Chapter 1 |
Chapter 6 (excerpt):
The Dream Society "Now I know that it is not out of our single souls we dream. We dream anonymously, communally, if each after his fashion. The great soul of which we are all a part may dream through us, in our manner of dreaming, its own secret dreams..." ----Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain Dreams are not only appraisingly well-informed about our intimate relationships, but shrewd observers of our wider social backdrop. They are remarkably attuned to the clamor of community, to the nuances of the body politic, even to the fate of the earth. A Healing Dream wants to wriggle free of our solitary nets and head into open water, toward communion with the greater conclave of souls. This may frighten us a little. Dreams are often socially transgressive. They chafe at boundaries, championing the rude, lewd, and wholly unacceptable. It has been standing policy in psychology that dreams are not meant to be enacted on the social stage; they are personal creations that speak to the dreamer alone. People who act out their dreams can be dangerous, becoming prey to delusions, dragging others along with them. When Julius Caesar dreamed he was sleeping with his mother, his royal dream interpreter told him he would soon possess the mother city, Rome. Caesar duly marched southward to take the capital. Would he and the world have been better off if, rather than setting out on the road to conquest, he had brought his dream to a therapist to work through his Oedipus complex? Those who have a firm relationship with the inner world attain an inner authority, which society yearns for and also fears---the individual not answerable to social consensus but, in the best case, his own conscience, and in the worst case, his personal demons. In dreamwork, psychologists wisely counsel that we "keep the lid on the pot;" "withdraw the projections" back into the inner world. "The purpose of dreams," one Jungian told me, "is to undermine group identification, oppose collective solutions, and spur individuation." Confined to itself, the soul can undergo its own alchemical transformation. If each of us faced our many selves and shadows before projecting them on our neighbors, a vast social transformation would undoubtedly ensue. Our tradition of "psychologizing" the dream rather than, as in some tribal cultures, acting upon it, is no small cultural achievement. But has Western psychology been too eager to bottle up the dream in the consulting room, forbidding it a wider life? Healing Dreams often speak to collective issues. They crave the give-and-take between the inner and outer worlds. They confront us with our own unmet social potential, calling upon us each to know ourselves as part of the whole. |
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