Understanding Dreams (I found myself this morning)

The understanding of dreams is an important process in the deepening of the wholeness of ourselves. Yet it is seldom easy, and often it feels like dreams are telling us something that we cannot quite grasp. Attempts at developing a universal lexicon of dream language are generally unsatisfying. Even the best interpretive frameworks, such as those of Jung and Castañeda, are often foiled by our most significant experiences in the dream world. Because dreams are rooted in very personal experience, they strongly resist universal categorization and interpretation. They speak a language, and they follow a logic, yes. But it is not a universal language or a universal logic. It is a personal language and a personal logic. Therefore, the key to understanding dreams lies in a personal journey to understand the uniquely individual language of one's own dream author, the Self.

Here is an example of how this language works, and the discipline necessary to learn it.

In the dream I am a student at a vast and multidimensional academy, where many people come together to study art, science, language, and all the human endeavors. I am in a gathering with students and teachers, and I remember that I have two bass lines to learn. I think of the sheet music, I can visualize it in my head, but I have not committed it to memory as I know I must do. I speak to one of the professors. “I feel like I am working as hard as I possibly can, but no matter how hard I work, what remains to me to do is still impossible.”

The professor is kind and reassuring. “It feels like that for everyone while they're in a challenging academic program.”

“Yes, but I've been feeling like that for twenty-five years.”

“Aren't you in the FINSEL program? Don't you have to review four musical pieces every week for that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, why not drop FINSEL? You don't need it.”

I realize the professor is right. I don't need FINSEL. Dropping it would make everything easier, and I would finally be able to relax a little. But I also have an immediate sense of attachment; the program is very important to me. I understand that it requires much time, attention, and discipline, but it is also part of who I am and why I am here. I could drop the program, but I will not.

When I awake, I remember the particulars of this dream, especially the strange word, “FINSEL.” I know that the feeling of being overwhelmed by work and obligation is a representation of very real waking anxieties and exhaustion, but what could this strange word mean? Although I never saw the word written in the dream, and in any case, I am seldom able to read or work with figures in a dream, still I knew that the word was an acronym. Its letters stood for something, or it was a contraction. But of what, I could not imagine.

I meditated on the dream throughout the morning (thankfully, it was a Saturday). I related it to my wife after breakfast, and began exploring the rest of the imagery. There were Jungian quaternities: four musical pieces in a week. The week is also a quaternity, since there are four of them in a month. Then there was the mention of “twenty-five years,” a quarter of a century. The two bass lines are a semi-quaternity. In the Jungian framework, such ubiquity of quaternities suggests a very significant dream of individuation. Already, I had no doubt of the dream's personal importance.

In the dream I was able to read music, though with difficulty. This was true in my waking life many years ago, but no longer, as I had left off performing written pieces in my teens, and had branched off into writing and performing my own music, intuitively rather than analytically, and without the benefit of formal writing. Nevertheless, music remains a central part of my personal self-expression, as it has been most of my life.

The dream's FINSEL program was a music program, and the students with whom I was speaking in the dream were music students. I thought I recognized one of them from my mathematics classroom of the waking world. I thought about that student, then remembered an incident that had occurred the day before in a calculus class, which happens to have a fair number of musically inclined students. Several of the students were getting permission slips signed to go on a field trip to a local engineering firm called “Boehringer Ingelheim.” I thought the name was funny, and it reminded me of the song, “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.” I tried to sing the song, substituting the name of the engineering firm for John Jacob's but I could not remember how the song went. I enlisted the aid of the students.

“You guys are musical types, you know the song 'John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,' right?”

About five students immediately burst into an enthusiastic rendition of the song. And yes, this is the sort of thing that typically happens in my calculus class.

“OK,” I said, delightedly, “ now substitute 'Boerhinger Ingelheim' for 'John Jacob Jingleheimer.'”

They immediately did so, and as they joyfully belted out the lampooned marching song, I began conducting. Another student exclaimed, “Look, Reese is conducting!”

“Sure,” I said. “I was in band in high school, too. I learned how to conduct 4/4 time: Floor, wall, wall, ceiling!”

All of this transpired during less than two minutes, while students were working out a calculus problem. Having had our fun – pedagogically useful, since a musical tangent can serve to stimulate the divergent thinking necessary for difficult mathematical problems – I redirected the students' attention to their work. But there had been a connection among us during that moment. Many of the students had not known about my musical background, so sharing that with them enabled us to connect in a new way. Moreover, in that experience of singing suddenly and joyfully together, there emerged that pure and transcendent feeling that is the dissolution of boundary. No longer were there teacher and students in the room, nor even persons isolated by their individuality, but a consciousness that blurred even the boundaries of self, so that something transpersonal emerged: The Collective Consciousness.

This was not the only musical connection I had with students on that day. In a different period of the school day, I was with students during what is called “advisory period,” which often functions rather like a socializing study hall. During this period, some students were using a laptop to look at Soundcloud, a website where amateur and professional songwriters post recorded music. Looking over the students' shoulder, I was surprised to see them using Soundcloud, since not many students do. I had never told any student that I have a Soundcloud page, but I suddenly felt moved to share, and suggested they look up my page.

The students did so, and were very surprised and amazed that their math teacher, whom they had known for four years, records and posts music that is modern enough to appeal to them (even though much of it was written and recorded before they were born). Several students liked it, and listened to several songs, and expressed great surprise and admiration. “I always knew Reese was a wizard,” one student said. Later in the day, one of the students to whom I feel close saw me in the hallway and said, “Reese, I'm telling everybody about your Soundcloud page. Everybody!”

I had always kept my musical activities private from the school, especially as some of the music is either aggressive or very personal in nature, and some has culturally subversive lyrics. On coming home, I somewhat nervously reviewed my page to see if there was anything that could jeopardize my career as a public school teacher, but I decided there wasn't, and in the end, I was glad that I had finally shared this part of my life with my students.

So. Only after reflection on the dream did I realize that two fairly significant events had occurred that very day, both of which had to do with connecting to young people in a school, through music. The import of the dream was beginning to assume definition. But I was no closer to understanding “FINSEL,” although my wife and I had each proposed several things having to do with music that didn't quite fit.

I reflected on the feelings I had experienced just after waking. In recent years, I have begun accumulating musical equipment, which I had left off for about a decade in a hiatus from music and recording. Now I had some recording equipment together, and had united it with things I had kept from my youth, and organized them into an efficiency studio built into a small desk in a corner of the bedroom. I had recorded a new song a couple of weeks ago, and had not put everything away yet.

On waking, I had noticed the amplifier, electronic delay unit, a notebook with scribbled lyrics, and a pedal effect, all stacked neatly, and a guitar and stand and coil of cords on the floor next to them. It had struck me how much this arrangement reminded me of how my bedroom looked twenty-five years ago, when I had still lived with my parents (and there was the “twenty-five years” from the dream). Indeed, three of the items of equipment were the same ones I had kept with me all those years; And the notebook, though only a few years old, was the same spiral type that I had always used in the past.

Here again was the musical connection to the past that had emerged twice on the previous day. I thought of how much I have changed and grown throughout those significant and transformative years, how I am not the same person now that I had been then. Yet there is a thread that runs through all of it, right to the root, right to the conception of my being. That thread is not music, but music is the perfect symbol of it. It is a touchstone to which I have always come back, and, like waking one morning and seeing an arrangement in my room exactly as it had been a quarter century ago, there I can find myself. Thinking of this, a thrill of excitement ran up my arms, caused my hair to stand on end, and tears to emerge in my eyes. My breathing became erratic and heavy, as though I could not get enough of the delicious oxygen that informs this life. I felt I was ready to jump out of my body and behold a series of incarnations from time immemorial.

FINSEL.

FIND SELF.

The instant I said it, I knew it was right. Even now, writing the words, after perhaps two hours of thinking and writing, I feel my face flush, tears well up, a rush of blood throughout my body. Everything about the dream was perfect. The people in it, the context, the images, the coded word, everything gave a perfectly clear message, and nothing was extraneous or unnecessary. Yes, my life has never been an easy one, and no matter how much I work, the work that remains to be done seems impossible, and this is how it has been all my life. Yet I have brought this challenge on myself by insisting at all times on a path that involved commitment to being authentic in the world, to finding and being myself and not anything else. This work has been demanding, sometimes crushing, but if someone were to suggest that I simply give it up to live an easier life – No, I would never do it. Not for an instant. All of the difficulty and hard work of my life has been worth it. I wouldn't trade it for anything. Even my worst mistakes were but steps on that path, and even those, I would not give up, if it meant abandoning the path of myself.

More than this understanding, there was something else that had brought an emotional climax to my whole body, mind, and spirit. It was not just the message that was significant in the dream. It was also the messenger. More important than receiving a needed missive about the condition of my soul, was knowing that there was someone to send that message. Like a shipwrecked sailor who receives a note in a bottle, the content of the note is not as important as the knowledge that there was someone who sent the bottle. Within the totality of consciousness that inhabits each of us, there is an intelligence that understands what is going on better than we do, and can help us through those dark despairs that haunt the human spirit. Indeed, that intelligence shows us that those travails and despairs are mere shadows, and that the fullness of our individual brilliance transcends them, though often we do not see. Some conceive this intelligence as an externalized deity, some as an internalized aspect of the Self. But internality and externality are properties of a three-dimensional, material world, not of the infinite-dimensional universe of which our physical existence is but an image. The soul transcends and crosses dimensions, and in a multidimensional universe, there is no inside and outside. There is no I nor Thou. There is I-within-Thou and Thou-within-I. The whole contains the part, and the part, the whole. Our dreams may tell us that this is so. We need only the diligence to listen.