Session 795

Nature of the Psyche, Session 795

In their play children often imaginatively interchange their sexes.  The young selfhood is freer in its identification, and as yet has not been taught to identify its own personality with its sex exclusively.

In the dreams of children this same activity continues, so that the boy may have many dream experiences as a girl, and the girl as a boy.  More than this, however, in children’s dreams as in their play activity, age variances are also frequent.  The young child dreaming of its own future counterpart, for example, attains a kind of psychological projection into the future of its world.  Adults censor many of their own dreams so that the frequent changes in sexual orientation are not remembered.

EXERCISE

Play then at another game, and pretend that you are of the opposite sex.  Do this after an encounter in which the conventions of sex have played a part.  Ask yourself how many of your current beliefs would be different if your sex was.  If you are a parent, imagine that you are your mate, and in that role imaginatively consider your children.

Your beliefs about dreams color your memory and interpretation of them, so that at the point of waking, with magnificent psychological duplicity, you often make last-minute adjustments that bring your dreams more in line with your conscious expectations.  The sexual symbols usually attached to dream images are highly simplistic, for example.  They program you to interpret dreams in a given manner.

You do have a “dream memory” as a species, with certain natural symbols.  These are individually experienced, with great variations.  The studies done on men and women dreamers are already prejudiced, however, both by the investigators and by the dreamers themselves.  Men remember “manly” dreams – generally speaking, now – while women in the same manner remember dreams that they believe suit their sex according to their beliefs.

People often program their waking memory in quite the same fashion.  The psyche, again, not only has no one sexual identification, but it is the larger psychic and psychological bank of potentials from which all gradations of sexuality emerge.  It is not asexual, and yet it is the combination of those richest ingredients considered to be male and female.

The human personality is therefore endowed sexually and psychologically with a freedom from strict sexual orientation.  This has contributed to the survival of the species by not separating any of its mental or psychological abilities into two opposite camps.  Except for the physical processes of reproduction, the species is free to arrange its psychological characteristics in whatever fashions it chooses.  There is no inner programming that says otherwise.

In dreams this psychological complexity is more apparent.  Because of programming, many people refrain from natural reactions of a most harmless nature, and these are often given expression in the dream state.  Those dreams, however, are precisely the ones least remembered – the censoring is so habitual.  The male’s aggressive tendencies, often taken as basic characteristics of the species itself, are a case in point.  This is an exaggerated, learned aggressive response, not natural in those terms in your species, or as interpreted in any other species.

This artificial aggressiveness has nothing to do either, basically, with the struggle for survival.  It is the direct result of the fact that the male has been taught to deny the existence within himself of certain basic emotions.  This means that he denies a certain portion of his own humanity, and then is forced to overreact in expressing those emotions left open to him.  The reasons for such a lopsided focus have been discussed at various times in my works.  The male, however, chose to take upon himself a kind of specialization of consciousness that, carried too far, leads to a hard over-objectivity.  Only in dreams in your time, in your society, is the male free to cry unabashedly, to admit any kind of dependency, and only at certain occasions and usually in relative privacy is he allowed to express feelings of love.

His rage turns outward as aggression.  It is the highest idiocy, however, to project that artificial aggression outward upon the animal kingdom in general.  Such beliefs invisibly affect all of your studies – and worse, they help you misread the activity in nature itself.

Those who imagine they look upon nature with the most objective of eyes are those whose subjective beliefs blind them most of all, for they cannot see through their own misinterpretations.  It has been said that statistics can be made to say two things at once, both contradictory; so the facts of nature can be read in completely different fashions as they are put together with the organizational abilities of the mind operating through the brain’s beliefs.  The exterior core of dreams is also blemished to that degree, but the inner core of dreams provides a constant new influx of material, feedback, and insight from the psyche, so that the personality is not at the mercy of its exterior experience only – not confined to environmental feedback only, but ever provided with fresh intuitive data and direction.

Even if such dreams are not recalled, they circulate through the psychological system, so to speak.  They are responsible for the inventiveness and creativity of the species, even bringing new comprehensions that can be used to bear upon the life of the physical world.

Again, as in your terms the species has a physical past, so it has a psychological past.  No experiences are ever lost.  The most private event is still written in the mass psyche of the species.

I am explaining this for now in terms of past, present, and future.  You can only understand some concepts when they are given in that fashion.  Taking that for granted, then, you are each born with the conscious knowledge of what has come before.  Your brain is far from an empty slate, waiting for the first imprint of experience; it is already equipped with complete “equations”, telling you who you are and where you have come from.  Nor do you wipe that slate clean, symbolically speaking, before you write your life upon it.  Instead, you draw upon what has gone before: the experiences of your ancestors, back – in your terms now – through time immemorial.

The individual is born equipped with his humanness, with certain propensities and leanings toward development.  He knows what human voices sound like even before his ear physically hears those sounds.  He is born wanting to form civilizations as, for example, beavers want to form dams.

Children’s dreams activate inner psychological mechanisms, and at a time when their age makes extensive physical knowledge of their world impossible.  In dreams they are given information regarding that environment.

Physical feedback is of course necessary for development, and a child deprived of it will not fully mature.  Yet the development of dreams follows inner patterns that activate the child’s growth, and stimulate its development.  There are even key dreams in infancy that serve to trigger necessary hormonal functioning.  The child crawls and walks in dreams before those acts are physically executed – the dreams serving as impetus for muscular coordination and development.

Language is practiced by infants in the dream state, and it is indeed that mental practice that results in children speaking sentences far more quickly than otherwise would seem possible.  The dream world, then, develops faster than physical experience.  For some time, the child is more secure there.  Without dreaming there would be no learning, nor would there be memory.

Events are processed in dreams, put in the necessary perspective, sorted and arranged.  This is done when the conscious mind is separated from direct involvement with physical events.  Dreams serve to dull the impact of the day’s events just past, while the meaning of those activities sifts through the various levels of the personality, settling into compartments of intent and belief.  Often the true impact of an event does not occur until it has been interpreted or re-experienced through a dream.

Because dreams follow paths of association, they break through time barriers, allowing the individual to mix, match, and compare events from different periods of his life.  All of this is done somewhat in the way that a child plays, through the formation of creative dream dramas in which the individual is free to play a million different roles and to examine the nature of probable events from the standpoint of “a game”.

In play, children adopt certain rules and conditions “for a time”.  The child can stop at any time.  Innumerable play events can occur with varying intensity, yet generally speaking the results cease when the game is over.  The child plays at being an adult, and is a child again when his parents call, so the effects of the game are not long-lasting.  Still, they are an important part of a child’s daily life, and they affect the way he or she relates to others.  So in dreams, the events have effects only while dreaming.  They do not practically intrude into waking hours – the attacking bear vanishes when you open your eyes; it does not physically chase you around the bedroom.

The great versatility of the species in its reaction to events is highly dependent upon this kind of dreaming capacity.  The species tries out its probable reactions to probable events in the dream state, and hence is better prepared for action “in the future”.

To some extent dreams are participated in by cellular consciousness also, for the cells have an equal interest in the individual’s psychic and body events.  In a way dreams are of course composite behavior – mental and psychic games that suite the purposes of mind and body alike.  Feedback from the physical environment may trigger an alarming dream that causes the individual to awaken.

Certain chemicals may affect dreaming by altering the cells’ reality.  Many sleeping pills are detrimental, in that they inhibit the body’s natural response to its environment while an individual is sleeping, and deaden the intimate relationship between the dreaming mind and the sleeping body.

Because you have very limited ideas of what logic is, it seems to you that the dreaming self is not critical, or “logical”, yet it works with amazing discrimination, sifting data, sending some to certain portions of the body, and structuring memory.  Sleeping pills also impede the critical functions of dreams that are so often overlooked.  The facts are that dreams involve high acts of creativity.  These are not only intuitively based, but formed with a logic far surpassing your ideas of that quality.  These creative acts are then fitted together through associative processes that come together most precisely to form the dream events.

It should certainly be obvious that dreams are not passive events.  Some rival physical events in intensity and even effect.  They involve quite active coordination on the part of mind and body, and they bring to the individual experience otherwise unattainable.

Small amounts of ordinary stimulators, such as coffee or tea, taken before bed when you are already sleepy, have a beneficial effect in stimulating dream activity and aiding dream recall.  Too large a serving, of course, could simply waken you, but small amounts taken if you are already drowsy allow you to take your conscious mind into the dream state more readily, where it can act as an observer.

A very small amount of alcohol can also serve.  Anything that suppresses activity will also suppress your dreams.  As is known, anyone deprived of sufficient dreaming will most likely begin to hallucinate while in the waking state, for too much experience has built up that needs processing.  There are many secondary hormonal activities that take place in the dream state and at no other time.  Even cellular growth and revitalization are accelerated while the body sleeps.