The Dream-Author

I have come to know that my dreams have an author.  This author is not me – at least not the me who is writing this now.  But it also is me.  Just a different me, a different person who is me.  I think it is right to think of the dream-author as a person.

I am not comfortable saying, with Freud, that the dream-author is the unconscious, because the dream-author shows that he is quite conscious (I project, linguistically, my own gender upon the dream-author, but the dream-author has no gender, or possesses qualities of all genders).  I say the dream-author is conscious, because he is very aware of my waking activities, possesses logic, intelligence, intent, language, and a desire to communicate.  The dream-author is aware of things that I am not aware of, and tries to communicate them to me using a hybrid of his and my own language.  I can identify numerous specific insights that my dreams have presented to me at various times, but which I did not understand because I myself lacked that insight.  When I achieved the insight at a much later time, It became clear what the dream had been trying to say.  This is evidence that the dream-author is aware of things in my waking life, that I am not aware of, and that the dream-author considers it important to attempt to communicate these things to me, as a friend would try to tell me something important that I do not know or understand.  These things tend to center around relationships to persons, and depth of connections to the world and the diverse disaggregated aspects of myself.  The intent of the dream-author seems to be for me to have a more fully integrated personality and to have healthier and more honest relationships, as well as to see the value of the most important things in life, and to see past my illusions of daily life to perceive things for what they are.  With its insight, intelligence, and caring, the dream-author seems more to me like a conscious personality than an amorphous unconscious substrate.

Yet I also cannot agree with Jung that the dream-author is the anima, the Atman or fully realized personality, robustly connected to the collective unconscious and its archetypes, an all-wise guide on the journey to individuation.  For although it is more astute than I am with regard to interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships, it is terrible at certain other types of operations.  Mathematics, spoken language, and spatial orientation are notably suppressed.  We could say that the dream-author is not interested in these things, but I have evidence that it is.  It tries to understand the significance of numbers, tries to remember words in various languages, tries to relate to a geographic landscape, it finds these concepts useful, but is simply bad at them.  It is also neurotically anxious, often wasting my time with interminable, emotionally laden narratives about how worried it is that I will be unable to handle mundane situations like my job.  Some of these weaknesses are complementary to my own strengths, but a poor sense of spatial orientation is a weakness that I share with the dream author.  Again, the dream-author does not seem like the mystically omniscient anima, but more like some guy I met at school and became friends with, complementing my orientation to the world in some ways, and reinforcing it in others.

I think of the dream-author as a writer because he uses a language to construct an idea-complex.  On waking, the idea-complex becomes a narrative, but I am fairly certain that it is my conscious, waking self that imposes narrative structure on the idea-complex, since in its raw form the idea-complex is not understandable to the conscious waking mind.  I suspect this because in some moments I am able to retain the idea-complex in mind,briefly, before imposing the narrative.  I am sometimes able to be consciously aware of the process of imposing the narrative, which seems neither conscious nor unconscious, but somehow an inevitable product of the interface of the two worlds and their incompatible logics.  The dream-author draws images and feelings from my waking activities and uses them as symbols in its language of dream-logic.  Thus, objects in my quotidian experience can become words and phrases in my dream, but they are not the meaning of the dream.  I have learned that it is important not to be distracted by the connections of the symbols to waking life.  So, for example, I might dream of a fish “because I had fish for dinner.”  But while having had fish for dinner supplied the image of the fish, it is not the meaning of the fish.  If I wish to understand the meaning of the dream of fish, I must ask what the fish represents for me, how I feel about seeing the fish, and what is the relationship of the fish to other symbols in the dream.  I must not be distracted by the superficial image of the fish.

Dream work, for me, involves deepening my relationship with the dream-author.  I wish to better understand not only his language and his messages for me, but I wish to better understand him as a person.  I wish to know how I can be of help to the dream-author, so that our relationship is not a one-way affair.  I wish to see the dream-author, within myself as I dream, and in the mirror when I wake.  I do not wish to become one with the dream-author, to realize that he is nothing other than my own self, any more than I wish to become the same person as my friend or spouse.  I want to appreciate the dream-author as a person who is striving to become fully realized alongside me, a person who is taking this journey with me, who is insightful, honest, possessed of universal wisdom, bad at math, disoriented in the towns and buildings, and has trouble remembering simple words and phrases.  I want us to grow together.

Ghosts

Our ghosts that rest upon our frighted frame
That speak in ciphers crafted from our culted names
And hold within their fingers nighted mummeries
That spoken would consume our breath and memories

What now pale husks?
Search the skies at dusk
Of thee nor toe nor tusk.