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Interview with Dr Robert Van Der Castle and Rita Dwyer.
Voiceofamerica Experiments in Dream Telepathy
Interviewer: Marcia Emery
(5:00)Welcome Bob (…)
The Partnership of Intuition and Dreams | VoiceAmerica
(3:33) Rita Dwyer said, “Human kind networks at night through dreams” (…)
(4:44) Now I want to introduce Dr Robert Van Der Castle, with a quote. He said:
“Exploring Dreams, bonds us with others. If you want to know and love others better, share Dreams. It’s a common denominator. Every night we have a hundred minutes of dreaming when we can become one with others. One with the whole”
(…)
(8:50) How do you go from being a Rocket Scientist to the Field of Dreams? (Rita)
Well Marcia, I knew nothing of dreams early on in my studies or and my life. But while I was working I was trapped in the explosion of rocket fuel in my laboratory. I was really burning to death and I had a near death experience (…).
But a friend rescued me. (…) And he did that not because he ever wanted to be thought of as a hero but rather he had dreamt about it happening, before, exactly as it happened. (…) So, since that time, obviously, I became very interested in how this could possibly happen, as did he. (…)
(10:00) I went to a workshop with Robert Van Der Castle and Henry Reed and that was my opening to this whole world and I’m still on that ride.
(…)
(10:50) And now Bob, what brought you into the field of Dreams?
Bob: Well I’d been teaching at the University of Denver and one of the courses was to be a graduate course in Clinical Psychology. (…) So, when I met with them I said, “Well, what would you folks like to try and learn about?” and they said, “We want to learn about dreams”
And I said, “Well, I really don’t know anything much about dreams. I know a little tinsy-tiny bit along the way but I couldn’t really be a decent teacher on that, so, what else would you like to do?”
And they said, “Well, we’d like to do dreams”.
I said, “Ok, you’re not getting the message”. “Read my lips, I Don’t Know anything about dreams, so what else can we do”.
They said “No, we want to learn about dreams”
So
We were just the blind leading the blind.
So I said “Ok, how about this as a deal, I’ll read a bit about dreams and take notes on it and you guys go and take notes on what are reading about in the field of dreams and then we’ll get together and share our notes. And when we did that I was really impressed because I hadn’t been exposed to that in graduate school. And when I saw how much interesting material there was, I got kind of hooked.
(12:00) And where it finally worked for me was – I knew something about ‘projective techniques’ (…) ink-blots (…) and seeing what was in those ink-blots revealed a great deal about the personality. So now having been tweaked by this course, I started gathering (?) from the students in my classes and also doing some of the same testing with them.
And then I was amazed to see that you could get a lot of information from their dreams about their personality that seemed to correspond to the kind of information I was getting from other kinds of personality tests. So, for me, it was a clear demonstration that dreams do have a lot about our personality dynamics and our interests and conflicts and so on. (13:00)
Dr Marcia Emery, interviewer:
(13:24) What can you tell us about you’re career at Mimomities with telepathies.
(…)
Bob vdc:
Well I had wound up going and working with Calvin Hall, and unbeknownst to me one night, he was trying to look at some images, and trying to send them to me. And I was able to pick up, to a startling degree, because I had no idea that I had any abilities, like that, at all.
And then, after a while word got up to Miamonities Hospital (…) So I went up there for a period of time between January and November back in 1967. So I went up there for a total of 8 nights.
My task was, they hooked me with the electrodes, and they were going to wake me up during the REM periods. And I had to try and dream about a picture which had been sealed up in an envelope. And someone had taken that envelope to their room, opened it up, and looked at it.
And they had tried to ‘quote’ send it to me.
Then they kept waking me up after every REM period and I would say what I had been dreaming about in the first (REM period). Then they would wake me again for the second REM period and so on.
Now, the person was looking at the same picture, all night long.
And I would be woken up, o, maybe 5 or 6 times during the night.
And then, I would have 8 different pictures presented to me the next day and my job was to try and review my dreams and on the basis of that I’d say, this picture seems to have a lot of this picture (…) so this picture I choose as my number one choice, this is my number two choice and so on until I ranked all 8.
(15:00) Now the problem with that was, like say for example, one night I said, “I’m sure that there were some African American in the picture because I had at least 3 dreams last nigh with African Americans and that’s not usually a typical topic for me. (…) So when I looked at the pictures there were 3 different ones with African Americans. So that was a tough one. Which one was the correct on?
The way we evaluated my results was if I had given a rank of one to four out of the 8 then they’d call it a hit, if I, done 5 to 8 they’d call it a miss. Using that kind of simple binomial thing I got 8 hits out of 8 while I was there. (15:50)
Break and commercials
(19:30) Back
Bob vdc goes into more detail about his experiences at Mamonidies.
(22:22)
So what happens during the night once you open up the gates is like we all become swimmers in the Cosmic Ocean at night, and it gets to be very porus. (...) The psi just leaks in all over the place.
So I’m dreaming not only of the target picture but I’m dreaming about the target person (the sender), I’m dreaming about the experimenter (in the EEG lab) I’m dreaming about the research assistant, so everybody gets to be in there. Once you open the gates everything comes through those gates.
(23:00) With Henry Reed and Virginia Cayce Association We got out of the lab and began to combine together as people. And just get people to dream together.
(23:17)
So now instead of having a target picture we would have a target person.
(…)
(24:15) We dedicated our dreams that night to be of service, to be of love, to try and be of help to that person. (and it worked powerfully)
The rest is pretty wonderful Dreamviewers but I am pooped so enjoy the interview for yourself. The whole interview is about 59 minutes.
Sexual Arousal every REM period (?,!!!?)
I found a link on Bobbie Anine's Blogg.
It is an partical in Psychology Today about REM sleep.
Here are some exerts:
The Very, Very Strange Properties of REM Sleep
By Patrick McNamara
on August 13, 2011 - 12:24pm
(...)
Persons with cardiopulmonary disease are indeed more likely to die during this REM period than at any other time of the 24-hour day.
(...)
Dreams are highly complex cognitive products that are produced, as far as we can tell, by Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
(...)
Yet another bizarre feature of REM is that phasic eye movements and muscle twitches occur upon a background of paralysis in the antigravity musculature, including the jaw, neck, and limbs.
This paralysis however does not extend to the sexual organs!
In males every REM period is associated with prolonged penile erections.
These REM-related erections apparently even occur in infants. They persist throughout the lifespan but are not reliably associated with erotic desire. Women sometimes undergo uterine contractions and pelvic thrusting during REM, but too few studies have been done on this topic to draw any firm conclusions.
(...)
End of article.
Here is the link to article from the publication called Psychology Today:
The Very, Very Strange Properties of REM Sleep | Psychology Today
I am on my phone so I hope the link works.
