Who’s Been Sleeping in My Subconscious?

Yes, I used to keep a dream journal. I was even given a beautifully bound “book” with empty pages, by an equally beautiful woman, so I could jot down my night time excursions when I awoke. What a nice gift, now that I think about it… That was when women actually paid attention to me – but that was a long time ago!

I was flattered, of course, because I had heard that many real artists, and some would-be ones, kept dream journals (to protect the innocent, I won’t rattle off any names at this point). I was eager to formalize my dream tracking because I believed dreams could be a useful aid to my creative efforts while I was awake. I no longer have this book – lost in the hassle of moving or constant travel. Nevertheless, I still remember a few of my youthful dreams thanks to that “dream book.”

Although I don’t continue with the practice, except to make it a point to remember my dreams (although, in the morning, they don’t even get short shrift once I do remember them), the simple effort of “remembering,” that is, going over one’s pictures of the night’s dreams before fully getting out of bed in the morning, is a wonderful mental exercise. It’s difficult at first, since most dreams are usually chaotic and appear to be utterly meaningless (when they’re not funny or obscene), but if one persists over a period of time, it gets a lot easier.  

I always felt there was something cool about what went on at night while I “wasn’t there.” In other words, when I was sleeping – oblivious to all that goes on in the darkness of the unconscious. Things forgotten have a way of percolating back up to our conscious level like an inverted aquifer (shy as that may be of a useful metaphor), and such memories are, like dream remembrances, well worth keeping tabs on. While I can’t vouch for this being the case, I’ve always had the sneaking sensation that dreams are woven into a tapestry that is worthwhile making some “sense” of. At least, to the point of asking why they appeared at a given point in my life.

Well, when I was younger, my enthusiasm to discover those hidden secrets of my subconscious soon waned. As the pages of my dream journal filled up with my passionate, but idiotic scribbles, it kept turning into a “diary” of dream events. I didn’t see the threat though them. I didn’t recognize how these dreams were really just feelings “in picture form,” and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it (of course, at that time, I was immersed in all the daft trends of materialistic psychology as purveyed by that cottage industry, and worse), so eventually, I slouched off and stopped.

But enough about me. I wanted to talk about dreaming and the phenomenon of sleep, because they are such a big part of our lives that we simply ignore. Think of it. Over a third of our lives is spent sleeping. We’ll get that time back after we’re no longer here, but it certainly does make me wonder what we actually “do” while we’re sleeping. And, dreams are the only “tangible” things that connects us, through a circuitous weave of tenuous memories and remembrances to our sleep time. Naturally, the most palpable thing we get in the physical plane from sleep is health!

Never before in the History of humanity have people slept so little, which explains why we’re the least healthy people of all time!

Do you think that the ancients, those living before the Iron Age were tired when they woke up in the morning? Do you imagine that the Black People suffered from CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome)? Not likely! If they had, they’d be well on their way to an early grave… Life was not as forgiving as it is today with all our machinations and medicines. We ought to start thinking a little more along realistic lines before popping too many pills to regain wakefulness. Reducing stress and sleeping more would go a long way towards dealing with that modern syndrome, and with the lack of “animus” that fatigue entails.

That’s right, us moderns sleep little and do even less once we’re allegedly awake. I argue we never are truly awake during our daytime hours, if such hours are being kept in our life. A little sleep shortens your life by weakening your health (your inner forces, which include those underpinning your immune system). A lot of sleep restores your health and replenishes your inner forces. And herein lies the secret to sleep – it’s how we restore not only ourselves after each new day, but our whole universe.

I wish I could be more precise, but unfortunately, the nature of the beast is such that a great many false ideas have been wrapped up in what the sleep state is, and what dreams actually are – and, since we know squat about them and what causes them – they continue to be a mystery to us. In this day and in this dark age, it could hardly be otherwise…

Sleep and Wakefulness

The “eternal” cycle of day and night… the spinning of our planet around its axis… at one point facing the sun at another away from it, conditions our physical bodies to require sleep. Therefore, we truly have two types of consciousness – the daytime (waking) consciousness and the night time (sleeping) consciousness. We enjoy lots of differing degrees of consciousness within those two states, but generally, we’re not aware of them (e.g., “daydreaming” is a “sleeping” consciousness we experience when we tend to fall back into “sleep” because we’re either bored, distracted, or fatigued.

As a result, it seems that there is a “waking” consciousness – filled with all the sense impressions we receive in our day-to-day – and a “sleeping” consciousness, which is for us as unfathomable as a black hole. The two states of consciousness are tightly woven into us with the circuit of the sun and the rhythmic cycle of day and night (which in our subconscious is still a highly mysterious phenomenon). And because when we fall asleep we lose consciousness, intuitively we know that sleep is a lot closer to a state similar to death than our waking-state. We don’t remember anything while we’re asleep and what we believe we remember, namely dreams, are only the brief passing in and out of the sleep state. Sleep always seems to us, intuitively, like falling into a warm oblivion, and we forget everything… Then, rather jarringly, it’s that darn alarm clock again!

And just as there’s a waking-state and a sleeping-state, we have an intermittent “transition” state period in between them, when we come in and out of our bodies. These brief transitional states are when we actually dream. The very “dreaming” we do is that transition out of our material state and then back into it (this may occur several times during the night even when we’re not fully conscious of being in our bodies).

Dreaming, therefore, was always a sacred state for people in ancient times. They knew well what was really going on as they passed into their nightly slumber and out of it the following morning. They felt it and understood their own feelings about it. And, might I add, back 4,000 years ago, and farther still, we were conscious of where we were. Back then, we were compelled to fall asleep soon after the sun went down (not like today, when some of us night owls can be awake all night and sleep during the day!). It wasn’t a choice then – it was rather instinctive – we’d fall asleep after sundown whether we liked it or not!

That’s why communal celebrations often lasted over several nights. These were religious, or sacred, experiences for the Black People (and all ancient people, everywhere!) – a kind of “endurance” test. In the distant past, we knew “intuitively” or “instinctually” (however base you want to get) that staying up “past our bedtime” was stealing away something the neteru gave us – HEALTH and LONG LIFE – a chance to be with them, in their domain, while we slept. That was the sacrifice people made. They sacrificed their “health” to honor the neteru/gods – that’s how deep our commitment was to them.

Rituals and rites grew out of this wisdom to become part of the Mysteries – in more recent ages these “events” were the cherished Dionysian Bacchanals – which were usually centered around the new moon or the full moon. Staying awake while we should be in the “other realm,” namely, the spiritual realm, was done as a form of “penance,” if you will. We forewent one to three nights of being in communion with the neteru (the higher beings of the spirit, which in our Western tradition are known as angels and archangels, etc.) in order to honor them. But that was O.K., because we got to drink a lot of wine and party all night.

Sleeping induces a “slowing down” of basic bodily functions, like respiration, blood flow, and nervous activity, etc. (these physiological changes are the by-product of sleep or meditation, but are really a foreground or superficial “benefit” compared to what we gain from sleep in our will and emotional life). For once we fall asleep, and get past our physical “boundary” delimited by what we remember of dreams, we are in a milieu where there are no sense impressions, or sense-bound feelings, thoughts, or actions… Once we fall asleep, we’ve left our bodies behind.

Life Is A Dream, But Dreams Are Not Even Dreams

Let us imagine that dreams are what the popular culture assumes them to be – irrelevant flights of fancy. Thanks to Freud we have many misconceptions about dreams. The eminent psychiatrist should have paid heed to his one-time colleague and adversary, Jung, to get a better grasp of dreams for they are part of our “collective unconscious” (although Jung’s conception seems equally abstract if you don’t follow his idea through to its conclusion).

What Freud missed is that we dream in retrospect about the future.

Say what? Yes, we dream what we haven’t yet lived through, yet it’s there because “everyone” has had a similar dream to ours and we’ve all lived through the same experiences (in our sleep consciousness, which is where Reality starts). A dream is based on our physical form, our appearance, our material surroundings, and even our material circumstances. All of which are the stuff of nightmares if you think about it too much.

Ever dream of being rich? Probably not, unless you feel yourself rich, or are otherwise satisfied emotionally (even if your net worth ain’t worth much). We dream our circumstance… we dream our “reality” to a great extent. When you do dream of being rich, or a feeling akin to what you imagine being rich feels like, then you’re doing well (even if your bank account disagrees with that assessment!). Either way, it’s a fleeting feeling.

Why? Because invariably, during our waking state, being rich feels just like being poor – it feels like shit – it feels like raw Fear!

And here’s another thing that’s true of dreams… Remember, we all dream the same things, mostly the same feelings… You may imagine it otherwise, and that’s fun for you, but while we’re asleep, we’re all in the astral plane together. The astral realm is one “made up” of Feelings. There’s nothing there beyond Feelings (and that includes everything in the universe that can be felt, so don’t think you’re being short-changed). Mostly, feelings of… yep, you go it—Fear… in one form or another (one degree of intensity or a lesser one, but it all adds up to the same thing).

Dreams may trigger neurosis, as the Freud believed (actually, the neurosis triggers the dream), but whatever does take place, believe me, no one dreams a surreal dream, ala Salvador Dalí, or anything like that.

Our dreams may be “weird” because they don’t fit right in with our daytime waking “logic,” but they’re never far-off enough to be “surrealist.” That’s a Hollywood convention (where Dalí worked in the 1940s) and fun to banter about at a cocktail party (do people still have cocktail parties anymore?).

Yeah, I can hear the complaints from here… people have their opinions and their a priori judgments and they’re hell bent on them – nothing will loosen their death grip on these stupid ideas…

That’s not so! I dreamed of a cat playing the sousaphone, or was it really an elephant?

No, you didn’t – unless your cat or elephant actually plays the sousaphone in a marching band during your waking day – you “saw” no such thing! Don’t recommend teaching your elephant an instrument – they already have a pretty big horn to play with as is!

How do you know? Didn’t I just tell you that we’re all asleep in the same place (a.k.a. the astral plane)? And, depending on what part of the Earth you’re sleeping there are quite a few people there with you, at the same time? Then why didn’t we all dream of your cat, or that same musical elephant? The answer is: because you only sensed it…

What happened is that you felt your cat or your elephant playing the sousaphone in your dream, but it wasn’t rendered that way to your inner eye (i.e., yourself watching inside your widescreen, HD home theater and entertainment center inside your head/heart/limbs). Actually, this “inner eye” stuff is overblown, since you dream with your limbs, mostly your hands, and if you’re a footballer, with your feet too.

In your actual dream, your cat, your dog, your elephant (if you have a big enough backyard for it), your mother, your friend, etc. was just as he, she, it was in your waking state, but your feelings made that person, animal, or thing, whatever you’ve imagined… and usually, that’s not something “purple” or exotic in any way, shape, or form. Your Feeling does color your dream world, but it doesn’t color your “pictures” of it, except when you recount your dreams. We simply lack the “art” and the organs to picture our feelings (at least, as precisely as we believe we dream them – since we dream them as a kind of hyper-reality).

So, what does it mean if you dream of your elephant playing a sousaphone? If you had dreamed of your wife, husband, mother or father, that way, we can get really Freudian. What does it really mean? Ahh… well, it means something to YOU, and here we enter in the multi-million-dollar industry of dream “interpretation,” Tarot reading, and other forms of charlatanism. It doesn’t mean anything, except what it made you feel, and whatever you can make out of that, which normally isn’t much since we dream through our feeling life and we aren’t ever either aware or very much in tune with our core feelings.

In my mind, the more important question should be: What does my dream reveal of what my inner feeling life is on about? (Forget about what’s being “externalized,” we need to get into our own hearts first!). The best we can say is that it’s your subconscious speaking to you. It’s telling you what’s up, as far as your being and that of the astral realm – a shorthand to your well-being, if you like. The subconscious (what we don’t remember) has its “economy” also, it wants production and disdains waste. Everything you’ve seen, heard, or sensed during your waking day, even things you haven’t actually paid attention to, will be presented back to you, as if upon a mirrored reflection (it’s not the mirror or the reflection, but something else...).

Really? Why? Because your ka-double is very much like a mirror reflecting light. Those are the images populating your dreams – feeling images they are and that’s why they’re difficult to interpret. Dreams, like the economy, has its own lingo in the form of pictures (or symbols, if you prefer). Although, if you pay close attention while you dream, you’ll also hear sounds, words, music, and whatever else pulls at your feelings, or your “heart strings,” should you have any. Like I said, by being “constrained” to the astral plane, to the reality of feelings only, if you will, you’re not being short-changed as far as the widest possible spectrum of experiences is concerned… (in fact, you’re only constrained in the material plane, since there’s a far broader range of experiences possible in the astral!).

We Awake To The World We Made While We Slept

As we awaken, we “build up” the world again, based on what’s been reflected back to us. Usually, it’s what’s been reflected back to us as part of a memory (the ka-double is what retains our memories). Reflections of light, form, movement, and time, as we left our body (khat) when we went to sleep the night before. The dreaming we do is the “glue” (or Lego set) that allows us to “rebuild” the world we’re coming back to inside our bodies the next morning. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to “reconstruct” the world each morning as we return to it… we’d have a different world each day. A world of our own making.

A world our feelings generate based on what we experienced during the night… Alas, that’s not to be in our present incarnation, in this particular age, because we can’t “bridge” the ka and the khat the way we could in the past in order to bring back the Feeling and Willing (acting we’ve done) in the sleeping state into normal, daytime waking consciousness. Why? Because we’re not conscious of it (what we did, felt, thought in the astral region) and therefore, we miss the opportunity to remake not only ourselves, but our entire material surroundings.

Whatever Freud believed dreams were, our Western culture has adapted itself to his way of thinking of it. Like him, we’ve narrowed our own powers into a lifeless, materialistic “manifestation” of things. Any wonder that what is hidden from us tends to take on a superstitious, dark tint? We live in the most superstitious times in all of human History because we don’t “see” anything when we look at things, since we’re looking at them as something we’ve hidden in our subconscious (or the unconscious, depending on the psychologist de jour). In other words, a kind of memory we’ve buried (according to novelists and psychiatrists – is there a difference?) for some ungodly reason (usually murder, incest, sexual abuse, or something worse, right?).

As a result, these “horrible” memories are somehow “gone” from our daily waking consciousness. We don’t want to go into our “inner feelings” and look around in there for them. Yet, there they lurk beneath the surface, waiting for us to fall asleep in order to haunt us once more. All well and good, while we can keep such feelings of fear “suppressed” – or vainly try to… and yet, nothing is hidden forever… and therein, I fear, lies the rub.

Happy dreams!