DREAMWALKING
Prepared for
Journal of Exceptional Experiences & Psychology (JEEP)
Sub. March 31, 2017, for Summer 2017
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Jung wrote, “The hero who overcomes the dragon brings into existence again all the ancestors, crops, and even whole nations that have been eaten by time.” Paqos believe that when negative energy (hoocha) from past trauma creating blockage in the luminous body is released, clearing is done for our ancestors as well as for our children. --Deborah Bryon, Ph.D., The Function of the Objective Psyche in Psychoanalysis in Relation to Time
https://irsja.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Deborah-Bryon-The-Function-of-the-Objective-Psyche-in-Psychoanalysis-in-Relation-to-Time-2.pdf
Prepared for
Journal of Exceptional Experiences & Psychology (JEEP)
Sub. March 31, 2017, for Summer 2017
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Jung wrote, “The hero who overcomes the dragon brings into existence again all the ancestors, crops, and even whole nations that have been eaten by time.” Paqos believe that when negative energy (hoocha) from past trauma creating blockage in the luminous body is released, clearing is done for our ancestors as well as for our children. --Deborah Bryon, Ph.D., The Function of the Objective Psyche in Psychoanalysis in Relation to Time
https://irsja.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Deborah-Bryon-The-Function-of-the-Objective-Psyche-in-Psychoanalysis-in-Relation-to-Time-2.pdf
Iona Miller is a clinical hypnotherapist in the USA who has worked in parapaychology and dreamwork since the 1970s. She consulted many years with Mankind Research Unlimited (Washington D.C.), Life Energies Research Institute (Miami), and pioneered Dreamhealing at Asklepia Foundation (So. Oregon) with Dr. Stanley Krippner. She serves on the Advisory Boards of Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, DNA Decipher Journal, and Scientific God Journal, and has appeared in Journal of Nonlocality. She writes on Archetypal Psychology, transpersonal studies, transgenerational integration, and genetic genealogy. http://ionamiller.weebly.com/
DREAMWALKING
Spontaneous Anomalous Appearances
in Dreams & Unconscious Psi
By Iona Miller, ©2017
"This is the secret of dreams—that we do not dream, but rather we are dreamt.
We are the object of the dream, not its maker." ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams, Page 159.
"A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood, it becomes a living experience." ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 252
"...the myth is not purely subjective. The Myth is real in the intersubjectivity. That's why the myth is that only for those who believe in it. For others it is a fairy tale." --Raimon Panikkar
Speaking of the foolishness of the wise, he [Jung] said one must always recognize it but one does not know what a dream means, especially one's own dream.
~E Harding, Conversations with Jung, Page 15
"What is going on in the dream is a psychic reality--the individuation process--that can happen to everyone. The process is very similar to the one in Plato's Timaeus."~Wolfgang Pauli, Atom and Archetype, Page 108
"Since we do not know everything, practically every experience, fact, or object contains something unknown." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 68
"One must allow one's own foolishness, for Nature is naive; there is always the joke, the just-so." ~Carl Jung, E Harding, Conversations with Jung, Page 17
"Nature is just what we do not know."
~ Carl Jung, E Harding, Conversations with Jung, Page 17
"The real life of knowledge and understanding is played out on the
borderline between the ascertainable and the nonascertainable."
~Carl Jung, Atom and Archetype, Pages 111-117
"A wrong functioning of the psyche can do much to injure the body, just as conversely a bodily illness can affect the psyche; for psyche and body are not separate entities, but one and the same life." ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 115
"What Jungians call the “Collective Unconscious” and physicists call “matter” in alchemy were always one – the Psyche." ~Marie Louise von Franz.
Again, no psychological fact can ever be exhaustively explained in terms of causality alone; as a living phenomenon, it is always indissolubly bound up with the continuity of the vital process, so that it is not only something evolved but also continually evolving and creative. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 718
"The pictures arise quite spontaneously, and from two sources. One source is the unconscious, which spontaneously produces fantasies of this kind; the other is life, which, if lived with utter devotion, brings an intuition of the Self, of one’s own individual being." "When the Self finds expression in such drawings, the unconscious reacts by enforcing an attitude of devotion to life." ~C.G. Jung, Commentary on the Secret of the Golden Flower, para.36
"It's our job to find that meaning that every time allows us to continue to live, or if you prefer, to respond, every step, our path. We are all called upon to carry out our lives as best we can ". --C.G.Jung
"These opposites, light and darkness, hot and cold, etc.. , are psychological facts projected into the world, when we perceive the difference we make the contrast and project the attributes we have established.
We desire and ponder, for instance, and these two opposites cause a moral conflict. Such a conflict is, however, indispensable or we should remain entirely passive. It is the opposites which are the impetus of our activity, all stimulating moments are moments of conflict." --Jung, ETH Lecture VI, Pages 125 -131.
Now, since the psychic process, like any other life-process, is not just a causal sequence, but is also a process with a teleological orientation, we might expect dreams to give us certain indicia about the objective causality as well as about the objective tendencies, because they are nothing less than self-portraits of the psychic life-process. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 210
It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 757
Spontaneous Anomalous Appearances
in Dreams & Unconscious Psi
By Iona Miller, ©2017
"This is the secret of dreams—that we do not dream, but rather we are dreamt.
We are the object of the dream, not its maker." ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams, Page 159.
"A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood, it becomes a living experience." ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 252
"...the myth is not purely subjective. The Myth is real in the intersubjectivity. That's why the myth is that only for those who believe in it. For others it is a fairy tale." --Raimon Panikkar
Speaking of the foolishness of the wise, he [Jung] said one must always recognize it but one does not know what a dream means, especially one's own dream.
~E Harding, Conversations with Jung, Page 15
"What is going on in the dream is a psychic reality--the individuation process--that can happen to everyone. The process is very similar to the one in Plato's Timaeus."~Wolfgang Pauli, Atom and Archetype, Page 108
"Since we do not know everything, practically every experience, fact, or object contains something unknown." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 68
"One must allow one's own foolishness, for Nature is naive; there is always the joke, the just-so." ~Carl Jung, E Harding, Conversations with Jung, Page 17
"Nature is just what we do not know."
~ Carl Jung, E Harding, Conversations with Jung, Page 17
"The real life of knowledge and understanding is played out on the
borderline between the ascertainable and the nonascertainable."
~Carl Jung, Atom and Archetype, Pages 111-117
"A wrong functioning of the psyche can do much to injure the body, just as conversely a bodily illness can affect the psyche; for psyche and body are not separate entities, but one and the same life." ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 115
"What Jungians call the “Collective Unconscious” and physicists call “matter” in alchemy were always one – the Psyche." ~Marie Louise von Franz.
Again, no psychological fact can ever be exhaustively explained in terms of causality alone; as a living phenomenon, it is always indissolubly bound up with the continuity of the vital process, so that it is not only something evolved but also continually evolving and creative. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 718
"The pictures arise quite spontaneously, and from two sources. One source is the unconscious, which spontaneously produces fantasies of this kind; the other is life, which, if lived with utter devotion, brings an intuition of the Self, of one’s own individual being." "When the Self finds expression in such drawings, the unconscious reacts by enforcing an attitude of devotion to life." ~C.G. Jung, Commentary on the Secret of the Golden Flower, para.36
"It's our job to find that meaning that every time allows us to continue to live, or if you prefer, to respond, every step, our path. We are all called upon to carry out our lives as best we can ". --C.G.Jung
"These opposites, light and darkness, hot and cold, etc.. , are psychological facts projected into the world, when we perceive the difference we make the contrast and project the attributes we have established.
We desire and ponder, for instance, and these two opposites cause a moral conflict. Such a conflict is, however, indispensable or we should remain entirely passive. It is the opposites which are the impetus of our activity, all stimulating moments are moments of conflict." --Jung, ETH Lecture VI, Pages 125 -131.
Now, since the psychic process, like any other life-process, is not just a causal sequence, but is also a process with a teleological orientation, we might expect dreams to give us certain indicia about the objective causality as well as about the objective tendencies, because they are nothing less than self-portraits of the psychic life-process. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 210
It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 757
As against Freud's view that the dream is essentially a wish-fulfillment, I hold that the dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9 Para 505
As against Freud's view that the dream is essentially a wish-fulfillment, I hold that the dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9 Para 505
The symbol in the dream has more the value of a parable it does not conceal, it teaches. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 471
Much may be said for Freud's view as a scientific explanation of dream psychology. But I must dispute its completeness, for the psyche cannot be conceived merely in causal terms but requires also a final view. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 473
'Most people can recount at least one dream that provided them with a new understanding of life or that helped them during a crucial period. These dreams appear to reach beyond the ordinary boundaries set by most dream analysts. They are monoliths speaking of an ancient wisdom and a deeper magic. These are the prophetic of visionary dreams of old; and they originate from the wellspring deep within us, where the Creator resides. These dreams aren't necessarily ordered or commanded, but reach out to us in times of need. They lend assurance and guidance through the "dark night of the soul." The prerequisites to tracing the thread that leads to vision and prophecy in your dreams are an open heart and the willingness to ask... and listen.' --Denise Linn, Hidden Power of Dreams.
As against Freud's view that the dream is essentially a wish-fulfillment, I hold that the dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9 Para 505
The symbol in the dream has more the value of a parable it does not conceal, it teaches. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 471
Much may be said for Freud's view as a scientific explanation of dream psychology. But I must dispute its completeness, for the psyche cannot be conceived merely in causal terms but requires also a final view. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 473
'Most people can recount at least one dream that provided them with a new understanding of life or that helped them during a crucial period. These dreams appear to reach beyond the ordinary boundaries set by most dream analysts. They are monoliths speaking of an ancient wisdom and a deeper magic. These are the prophetic of visionary dreams of old; and they originate from the wellspring deep within us, where the Creator resides. These dreams aren't necessarily ordered or commanded, but reach out to us in times of need. They lend assurance and guidance through the "dark night of the soul." The prerequisites to tracing the thread that leads to vision and prophecy in your dreams are an open heart and the willingness to ask... and listen.' --Denise Linn, Hidden Power of Dreams.
KEYWORDS: Dreamwork, projection, participation mystique, co-consciousness, bloodlines, psychic dreams, precognition, dreamwalking, Jungian, transpersonal, and transgenerational dreamwork, dream telepathy, anomalous dreams, akashic field, big dreams, noetic field theory,
ABSTRACT: For many years, persons known and unknown to the author (Miller) have reported her appearance in their dreams in a meaningful way, some more than others. Some presume it is a psi anomaly involving two people -- a telepathic, mystical, psychic, even prophetic dream. An experienced writer in psi experiences, genetic psi, and professional dreamwork, Miller has examined such examples, which continue to be reported to her, with a phenomenological approach.
Whatever information the dream conveys as images and impressions are direct and intense. However, we must be carriers of the opposites, not exteriorizers, but more accurate elementary perceivers of the environment and instinctual soul. We learn to hold on to the tensions as physicality made more conscious as the code of the soul, instead of acting them out. Then that stratified meaning incarnates as embodiment and tangible actualization and carries you. It is not the dream figure that needs manifesting but consciousness or realization of the personification as symbolic material representation; emotional memory process not product.
Personal experience brings highly spiritual material down-to-earth. Like ourselves, dream are partly empirical and partly transcendent. Objective psyche moves subjective feeling as the moving force in all life -- am embodied "poetic ecology," feeling the others manifest in their appearance and incarnate in the bodies of other organisms. Nature, anima mundi, in this fashion exemplifies what we also are -- our soul is the whole world. It is the living medium of our emotions and our mental concepts as we are the living manifestation of psyche.
WANTING THE THING TO EXIST
"We are steeped in a world that was created by our own psyche."
~Carl Jung CW 8, Para 747
"Dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts." ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 52
"Dreams may contain ineluctable truths, philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, irrational experiences, even telepathic visions, and heaven knows what besides."
~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 317
We live in a psychic, rather than material world, and, in that sense are all 'psychic,' as we can make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter, the supernatural, and the self. Through dream the timeless regions bleed into everyday life. Something within us is worthy of genuine service that brings value of the soul to our lives. There is always a split between esoteric and exoteric.
Big, epic, or visionary dreams provide a naive or disordered person with a sense of fascination that may have secondary gains like self-reification, depending on interpretation. Reification is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity. Some people attempt to reify themselves unconsciously with their idiosyncratic beliefs. In other words, it is the error of treating something that is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing.
They just want to live the myth and leave it at that because the psyche experiences the mythic numinosity. If the dream seems remarkable, perhaps they are, too. Nobody wants to understand the banality of it all. They just want the fascination.
Predictions and telepathy in dreams may indicate unconscious awareness of a situation, based on observations actually made but no longer remembered or accessible to the conscious mind.
When experiences bring distress, or mythic and spiritual dissociation, how can psychological approaches bring relief? When experiencers are curious, open, and explorative, how have anomalous life events been integrated into processes of self-actualization? Jung suggested that mythic responsibility for meaning has shifted from institutions to the individual. Some big stories of cultural instinct are eroding, others are arising.
Psychological and intuitive, creative practices reveal deeper meanings in our super nature, spanning from fear and distress through intuition to realization and authorization, integrating the psychical toward self-actualization. Such an approach has been used in psi studies at Rhine Research Center, for example.
The unconscious consists of myriad archaic traits. Anyone who dreams participates in shamanism, according to Dr. Stanley Krippner. He says in tribal life, "It is customary for dreams about the "supernaturals" to be interpreted literally.
It is typical for positive dream reports to be communicated only after their 'prophecy' has been fulfilled. But not all dreams called prophetic turn out to be so. Jung acknowledged that prophetic dreams may be evidence that when we are asleep we are capable of projecting our thoughts forward into the future, and sometimes hitting the truth.
This retrospective analysis permits the verification of premonitions received in dreams and perpetuates, thereby, the use of dreams as forecasting devices. It also establishes the dreamer as a competent channel of communication with the spirit world. But we must also be aware some people will consider themselves to have special telepathic powers in and out of dream which may be over-stated in their own self-image to compensate the disorder of their daily lives.
The collective unconscious is comprised of the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. Our inheritance consists in physiological paths -- mental processes in our ancestors that traced these paths. It matters because we matter as the psychophysical expression of all those who came before us. We continue to embody them. Thus, the ancestors are personal, collective, and present.
Even assertions and opinions are psychic realities. We are the convergence of vast streams of stories - some are unconscious and flow beneath the surface, while others are apparent in our biographical stories exerting their unconscious power like force fields of energy. We embody and carry stories of our dreams and dayworld -- love, power, wealth -- stories of history, stories of myth.
Stories like vast rivers course through us as complexes and ancestral inheritance all feed into the narrative at the surface of our lives. And tribal values, personal scenarios, and dynamic intrapsychic stories link us in relationship with others, motivate and move us. Overwhelming emotions take over our experience. The psychotic identifies with the mythological image in an inflation. The trick is to get in relation to it, to get in play with it, and let the energy it carries feed you without identifying with it (Campbell).
Stories of psychophysical hunger, loss, absence, rage, unprotected desire, failed grief, and lost radiance drive us to an adaptive not natural response and create the atmosphere around us. We become helpers, fixers, scapegoats, or other prisoners of our stories of childhood and instinctively seek the family whether it is good or bad for us.
Yet we only recognize what has an effect on us as real and actual. Jung noted, there are psychic and physical truths: "Physical" is not the only criterion of truth: there are also psychic truths which can neither be explained nor proved nor contested in any physical way. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 555.
"If the character of a person is a complexity of images, then to meet you I have to imagine, absorb your images. To keep me in touch with you, I have to maintain an imaginative interest not for the process of our relationship or my feelings towards you, but for the images that I guess you. The contact through the imagination produces an extraordinary intimacy." --James Hillman
"To the extent that the world does not assume the form of a psychic image, it is virtually nonexistent." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 769. "What we call fantasy is simply spontaneous psychic activity, and it wells up wherever the inhibitive action of the conscious mind abates or, as in sleep, ceases altogether." ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 125
The world soul (Greek: ψυχὴ κόσμου, Latin: anima mundi) is, according to several systems of thought, an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet, which relates to our world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the corporeal human body.
For example alchemical "sapientia" appears personified as Sophia in action and conversation as the "wisdom of the knowledge of God" or a feminine form of the collective unconscious. She transmits the knowledge, the 'scientia,' of the sapientia, the wisdom which God possesses, or the wisdom which man possesses about God., the science of the Lord which originates in the sapientia, which is the mother, the old Sophia. (Jung, ETH, Pages 186-195.)
If we are the images that we have formed, our story is the story of our own images. Robert Bly says that "the image is a form of intelligence" Two centuries before Kant wrote: "without imagination, we would not have any knowledge," but we aren't normally we are aware of this. (E.S.)
"The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, performed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche." ~Carl Jung; CW 10; "The Undiscovered Self"; Civilization in Transition. P. 528
Awake or asleep, unconscious processes steer the lives of ordinary people. We cannot superimpose our heuristics, interpretations, or literalizations on the reality of the whole instinctive ground whose language is metaphor, image, and archetypal patterns. Dreams have a strange way of distorting things.
In a telepathic dream thoughts, emotions or physical sensations are transmitted from one mind to another. Some have precognitive, clairvoyant and telepathic dream experiences with great frequency. Precognitive dreams appear to predict the future through a sixth sense, accessing future information beyond any existing knowledge acquired through normal means.
Any dream image may be more prophetic of the dreamer's issues than events. Jung said: “The collective unconscious stands for the objective psyche, the personal unconscious for the subjective psyche.” Yet, the dream figures, the presence of the autonomous or objective psyche in dreams, are just as real as anything we meet in the outer world. Narrative fantasy is a way of describing it.
The objective psyche produces spontaneous images in dreams and fantasies, which relate to instincts, emotions and drive impulses, which the dreamer has been out of touch with in daily life. The libido energy of the objective psyche includes all aspects of human life, including the religious or spiritual urge toward meaning, the search for God, for transcendence, for ultimate meaning. Jungian psychology shares this goal with religion.
Mythology is the most archaic and profound record we have of mankind's essential spirit and nature. As far back as we are able to trace the origins of our species, we find myth and myth-making as the fundamental language through which man relates to life's mystery and fashions meaning from his experiences. The world of myth has its own laws and its own reality. Instead of concepts and facts that make logical sense, we find patterns of irrational imagery whose meaning must be discerned or experienced by the participant-observer. Discovering these patterns of meaning is what Jung meant by the symbolic approach to religion, myth, and dream.
The mythic image is not to be taken literally and concretely as it would be in the belief-system of a particular religion, nor is it to be dismissed as 'mere illusion,' as often happens in scientific circles. Instead, we must approach myth symbolically as revealed eternal 'truths' about mankind's psychic existence — about the reality of the psyche. 'Once upon a time' does not mean 'once' in history but refers to events that occur in eternal time, always and everywhere.
INTRODUCTION
We should be cautious about presuming continuity between the imaginal dreamworld and concrete dayworld. Our dreams of chaos may or may not fit into our visions of order and interpretive schemata. The phenomenology of the dream presents itself to the direct perception of the viewer. Dreams are our medicine.
The dream is interpreted as the embodiment of some fundamental feature of consciousness. On awakening the dreamer begins manipulating the experience, generating a deliberately crafted but unconscious psychological illusion. Each of our lives involves an invisible interiority, which is the substance. In dreams and inner images, this process of becoming human is represented as rejoining the fragmented and undifferentiated elements that were always there in a gradual emergence and clarification.
In the anti-illusion schema, the dream image is interpreted as an assertion of the inherent qualities of the dream. There is the dream, and there is the memory reconstruction. If belief's charge of numinosity comes from the believer's attribution, not its inherent qualities, it is revealed as a projection, the inherent effect to distort reality. The unconscious has a template for the perfect 'other' to fill their psychological need but it is not that person. The next step is to differentiate them, one from the other.
Jung used the terms objective psyche and unus mundus -- one world -- to describe the layer underneath the sum of the archetypal structures. This all-extensive world-soul (anima mundi), or cosmic luminous body, “is the central ground of empirical being, existing beyond time and space, within the psychoidal realm.”
"And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that its images may live." ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 325
Who's Dreaming What?
What's hidden by such dreams? What's beneath the dream? What is the reality underlying this fiction which is interpreted through a continual process of literary and conceptual revision of the dream upon awakening? What do we impose and superimpose on the dream? We cannot superimpose any utopian/idealistic dream interpretation over the actual reality on the ground.
Who am I to dream such a dream, or to have it dreamed of me? What is the relationship of the dreamer to family secrets: suppressed identity, abuse, addiction, violence, poverty, illness, abandonment and betrayal? There is no story without conflict.
The most likely answer is arguably the archetypal unconscious. Part personal and part transpersonal, it is an immanent, liminal space -- a plenum filled with archetypal representation connecting and interweaving the eternal and the temporal. Nonlinear evolution is a circumambulation of the self, which stays close to the original image, interpreting an image by reflecting on it from different points of view.
We stand in the midst of things we cannot grasp. But we tend to mystify them further through unconscious identification, perceptual causality, and projection. The arc is from unconscious to conscious, but the movement of processing is not complete until we go from conscious to unconscious and live there. The ego has to go back in and heal or transform the raw material. Fragmented and undigested material is unintegrated and alters our relationship to the inner and outer “reality.”
Anima mundi is the field of infinite meanings, created from metaphors of different places, points of view, and narratives. New understandings arrive with new images at the surprising edge of things, new expressive forms that arise of their own accord. In this model, inner figures or dream figures are personal representations: combined internal objects that represent our idiosyncratic views and alter immanent truths with core beliefs and assumptions that color our experience.
Numinous female wisdom figures in dreams are the dynamic, transformative Feminine, the wild feminine. She is the dynamic embodiment of the transformative feminine, an aspirational focus.
What is Anomalous?
Some dreams are "anomalous" (or "psychic") because they appear to bypass the ordinary constraints of time and space. Examples would be so-called telepathic, clairvoyant, and precognitive dreams that appear to incorporate another person's thoughts, activities occurring at a distance, or events that later occur and appear to match the dream content (Krippner, Bogzaran, & de Carvalho, 2002).
Parapsychology is sometimes called "psychical research”, or "psi research”. The word "psi" refers to the anomalous interactions studied by parapsychologists. Examples of these interactions are reports of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis. Each example may be part of the "cosmic information field" discussed by Ervin Laszlo (2004), who, like Cheney, calls it the "Akashic field."
Parapsychologists use questionnaires, interviews, and field observations. In each of these cases, there is a possibility that conventional scientific explanations can account for the report. Some of these phenomena may be explained as the result of subtle sensory or motor activities, misinterpretation of natural events, poor memory for a particular event or the context of that event, or deliberate fraud. However, if an investigation systematically eliminates conventional scientific explanations, that research produces data that is considered "anomalous" because they appear to transcend the constraints of time, space, or energy.
A system may be described as any pattern of elements in mutual interaction. The boundaries of a system depend on the activity under consideration. It was apparent to me that what is called "psi" probably is a complex system with very wide boundaries. I speculated on the conditions that would increase the appearance of psi in our experiments, especially environmental field effects.
A "field" is a matrix, or region of influence, that connects two or more points in space or time, usually by means of a force or energy. In other words, a field is held together by something capable of manifesting a noticeable change (McTaggart, 2002).
A field is presumed to exist in physical reality even though it usually cannot be observed directly. Instead, it is inferred through its observable effects. A magnet exerts a field, even though that field can not be seen. But when a magnet attracts small pieces of metal, these are the "observable effects" that demonstrate the existence of the magnetic field.
The appearance of psi in dreams suggested that there are psychological conditions that favor its appearance. These conditions might include altered states of consciousness, the relationship between the dreamer and the researcher, and the nature of the postcard picture used for the experiment. Various aspects of a research participant's personality also seem to be important, and have been intensively studied over the years (see Palmer, 1994). However, environmental conditions, such as physical fields that could influence psi phenomena, have been virtually ignored.
Telepathy and clairvoyance are examples of psi that involve a short period of time between the event and the experience. However, precognition is an example of psi that involves a larger gap in time between the experience and the event.
In telepathic dream reports, it is the dreamer's impression that the dream correctly identified the thoughts of someone in external reality at the time of the dream. Mutual dreams are those in which the dreamer and someone else report similar dreams on the same night. Clairvoyant dreams concern distant events about which the dreamer had no ordinary way of knowing. In precognitive dreams, information is reported about an event that had not taken place at the time of the dream. A past-life dream concerns past events in which the dreamer participated but with a different identity than characterizes his or her current life. Initiation dreams introduce the dreamer to a new worldview, or to a new mission in life. In visitation dreams, the dreamer is visited by ancestors, spirits, or deities, and is given messages or counsel by them.
Lucid, healing, and out-of-body dreams were also deemed anomalous but were not defined in the abstract. In fact, lucid dreams were the most common type of anomalous dream. Out-of-body dreams came next. Precognitive dreams were third in frequency.
These aren't lucid dreams, telepathic dreams, or psychic dreams but are interpreted that way in self-reports. To call it clairvoyance is metaphysical and an interpretation. No particular information is transmitted or acquired by the dreamer, certainly not for daylife. They are powerful just-so stories with mythological and symbolic elements of persons and personifications, known or unknown. Elements of such dreams can be read through one's own personal mythology.
In the grip of the experience they seem literal, but to understand we have to overcome concretization -- the tendency to give definite form to the abstract. Rather than paranormal events, they are typical variations in the Jungian framework, often a variation on the Big Dream. Perhaps more unusual is the frequency of reports that feature the author from others.
Jung calls this type of interpretation which equates the dream images with real objects or person to an objective level; whereas, in the subjective level the interpretation refers all parts of the dream and all actors back to the dreamer. (Jung, CW 7, Para 130). False memory can retrofit out interpretation of experience.
Phenomenologically speaking, "a dream" may just be our waking mind’s memory of a dream. When patients at Asklepian temples were cured in epiphany dreams, the visit that the god paid to them during their slumber wasn’t made in order to give them something to do, something in the waking world to obtain or pursue in order to be cured. The dream itself was the cure.
What we do with the dream in waking life (if anything) should be a careful extension of the principles of the dream itself; any slip into the habits of translation or principally pragmatic exploitation could banish the mysterious power of our brush with this imaginal underworld.
Archetypal psychology offers an approach to what connects us to that which is imagistic, metaphorical, and symbolic.. The dream as a fantasy does not ask to be concretized or literalized. Mythopoetic images require no validation by reference to external events; mythopoeic imagination is the only ground they need.
Dreams can use known or unknown people as psychic personifications, and can compound them with archetypal figures. The meaning of dream content is primary for the underworld of the dream, the spectral world of psychological depth, not the rational day world.
James Hillman attributes such content to poetic imagination, imaginative possibilities. We have to be cautious attributing any external, concrete, or literal meaning or misapplying psychic or telepathic notions to the anomalous dream. It may not be anomalous at all, but simply categorized that way within the dreamer's beliefs.
We have to follow Hillman's dream prescription to "stick to the image" as close as possible. Images are self-originating, self-revelatory, and self-referential. In this view even archetypal architecture or theory is an image. Soul a perspective, liminal, polytheistic, metaphor-loving aspect of our being, which we dwell within as much as it dwells within us, and which resists all attempts to pin it down for service to pragmatism.
“...put it my way, what we are really, and the reality we live, is our psychic reality, which is nothing but...the poetic imagination going on day and night.” --James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse, p. 62
...by “soul” I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy —that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical,...that unknown component, which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is
communicated in love, has religious concern [deriving from its special relation with death] (Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xvi).
Jung’s understanding of image as a primary phenomenon of psychic life, that
“image is psyche,” (CW 13, para. 75) where image is taken “in the poetic sense,
considering images to be the basic givens of psychic life, self-originating,
inventive, spontaneous, complete, and organized in archetypal patterns...[they]
are both raw materials and finished products of psyche” (Re-Visioning Psychology, p.xvii).
Such non-reproducible reports are mythologized and idiosyncratic, with any interpretation rooted in assumed truths of the dreamer, having little or nothing to do with the alleged walker or psyche's presentation. They are best unpacked in speculative terms using Jung's psychological, epistemological, and phenomenological notion of soul, not a religious or metaphysical one.
Noetic field theory and the whole panoply of nonlocal, entangled, or other solutions might apply if it could be demonstrated that both parities were non-conscious participants, but this cannot be assumed nor assured.
Jolande Jacobi calls the mana figure or supraordinary wisdom figure, the "wise old woman"...[or] helpful "old woman" --a well-known symbol in myths and fairy tales for the wisdom of the eternal female nature'. In dreams such figures tend to be the same sex as the dreamer, whereas the 'soul figure' (anima/animus) is the opposite.
It appears in a new symbolic form representing the Self, the innermost nucleus of the personality. In the dreams of a woman this center is usually personified as a superior female figure - a priestess, sorceress, earth mother, or goddess of nature or love. In the case of a man, it manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature and so forth'.
These ‘mana’ personalities are symbols of the power and wisdom that lie deep within parts of our own psyche. But, like other things in our unconscious they may be projected. For example, instead of making contact with this inner store of power and wisdom, we may choose to disown it and see it as the property of someone else.
The right thing to do with the ‘mana’ personality, however, is neither to project it nor keep it suppressed, but to integrate it into your consciousness. This means enriching your life with a wisdom that is not accessible to intellect but comes from the unconscious. It also means that from now on, conscious and unconscious are no longer seen as opposites, but as two cooperating and complementary parts of one and the same psyche.
Hillman believes that “...every statement regarding the archetypes is to be taken
metaphorically, prefixed with an ‘as-if’” (ibid., p.156). Hillman sees metaphor as
an “as-if fiction,” both a form of being and a style of consciousness, a way for the
psyche to see through itself. The metaphor itselfis a myth in brief, an expression
of creative mythopoesis.
In order for such reports to come back to the author, the dreamer must first recall the dream, and attribute importance. Those who did not know her must make that connection, somehow (which varies), and then make realtime contact and report their dream experience, which is usually loaded with affect. Those who have doneso range from a Sufi sheik who’s mother is the head of a Sufi order, based on dream initiations, to those who may or may not have seen her online presence and found her an unconscious psychological ‘hook,’ to those who share her ancestral lines and feel ‘called’ to make that connection. This is not lucid dreaming and generally the dreamwalker is unaware of the unconscious activity, no matter what its conjectured ‘origin.’
We all know that dreams often have great relevance or personal significance to the dreamer, but they can also have relevance for others, in symbolic, metaphorical, and even literal ways. This article concerns and describes one such connection with the second author (Radcliffe), a Gnostic church participant with an MA in psychology, who also practices psychic readings. She has an intergenerational history of precognitive dreams, which the first author has witnessed for a considerable time.
We use a phenomenological approach, taking care to examine personal assumptions and beliefs, when engaging the living or deceased in dreams. Interpretations of the value and meaning of such experience will vary. We suggest field effects and co-consciousness, among others. Such anomalous dreams may carry more psychological weight for the dreamer, depending on what the walker represents for them. The walker may or may not respond to being informed. By investigating, observing and questioning with an open mind, you become a more insightful explorer of inner realms. There is dreaming of the future, but also dreaming up the future.
In 2016, IONS began an open study of genetic psi (GOTPSI), seeking subjects responding with the right markers and traits in the conceptual context of their Genetics of Psychic Ability Study. Questions and self-reports target and evaluate specific psychic abilities. Both authors passed all three rounds for requisite background and subsequent genetic testing. While those results are not included here, it provides an independent measure of the context of these anomalous dreams.
ABSTRACT: For many years, persons known and unknown to the author (Miller) have reported her appearance in their dreams in a meaningful way, some more than others. Some presume it is a psi anomaly involving two people -- a telepathic, mystical, psychic, even prophetic dream. An experienced writer in psi experiences, genetic psi, and professional dreamwork, Miller has examined such examples, which continue to be reported to her, with a phenomenological approach.
Whatever information the dream conveys as images and impressions are direct and intense. However, we must be carriers of the opposites, not exteriorizers, but more accurate elementary perceivers of the environment and instinctual soul. We learn to hold on to the tensions as physicality made more conscious as the code of the soul, instead of acting them out. Then that stratified meaning incarnates as embodiment and tangible actualization and carries you. It is not the dream figure that needs manifesting but consciousness or realization of the personification as symbolic material representation; emotional memory process not product.
Personal experience brings highly spiritual material down-to-earth. Like ourselves, dream are partly empirical and partly transcendent. Objective psyche moves subjective feeling as the moving force in all life -- am embodied "poetic ecology," feeling the others manifest in their appearance and incarnate in the bodies of other organisms. Nature, anima mundi, in this fashion exemplifies what we also are -- our soul is the whole world. It is the living medium of our emotions and our mental concepts as we are the living manifestation of psyche.
WANTING THE THING TO EXIST
"We are steeped in a world that was created by our own psyche."
~Carl Jung CW 8, Para 747
"Dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts." ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 52
"Dreams may contain ineluctable truths, philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, irrational experiences, even telepathic visions, and heaven knows what besides."
~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 317
We live in a psychic, rather than material world, and, in that sense are all 'psychic,' as we can make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter, the supernatural, and the self. Through dream the timeless regions bleed into everyday life. Something within us is worthy of genuine service that brings value of the soul to our lives. There is always a split between esoteric and exoteric.
Big, epic, or visionary dreams provide a naive or disordered person with a sense of fascination that may have secondary gains like self-reification, depending on interpretation. Reification is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity. Some people attempt to reify themselves unconsciously with their idiosyncratic beliefs. In other words, it is the error of treating something that is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing.
They just want to live the myth and leave it at that because the psyche experiences the mythic numinosity. If the dream seems remarkable, perhaps they are, too. Nobody wants to understand the banality of it all. They just want the fascination.
Predictions and telepathy in dreams may indicate unconscious awareness of a situation, based on observations actually made but no longer remembered or accessible to the conscious mind.
When experiences bring distress, or mythic and spiritual dissociation, how can psychological approaches bring relief? When experiencers are curious, open, and explorative, how have anomalous life events been integrated into processes of self-actualization? Jung suggested that mythic responsibility for meaning has shifted from institutions to the individual. Some big stories of cultural instinct are eroding, others are arising.
Psychological and intuitive, creative practices reveal deeper meanings in our super nature, spanning from fear and distress through intuition to realization and authorization, integrating the psychical toward self-actualization. Such an approach has been used in psi studies at Rhine Research Center, for example.
The unconscious consists of myriad archaic traits. Anyone who dreams participates in shamanism, according to Dr. Stanley Krippner. He says in tribal life, "It is customary for dreams about the "supernaturals" to be interpreted literally.
It is typical for positive dream reports to be communicated only after their 'prophecy' has been fulfilled. But not all dreams called prophetic turn out to be so. Jung acknowledged that prophetic dreams may be evidence that when we are asleep we are capable of projecting our thoughts forward into the future, and sometimes hitting the truth.
This retrospective analysis permits the verification of premonitions received in dreams and perpetuates, thereby, the use of dreams as forecasting devices. It also establishes the dreamer as a competent channel of communication with the spirit world. But we must also be aware some people will consider themselves to have special telepathic powers in and out of dream which may be over-stated in their own self-image to compensate the disorder of their daily lives.
The collective unconscious is comprised of the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. Our inheritance consists in physiological paths -- mental processes in our ancestors that traced these paths. It matters because we matter as the psychophysical expression of all those who came before us. We continue to embody them. Thus, the ancestors are personal, collective, and present.
Even assertions and opinions are psychic realities. We are the convergence of vast streams of stories - some are unconscious and flow beneath the surface, while others are apparent in our biographical stories exerting their unconscious power like force fields of energy. We embody and carry stories of our dreams and dayworld -- love, power, wealth -- stories of history, stories of myth.
Stories like vast rivers course through us as complexes and ancestral inheritance all feed into the narrative at the surface of our lives. And tribal values, personal scenarios, and dynamic intrapsychic stories link us in relationship with others, motivate and move us. Overwhelming emotions take over our experience. The psychotic identifies with the mythological image in an inflation. The trick is to get in relation to it, to get in play with it, and let the energy it carries feed you without identifying with it (Campbell).
Stories of psychophysical hunger, loss, absence, rage, unprotected desire, failed grief, and lost radiance drive us to an adaptive not natural response and create the atmosphere around us. We become helpers, fixers, scapegoats, or other prisoners of our stories of childhood and instinctively seek the family whether it is good or bad for us.
Yet we only recognize what has an effect on us as real and actual. Jung noted, there are psychic and physical truths: "Physical" is not the only criterion of truth: there are also psychic truths which can neither be explained nor proved nor contested in any physical way. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 555.
"If the character of a person is a complexity of images, then to meet you I have to imagine, absorb your images. To keep me in touch with you, I have to maintain an imaginative interest not for the process of our relationship or my feelings towards you, but for the images that I guess you. The contact through the imagination produces an extraordinary intimacy." --James Hillman
"To the extent that the world does not assume the form of a psychic image, it is virtually nonexistent." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 769. "What we call fantasy is simply spontaneous psychic activity, and it wells up wherever the inhibitive action of the conscious mind abates or, as in sleep, ceases altogether." ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 125
The world soul (Greek: ψυχὴ κόσμου, Latin: anima mundi) is, according to several systems of thought, an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet, which relates to our world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the corporeal human body.
For example alchemical "sapientia" appears personified as Sophia in action and conversation as the "wisdom of the knowledge of God" or a feminine form of the collective unconscious. She transmits the knowledge, the 'scientia,' of the sapientia, the wisdom which God possesses, or the wisdom which man possesses about God., the science of the Lord which originates in the sapientia, which is the mother, the old Sophia. (Jung, ETH, Pages 186-195.)
If we are the images that we have formed, our story is the story of our own images. Robert Bly says that "the image is a form of intelligence" Two centuries before Kant wrote: "without imagination, we would not have any knowledge," but we aren't normally we are aware of this. (E.S.)
"The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, performed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche." ~Carl Jung; CW 10; "The Undiscovered Self"; Civilization in Transition. P. 528
Awake or asleep, unconscious processes steer the lives of ordinary people. We cannot superimpose our heuristics, interpretations, or literalizations on the reality of the whole instinctive ground whose language is metaphor, image, and archetypal patterns. Dreams have a strange way of distorting things.
In a telepathic dream thoughts, emotions or physical sensations are transmitted from one mind to another. Some have precognitive, clairvoyant and telepathic dream experiences with great frequency. Precognitive dreams appear to predict the future through a sixth sense, accessing future information beyond any existing knowledge acquired through normal means.
Any dream image may be more prophetic of the dreamer's issues than events. Jung said: “The collective unconscious stands for the objective psyche, the personal unconscious for the subjective psyche.” Yet, the dream figures, the presence of the autonomous or objective psyche in dreams, are just as real as anything we meet in the outer world. Narrative fantasy is a way of describing it.
The objective psyche produces spontaneous images in dreams and fantasies, which relate to instincts, emotions and drive impulses, which the dreamer has been out of touch with in daily life. The libido energy of the objective psyche includes all aspects of human life, including the religious or spiritual urge toward meaning, the search for God, for transcendence, for ultimate meaning. Jungian psychology shares this goal with religion.
Mythology is the most archaic and profound record we have of mankind's essential spirit and nature. As far back as we are able to trace the origins of our species, we find myth and myth-making as the fundamental language through which man relates to life's mystery and fashions meaning from his experiences. The world of myth has its own laws and its own reality. Instead of concepts and facts that make logical sense, we find patterns of irrational imagery whose meaning must be discerned or experienced by the participant-observer. Discovering these patterns of meaning is what Jung meant by the symbolic approach to religion, myth, and dream.
The mythic image is not to be taken literally and concretely as it would be in the belief-system of a particular religion, nor is it to be dismissed as 'mere illusion,' as often happens in scientific circles. Instead, we must approach myth symbolically as revealed eternal 'truths' about mankind's psychic existence — about the reality of the psyche. 'Once upon a time' does not mean 'once' in history but refers to events that occur in eternal time, always and everywhere.
INTRODUCTION
We should be cautious about presuming continuity between the imaginal dreamworld and concrete dayworld. Our dreams of chaos may or may not fit into our visions of order and interpretive schemata. The phenomenology of the dream presents itself to the direct perception of the viewer. Dreams are our medicine.
The dream is interpreted as the embodiment of some fundamental feature of consciousness. On awakening the dreamer begins manipulating the experience, generating a deliberately crafted but unconscious psychological illusion. Each of our lives involves an invisible interiority, which is the substance. In dreams and inner images, this process of becoming human is represented as rejoining the fragmented and undifferentiated elements that were always there in a gradual emergence and clarification.
In the anti-illusion schema, the dream image is interpreted as an assertion of the inherent qualities of the dream. There is the dream, and there is the memory reconstruction. If belief's charge of numinosity comes from the believer's attribution, not its inherent qualities, it is revealed as a projection, the inherent effect to distort reality. The unconscious has a template for the perfect 'other' to fill their psychological need but it is not that person. The next step is to differentiate them, one from the other.
Jung used the terms objective psyche and unus mundus -- one world -- to describe the layer underneath the sum of the archetypal structures. This all-extensive world-soul (anima mundi), or cosmic luminous body, “is the central ground of empirical being, existing beyond time and space, within the psychoidal realm.”
"And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that its images may live." ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 325
Who's Dreaming What?
What's hidden by such dreams? What's beneath the dream? What is the reality underlying this fiction which is interpreted through a continual process of literary and conceptual revision of the dream upon awakening? What do we impose and superimpose on the dream? We cannot superimpose any utopian/idealistic dream interpretation over the actual reality on the ground.
Who am I to dream such a dream, or to have it dreamed of me? What is the relationship of the dreamer to family secrets: suppressed identity, abuse, addiction, violence, poverty, illness, abandonment and betrayal? There is no story without conflict.
The most likely answer is arguably the archetypal unconscious. Part personal and part transpersonal, it is an immanent, liminal space -- a plenum filled with archetypal representation connecting and interweaving the eternal and the temporal. Nonlinear evolution is a circumambulation of the self, which stays close to the original image, interpreting an image by reflecting on it from different points of view.
We stand in the midst of things we cannot grasp. But we tend to mystify them further through unconscious identification, perceptual causality, and projection. The arc is from unconscious to conscious, but the movement of processing is not complete until we go from conscious to unconscious and live there. The ego has to go back in and heal or transform the raw material. Fragmented and undigested material is unintegrated and alters our relationship to the inner and outer “reality.”
Anima mundi is the field of infinite meanings, created from metaphors of different places, points of view, and narratives. New understandings arrive with new images at the surprising edge of things, new expressive forms that arise of their own accord. In this model, inner figures or dream figures are personal representations: combined internal objects that represent our idiosyncratic views and alter immanent truths with core beliefs and assumptions that color our experience.
Numinous female wisdom figures in dreams are the dynamic, transformative Feminine, the wild feminine. She is the dynamic embodiment of the transformative feminine, an aspirational focus.
What is Anomalous?
Some dreams are "anomalous" (or "psychic") because they appear to bypass the ordinary constraints of time and space. Examples would be so-called telepathic, clairvoyant, and precognitive dreams that appear to incorporate another person's thoughts, activities occurring at a distance, or events that later occur and appear to match the dream content (Krippner, Bogzaran, & de Carvalho, 2002).
Parapsychology is sometimes called "psychical research”, or "psi research”. The word "psi" refers to the anomalous interactions studied by parapsychologists. Examples of these interactions are reports of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis. Each example may be part of the "cosmic information field" discussed by Ervin Laszlo (2004), who, like Cheney, calls it the "Akashic field."
Parapsychologists use questionnaires, interviews, and field observations. In each of these cases, there is a possibility that conventional scientific explanations can account for the report. Some of these phenomena may be explained as the result of subtle sensory or motor activities, misinterpretation of natural events, poor memory for a particular event or the context of that event, or deliberate fraud. However, if an investigation systematically eliminates conventional scientific explanations, that research produces data that is considered "anomalous" because they appear to transcend the constraints of time, space, or energy.
A system may be described as any pattern of elements in mutual interaction. The boundaries of a system depend on the activity under consideration. It was apparent to me that what is called "psi" probably is a complex system with very wide boundaries. I speculated on the conditions that would increase the appearance of psi in our experiments, especially environmental field effects.
A "field" is a matrix, or region of influence, that connects two or more points in space or time, usually by means of a force or energy. In other words, a field is held together by something capable of manifesting a noticeable change (McTaggart, 2002).
A field is presumed to exist in physical reality even though it usually cannot be observed directly. Instead, it is inferred through its observable effects. A magnet exerts a field, even though that field can not be seen. But when a magnet attracts small pieces of metal, these are the "observable effects" that demonstrate the existence of the magnetic field.
The appearance of psi in dreams suggested that there are psychological conditions that favor its appearance. These conditions might include altered states of consciousness, the relationship between the dreamer and the researcher, and the nature of the postcard picture used for the experiment. Various aspects of a research participant's personality also seem to be important, and have been intensively studied over the years (see Palmer, 1994). However, environmental conditions, such as physical fields that could influence psi phenomena, have been virtually ignored.
Telepathy and clairvoyance are examples of psi that involve a short period of time between the event and the experience. However, precognition is an example of psi that involves a larger gap in time between the experience and the event.
In telepathic dream reports, it is the dreamer's impression that the dream correctly identified the thoughts of someone in external reality at the time of the dream. Mutual dreams are those in which the dreamer and someone else report similar dreams on the same night. Clairvoyant dreams concern distant events about which the dreamer had no ordinary way of knowing. In precognitive dreams, information is reported about an event that had not taken place at the time of the dream. A past-life dream concerns past events in which the dreamer participated but with a different identity than characterizes his or her current life. Initiation dreams introduce the dreamer to a new worldview, or to a new mission in life. In visitation dreams, the dreamer is visited by ancestors, spirits, or deities, and is given messages or counsel by them.
Lucid, healing, and out-of-body dreams were also deemed anomalous but were not defined in the abstract. In fact, lucid dreams were the most common type of anomalous dream. Out-of-body dreams came next. Precognitive dreams were third in frequency.
These aren't lucid dreams, telepathic dreams, or psychic dreams but are interpreted that way in self-reports. To call it clairvoyance is metaphysical and an interpretation. No particular information is transmitted or acquired by the dreamer, certainly not for daylife. They are powerful just-so stories with mythological and symbolic elements of persons and personifications, known or unknown. Elements of such dreams can be read through one's own personal mythology.
In the grip of the experience they seem literal, but to understand we have to overcome concretization -- the tendency to give definite form to the abstract. Rather than paranormal events, they are typical variations in the Jungian framework, often a variation on the Big Dream. Perhaps more unusual is the frequency of reports that feature the author from others.
Jung calls this type of interpretation which equates the dream images with real objects or person to an objective level; whereas, in the subjective level the interpretation refers all parts of the dream and all actors back to the dreamer. (Jung, CW 7, Para 130). False memory can retrofit out interpretation of experience.
Phenomenologically speaking, "a dream" may just be our waking mind’s memory of a dream. When patients at Asklepian temples were cured in epiphany dreams, the visit that the god paid to them during their slumber wasn’t made in order to give them something to do, something in the waking world to obtain or pursue in order to be cured. The dream itself was the cure.
What we do with the dream in waking life (if anything) should be a careful extension of the principles of the dream itself; any slip into the habits of translation or principally pragmatic exploitation could banish the mysterious power of our brush with this imaginal underworld.
Archetypal psychology offers an approach to what connects us to that which is imagistic, metaphorical, and symbolic.. The dream as a fantasy does not ask to be concretized or literalized. Mythopoetic images require no validation by reference to external events; mythopoeic imagination is the only ground they need.
Dreams can use known or unknown people as psychic personifications, and can compound them with archetypal figures. The meaning of dream content is primary for the underworld of the dream, the spectral world of psychological depth, not the rational day world.
James Hillman attributes such content to poetic imagination, imaginative possibilities. We have to be cautious attributing any external, concrete, or literal meaning or misapplying psychic or telepathic notions to the anomalous dream. It may not be anomalous at all, but simply categorized that way within the dreamer's beliefs.
We have to follow Hillman's dream prescription to "stick to the image" as close as possible. Images are self-originating, self-revelatory, and self-referential. In this view even archetypal architecture or theory is an image. Soul a perspective, liminal, polytheistic, metaphor-loving aspect of our being, which we dwell within as much as it dwells within us, and which resists all attempts to pin it down for service to pragmatism.
“...put it my way, what we are really, and the reality we live, is our psychic reality, which is nothing but...the poetic imagination going on day and night.” --James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse, p. 62
...by “soul” I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy —that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical,...that unknown component, which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is
communicated in love, has religious concern [deriving from its special relation with death] (Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xvi).
Jung’s understanding of image as a primary phenomenon of psychic life, that
“image is psyche,” (CW 13, para. 75) where image is taken “in the poetic sense,
considering images to be the basic givens of psychic life, self-originating,
inventive, spontaneous, complete, and organized in archetypal patterns...[they]
are both raw materials and finished products of psyche” (Re-Visioning Psychology, p.xvii).
Such non-reproducible reports are mythologized and idiosyncratic, with any interpretation rooted in assumed truths of the dreamer, having little or nothing to do with the alleged walker or psyche's presentation. They are best unpacked in speculative terms using Jung's psychological, epistemological, and phenomenological notion of soul, not a religious or metaphysical one.
Noetic field theory and the whole panoply of nonlocal, entangled, or other solutions might apply if it could be demonstrated that both parities were non-conscious participants, but this cannot be assumed nor assured.
Jolande Jacobi calls the mana figure or supraordinary wisdom figure, the "wise old woman"...[or] helpful "old woman" --a well-known symbol in myths and fairy tales for the wisdom of the eternal female nature'. In dreams such figures tend to be the same sex as the dreamer, whereas the 'soul figure' (anima/animus) is the opposite.
It appears in a new symbolic form representing the Self, the innermost nucleus of the personality. In the dreams of a woman this center is usually personified as a superior female figure - a priestess, sorceress, earth mother, or goddess of nature or love. In the case of a man, it manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature and so forth'.
These ‘mana’ personalities are symbols of the power and wisdom that lie deep within parts of our own psyche. But, like other things in our unconscious they may be projected. For example, instead of making contact with this inner store of power and wisdom, we may choose to disown it and see it as the property of someone else.
The right thing to do with the ‘mana’ personality, however, is neither to project it nor keep it suppressed, but to integrate it into your consciousness. This means enriching your life with a wisdom that is not accessible to intellect but comes from the unconscious. It also means that from now on, conscious and unconscious are no longer seen as opposites, but as two cooperating and complementary parts of one and the same psyche.
Hillman believes that “...every statement regarding the archetypes is to be taken
metaphorically, prefixed with an ‘as-if’” (ibid., p.156). Hillman sees metaphor as
an “as-if fiction,” both a form of being and a style of consciousness, a way for the
psyche to see through itself. The metaphor itselfis a myth in brief, an expression
of creative mythopoesis.
In order for such reports to come back to the author, the dreamer must first recall the dream, and attribute importance. Those who did not know her must make that connection, somehow (which varies), and then make realtime contact and report their dream experience, which is usually loaded with affect. Those who have doneso range from a Sufi sheik who’s mother is the head of a Sufi order, based on dream initiations, to those who may or may not have seen her online presence and found her an unconscious psychological ‘hook,’ to those who share her ancestral lines and feel ‘called’ to make that connection. This is not lucid dreaming and generally the dreamwalker is unaware of the unconscious activity, no matter what its conjectured ‘origin.’
We all know that dreams often have great relevance or personal significance to the dreamer, but they can also have relevance for others, in symbolic, metaphorical, and even literal ways. This article concerns and describes one such connection with the second author (Radcliffe), a Gnostic church participant with an MA in psychology, who also practices psychic readings. She has an intergenerational history of precognitive dreams, which the first author has witnessed for a considerable time.
We use a phenomenological approach, taking care to examine personal assumptions and beliefs, when engaging the living or deceased in dreams. Interpretations of the value and meaning of such experience will vary. We suggest field effects and co-consciousness, among others. Such anomalous dreams may carry more psychological weight for the dreamer, depending on what the walker represents for them. The walker may or may not respond to being informed. By investigating, observing and questioning with an open mind, you become a more insightful explorer of inner realms. There is dreaming of the future, but also dreaming up the future.
In 2016, IONS began an open study of genetic psi (GOTPSI), seeking subjects responding with the right markers and traits in the conceptual context of their Genetics of Psychic Ability Study. Questions and self-reports target and evaluate specific psychic abilities. Both authors passed all three rounds for requisite background and subsequent genetic testing. While those results are not included here, it provides an independent measure of the context of these anomalous dreams.
REFERENCES
Cohn, Shari A., 1999, Second Sight and Family History: Pedigree and Segregation Analyses, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 351–372, 1999 0892-3310/99 © 1999 Society for Scientific Exploration www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_13_3_cohn.pdf
IONS, GotPsi website http://psiresearch.com/
Krippner, The Akashic Field and Psychic Dreams,
http://www.ceoniric.cl/english/articles/the_akashic_field_and_psychic_dreams.htm
Krippner, Stanley, and Faith, Laura; "Anomalous Dreams: A Cross-Cultural Study," Society for Scientific Exploration paper, 2000.
Miller, Iona, Dreamhealing
Miller, Iona, 2012, Remote Mental Interaction, Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, Vol. 3 No. 6 (2012)
Miller, Iona, March 2012, The Nonlocal Mind Paradigm: A Transdisciplinary Revision of Mind-Body in Philosophy, Art & Science, JCER, Vol. 3; Issue 3.
Jung, Occult Phenomena
Radin, Dean, (2006). Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality
Vorhand, Susan, Dreams in the Talmud and in Depth Psychology, http://www.depthinsights.com/Depth-Insights-scholarly-ezine/e-zine-issue-4-spring-2013/dreams-in-the-talmud-and-in-depth-psychology-by-susan-vorhand/
Wright, Sylvia Hart, Childhood Influences that Heighten Psychic Powers, Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies
http://ionamiller.weebly.com/dreamhealing.html
http://www.depthinsights.com/Depth-Insights-scholarly-ezine/e-zine-issue-4-spring-2013/dreams-in-the-talmud-and-in-depth-psychology-by-susan-vorhand/
The unconscious contents want first of all to be seen clearly, which can only be done by giving them shape, and to be judged only when everything they have to say is tangibly present.
It was for this reason that Freud got the dream-contents, as it were, to express themselves in the form of "free associations" before he began interpreting them.
It does not suffice in all cases to elucidate only the conceptual context of a dream-content.
Often it is necessary to clarify a vague content by giving it a visible form.
This can be done by drawing, painting, or modelling. O
ften the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect has wrestled in vain.
By shaping it, one goes on dreaming the dream in greater detail in the waking state, and the initially incomprehensible, isolated event is integrated into the sphere of the total personality, even though it remains at first unconscious to the subject.
Aesthetic formulation leaves it at that and gives up any idea of discovering a meaning.
This sometimes leads patients to fancy themselves artists—misunderstood ones, naturally.
The desire to understand, if it dispenses with careful formulation, starts with the chance idea or association and therefore lacks an adequate basis.
It has better prospects of success if it begins only with the formulated product. The less the initial material is shaped and developed, the greater is the danger that understanding will be governed not by the empirical facts but by theoretical and moral considerations.
The kind of understanding with which we are concerned at this stage consists in a reconstruction of the meaning that seems to be immanent in the original "chance" idea. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 179-180.
JEEP – Journal of Exceptional Experiences & Psychology; March 31, 2017
http://www.magcloud.com/user/exceptionalpsychology
http://www.magcloud.com/browse/magazine/575773
http://www.magcloud.com/user/exceptionalpsychology
http://www.magcloud.com/browse/magazine/575773
Thus much let me avow--
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
--Poe, A Dream Within A Dream
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
--Poe, A Dream Within A Dream
Pathologizing means the psyche's autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective". "Archetypal psychology can put its ideas of psychopathology into a series of nutshells, one inside the other: within the affliction is a complex, within the complex an archetype, which in turn refers to a god. Afflictions point to gods; gods reach us through afflictions. Jung's statement -"the gods have become diseases Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room" (C W 13 * 54) - implies that gods, as in Greek tragedy, force themselves symptomatically into awareness. Our pathologizing is their work, a divine process working in the human soul. By reverting the pathology to the god, we recognize the divinity of pathology and give the god his due" ...
"Re-Visioning" - James Hillman.
"Re-Visioning" - James Hillman.