“The dreamer is like somebody who has

an enormous bank balance and

does not know it,

or who has lost the safe

key.” — M-L von Franz (p38).

DREAM-WORK.

One of the powers of dreams—their ability to trick our critical faculties—is facilitated by so-remarkable-as-to-be-rendered-unremarkable realism. But it is “thanks to their condensed and often exaggerated treatment of a theme,” that dreams may help us “become aware of cognitive distortions and schemas” and thereby may contribute to “cognitive restructuring” (Montenegro, 2009). Whether recognized at the time or not, in dreams we can battle Titanic forces and make it through in one piece, or, we can soar over alien landscapes and converse with sleep-beings. And in dreams, we do. Temenos is “the sacred space set apart either by circumambulation or by drawing a circle,” as described by Jung (von Franz, p82). Temenos is an asylum, a safety-net, “and within it one is asulos,” immune to attack. In dreams, even as the walls cave in, we are protected, alike the forcefield around my Golden Knight avatar. In dreams, we are free to try anything we can imagine to try, and we can rise again from the worst attack or fall, unscratched. However, as long as we do not recognize that we are in a position of incredible power in dreams, we will be blown to and fro by cyclonic winds, forever out of place.

So— how do we map the unmappable? Jung might have answered with: Amplification. This is how we can disambiguate Megaforms. And where does the energy come from for this Amplification? Us. It requires effort. It is not for the lottery scratchers. You have to work for it. And, what is Work? Consider the relationship between currency (money) and work. Money is an extension of praise for hard work. Without hard work, money obtained (though unearned) doesn’t bring with it the feeling of praise— which is what the money represents in the first place. You cannot skip the earned part and keep climbing on to higher levels of appreciating your own Self-worth. You can skip the earn part and be a liar, I suppose. But anyone who has actually been fire-tempered by their own Work will sniff you out.

Abraham Maslow described needs which are universal to each species. Unlike the typical direction of psychology theories, as they tend to focus on pathologies, “his radical approach to psychology" was "the analysis of healthy people...the heretical impulse to find out what is right with us” (Ardrey, p334). “Healthy,” has a price, and a “positive psychology” should not be mistaken for an “easy school” of thought. “Security will be sacrificed for either Stimulation or Identity...Human war, for example, has been the most successful of all our cultural traditions because it satisfies all three basic needs” (p335). Without developing a strong Individuated Self, people are easily led to war, or even into slavery, because: “Rank satisfies identity.” In war time and when the sky is falling, everyone wants reassurance that they still have a place and a purpose. But what about when you disagree with the masses, or, when there is no one around, when you are alone, or when solid ground gives-out? What is your identity when no one is looking...and nobody else can applaud or boo you? What stimulates you when all the basics are met— why haven't you stepped closer to this reality than you have hitherto? To know what our waking dream could be, we only need admit what it is we are most afraid of failing at. The simplest thing...is the hardest thing.

What is dream-Work? Every assemblage of quarks manifests a willful quality, and every group of like-minded lepton and gluon groupons in the soup are all cooperating or competing as they commingle, each to their own nature. The more complicated the forms in this world become, the richer and perhaps less predictable will be their nature and quality. "Man, as the most complete objectification of that will, is in like measure also the most necessitous of all beings: he is through and through concrete willing and needing; he is a concretion of a thousand necessities" (p253). Such a complex creature has to deal with the same truth as all simpler entities: The Cosmos are trying to rip us apart. Therefore, with man— as with all life capable to do so: "Self-maintenance is his first effort" (Schopenhauer, p273). In dreams, the servants who came with us do their maintenance.

“If we pay attention to our dreams, instead of living in a cold, impersonal world of meaningless chance, we may begin to emerge into a world of our own, full of important and secretly ordered events” (Jung, 1964, p221). Von Franz made it clear

though: Our dreams “are not as a rule primarily concerned with our adaptation to outer life.” The order-out-of-chaos that dreaming provides hardly appears as such to the waking mind.

CELLAR-DOOR. “The cellar, one can say, is the basement of the dreamer’s psyche” (Jung, 1964, p176). When that door is ajar “one is ‘open’ to other influences in one’s unconscious shadow side,” and this is when uncanny and alien elements can break in.” M-L von Franz found that “the most frequent way in which archetypal stories originate is through individual experiences of an invasion by some unconscious content, either in a dream or in a waking hallucination— some event or some mass hallucination” occurs and “becomes amplified by any other existing folklore” (von Franz, p24). “Although the inner order refuses to be schematized, we can nevertheless obtain hints of that order by observing that all the different tales circumambulate one and the same content— the Self” (p197).

THE PROCESS OF INDIVIDUATION. M-L von Franz wrote that “the organizing center from which the regulatory effect stems seems to be a sort of ‘nuclear atom’ in our psychic system. One could call it the inventor, organizer, and source of our dreams. Jung called this center the ‘Self’ and described it as the totality of the whole psyche”— distinguishing it from the “ego” (Jung, 1964, p162). The Self was what the Greeks called “man’s inner daimon; in Egypt it was expressed by the concept of the Ba-soul; and the Romans worshiped it as the ‘genius’ native to each individual. In more primitive societies it was often thought of as a protective spirit embodied within an animal or a fetish.”

A PERTURBATION IN THE FIELD. Bucky Fuller said the Vector Equilibrium (VE) "represents the ultimate and perfect condition wherein the movement of energy comes to a state of absolute equilibrium, and therefore absolute stillness and nothingness.” Fuller said this is the zero-phase from which all other forms emerge, as well as all dynamic energy events. When the Field is somehow perturbed, when the “Laws” of physics are called to order, we experience forms.

And which principles these laws should conform to were decided long before we could test their tenacity. “Most of the basic concepts of physics (such as space, time, matter, energy, continuum or field, particle, etc.) were originally intuitive semi-mythological, archetypal ideas of the old Greek philosophers” (Jung, 1964, p380). Leucippus and Democritus came up with the “atom,” the Stoics gave us tonos—the “life-giving ‘tension’” that “supports and moves all things...a semi- mythological germ of our modern concept of energy.” These are all the fluxing energy waves disturbing Bucky’s zero-phase vector-field matrix. Have we been discovering what is out there, or have we been unearthing our own role as part of

nature? Werner Heisenberg said that when we examine the natural universe, instead of discovering disconnected objects “man encounters himself” (p381).

MANDALA EFFECT. Von Franz explained that “Jung used the Hindu word mandala (magic circle) to designate” the Self or “the Great Man,” a quartered- circle (or circley-square) “which is symbolic of the ‘nuclear atom’ of the human psyche—whose essence we do not know” (Jung, 1964, p230). Round represents wholeness (and a boundary between Self and not) and “quadrangular formation represents realization of this in consciousness,” as in the Cartesian earth-bound- categorization-schemes we impose on the chaos from out-there (234). In myth we see the roundness in his famous knightly table, “which itself is an image derived from the table of the Last Supper” (pre-DaVinci). In Christian paintings the Holy Ghost is usually depicted “by a fiery wheel” (p248).

“A number of medieval cities were founded on the ground plan of a mandala and were surrounded by an approximately circular wall. In such a city, as in Rome, two main arteries divided it into ‘quarters’ and led to the four gates. The church or cathedral stood at the point of intersection” (Jung, 1964, p272). And though the cross has become prominent, “Up to the Carolingian times, the equilateral or Greek cross was the usual form,” directly implying the mandala design (p273).

JUNG-JITSU. When Carl Gustav was a boy, he was viewed as awkward, an outsider. He was bullied. (How many great minds were forged with the help of high-school ostracization?) When puberty struck, the young Jung sprouted up, and faster than the other kids did. With his trademark hyper-passion, and no inclination to play the victim, a tall Jung had no reason to back down from aggressors. He seemed fond of a memory—retold in his books and interviews—of one such rumble...

Carl, although now craftier than the other kids and also physically bigger, they still came at him— some things just have to be learned the hard way. Rather than take these little thugs on one at a time, Jung got a hold of one boy’s ankles. Next thing this boy knew, he was spinning through the air—extended from a nucleus shaped like Carl—and filling the role of a human baton. Swinging the one boy, a whole gang was wiped out in one revolution. Brutal. Awesome. True? I’d do it. But it’s an epic short story, regardless. When I told this to my wife, she said, “Oh, that’s Jung Jitsu.” (We’re both fight fans.) I like to think of this sort of imagery when everything is set up around you, and with one swing everything gets knocked into place. (In reality, if you see a clean Jung Jitsu maneuver—pulled-off successfully—it may appear like wild survival in action, but chances are what you’d be looking at is the end result of a long-prepared for and practiced performance.)

ACTUALLY. The psychology systems which matured and propagated forth from the will of Freud were based on deficiencies, pathologies, and psychic conflict. As much as we can learn from a broken mind, I was always more interested in learning how a decent mind can rise to ever greater heights. My interest was predated by, among others, Abraham Maslow—best remembered for his Hierarchy of Needs—who believed that humans have innate goals, and that the preponderance of psychopathologies result when our basic needs are not satisfied (1962). When our basic goals—our “inner-nature”—are suppressed, a person “gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle,” and if this blocked objective leads to behaviors that “we call evil,” this is, according to Maslow, likely a “reaction to frustration” and not evidence for humans being essentially bad (or good) (p3).

The greatest gift you can give the world is to be an example. Better yet, be an exemplar— the prototype of possibility. “We can now reject, as a localism, the almost universal mistake that the interests of the individual and of society are of a necessity mutually exclusive and antagonistic” (Maslow, p150). Man does not learn how to become human. Man is not merely “molded...the role of the environment is ultimately to permit him or help him to actualize his own potentialities, not its potentialities. The environment does not give him potentialities and capacities; he has them in inchoate or embryonic form, just as exactly as he has embryonic arms and legs” (p152). As such, the world “permits, or fosters, or encourages or helps what exists in embryo to become real and actual...the culture is sun and food and water: It is not the seed.”

Maslow’s Self-actualized person, simply put, has developed an inner-culture that is consistently capable of exploiting their full potential. Knowing and coming to terms with one’s drives may be the only road to unlocking all of that energy we have trapped under the repressed recesses of the mind. Carl Rogers preferred to call such a soul a “fully functioning person,” others have labeled them as a “genuinely sane person” (Hayakawa).

Maslow generalized the characteristics of what he called Self-Actualized people, claiming they were endowed with a “superior perception of reality,” and “increased autonomy, and resistance to enculturation,” while enjoying a “higher frequency of peak experiences” (p24-25). In a half-serious way, Maslow compared the Self-actualized person to “a self-accepting and insightful neurotic...accepting the human situation” and “being amused by the ‘shortcomings’ of human nature instead of trying to deny them” (p109). “Evolved personalities”—the Actualized— operate from what Maslow called B-cognition: “B” for Being. B-cognition is an ability to apprehend the “intrinsic structure and dynamics, and presently existing potentialities of something or someone or everything” (p110). (Bucky Fuller used to refer to himself as Guinea Pig B, viewing himself as his own experimental subject— surely employing in that role something akin to this B-cognition.) B- cognition is in contrast to the default state of humanity, D-cognition: deficiency- need-motivation. It is important not to miss Maslow’s attempt to frame B- and D- cognitions as supporting one another (although, he repeated frequently that most people do not operate from a place of B-cognitive ability). Yet, “it is only when the cognition shifts over to D-cognition that action, decision, judgment, punishment, condemnation, planning for the future becomes possible” (p111). This means that the struggle and the sweat and tears are a “‘necessary’ epiphenomena of self-actualization. It means that self-actualization involves both contemplation and action necessarily.”

Maslow framed humans as being goal-oriented, from the get-go, rather than merely reactive to circumstance (this is similar to B. Disraeli’s line: “Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men”). “Self- actualizing people,” according to Abraham, “have come to a high level of maturation, health, and self-fulfillment, have so much to teach us that they seem almost like a different breed of human” (p67).

Maslow wrote that people live constantly “trying to get there rather than being there” (p69). The “peak-experiences,” AKA “the mystic, or oceanic, or nature experience, the aesthetic perception, the creative moment,” all involve Being cognition, a “fascination or complete absorption...the figure becomes all figure andtheground,ineffect,disappears”(p70). Itis“asifthepercepthadbecomefor the moment the whole being.” The peak-experience is described as “self- validating...an end in itself” (p74). How can we experience the mind-state of a Self-actualized person?

Maslow wrote that “any person” immersed in a peak-experience temporarily takes on “many of the characteristics” which he had “found in self-actualized individuals” (p91). Among the signs of “peaking:” the person is “fully functioning,” and “feels more intelligent, more perceptive, wittier, stronger...at his best, at concert pitch” (p99). And this is important: When in peak-mode, the glorious abilities are “not only felt subjectively but can be seen by the observer.” Even peeking in, the person in flow “looks more trustworthy, more reliable, more

dependable, a better bet” (p101). “Now there is no waste; the totality of the capacities can be used for action,” and when in this flow, one “becomes like a river without dams” (p100). When peaking we feel, “more than at other times, to be the responsible, active, creating center” of our perceptions and behaviors. Master of one’s fate. Good to know, because peak-experiences are not only self-validating whilst occurring, they are valuable just ‘cause. We may also desire...

“THE AFTEREFFECTS OF PEAK-EXPERIENCES” (Maslow, p95). “If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Ay! and what then?” (Schneider, p477). Do you think you are ready for that? Something like this would change everything for you.

Seemingly trapped within “the physical and psychological tensions and perseverations of incompleteness” (Maslow, p105), mankind’s “normal” state of affairs is to scurry about in a never-ending effort to stick a finger in every hole in every dyke to stall the inevitable: The dam will burst, eventually. Maslow told of a “puzzling finding that many people report their peak-experience as if they were somehow akin to (beautiful) death, as if the most poignant living had a paradoxical something of eager or willing dying in it, too” (p105). First thought is of some relation here to Freud’s “death-wish,” or death-drive, the eternal counter-weight to the will-to-live. After more reflection, it appears that Maslow is giving a purposeful, useful function to this apparently inherent “death” drive, embedded within our being en masse and also within the peak-experience. The purpose of this, perhaps, has more to do with a yearning to be challenged near our threshold of capabilities than it has to do with an actual desire to disappear into oblivion. Working at the edge between what is possible and what would rip us apart, is so attractive, maybe, because of the promises embedded in challenging victories. Not knowing if we will win, but feeling ready to give it a go, is thrilling. We want the trial, the battle. We want an informed gamble. We would really like to, eventually, dominate or feel competent and connected to this whole gamut.

Play the Game of games and win, knowing that losing is horrible, and yet, not participating is the worst of all things (hint: there is only one way to win, and not playing guarantees you don’t find it). Buddha taught in his Four Noble Truths that, first of all, life is dukkham, typically translated as suffering, or more elemental, simply as “pain.” Supposedly, this pain is felt when a sentient being tries to hold onto transient phenomena as if these should be eternal. Don’t fret, Truths two and three—samudayo and nirodho—tell us where this pain comes from, and the Fourth Truth, magga, is the path to cessation of suffering. In effect, magga is the Tao, the Way, the road of salvation.

I’m not sure that the fundamental aspect of our nature is “pain.” And I think the whole “cessation from suffering” bit would have been constructed differently had it not been for the Buddha’s enculturated belief in samsara—the “wheel of life”

with its seven kingdoms—and supposition that this harsh reality cannot be evaded even by way of “regular” death.

Is life another window, or a cellar-door, into an after-aether of what’s come before? Maybe. But perhaps that is a trap, a snare, and the urgency we should feel—because of the impending Nothing—is suppressed by hopes and wishes for an existence we have not fully earned. Tick-tock, can you hear it? Is this a “simulation,” or is this Hell now and later, or is Heaven awaiting with vindication, or does something else better paint our picture? What if the pain was the salvation? Not in some horror-show pain, a mutilation imposed by an external force like the Jigsaw Killer or a Hitler or Jack the Ripper. Not in a self-flagellated attack-on- one’s-guilt kind of pain. I’m talking about the “good” hurt; I’m talking about something like the difference between maximum muscle-growth-triggering reps, from those jerking motions which tear ligament from bone. The pain of intentional sacrifice activates our superordinate goals, which target all of our will and resources into a singular, indomitable focus. What’s that? But, but, life is so heavy. So hard!

How do you solve a problem, a quandary that eludes all allusions to solution? Maslow pointed out: “One way of solving a problem is to be amused by it” (p106). By countering the healthy fear that a grand task or obstacle presents to us—by viewing it as a game, or as a level in a game—we access more creative insight. When angry and scared we become overly engrossed in myopic, and often unimportant, side-events. What we would prefer is to have a strong grasp on the realities of our environment, including the dangers, while simultaneously maintaining an almost dream-like hyper-connectivity among the contents in our mental catalogue. In a psychologically ill person, such waking hyper-connectivity may be contraindicated because the person is full of incompatible motivations, perhaps in relation to both the outer-world and to “themselves.” If all of these contradictory directives activated at once, we would have a mess. However, the person with a clear perception of both the opinions of others and a well-integrated image of who they Really are can benefit greatly by the hyper-connective flow of peaking. And every time you get a peek in, you are reminded that all that “pain” stuff is what is really temporary. So, let the muses move you.

By being amused, rather than horrified or indifferent to the challenges we will face (or turn our back to), we can be both inquisitive as a child-scientist (Piaget’s term for children’s natural approach to thought), and realistic as a war-forged soldier. We can “be at the same time Don Quixote and Sancho Panza” (Maslow, p106). Richard Feynman told of how he learned to reconnect with his passion.

Physics had begun to disgust Feynman a little, and he thought of how he used to “enjoy doing physics...to play with it” (p173). When there was no undue importance placed on the objective, Feynman would become obsessed in finding answers to puzzles— what was key was “whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.” For instance, Feynman was in a cafeteria at Cornell once and

saw a guy playing around and tossing a plate up into the air. Noticing a ratio- relationship between “the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around” and the wobbling-action, Feynman got to calculating the rotational motion, and through a chain of transformations came to a formula which explained the phenomenon in terms of particle motion. When telling a friend what he found, he was met with: “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?” (p174). Richard said: “Hah! There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” Not discouraged by the world’s reactions, Feynman went on working with these wobble equations. He considered what the theory of relativity, the Dirac Equation, and quantum electrodynamics would say about the particles. “I was ‘playing’—working, really—with the same problem that I loved so much,” the one he had begun working on before his days at Los Alamos. “It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly.” Although it appeared as if there was no real importance for this work, it was fulfilling in itself, in its pursuit. And ultimately, “the diagrams and the whole business” that got Feynman the Nobel prize “came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.” An amused and curious mind not only looks for the Good Life, but also acts as a torch, illuminating the path ahead. Do you want to know the world?

BRING A LIGHT. Oliver Sacks wrote: "Autobiographical memories are not isolated—they are embedded in the context of an entire life, given a broad and deep context and perspective—and they can be revised in relation to different contexts and perspectives" (2012, p242). Far less mutable than regular memories, though, are those which are burned-in during traumatic life events, PTS-Daemons scorched into mind for replay "in all their fearfulness and horror, all their sensorimotor vividness and concreteness," seemingly "preserved in a different form of memory, isolated and unintegrated" (p243). A primary focus of psychotherapy is to expose the macabre, shadowy world of these frozen memories to "the light of full consciousness, to reintegrate them with autobiographic memory." Dark and automatic replays can run the show, each with their own conflicting agenda. Or, you can work to get everything bright and willing in the same direction.

WAKING DREAM WORK. Sacks wrote about a "hypnopompic state of heightened musical sensibility," which he noticed almost any time he was woken by radio alarm clock (p213). Sacks felt delighted by any music he heard immediately upon waking, with the capability, for instance, to hear every instrument in a Mozart quintet even though his "normal musical memory and imagery" were admittedly not very strong.

Spoken language and visual imagery tend to mutate and morph rapidly in dreams, but it has long been noticed that music is typically unaltered in dreams,

maintaining fidelity regardless of what is happening in the dream environment (Massey). Music overrides or subordinates words if the two are combined. It may be that regular language is so impoverished in dreams while music maintains a robust integrity because of the right-brain dominance during REM.

GUILT. Autoscopy comes from an Old Greek word meaning “watcher,” and in autoscopic conditions a person has the experience that they are perceiving the environment from outside of their body. Heautoscopy is “an extremely rare form of autoscopy” in which a person interacts with their “double...occasionally amiable but more often hostile" (Sacks, p265). Not only are you seeing the world as if from outside of your body, and as from another body— but that body is threatening your original body, except...“there may be deep bewilderment as to who is the 'original' and who is the 'double.'" Edgar Allan Poe's The Story of William Wilson (1839) is an example of another doppelgänger, this one as the projection of an intolerably guilty conscience.

There was a boy whose name rhymes with William Wilson. His parents were “weak in body and mind,” and although they had as busy minds as he did, his grew so powerful that they were unable to manage him, even from an early age. The boy-who-rhymed-with-William became the ruling voice in his house and would try to rule over his fellow schoolchildren. One day he meets someone in school who dresses like him and even had the same birthday, and this boy was actually named William Wilson. The only difference was that this copy-cat had a quiet voice, and he alone was unwilling to be ruled-over by rhymes-with-Will. This William seemed to care about Rhymes-With, but the more he tried to guide him to do the right things, the more irked and resentful he became. As the years went on, their paths remained parallel, William always admonishing the other for cheating someone or doing some wrong, until, Rhymes-With grabs W.W. one night— “Always you again!” Will is dragged into a room, the door is shut, and Rhymes- With slams him against a wall. And stabs a blade into his heart. Hearing someone at the door he rushes to makes sure it’s secure, but when he turns around and looks into the room all he sees is “a large mirror—a looking glass—or so it seemed...now stood where it had not been before,” and the boy was covered in his own blood. The dying boy tells himself: “In my death—see by this face, which is your own, how wholly, how completely, you have killed—yourself!”

From a Cognitive Behavioral perspective—the school of psychotherapy seemingly most removed from psychoanalysis—it is assumed that if a person’s actions in their “dreams are not in keeping with their schemas, they may experience dissonance or awake feeling guilty about what they ‘did’ in the dream” (Rosner, p79). But what if the schemas in dreaming—the typical flora and fauna—are not in accord with civilized life as we know it? Does this automatically add to our shame?

Guilt is a heavy bag of bricks, and it’s not so easy to drop the sack, not when we inherit other people’s guilt or yoke on our own— even before we are cognitively developed enough to appreciate the nuances and complexities of life. Your guilty conscience can tear you apart—stab you in the heart, even—or, it can serve as a compass, a needle pointing away from what not to do. Yes, we have all done wrong— even in our own eyes. The question is: Have we learned to do better, and are we doing it? How about in our dream worlds; are we being stand-up rulers over our dominions, or are we dictating mediocre and dishonorable short terror- story territories?

WE ALREADY KNOW HOW IT ENDS. IT IS NOT OVER YET. After Feynman left Los Alamos and began teaching at Cornell in New York, he would sit in restaurants and look out the window at all of the buildings, and people, constructing bridges or roads, and he would think to himself “they’re crazy, they just don’t understand. Why are they making new things? It’s so useless?” (p136). Just like Feynman realized when pondering on this decades later, “it’s been useless” for a long time now and thank the Almighty for that. Dag nabit! Stop crying out there. Stop running from every challenge. And play more! Take responsibility for your own dream. I am not the first to say it, but it’s like most of these guys out there have never taken a good punch on the chin. Kick to the ribs. I’m not talking anything debilitating, just saying, we are killing ourselves trying to Nerf our children. The way we try to bubble-wrap ourselves. The way we give up and give in so quick. This dream, so it tells me, has been cycling for billions of years. Maybe you can add even more zeros onto that. Do you really think none of this matters?

One day, Feynman gets back to his teaching gig and stops at the Dean’s office, to drop something off on his way to class. Seeing that Feynman had a black eye, the Dean joked: “Oh, Mr. Feynman! Don’t tell me you got that walking into a door?” No, “Not at all. I got it in a fight in the men’s room of a bar in Buffalo” (p179). Feynman then went to give his lecture to his class. “When I was ready to start, I lifted my head and looked straight at them, and said what I always said before I began my lecture—but this time, in a tougher voice: ‘Any questions?’”

“In therapy the problem is always the whole person, never the symptoms alone.” — Jung (1963, p117)

In 1971, Aaron Beck published Cognitive Patterns in Dreams and Daydreams in a psychoanalytic journal, a rarely cited article from a man who would develop the antipodal approach to psychoanalysis— Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Beck had inherited from mentors a quantitative approach to studying manifest

dream content, and unlike most analysts who used singular case studies to draw general insights, Beck became “proficient in large-sample experimental science” (Rosner, p10).

In 1967 Beck had re-examined the data from a large 1962 NIMH project, and decided that the initial results didn’t support the psychoanalytic “hostility hypothesis,” as had been claimed (Rosner, p14). The hostility hypothesis held that depressed people dream about hurting themselves because their hostility has been “inverted”— they “wish to suffer.” Masochists of the night. To the contrary, Beck felt that the manifest thematic content was absent of any such wishes. He came to believe that “wishes” could not be empirically validated, and, they didn’t appear to be there, anyway. This led to a domino collapse of drive theory and then defense mechanisms in Beck’s mind, so he went his own way, and after 1971 did not focus much on dreaming. However, his students would eventually spiral back around to dreams, out of necessity.

Rather than interpret the secret meaning of patients’ dreams or attempt to unearth hidden memories, Beck developed a method whereby his clients would identify “automatic thoughts,” or cognitive distortions, which they felt were maladaptive to their goals. Then, with the therapist’s help they would come up with strategies to objectively test these beliefs— against the mirror of reality. Clients were encouraged to reinterpret their beliefs based on the results of this testing, taking safe baby-steps along the way. Using this process, they may form new “theories.” The idea was to poke—carefully—at the fabric. Beck called this “reality testing.” From a Beckian perspective, a therapist might be "less interested in the dream images as in challenging the faulty assumptions embedded within them” (Rosner, p185). Reality testing remains a core principle in Cognitive- Behavioral therapies.

In Cognitive Patterns, Beck said that dreams were the cousins of automatic thoughts, both part of the “irrational thoughts” clan. The pressures of waking reality might “put the irrational content of waking fantasies...in check,” but in dreams “external input is withdrawn,” and so these become visible in a “kind of biopsy of the patient’s psychological processes” (Rosner, p16). Still, Beck saw no psychic function in dreams and disavowed classical interpretation. In his cognitive view, dream material is unique to the dreamer, so any symbolic system saying an image universally means this or that is faulty. Regardless of Beck’s conclusions on dreaming, as therapists dealing with real people in the real world, his heirs noticed that, with no training in dream-issues, they were desperately inadequate in dealing with any that would—and did—arise.

Therapists have noted that quality is consistently and significantly higher-rated “in dream interpretation sessions than in regular therapist sessions” (Hill, 1993; Rosner, p34). This can make the client-therapist relationship feel warmer, which can facilitate trust and honesty in sessions, creating a virtuous loop. Cognitive therapists rate themselves as “very likely to work on dreams when clients presented

troubling dreams” as long as said client did not also have a diagnosed condition such as PTSD, feeling inadequate to safely deal with dreams when the stakes appeared high (because they lacked the appropriate training). Maybe we all feel this inadequacy, to some extent.

Arthur Freeman and Beverly White recommended a number of guidelines for working with dreams from the cognitive perspective. “The dream needs to be understood in thematic rather than symbolic terms” (Rosner, p79). Also, “The dream is a product of, and responsibility of, the dreamer;” and “Dream content and images are amenable to the same cognitive restructuring as are automatic thoughts.” When working from this approach, the intent of the therapist—or shaman or guide—is to help the dreamer to “develop skill at restructuring” maladaptive or distressing dream content into “more functional and adaptive images,” treating the relationship to dreaming like a “pilot in a simulator” (p80). Freeman and White also recommended trying to pull a moral lesson from troubling dreams or identify typical patterns of behavior (which will likely occur again and could then be addressed).

Image rehearsal therapy (IRT) was developed by cognitive therapist Barry Krakow primarily as a treatment for chronic nightmares, but the idea has always been around. Krakow wondered if the success he saw with clients when using an IRT approach was, in part, the result of dreamers reconnecting “with the natural human capacity to change imagery in the mind’s eye, beyond any specific changes in the content within the new dreams.” Maybe one in twelve people suffer from chronic nightmares (Neilsen, 2000), but whenever Krakow would ask these rare birds where they learned whatever coping techniques they may have for dealing with their nightmares, the response would almost always be “my mother or father,” or whomever, “‘told me to change my dream by’ (fill in the blank)” (Rosner, p94).

IRT is simply a conscious restructuring of previous dream narratives, with the intent to have new scripts to follow—on the ready—should a similar dream occur again. Before applying IRT to nightmares, it is important to first learn how to activate “the imagery system in a specific way to take control” of one’s nightmares (p96). As a four-part plan, IRT looks like this: 1., Choose a somewhat disturbing dream, but one that is not too overwhelming (baby steps); 2., Make whatever changes to this nightmare you wish; 3., Practice the changes whenever you’d like, for a few minutes every day; and 4., Work with one dream at a time, perhaps no more than one per week (remember the Fifth Rule in Fight Club [1999]— “One fight at a time, fellas”).

Krakow did not see in PTS-Dreams any semblance to the weaving-in function championed by Hartmann (1999b). Post-traumatic nightmares “are sometimes more grisly” than the waking events they echo, and rather than act as an opportunity for diffusing negative experiences—by thatching these dark memories into our totality—the repetitive dreams that follow trauma (sometimes for life) may

“constitute a form of ‘retraumatization’ that clearly serves no useful purpose” (Rosner, p100). It is up to us to repurpose our darker daemons into illuminating angels.

LISTENING TO YOURSELF. Experiential psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin concentrated his work on the idea of focusing, described by him as “a method of methods” (Rosner, p138). Focusing is a way to get in touch with “a special kind of internal bodily awareness...The body carries a sense of some situation, problem, or aspect of one’s life, felt as a whole complexity, a multiplicity implicit in a single sense” (p139). By interacting and working with dream symbols and images the “felt experience” can be shifted around, and even resolved, in the case of negative dream residue. The dreamer needs to access their “inner therapist,” and learn to lean into the messy uncomfortable parts. And learn to wait there for a while.

Gendlin came up with a multi-step process for focusing. First, clear a space. Sort out the problems actively vying for conscious attention, anything pulling on your strings lately. If the peanut gallery won’t quiet down, just have them remain in the back and close a curtain on them for the time being, knowing they will be waiting for you later. Create some distance from all those worries you cannot deal with at this moment, maybe write them down on a list and put the list in another room (don’t worry little worry, I won’t forget you). Next, get a “felt sense” of how the body feels when thinking about a specific dream (or any issue, actually.) Some people “do not know the body as an internal authority; they look for meaning ‘outside,’” and it is important to forget about what you think you are supposed to feel and actually tune-in to what is really being experienced in the body (p140). The aim when identifying the felt sense is not to melt away into relaxation—if relaxed too deeply “the body no longer ‘talks back’” (p141). Stay alert and listen, feel. Once space has been made and a felt sense has been achieved, there is the asking of questions phase, always including: “What comes to you in relation to the dream?” (p149). Other possible open-ended questions used by Gendlin include: “What does it remind you of? Where have you been in a place like that? What place felt like that?” Gendlin recommended working with dream characters by stepping into their different roles. How would you act as this or that character? “How would you stand or sit? Don’t decide. Let your body do it of its own accord. Exaggerate it. Wait and see what words or moves comes from the body feel.” Ask questions about symbols and analogies: “‘What is that kind of thing anyway?’ What is it used for? Say the obvious...Then substitute that into the story of the dream” (p151). Consider developmental dimensions, such as “What childhood memory might come in relation to the dream” or “In your childhood, what had this feel-quality from the dream” (p154).

All of the questions used with focusing are intended to help explore a felt sense of how the body experiences previously ignored corners, noticing where there may be trapped or stagnant energy and where energy seems to flow from or move when

light is shined there. Exercising “Bias Control” is Gendlin’s answer to habitual thinking when working with one’s dream material: “‘Bias is understood as the way someone would react usually. Bias Control consists of considering an interpretation opposite to one’s usual ways of thinking” (p154). This can lead to discovering new areas of growth, recognizing things once assumed abhorrent or that you were indifferent to as useful, or, worst-case, as just another one of those things we all have to deal with on occasion.

The Hill Model of Dream Interpretation. Clara Hill blended “humanistic/experiential, gestalt, psychoanalytic, cognitive, and behavioral theories” into her own Cognitive-Experiential Model for working with dreams (Rosner, p161). Psycho-therapeutic work is intended to “access existing cognitive schemas and reorganize them to make them more adaptive and functional” (p162). Hill’s model is a three-parter: Exploration, Insight, and Action. Write down or recall a dream “in the first-person present tense” as if it were happening right now, because this increases a feeling of immersion (p163). Then, consider the dream from different angles and on different levels. “The dream can be understood in terms of waking life” concerns, or “the dream can be interpreted in terms of parts of the self,” such as characters or locations or events acting as analogies for parts of your own psychology or your health, or your situations. Other possible sources of insight can come from considering the dream “as an experience in and of itself” or “in terms of spiritual issues” or as metaphors for interpersonal relationships (p169).

Hill found that in therapy her clients reported significantly greater insight gains from thinking about associations between dream elements and waking life than frommerelydescribingtheirdreams,thoughshe acknowledgedthat“itisdoubtful that the ‘true’ meaning ever is attained,” instead, “it is more appropriate to think about the value of the dream interpretation,” whether it “sparks an ‘aha,’ provides a sense of newness and satisfaction” (p170). Once insight is attained, the purpose of stage-three in Hill’s model is to develop action plans. What changes would you like to make, specifically?

“I had always been impressed by the fact

that there are a surprising number of individuals

who never use their minds if they can avoid it,

and an equal number who do use their minds,

but in an amazingly stupid way.” — Jung (1964, p48)

PRIMARY vs. SECONDARY PROCESSES. First-order drives are Freud’s “id and libidinal drives”—the primary processes—and the Second-order refers to the “reality-testing functions of the ego” (Rosner, p184). Beck re-forged Freud’s primary drives into a primitive-irrational “mode of interpreting stimuli,” and the secondary process into a “secondary” mode capable of mature and rational interpretive abilities (Beck, 1970). “The goal is to reshape the cognitive mechanism that evaluates irrational and primitive thoughts, rather than to change the mechanism that generates automatic thoughts in the first place” (Rosner, p185). It’s all in the interpretation. Then again, the interpretation relies on the quality of the story— itself determined by who’s orating. And who’s listening…