Thread: Gestalt Psychology - Applications for Lucid Dreamers

Funnily enough, the other day before I first saw your thread I looked up Gestalt for some reason or another, unrelated to dreaming. It is a topic I formally know nothing about, so I am curious and will require clarifications no doubt. Can you make up an example of how, as you understand it, Gestalt psychology could be applied to the barriers you mentioned? I would be interested in seeing more of your thoughts, at any rate.

For the purposes of applying Gestalt theory to lucid dreaming, do you have any suggested reading material, both on and off-line?

With regards to those barriers, I feel you're right in saying that authors (sometimes) don't have quite the same grasp of what it is to have some issues that are definitely normal for common people, though I would hazard a guess that the authors who actually publish said writings are ones that by nature of their attitudes are part of a general "type" that is more likely to have actually gone and published a book of the sort in the first place. It takes a lot of determination, perseverance and patience, nevermind organisation, to undertake any writing project, even something as plain as a fiction, so anything that tries to address matters of substance or technique will necessarily require their author to be somewhat... Virtuous, I suppose. Assuming my supposition has any truth to it, I would think that as a result some authors simply do not come across many barriers that "normal" people come across because, psychologically speaking, they are more "functional", but I think this just depends on where they started their own journey.

On the other hand, I can understand why authors might not really touch upon certain barriers; although many problems are indeed common for any person getting into lucid dreaming practises, it doesn't seem like there's any one-size-fits-all solution even for many of these common problems; to address all of the potential issues while also giving multiple potential solutions that might work better for different types of individuals would likely, in itself, constitute an entire book on its own that could likely become a couple of hundred pages long, even if it were limited only to this specific subject. Even so, I would say that in a book such as LaBerge's ETWOLD, there is a decent amount of care taken trying to address common pitfalls, in particular the pitfalls where expectations are concerned.

Hopefully that wasn't too much of a tangent on your topic. I kind of wanted to discuss the normal/healthy/unhealthy too, though it can wait as it might be too tangential as well, what do you think?

Hi DarkestDarkness,

Thanks for stopping by. I won’t answer your question about reading material here since the post I’ve been working on covers it pretty thoroughly, and I currently don’t have a lot of familiarity with this topic outside of a single (pretty comprehensive) book. I guess I could mention that one of the first books I learned about Gestalt psychology from was Ann Faraday’s Dream Power, which is concerned mainly with dream interpretation rather than lucid dreaming. But I am hesitant to recommend the book on that count since, in retrospect, the way Gestalt psychology is presented there was probably part of the reason I didn’t decide to learn more about it sooner.

Yes, I can see how that statement about the guidebooks could come off as a bit unfair, especially considering that this is a topic that’s only started to be explored in a systematic way relatively recently. Maybe it is a bit unfair – but it is annoying that even the relatively comprehensive books like ETWOLD don’t really go very far into the depths. And I have seen the idea that mental blocks could even be relevant to lucid dreaming difficulties shot down out of hand. I honestly can’t remember where anymore – I have checked books but have so far been unable to find such a statement. Perhaps it wasn’t a book at all, but just a stranger on the internet. But I actually do have more to say on why I’m dissatisfied with the most common account of how expectations work to shape lucid dreams – I just want to do a bit more research first.

Re: the whole normal vs. healthy thing – by all means, go ahead. It may take more time for me to respond if tangents develop, but the topic is both relevant and interesting to explore.

The book that I’m drawing on for this extended exploration – at least, until I make it to the library again – is Gestalt Therapy by Fritz Perls, with Ralph F. Hefferline and Paul Goodman as translators and co-contributors. It consists of two volumes, one focused around a series of practical exercises and the other focused on establishing the theoretical foundations of Gestalt psychology. The book was originally published in 1951, and it shows its age in some ways. Some of these ways are negative – for instance, in the constant use of masculine pronouns to refer to human beings in general – and some I would consider positive, such as the fact that it starts from first principles.

All practical psychology books are based on a definite conception of what human beings are like. It is not possible to refuse to take a stance on human nature when your goal is to help human beings to function more effectively. But even though the big-picture view is always relevant, it is often not stated explicitly. This is a problem for somebody whose views diverge from mainstream ones in important ways, and it means having to read with an eye to what kinds of assumptions are being made and whether any of those assumptions are dodgy ones – and, if they are, whether they are actually baked into the theory itself or were just brought to the table by the authors.

In the case of Fritz Perls & Co., while their approach is unusually thorough, the question of whether or not Gestalt theory is based on materialist* assumptions is never broached. I guess that shouldn’t surprise me, but you never know. Anyway, while the scope of the book suggests that the authors’ concerns are largely guided by such a view, as far as I can see, the theory itself does not imply it in any way. The nature of experience is taken as its starting point, and there are no attempts to define what can or can’t be an a priori legitimate object of experience. I don’t think the theory could even accommodate such attempts.

*That is, materialist in the philosophical sense – to put it roughly, the view that matter/the material world is the only thing that exists, and anything that can’t be understood in terms of it is unreal.


(tldr; You can probably make good use of Gestalt concepts no matter what your metaphysical views are.)


I mentioned that the book has two volumes. It says a lot that the practical volume comes before the theoretical volume: in fact, the authors make it clear right from the beginning that they do not intend to make their case through intellectually convincing readers that their reasoning is sound but rather by convincing them to experientially test their concepts. The experiments are all exercises in directed awareness, with the object of focus being various kinds of mental contents, bodily sensations, and environmental stimuli.

Also included in the practical section are the reports of college students (who, then as now, probably represented the most easily accessible supply of guinea pigs for psychology professors) concerning their experiences with the experiments. These reports showcase the full range of responses, from those of students who had genuinely life-altering insights as a result of them to those who refused even to perform them because they couldn’t see how the premise behind them could possibly be right. Some of these are quite snarky and would be hilarious if they weren’t clearly and most likely deliberately missing the point. To me, at least, they are also a reminder that the passage of time does not always entail progress. I have tutored college-level writing, and I think you’d have a hard time finding a class nowadays that could express themselves in writing as clearly as this one did.

I tried out all the experiments, although it was a very quick run-through. I didn’t spend enough time with any of them to see whether there would be results, much less life-changing ones. It was more just to get a taste of them and to see whether there was anything I might like to spend more time with.

(tldr; You should give Gestalt concepts a chance even if they sound stupid.)


I do have a great deal of confidence in this approach, however, and it is entirely due to experience – specifically, to the time in my life when I was making my earliest attempts to induce lucid dreams. I was already having lucid dreams on an irregular basis then, but my deliberate attempts to have more weren’t having much effect. I tried performing state tests, but the habit never carried over into my dreams. At a time when I was recording an average of two or three dreams a night, I only ever had a single dream in which I performed a test. I had a little more success falling asleep directly into dreams, once I had the timing right – but in those early days, this almost always meant having to deal with paralysis and perceptual difficulties in the resulting dream, which the how-to books insisted would go away after a while but which never did.

In the end, it was a book that resulted in my breakthrough into lucid dreaming, but it was not one of the how-to books. It was Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, a classic of existential philosophy which, I feel safe in claiming, nobody before or since has ever put to this purpose.

Specifically, it was Camus’s description of phenomenology that did the trick. I’m no longer sure what passage it was that inspired the experiment I made that day, but as I recall, what I had found so intriguing was the idea that, as they go about their day-to-day lives, most people don’t really see the world around them – only their conception of it, a product of ideation amalgamated out of previous experiences rather than a perception in the true sense of the word. I was never one for armchair philosophy: the moment my interest was kindled I wanted to put this fascinating idea to the test. And so I stood in the middle of my room and imagined myself in a place of natural beauty where, relatively recently, I had felt truly present, alive and alert to my surroundings. And then I took that feeling and I looked at my present surroundings the way I had looked at my environment then – and everything changed.

There are no words for this kind of experience. In a way, nothing had changed, everything was as it had been before, only something within me had shifted, and everything my senses touched was vivid and present in a way it hadn’t been before. The texture of life had changed, and the change proved to be a lasting one. At first, it required deliberate focus to maintain, but it soon became second nature to me – or possibly the first all over again.

And it wasn’t only waking life that changed: my dream life changed as well. Lucid dreams began to occur spontaneously on a more frequent basis – much higher-quality dreams than the brief, unstable ones that had initially inspired my efforts or the difficulty-plagued dreams I had entered deliberately. Those perceptual and motor difficulties didn’t go away on their own, but in time, I discovered that I could apply a similar (and similarly indescribable) shift in perception there as well, which also involved adopting a receptive attitude to my surroundings – surroundings which, in many cases, weren’t even there until I began to treat them in this way.

This is the power that a perceptual shift can have – and this is exactly what those Gestalt experiments aim at accomplishing. I think experiences as dramatic as mine were are probably very rare, and it would be unrealistic to expect instant results – not everybody is standing right in front of the door at the moment they find the key, so to speak. But I think applying Gestalt principles has the potential to help people discover and break various perceptual habits that may otherwise present considerable obstacles to having lucid dreams, or to unleashing their fullest potential.

It has been, honestly, a bit frustrating to have had this sort of experience and not to have been able to recommend anything that could help bring others closer to having similar ones. Reading The Myth of Sisyphus is very unlikely to be helpful. There are Buddhist practices that also have this potential, but they wouldn't make a great deal of sense presented outside of their original context. This, though - this seems very promising. This is, essentially, what I get out of writing this thing.

(tldr; This is the part where I actually start talking about lucid dreams, and so you should probably just go back and read it.)

Strangely I came upon Sisyphus as a name just a few days ago when trying to find new tracks for a playlist and I don't think I'd heard the name before. And I see now that to some irony, I started off the playlist based on a track called Stillbirth which is partly about starting again and in another sense being born once again, which incidentally I feel is thematically relevant here.

Your description of how your perception shifted towards your otherwise normal environments makes me think of what I learned and experienced through mindfulness, which is about appreciating and at the same time not making judgments on one's situation and surroundings. It sounds to me like there's a difference because mindfulness in that sense is about quietude of conscious mind, which I don't think is what your described experience was about. Both seem to be about subjective perception though. Perhaps this relates to the Buddhist practises that have a similar potential? I admit that mindfulness is not a practise I've kept at the fore of my mind, but it's been there nonetheless.

It's interesting about Perls' book putting forward the notion that they were not intent on convincing readers intellectually or through reasoning in itself; in a way this is very close to something I have appreciated about reading Jung's works and more specifically reading one of the translated versions of the Red Book, because like you say the big-picture view is relevant but not necessarily entirely clear. Yet, to me there's at some point a fairly clear message that as a reader I should make my own judgment and not necessarily be so concerned with trying to make intellectual sense of what I am are reading. Much of Jung's experiences in said book had been otherwise private for quite some time and I think this may be of relevance because it meant that the pretext of "needing to prove" was not truly required when writing, since they were to some degree "just" his experiences.

I will admit that I think it is very difficult for just anyone to read something of this nature, possibly Gestalt Therapy too then, because most of us have that need of "logical" proof from an author except for the instances where we can actually relate to the described methods or experiences; in my case I have felt it easy to read the Red Book because although it is a product of its time and of its author's mindset, for me it provides a very relatable reading on some accounts, while also giving me some context of what some notions might have been like a hundred years ago.

Right now there's not much else I can comment because I think I need to process this a bit and I've come and gone away from the keyboard a few times since I started writing this. So far however, I like your extensive explanation here and feel like it's something to read with interest in exploring what's behind what's being said.

---

(This bit is a bit haphazard and disoriented because I am a bit short on time as I finish this, so I may need to revise/clarify something I said)

Just to briefly touch on the subject of normal versus healthy, in semi-recent conversations with someone elsewhere the topic of normality has come up a few times, no doubt in good part because of the community that I and they are in, we necessarily have to accept that we are not mainstream in relative terms as far as sub-cultures go.

So I think when you pointed out that "normal" sometimes incorporates "unhealthy" into its coping/survival mechanisms, I felt this to be a bit incomplete in some way, and if you were to give further explanation or example on it I might understand in what sense you meant this. I think because we tend to define normality as that which is apparently average. In a sense the entirety of people's individual experiences cannot be reasonably summarised based on their whole, because that whole does show patterns about the people, but it does not explain the patterns in itself, though it points there.

In my particular case, many people in the same community are individuals that I would 90% of the time label as "emotionally damaged", myself included. This is the apparent normal for myself and others in the community, whether they realise it or not and it's true that these individuals' lives likely include many degrees of unhealthy coping... However, through my experience and reading of works and thoughts such as those of Jung, I have been made to consider over the years that human experience requires the unhealthy aspect to be healthy; in Jungian terms, without the Shadow aspects of ourselves we might not be whole and these are aspects that we could totally consider to be unhealthy in some cases, psychologically anyway, if nothing else. I feel I'm straying a bit here so to be more specific I mean to say that I feel people do require to some degree to have this sort of unhealthy and self-expressing freedom, because if they don't have that freedom, behaviours, attitudes and coping mechanisms may become ever more extreme, much in the same way that anything that gets illegalised, banned or forbidden will be sought out just as much, if not more, than if the banned thing were to be normally available in some way, even if in a limited manner that is still restricted. I think there is obviously a need for balance, because one way or another, extreme behaviour and damaged or ill-intending psyche will always exist and cannot be eradicated so to speak, regardless of whichever way the pendulum swings, since such behaviour is to some extent resultant of individuals reaching breaking points in their lives because to some degree, that's just what happens in life.

Sorry for the delay - I will definitely get to posting more, and answering, in the next couple days once I have time to do it properly!

Originally Posted by DarkestDarkness

Your description of how your perception shifted towards your otherwise normal environments makes me think of what I learned and experienced through mindfulness, which is about appreciating and at the same time not making judgments on one's situation and surroundings. It sounds to me like there's a difference because mindfulness in that sense is about quietude of conscious mind, which I don't think is what your described experience was about. Both seem to be about subjective perception though. Perhaps this relates to the Buddhist practises that have a similar potential? I admit that mindfulness is not a practise I've kept at the fore of my mind, but it's been there nonetheless.

Ah, mindfulness. I don’t like to use the word myself since it’s rather imprecise, and I have the impression it’s been diffused to the point where it just sounds like it doesn’t mean anything much. I could call what I tried back then a mindfulness technique – but I am quite sure that corporations would not offer their employees programs on something if they were expecting results akin to what I experienced, and it would be kind of creepy if they did.

I’m not entirely sure I know what you mean by “subjective perception” – I would say that all perception is subjective – but I guess I might describe it as something like centered perception, or perception grounded in the present moment, or possibly embodied perception, in contrast with perception in which thought has taken precedence over the senses. Maybe that’s close to what you mean?

Originally Posted by DarkestDarkness

It's interesting about Perls' book putting forward the notion that they were not intent on convincing readers intellectually or through reasoning in itself; in a way this is very close to something I have appreciated about reading Jung's works and more specifically reading one of the translated versions of the Red Book, because like you say the big-picture view is relevant but not necessarily entirely clear. Yet, to me there's at some point a fairly clear message that as a reader I should make my own judgment and not necessarily be so concerned with trying to make intellectual sense of what I am are reading. Much of Jung's experiences in said book had been otherwise private for quite some time and I think this may be of relevance because it meant that the pretext of "needing to prove" was not truly required when writing, since they were to some degree "just" his experiences.

Oh, you’ve read the Red Book! It had only just been published when I was really focused on getting to know Jung’s works, and I couldn’t afford it then, but it sounds fascinating. There’s a chapter in Jung’s (semi-)autobiography – it’s called something like “Confrontation with the Unconscious”, I think – which I understand deals with the period in his life the Red Book dates from, but as a more general overview.

In the case of this book, it isn’t that Perls doesn’t want to convince readers that his theory is correct, but that he wants to convince them on an experiential basis rather than an abstract, intellectual one that would be meaningless if it wasn’t grounded in experience. Not to mention useless, since most people wouldn’t be motivated to act on the basis of something that wasn’t meaningful to them on an experiential level. At best, the intellectual understanding can serve as an inspiration and a guide towards getting the right sorts of experiences, but only if you actually try to put it into action – and the book does offer a very thorough grounding. It’s just not where the main emphasis lies.

Since you’ve got me thinking about Jung now, I guess I can borrow an example out of his life to illustrate what I mean. Jung was a Christian because God was just part of how he experienced the world – experience colored by the culture he grew up in, but experience nonetheless. Jung’s father was a pastor, but his understanding of his religion never got beyond the intellectual level – it never became truly real for him, which according to Carl Jung was a major source of dissatisfaction in his life.

Or – to use another example, since only using a religious one might give the wrong impression – my grandfather has been a psychology professor and a school counselor, but he always seemed to keep his “psychologist self” completely compartmentalized from his family life (which I’ve been given to understand was outright dysfunctional in some ways) and has always been rather clueless as to how to actually communicate with people effectively. I don’t know whether he’s felt like there’s something important missing from his life since he would never mention it if there was, but he’s my only living grandparent at this point, and even though we theoretically have an interest in common, it still feels like we never have anything to talk about when we see each other, which is kind of sad.

(On that note: I don’t know whether mentally psychoanalyzing one’s relatives actually does them any good, but it is a good way of staying sane in a dysfunctional family. )

I’m going to try to get back to the normal vs. healthy point later and address the rest of your post, but since it is sort of relevant here, I will say that I think one way in which what is normal in Western culture is unhealthy is the heavy emphasis placed on intellectual understanding – on being knowledgeable, on being right, on knowing the facts – when it’s at best the prelude to a deeper, experiential sort. And the dark side of this is that people who (reasonably) find the resulting shallowness and hypocrisy objectionable, or (reasonably) don’t see the point in acquiring knowledge that stays purely abstract, start thinking that ignorance must be a good thing, and the facts don’t matter at all (which is not reasonable). Sociology has its own separate toolkit from individual psychology, but I find there are a lot of social problems that come into focus when you consider that there are people in a culture that embody its shadow in various ways.

OK, so I’m finally ready to continue. This may or may not be a logical place to start – but I did want to focus on explaining some of the basic concepts before trying to make something out of them, and so I’m going to begin by considering the Gestalt view of the structure of the psyche.

I’ve always found theories mapping the psyche into distinct parts, like Freud’s id, ego, and superego, to be a bit slippery. If you look for these distinctions in your own mind, it’s usually possible to find at least some evidence for pretty much any theory, but I’ve never found any of them to really “click”. Just dividing the mind into conscious, preconscious, and unconscious regions is unobjectionable, and may be useful for some purposes, but it doesn’t actually lead to a better understanding of how it works, except by emphasizing that we aren’t aware of everything that’s there at any given time, and that there’s probably a lot there that has doesn’t regularly (or ever) enter awareness.

In contrast to mapping the psyche functionally, or based on the relative level of awareness of mental contents, Gestalt psychology considers the psyche to structure itself in various ways in response to stimuli – for example, one’s intentions or external situations. All of these temporary configurations can be understood using the concept of figure and ground: various parts of ourselves are brought into focus as they become relevant, or else they fade into the background, where we are aware of them only in a vague way, if at all.

(tldr; The psyche only has particular structures situationally: they are not a permanent feature.)

The concept of figure and ground is a bit easier to understand when considering sight or hearing: it means that we perceive one or several elements to be central and the rest as peripheral to them. This does not happen in a static way, but in a fluid, shifting one that is dependent on factors such as our own interests, desires, or the presence of something new or unusual in our environment. If you’re very hungry when entering a restaurant, you may not even notice its decor until you’ve eaten something. If you’re listening to a piece of music and an instrument you play enters, that’s likely to be the focus of your attention even if it’s not playing the melody. This is essentially the basis for the concept of state tests as well: things that “don’t belong” naturally stick out to us, and what we’re doing when we perform one is making the connection between “this isn’t something that would normally happen in this kind of a situation” and “I might be dreaming”.

This is the case for thought, one’s “conceptual sense”, as well as sight, hearing, and the other senses. This idea may be a bit difficult to grasp if it’s new to you, but it’s easily testable in one’s own experience of external reality. That reaction of seeing something that does not belong and thus attracts our attention is clearly a conceptual reaction as well as one of sight; there’s just no reason to schematize our reactions and separate out their various elements most of the time. It’s also worth mentioning that Buddhist philosophy has traditionally considered thought as a sense alongside the usual five, and it should also be a familiar idea if you’ve read ETWOLD (see Chapter 5!), although its role in perception is assumed there rather than stated explicitly.

It’s a little more difficult to catch your own mind in the act – to be aware of what exactly is happening as you take on various attitudes, roles, and mental stances and see the various combinations of figure and ground – but it’s a worthwhile exercise. And it is quite possible for noticing something is odd about your own thoughts to lead to a lucid dream, just as noticing environmental oddities can.

(tldr; Perception, which is always colored by thoughts, takes the form of figure and ground, with some parts sticking out to us and others fading into the background.)

I find this is a much more intuitive way of considering the structure of the psyche: as entirely situation-dependent. There are some situations where it may make sense to consider it in terms of conscious vs. unconscious (particularly while dreaming) and others where distinctions such as superego vs. ego or ego vs. shadow might be appropriate. These are temporary configurations or patterns that become habitual, and the degree to which they resonate with us will tend to depend on the sorts of situations or conflicts that are typical for us.

That part about conflicts is actually a major limitation of the better-known ways of dividing of the psyche. Freud formulated his model of the psyche based on the sorts of inner conflicts he saw his patients experiencing. Plato does something very similar in the Republic: he posits different parts of the psyche based on the various ways people can be in conflict with themselves. However, people aren’t always in a state of conflict in which they experience themselves as having various “parts”. And most of us (with the notable exception of Freud) would probably agree that inner conflict is not a natural state to be in. Do those parts still exist when we’re not feeling divided? We would have trouble finding them when introspecting – and I think I can safely say that they’re not discoverable by experience except by actually summoning up a compelling inner conflict or experimentally placing ourselves in the right kind of situation. When they make up the figure, they’re parts; when they’re part of the background, they’re not.

Introspection as a method is subject to similar limitations in that, when you’re examining your own psyche, it is not from a neutral observation post: it’s you who’s considering you, and so you’re actually introducing another type of division. This split is not a permanent feature of the mind either, and the sort of self-awareness that is characterized by taking on the role of a “watcher” is not the only kind that’s possible. (Note: This is something I’ll probably be returning to at some point since it’s highly relevant for various methods of attaining and maintaining lucidity, and mistaking one sort of self-awareness for another may be the source of some difficulties).

In the mind’s optimal state of functioning, these systems of figure and ground – the Gestalts, or wholes, of Gestalt psychology – are free to develop out of the basic unity of mind, body, and environment, with anything capable of becoming figure, and the figure being in focus and clearly distinguishable from the background. However, there are various habits of thought and perception that disturb this relationship and prevent certain things from coming into focus, or prevent any figure from coming fully into focus. This is where the methods of Gestalt psychology come into play: not with the goal of establishing some sort of theoretically harmonious relationship among the various parts of one’s mind, but rather troubleshooting the various problems that prevent this entirely natural thing from happening.

Interestingly, Perls seems to regard this state in which this process is allowed to take place undisturbed as being the same as the end-point of what Jung calls integration. This would also be something worth following up on, since it’s easy to see how this could be the case, but Jung is coming at it from a different enough angle to where it isn’t immediately obvious that there aren’t any important differences.

(tldr; Other approaches to this question are characterized by various limitations as their methods tend to introduce artificial divisions into what is essentially a unity.)

I mentioned not liking the word ‘mindfulness’. I also don’t like that thing where people twist the spelling of words to imply a different meaning from the usual one (e.g., ‘response-ability’), a habit Fritz Perls seems to have acquired somewhere along the course of his career. But it doesn’t really matter that I don’t like them because that’s just a matter of personal taste. My dislike of the word ‘ego’, however, is not personal. It arises out of the fact that the word has distinct though connected concepts tangled up in it in a rather confusing way.

It was Freud who first formulated the concept of the ego, but he didn’t invent the word. That honor belongs to one of his early English-language translators. Freud just called it ‘das Ich’, or ‘the I’. In a sense, then, the concept is just what it says on the tin: the ego is our conscious selves, everything that’s encompassed by the word ‘I’.

The other meaning is the one found in words like ‘egoism’ or ‘egotism’, which, confusingly, have different technical meanings but are both colloquially synonyms for ‘selfishness’. I haven’t done the research, but I would guess, given that it was once the common practice of learned English speakers to borrow from Latin when they wanted to coin new words, that the same word was just borrowed on at least three different occasions, resulting in the conceptual clusterf*ck it is today. In any case, you can probably imagine how troublesome it would be if ‘self’ and ‘selfishness’ were both the same word. That’s my problem with ‘ego’. That and the related problem of people who are keen on getting rid of their egos not always being clear on which one they’re aiming for, which is problematic since only one of its meanings signifies something negative and it is by most accounts hard to be a functioning human being without the other. But that’s a whole other topic.

(tldr; ‘Ego’ is a confusing word, but for my purposes, it is just what we are referring to when we say ‘I’.)

Different psychologists have their own formulations of what exactly the ego is, beyond just what people mean when they say ‘I’. Freud defined it by its role as referee between the id and the superego (which I won’t get to describing here). From what I can remember, Jung mostly considers it in contrast with the ‘self’, which is used to indicate the entirety of a person, most of which (unlike the ego) is unconscious.

Perls also considers the ego in contrast with the self, but a distinct concept of self that isn’t immediately identifiable with Jung’s (although there are once again intriguing parallels). He defines the ego as one’s ‘system of identifications’ – it is what one feels oneself to be in an active, deliberate, goal-oriented role. One is trying to control one’s environment in some way, which entails a feeling of being separate from that environment. The ego is what one perceives when introspecting – that is, deliberately trying to perceive one’s own mind – which makes it more immediately comprehensible and familiar than the self, although the latter is more fundamental.

Perls mostly defines the self in terms of what it isn’t, or as transcending and incorporating opposing concepts. It is spontaneous; it is neither active nor passive, but somewhere in between them; it is both engaged and disinterested; it does not just act on the environment but is, in Perls’s words, ‘growing in it’. It’s a rather confusing description, but if anybody is familiar with the concept of flow states, that’s very much what it sounds like Perls is describing, with the additional implication that this is a more fundamental state of being than the more limited ones derived from it.

The self is the more comprehensive, more fundamental mode, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t times and places in which the more active stance in which one is aware of oneself as ego isn’t appropriate. But it works best as an ‘emergency mode’, and having it as one’s habitual state is a general symptom that something is off somewhere in one’s relations of mind, body, and environment, sort of the way that fever indicates a health problem without being a useful clue as to what sort it is. This habitual primacy of the ego is characteristic of modern society and represents one very important way in which normal is not necessarily healthy.

The nature of the self is a complex concept, and I’ll be returning to it later to consider it more fully. But I’ll add here that Perls also considers one other typical structure of the psyche in the book: the personality, which is essentially one’s social self when it’s taken as an object of analysis or observation. It’s also a subsidiary structure to the self – in Perls’s words, ‘a verbal replica of the self’. To again (perhaps unwisely) make a parallel with Jung, the concept is similar to that of the persona – a framework of attitudes constructed through and used in interaction with others.

(tldr; Self is an essential, holistic mode of functioning; ego is a subsidiary goal-oriented one.)

While it may be initially confusing to come to grips with a set of concepts that aren’t necessarily intuitively obvious, one of which is by definition not actually possible to observe directly since the act of trying to observe it changes it into a different structure, I think this is a useful framework that does capture some important distinctions. It’s interesting to note, for instance, that it’s very common for lucid dreamers to adopt a deliberate, goal-oriented attitude upon becoming aware that they’re dreaming. To a degree, especially for those who don’t yet have a lot of practice lucid dreaming, this is necessary in order to keep from slipping back into nonlucidity. However, this isn’t the only possible way of engaging with one’s dreams, and it may be necessary to let the deliberate attitude drop in order to experience some aspects of one’s mind.

This may also serve as a reminder that, even as an experienced lucid dreamer, there may be entire worlds of experience one hasn’t explored, to the degree that one has been focused on making things happen instead of letting them happen. But this isn’t such a strange notion: once one acknowledges the role expectations play in the formation of dreams, it’s only a small step to acknowledging the sorts of limitations that adopting a particular attitude may impose on them.

(tldr; Yes, this does actually relate to lucid dreaming.)

Note: It has occurred to me that, as much as I like dancing bananaman , he is a little too distracting for my purposes here. This might be a little better.

Very interesting. It seems to me that gestalt psychology is undergirded by the apprehension of the present moment as well as interpersonal relationships which may lead one to 'knowing thyself'—not too dissimilar from the goal in Jung's individuation but, granted, two different approaches. I know you don't like the term 'mindfulness', LeaningKarst, but gestalt includes the insightful nature of the present moment commensurate with eastern meditative practices such as Vipassana.

Gestalt theory gained some popularity in the 60s but did not favour the kind of research that positivists believed was essential and eventually cognitive therapies would take over. Les Greenberg (born at the end of WWII), however, was an exception in that he did employ research in order to develop the practice of gestalt therapy; I have not read all the posts here as there is an intriguing wealth of information (good job LeaningKarst), but I will as soon as I've checked out the 'Validating Gestalt' interview with Greenberg and delve into what Laura and Fritz Perls so eloquently proffered. I certainly do believe we don't just grasp individual components within wholes as it is apparent that patterns can also be identified as components and patterns of patterns across time as space. I pretty much do think consciousness can encompass any conception imaginable and it is only limited by the constraints of the sentient organism's biology.

Anyway, just so you guys are aware, I am keeping an eye on this and keep up the good work.

Just before he died, Fritz Perls warned us of a major societal setback where humanity was increasingly shifting from a puritanical approach into hedonism, where anything that doesn't provide pleasure is to be avoided altogether along with pain and suffering. I suppose what we can take from this in the context of lucid dreaming research is that oneironauts can find excitement in the process of experimentation with the goal to explore uncharted territory before prematurely seeking oneiric escapism and highs only to be mostly disappointed by how difficult it can be to navigate through the unknown. Don't expect too much too soon; in other words, walk before you can run. When Perls was explaining gestalt therapy, he actually stated that shortcuts lead to a lack of growth, which in turn leads to neuroticism—an ailing condition of those who are unable to see the obvious (one can imagine a waffling Woody Allen character so embroiled in his own mental narratives that he misses the splendour of his surroundings); the Perlsian remedy is to begin training in awareness and ground oneself to the present moment to obtain a balanced centre in perception. Perls disagreed with Freudian psychoanalysis because it assumed that healthy minds require individuals to be free of guilt and anxiety, a proposition that contradicted his theoretical premise that guilt is only unexpressed resentment and anxiety is the gap between the now and the later. His therapy involved asking his patients to use role playing to aid the resolution of past conflicts besides focusing on insights into gestalts. Logo designs, by the way, tend to employ gestalt principles to effectively aid communication besides illustrating them really well.

The use of male pronouns in Gestalt Therapy by Fritz Perls is venial considering that we are talking about an age when masculine terms were, in certain contexts, generally inclusive such as when we employ the word 'mankind' to mean women, too. When it comes to psychology books, I don't really concern myself with whether or not they proffer their theories with materialist assumptions (and yes, Perls talks of understanding structures in order to bend them to our will which posits mechanistic explanations)—I'm more of a pragmatist and evaluate how therapeutically proficient their instructions might be.

If gestalt psychology concerns bringing disturbances of awareness into awareness—which is redolent of Dzogchen's awareness of awareness, viz. rigpa (knowledge of the ground)—then it may be an optimal strategy for inducing WILDs, if it improves the chances of capturing the shift from wakefulness to the borderland states of hypnagogia. By the time one reaches lucid dreaming—a popular goal in Dream Views—one has the perfect playground to deal with those underlying internal conflicts. (What better way than to have a lucid encounter with the unconscious?)

I believe LeaningKarst meant to say Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (as opposed to 'Entering the World ...), an excellent book by Stephen LaBerge, but I have not seen the three pillars of lucidity being covered in depth as much as in Daniel Love's Are You Dreaming? (if you haven't read this one yet, I strongly recommend it). One certainly increases one's chances by seriously considering right timing (e.g., catching those long REM periods), brain chemistry (making sure acetylcholine levels are up) and psychology (the approach and attitude to the practice are equally important). If you lack in any of these areas, your chances are practically reduced—so it is worth mentioning that even if you have a jolly, light-hearted approach, which is the most favourable psychology when inducing a lucid dream, you are not guaranteed success if you haven't worked on your memory, habits, timing and brain chemistry. (In Lucid Aids there is plenty of information on optimising brain chemistry by boosting acetylcholine levels with certain foods and supplements if one is feeling adventurous with a cautionary doctor's advice/permission.)

I agree with DarkestDarkness in that most authors assume that if lucid dreaming comes easy to them after using prescribed techniques then it will also be the case for their readers. The truth is that the phenomenon, which is a hybrid state in itself apart from default sleep states, can be easy to attain for some but next to impossible for others; unfortunately, when selling books of this sort, authors want to sound optimistic and are thus inclined to promise an oneiric Shangri-la with their instructions rather than sermonise on brute facts. People often want quick and easy solutions!

Gestalt psychology reflects modes of perception and organisation of percepts which might have aided our survival over the course of our evolution. Such cognitive predispositions lead us to consider multiple scenarios (possibly facilitating distinctions between what is and what is not) of what could and what might be; with pros also come cons as the brain does its guess work about reality and sometimes visual illusions are mistaken for accurate mental depictions of the objective world. Funny thing: Fritz Perls may allude to materialism but his thesis is certainly compatible with the conscious realism and multimodal user interface theory of perception by the psychologist Donald Hoffman, who stresses that consciousness is primary and that we see a sufficiently practical mental model of the world and not some objective truth—indeed, some might point out that, epistemologically speaking, all we have is the subjective world whether we are awake or sleeping.

The principles of gestalt theory might play a role in facilitating the change of environments within lucid dreams. It isn't just imagination but actually a propensity to see what isn't there but could be there in order to make another sense or interpretation of what is observed which differs from the initial impression. Principles like figure-ground perception, proximity, similarity, closure, good continuation and fate might have helped me to make the transition from one reality to the next in this instance of lucid dreaming:

'I'm standing next to a stable and the rodeo crowd is no longer present. In fact, not a soul in sight, as it were. Before me is a vivid, rural landscape at the crack of dawn. I bring the palms of my hands to about six inches from my face and start peering at the creases, imagining that my eyes are microscope lenses. My skin turns into a beige canvas, so to speak, which comes to dominate my field of vision and, as I zoom in, its creases begin to resemble gorges enabling the flow of peculiar sperm-like swimmers of a dark pigmentation. I no longer feel like I'm looking at my hands, having acquired a bird's-eye view of a weird but captivating landscape—a world which isn't the cellular topography I initially expected. I'm eerily drawn to the craggy terrain below, which becomes increasingly defined with my approach. The bizarre sperm-like creatures turn out to be squid-shaped machines similar to the Sentinels in The Matrix, gliding through canyons in a vast desert.

'As soon as I land on rocky terrain, the sky quickly darkens, turning overcast in a matter of seconds. A few mechanical squids fly above me and I take off to give chase over a mountainous grey landscape. I see someone walking alongside a precipice and decide to allay my curiosity by landing next to the character in order to strike up a conversation.'

If in the waking state our gestalt psychology employs our subconscious to fill in the gaps to create a new image from the initial impression of a new whole, we witness the perception reification of this process in lucid dreams because imaginative exploration and perceptual predispositions become reality in the dream world. The very act of deliberately looking at the details of my hands in a lucid dream produced new wholes—i.e. new objects with their own intricate details resembling squid-shaped machines against a new background (figure-ground perception) creating a new world which also included in its process the principle of closure. This is congruent with the gestalt hypothesis that people tend to organise visual elements into groups or 'unified wholes' when certain principles are applied. The relationships between perceived objects in the dream world, it has to be said, are far more fluid than those in waking life.

But I would say that gestalt psychology, with its principles, isn't the only force driving the way the dream world behaves. There's another level of influence which is actually mentioned in great detail in Stephen LaBerge's ETWOLD: dream schemas—these go beyond visual appearances to include semantics, linguistics and niche associations (e.g., the image of the Ichthys on a wall might lead to the next scene being a beach environment with the sea as a body of water where fish may be found). The reason why I mention this is that, even though gestalt psychology has a very powerful rule that human beings tend to perceive objects in their simplest form; in an oneiric context I don't see how it could bring about dark sperm-like swimmers in my hands other than a schematic influence being at work, too, such as the association between 'microscopic eyes' (my lucid dream is labelled 'The Microscope Experiment' in my dream journal) and seeing sperm cells—which is an initial scenario that would make sense in the real world as the erotic leftovers of, or the forensic evidence for, masturbation (something which I wasn't contemplating or expecting to see at the time). The sperm cells are subsequently redolent of the 'squiddies' from The Matrix which is exactly what progressively follows in some weird oneiric evolution unfolding.

How much schemas override gestalt principles or vice versa in lucid dreams, or how much they complement or reinforce each other in an oneiric context, I don't know, but it is easy to see how LaBerge picked up on schematic associations straight away due to the fluid nature of perception in the dream state. Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist and dream expert, emphasises in her oneirological contention that the dreaming mind tends to tap into radically different ways of thinking and hence why it can lead us to be creative or, at times, stumble upon eureka moments. Perhaps what also helps with surprise environments in lucid dreams is an amalgamation of the gestalt observation that the summation of different parts produce a novel unity with schematic associations based on knowledge (common and/or uncommon) and experience.

Hi Summerlander,

Thanks for stopping by and writing such a detailed post! I will respond when I have time to do so properly - hopefully soon.

I ended up getting a bit sidetracked this week – I think it would probably make sense to continue outlining the self next, and how the central concept of contact relates to it, but it will probably take another week before I have something ready to post. In the meantime, though, I did actually happen across a quotation from a different book – Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music – that illustrates the kind of state that characterizes the ‘self’ stance as opposed to the ego one.

‘In a sense, the ideal listener is both inside and outside the music at the same moment, judging it and enjoying it, wishing it would go one way and watching it go another—almost like the composer at the moment he composes it; because in order to write his music, the composer must also be inside and outside his music, carried away by it and yet coldly critical of it. A subjective and objective attitude is implied in both creating and listening to music.’

I think this does a better job of clarifying the sort of active-passive, in-between mode of experience than anything in Perls’s book does, maybe because Copland is free to be more specific in talking about one particular realm of experience, music, and it’s one where he has expertise. I’ll be on the lookout for more good quotations if I read anything else on similar topics since this concept of how one experiences art is not unique to Copland, and I would imagine that it’s probably much easier to find good descriptions in aesthetics than anywhere else.

Perls’s book actually ends up considering art far more than you might expect a book of general psychology to do, but mainly poetry. And while I was initially pretty happy to see it treated as an important part of life, that section ended up being the one I had the most problems with, mostly because it overemphasizes exactly those aspects of poetry that a psychologist would be most interested in. Perls actually supplements that account in a later chapter in a way that meets some of my objections, but this is definitely another topic I’d like to consider later on in more detail.

Well, I haven’t had time to get around to finishing my new post, and I don’t have time to address everything in your posts before leaving on a trip tomorrow, Summerlander, but I’ll try to respond to your initial post, at least. The rest has got to wait for next week.

Indeed, the present moment is very important in Gestalt theory – and practice. Despite what the name of the book suggests, there’s actually very little about what Gestalt therapy is like in there, and so what I know about it comes mostly from other sources. But it is made clear that, in contrast to Freudian and other approaches, it does not involve delving into one’s past to unearth the origins of present problems. It just works with the problems as they present themselves. I’ve also read from other sources that Gestalt therapy is ideally practiced in groups for this reason – providing problems with a real interpersonal context in which to present themselves. But the one person I know who’s actually been through it seemed to find the idea of it being done in groups rather weird, so maybe that’s more of an ideal than the way things are typically done, or else something that’s changed over the decades.

Regarding ‘mindfulness’, I have no problems with most of the things it’s used to signify. It’s more – so to speak – the gestalt of the word I don’t like. I’m an editor: I have lots of opinions about words. But I’m really not interested in foisting them on other people unless they’re paying me for it. Or unless it happens to involve ‘ironic’. I only mentioned my dislike of the word here because I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds the vague cloud of concepts around it off-putting, and there may be people out there who don’t take the idea that one can fundamentally change the texture of one’s experience seriously because of that. I wouldn’t want anybody to pass it by for a reason like that.

Ditto on the book’s use of masculine pronouns (which you actually mention in your next post, but why not?). I don’t consider it a big deal: I just wanted the first time it comes up in this thread to be me complaining about it rather than it suddenly appearing in a quotation, where it would serve as a rather jarring reminder that psychology has had quite a lot of time to develop since the book was written – and that it has, at least in some ways. Funnily enough (but not ironically!) it’s already made an appearance here, but in a quotation from another book. C’est la vie.

Hi Summerlander,

I hope you receive email notifications of responses to threads you’ve posted in so that you read my previous message here, which was deleted for quoting your (deleted) message. But if not – I’m sorry to hear that you won’t be returning to the forum but will respond to your points here on this thread just the same as I would have otherwise. And since I don’t seem to be able to PM you, I’ll just say here that I hope you find equally interesting conversations to participate in elsewhere. But I would recommend against ad hom language in the future, even if it’s in response to strawmanning or other fallacies.

Life has gotten unexpectedly busy since I decided to start this thread, but I still hope to be able to continue it once things have settled down a bit. I think I’ve just about reached the point where it makes sense to start branching out from the central concepts of Gestalt theory and to address more specialized ones, so I’ll go ahead and wait a little longer before addressing your points on hedonism vs. puritanism, willpower, how this might relate with Dzogchen and rigpa, and so on. My next post will at least partially address your points on schemas, though – or at least it would have if, on closer inspection, the topic hadn’t turned out to be complex enough to warrant a post of its own. But I will say now that while it’s easiest to understand gestalts and their role in organizing perception through considering visual perception, Perls considers them to be a much broader phenomenon. And my own reading of Perls’ book suggests that schemas should actually be considered as a kind of second-degree gestalt instead of something distinct from them – or, to put it in a different way, a habit of perceiving certain gestalts (i.e., figure/ground configurations) that, once developed, is then deployed to organize subsequent perceptions, making them more likely to appear in a similar configuration whether or not such an organization is appropriate for any particular instance. But I want to do some more reading before committing myself to that interpretation.

Speaking of which, I will say here that, yes, you’re absolutely correct that it should be Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. I always get the name of that book wrong, and I’d actually meant to go back and fix it at some point. Oh, well.

Originally Posted by LeaningKarst

Hi Summerlander,

I hope you receive email notifications of responses to threads you’ve posted in so that you read my previous message here, which was deleted for quoting your (deleted) message. But if not – I’m sorry to hear that you won’t be returning to the forum but will respond to your points here on this thread just the same as I would have otherwise. And since I don’t seem to be able to PM you, I’ll just say here that I hope you find equally interesting conversations to participate in elsewhere. But I would recommend against ad hom language in the future, even if it’s in response to strawmanning or other fallacies.

Life has gotten unexpectedly busy since I decided to start this thread, but I still hope to be able to continue it once things have settled down a bit. I think I’ve just about reached the point where it makes sense to start branching out from the central concepts of Gestalt theory and to address more specialized ones, so I’ll go ahead and wait a little longer before addressing your points on hedonism vs. puritanism, willpower, how this might relate with Dzogchen and rigpa, and so on. My next post will at least partially address your points on schemas, though – or at least it would have if, on closer inspection, the topic hadn’t turned out to be complex enough to warrant a post of its own. But I will say now that while it’s easiest to understand gestalts and their role in organizing perception through considering visual perception, Perls considers them to be a much broader phenomenon. And my own reading of Perls’ book suggests that schemas should actually be considered as a kind of second-degree gestalt instead of something distinct from them – or, to put it in a different way, a habit of perceiving certain gestalts (i.e., figure/ground configurations) that, once developed, is then deployed to organize subsequent perceptions, making them more likely to appear in a similar configuration whether or not such an organization is appropriate for any particular instance. But I want to do some more reading before committing myself to that interpretation.

Speaking of which, I will say here that, yes, you’re absolutely correct that it should be Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. I always get the name of that book wrong, and I’d actually meant to go back and fix it at some point. Oh, well.

I finally got to read it, my friend, thank you, it wasn't in vain. 🙂

Thanks for stopping by, Summerlander!

I’d like to keep going with this – someday, at least, and in some form. But I’m in the middle of too many things to do so at the moment, and I have no idea when I’ll have the time again.

It's been hectic for me, too, lately. But who knows, one of these days we might be able to expand upon this subject. No worries.