DREAM FORAGING

​“If we can't be free at least we can be cheap.” - Frank Zappa

​Greetings and welcome back to Cheap Thrills, your source for speculation on bargain-basement entertainment during the long twilight of industrial decline. In the first column I grappled with Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle and the entertainment-industrial complex as embedded in three forms of mass media. Now I turn my attention to dreams, a natural resource rich in wisdom, full of puns and funny amusements. Dream have been available to us for a long time, are available to us now, and will continue to be available long in the future when other resources may be in short supply. The pool of dreams is also an excellent fishing hole. With patience and the right bait, symbols can be caught and reeled up to the surface. I have found this imagery to be more nourishing than the bland offerings available from the McGovCorp menu.

The Surrealist movement in the arts was rife with dreams as part of their attempt to liberate the unconscious and shock mainstream sensibilities. Yet in short order Surrealist techniques were recuperated[1] by advertising agencies, who found the school’s techniques perfect for implanting imagery into the unconscious. This was the power of the “incongruous image,”[2] where two or more things that don’t normally belong together, like a sewing machine and umbrella, or a lizard and a car insurance salesman, are made to hang out together. When the Situationists came on the scene they were critical of the Surrealist movement’s interest in psychoanalysis and all things metaphysical and occult. They launched similar criticisms against the American Beatniks who they thought were equally mired in mysticism. The Situationists wanted to create new situations for living, and their critique of these movements was a necessary counterbalance to their tendency towards astral escapism: going off into the realms of dream at the expense of the physical world.

Yet the study of dreams and the various metaphysical and mystical traditions that have evolved on this planet do not mean physical existence with all its troubles and problems has to be ditched. By the same token, embracing the material aspect of this world does not mean a person has no need of the insights and perceptions which come to us from more subtle avenues.

What if instead of looking at dreams and waking life as a binary, we used three-valued logic to allow for the interplay of a third position? The material world and the dream world are both connected via the interface of our imagination, forming a potent and fertile triangle.  Giving the imagination a place in our way of thinking about the world and our place in it allows for solutions to our problems to come from places outside the binary narratives pushed by McGovCorp.

            Dreams and synchronicities are accessible to everyone as a source of guidance through the vagaries of the long descent. Yet if we wish to profit from their wisdom, we first must listen to what they are saying to us now.

When the Covid-19 pandemic began to play havoc with our institutions and the world went into various degrees of lockdown in the spring of 2020, there was a noted upsurge of people reporting intense dreams to their friends, family and fellow travelers. Many in the healthcare industry claimed that the uptick in bizarre dreams was due to folks getting extra sleep. People’s bodies finally had a chance to play catch-up from the sleep-deprived rush of the 21st century schedule. Whether laid off or able to work from home, many people used the time to catch their breath and an extra wink. The regenerative nature of sleep had been deprioritized in the haste of working and consuming. I find that the longer I am able to sleep, the more dreams I have, alongside a greater ease in remembering them. From my experience there is some truth to what the health care workers claimed—yet I believe there was also something more.

As people decompressed from the rituals of the rat race, one form of stress was replaced by a slew of others: not knowing when the next paycheck was going to come, not knowing who and what to believe in a divisive media matrix during a divisive election year, with a divisive virus on the loose, while also dealing with toilet paper shortages. Cognitive dissonance abounded. For healthcare workers, police and other public safety personnel there were other kinds of stress brought on by the pandemic. One thing the whole debacle has brought into awareness is just how little control we humans actually have.

Covid-19 marked an interruption to the regularly scheduled spectacle. It was a crack in the illusion of a controlled existence. Panic erupted from that crack in the form of Covid-19 dreams. These dreams were also a break from the dominant materialist interpretation of reality.

Deirdre Barret, a dream researcher and assistant professor of psychology from the hallowed halls of Harvard University in Cambridge, started studying the phenomenon of people’s intense dreams during the lockdowns.[3] She noted that a change in the content and character of dreams is very common during a crisis. Her research documented the huge numbers of people who had dreams of being attacked by bugs, worms, armies of roaches, wasps, flies, gnats and other creepy crawlies. Dreams often have a punny way about them, and the pun of getting a bug, a.k.a. catching a virus, is apropos here.  As people tried to cope with the situation, unprecedented for those accustomed to luxury elite lifestyles and the comforts of a materialist society, the suppressed contents of their minds could not be contained, controlled. The bugs burst forth. 

Dreams are adept at pointing out our fears. In my experience of keeping a dream journal for close to two decades I have found that dreams can also show us a way to patch up some of the separation that has occurred between people, other species, and the planet we all share. If we can see past the wounds our dreams often show us, we can also grasp some of the light pouring through those wounds. Maybe when we have dreams of insects, instead of bugging out, we should bug in, learn about those bugs and see what they have to teach us.

I used to have a strong fear of spiders and for many years they showed up consistently in my dreams. I would wake up from these encounters with shudders but also a sense of awe. As part of my dream play I was inspired to learn about their biology and ecological roles, the various myths and folklore that surround them. Now when I see a spider I don’t shudder anymore, but talk to them and say hello. I approach them with respect and fascination instead of fear and apprehension. Spinning out from those dreams of spiders entire webs of connection were born.

Dreams are a way to reconnect with the greater web of reality. Making the effort to remember them is one way to begin healing the false sense of separation between ourselves, nature, and the subtle realms that interpenetrate us, the many threads that connect one thing to another. Dreams can help an individual flourish and regenerate when the landscape and the media-space around them are otherwise barren. Dreams can help a person to navigate along their individual fate path, mining the unconscious for clues to lead them on to their destiny. The person who studies, records and shares their dreams will find that they are just as often practical as they are otherworldly. Dreams bring us the messages we need, whether or not they are messages we want. In doing so they can help attune us back to the rhythms of nature and the Earth.

Derrick Jensen has never been one to back away from controversy in putting forth his agenda of ecological education and critique of civilization. His 2011 book Dreams also showed wisdom, bravery and courage as he challenged the view that there is no such thing as knowledge outside of science.

He writes about how “dreams are living, willful beings, as alive as you or I or a cat or a dog or a bird or a fire or a river or a flash of lightning or a song or a kiss. As living beings, dreams act with…willful unpredictability. They are not machines. They cannot be managed, only denied, and they can only be denied temporarily, and then to our own poverty and at our own peril. They are not bound by laws, and will be constrained neither by scientific equations nor other holy texts. They, more than most, maybe more than almost any others, will not be enslaved. Dreams can be messengers, as can you or I or any of these others, but they cannot be domesticated. They are proud, and they are free.”

Dreams erupt unbidden, coming through when and as they see fit. In this they have a unique capacity to jolt us awake from the sleepwalking trance of waking life. A dream can direct a person to things in need of tending, and the personal issues we’d rather not address.  In his book Jensen explores his own dreams and imaginative insights and along the way gropes towards reconciliation with the wild side of nature we humans have longed to suppress and control.

Have you ever tried to control your dreams? Just as trying to control the behavior of another individual is difficult, and often misguided, I believe the same is true when we try to control our dreams. Yet like many other things in life, people do try to rein in and control them. The practice of lucid dreaming, where people first try to become aware they are dreaming, and then attempt to shape and control the dream, is a case in point. Lucid or conscious dreams do happen at times, but they are often just as spontaneous and outside of the sleeper’s control as is the dream content itself. At best we can influence them through the practice of dream incubation, when a person goes to sleep with a specific intention or question they wish to have answered by a dream. But the shape the answer comes in is often unforeseen.

Personally, I think it is best to not try and control dreams but to be open to receiving whatever comes through that window of consciousness.  Trying to control our dream life strikes me as just another way for humans to fool ourselves into thinking we are ultimately in charge. But just because I don’t think dreams should try to be controlled doesn’t mean I think they shouldn’t be worked with, interpreted, and used as source of wisdom, meaning, entertainment and authentic imagery. When we quarantine our minds from the influence of corporate media, we make space for other voices to be heard. Some of those voices may whisper to us in the chamber of sleep.

To get back to one of the purposes of this column, dreams are often a great entertainment. Sharing your dreams in the morning with a loved one is a great way to start the day. Telling your dream as if it was a story that happened to you—because on some level it did—is a free way to sharpen the skill of telling tales. I have a dream that one day people will talk about their dreams with each other as much as they talk about sports games or what happened on the latest episode of The Bachelor or Seinfeld or whatever it is people watch these days. Instead of saying, “Did you see that one where Kramer had kidney stones?” or “What did you think of the ending of Game of Thrones?” we could ask each other where we went when we went to bed.

There are other ways of working with dreams too, besides just writing or telling them as stories. We can act them out in dream theater, draw, paint or sing them, put them together on a workbench when a solution to an invention is dreamed up, or hold them in our hearts as a source of radiant heat on the cold days of winter when all else seems bleak.

Elias Howe had a dream that gave him the breakthrough he needed for a major invention. He was an inventor who was working on the concept and design of a machine for sewing. There was one problem which he couldn’t resolve until the answer came to him in a dream. In his original idea he was going to use an ordinary needle with the eye located at the heel for the automated stitch, but this didn’t work.

Howe dreamed he was being chased down for a meal by cannibals who had spears with holes in their tips. Awaking from this dream he had a flash of insight and realized that the needle in his invention needed a hole in the tip for the thread to be put through.  This led to his innovative design for the sewing machine which he received a patent for in 1846. His invention changed lives all across the globe.

Answers come in dreams and solutions to the various problems imposed by decline can also come to us in this way. The mad scientists and cranks of the long emergency would do well to keep a pad on their nightstand to sketch down diagrams and ideas that might otherwise wisp away if not caught on waking’s cusp.
There are a lot of resources out there for learning about how to play with dreams and many approaches. I found the books of Robert Moss to be the best practical guides, though your mileage may vary.  For the history buffs out there I recommend his The Secret History of Dreaming. In that book he shows how dreams have shaped world events and how they are vital for the future. In this context he calls dreams the secret engines of history.  To jumpstart the practical and fun use of dreams I’d say it’s best to start with his book Conscious Dreaming which gives the foundation to his approach. After the basics have been established through, his book Dreamgates:  An Explorer’s Guide to the Worlds of Soul, Imagination, and Life Beyond Death goes into more esoteric territory. It is quite the useful guidebook to some of the places a dream traveler might go. 

Yet there are other books and approaches. Something a lot of them have in common is the keeping of a dream journal, or written record of dreams. Making a record of your excursions to the ethereal realms in some physical way seems to be an essential component for building up and strengthening the capacity for dream recall. Perhaps it was different in oral cultures, and in times when sharing dreams was a matter of course. For those of us who are addicted to the written word, these notebooks will become in time your own vital travelogue, wildcrafted from the jungles, deserts, spectacular cities and temples of the imaginal realms.
For all of you writers and aspiring writers out there, keeping a dream journal is an excellent tool for developing skills in narrative and description. Characters, settings, moods and themes all emerge from the sanctuary of sleep, ready to be transcribed.  Dreams can also be the key to giving you the solution to a tricky plot problem—or delivering a fully formed plot. This latter happened to Stephen King when he dreamed up his novel Misery while sleeping on a trans-Atlantic flight to England.  After he woke up he sketched the idea on a cocktail napkin, and when he and his wife Tabitha finally got to the hotel they were staying at in London he outlined the rest of the novel in sixteen pages of notes that came flowing out of his dream inspiration. The story has gone on to entertain countless readers. 

The novels in Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower series were likewise inspired by a dream, though not his own. The idea for this tale of a traveling gunslinger searching for the Dark Tower was inspired in part by his love for the Robert Browning poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. The poem itself had come to Browning in a dream which he then wrote down the same day. The title for Browning’s poem, and its last line, in turn came from a line in Shakespeare’s King Lear. So it is that one dreamer passes along a key that unlocks a door for another. 

H.P. Lovecraft was another avid dreamer of the dark fantastic. Many of his stories were fueled by his vivid nightmares. His first adult story, The Tomb, is a tale of dream incubation set inside a decrepit crypt. Polaris, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, and the fantasy stories of his Dream Cycle, among many others, all had dreams as points of origin. By trusting his dreams Lovecraft created tales that continue to haunt and delight devotees and new readers alike. Iä iä Cthulhu fhtagn!

Notebooks and pens are cheap and with just a few basic tools we can all become dream foragers. This is bounty that once a person begins harvesting, will continue to give, and when one person is enriched, that dream, as compost, becomes cultural fertilizer, giving back to others further stories, poetry, inventions, and different ways of organizing the situations of life. Big dreams await those who are willing to let go and forage in in the wild undergrowth of the sleeping mind.

RE/SOURCES:

Here are just a few seed books and articles for growing a dream practice and further exploration.

Jensen, Derrick. 2011. Dreams. New York, N.Y.: Seven Stories Press.

Kelley, Buckley. May, 26, 2015. “13 Dream-Related Stories by H.P. Lovecraft.” HuffPost. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/13-dreamrelated-fictions-_b_7446952>

King, Stephen. 1982–2012. The Dark Tower (series). New York, N.Y.: Donald M. Grant Publishers Inc.

• For more on dreams by King see the “Coda: Pages From a Writer’s Journal” at the end of A Song of Susannah.

King, Stephen. 2010. On Writing. New York, NY.: Simon and Schuster.

Lovecraft, H.P. 1995. The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Tales of Terror and Death. New York, N.Y.: Del Rey.
 McDonough, Tom. 2002. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

• See in particular Guy Debord, “Contribution to the Debate ‘Is Surrealism Alive or Dead?’ ” (1958).

Moss, Robert. 1996. Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life. New York, N.Y.: Three Rivers Press.
Moss, Robert. 2009. The Secret History of Dreaming. Novato, Calif.: New World Library.
Moss, Robert. 2010 Dreamgates: Exploring the World’s of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death. Novato, Calif.: New World Library.

[1] The use of avant-garde techniques and strategies by mainstream culture was a process the Situationists called “recuperation.” In their writings they showed the problem of institutional forces co-opting oppositional tactics and practices from the underground to be put back in service to the mainstream.

[2]Jill Lawless, The Selling of Surrealism, LA Times, <https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-apr-02-et-surrealism2-story.html>

[3]Kelli Miller.  COVID and Sleep: Sweet Dreams Aren’t Made of This. <https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200527/covid-and-sleep-sweet-dreams-arent-made-of-this>

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This was the second essay for my Cheap Thrills column in a 2021 issue of New Maps. I am adding these all to my website now, since they originally appeared first in print.

Find my other Cheap Thrills articles here at the links below:

A COMPLEXITY OF SPECTACLES

STREAM FORAGING

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING
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