OVERCOMING FEAR

The key to this method, Tsongchapa says, is simply to "Recognize dream objects as dream objects."¹ Interestingly, even if you are experiencing a very stable lucid dream—meaning you are aware and confident of the illusory nature of your environment—your old cognitive habits are likely to interfere. I have a real problem with snakes, for example, and I can’t even look at one without feeling a little uncomfortable. When I first began dream yoga, I would encounter snakes time and again. I would be fairly sure I was dreaming, but not entirely. Often, when these snakes began to crawl around on me I would panic, waking myself up. In time, however, I learned to stay relaxed and focused. As hundreds of snakes would crawl around on my body, I would remind myself that dream snakes couldn’t harm me. Soon enough, these snakes would dissolve into my body and I would be transported into higher and higher realms. Once again, this practice of fearlessness should translate into your daily life. If you have a fear of elevators, for instance, you might recognize that all elevators, waking and non-waking, are essentially dream elevators and can’t harm you.

Overcoming fear in your daily life will greatly increase your success in dream yoga. Obviously, it’s important to be reasonable. If you lie down on the highway, you are just going to get run over by a very real vehicle. Say you have always wanted to get up and sing at a Karaoke bar, however, but have just been too intimidated. This is a pretty safe, although likely terrifying, exercise. Once again, remind yourself that all Karaoke bars are dream Karaoke bars in the sense that no true harm can come to you from getting up and singing. This doesn’t mean, I should say, that you won’t be terribly embarrassed, nor does it guarantee that people won’t laugh at you. In fact, if such guarantees were possible, it wouldn’t even be a worthwhile practice, right? Instead, no matter what might happen, no matter how humiliating the experience, you will still endure. Your awareness will continue. Moreover, to the degree that such an experience is truly difficult and terrifying, it will only bring deeper confidence into your experience of yourself as a continuous unfolding of awareness, thereby allowing for the loosening of the various limits and rules you place on yourself from day to day.

FREUD AND THE PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS

Freud hypothesized that the mind is composed of two basic parts: the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious is simply that part of the mind that we can’t access in an intentional way—not directly, at least. After all, that’s what makes it the unconscious. For Freud, the unconscious consisted mostly of two sorts of data: latent, or temporarily unconscious, and repressed. We each know we have forgotten certain significant life experiences, but how do we know? Such experiences, according to Freud, are simply latent. They were conscious once, but now—for whatever reason—they have faded from our readily accessed, daily consciousness. Even so, such experiences leave a sort of footprint in our head somewhere—a kind of secret elf, half-suspected but never quite caught, making shoes in the shadowy corners of our mind. We could say that latent unconscious material is recognized, however vaguely, through the "secret helper" of the natural mind discussed in chapter 7.

Some psychological data, says Freud, has never exactly been conscious. Freud considers this to be repressed data—"processes . . . which if they were to become conscious would be bound to stand out in the crudest contrast to the rest of the conscious process.²" Due to these habitual repressions, many emotional difficulties tend to recur. Some time in the past, each of us has unintentionally held back certain thoughts or wishes that we thought didn’t fit in very well with our idea of "Who I Am." As a kind of automatic strategy, we have stored these unacceptable thoughts and wishes for later processing in the deeper layers of the psyche, and learned to protect them from conscious manifestation through a complex array of psychological defenses. These packages are too heavy and unwieldy right now, we decide, so we’ll let the elusive elephant of the unconscious carry them for a while. . .

CATHEXIS OF UNCONSCIOUS MATERIAL

Unconscious material remains hidden from our everyday awareness. We may vaguely suspect that elf of lost internal and external experiences is in there somewhere, but as soon as we poke our head around the corner, trying to catch him, he disappears into impossible nooks and crannies. Over time, we can imagine this elf calling over other elves to join the party until we have a confused, tangled knot of drunken elves heaped up in a stuffy little psychological corner somewhere. Freud called this tangled, pressurized little knot of unconscious material, be it latent or repressed, a cathexis. The main goal of psychoanalysis, then, is to achieve a catharsis, or discharge, of the mental energy tangled up in these little knots. Using the processes of dream analysis and free association, Freud believed we can somehow sneak up on our secret elf colonies and break the party up. Approaching from the mental periphery, we can gradually unpack unconscious material into our ordinary conscious, where we can then neatly tuck it away into the cozy drawers and cupboards of our daily awareness.

Not surprisingly, given his view of the unconscious, Freud believed dream material was primarily motivated by traumatic memories, repressed wishes, and forbidden impulses hidden just out of our conscious reach. Consequently, dreaming somehow releases this charged energy by acting out our wishes in a disguised or symbolic way.

EXAMPLE DREAM INTERPRETATION

Let’s examine a theoretical dream to see how a typical Freudian dream analysis might be applied. Suppose I have a dream in which my much-beloved childhood dog, Fido, is angrily trampling through a garden of yellow roses. Now given just this much, there is no secret psychoanalytic decoder ring, no prearranged interpretation for the elements "childhood dog" and "yellow roses." Instead, I would be encouraged to talk freely about any associations I might personally have to these elements—a process known as free association. Well, as it turns out, I always thought of Fido as an unfailingly loyal companion, in much the same way I imagine myself to be a steadfast and faithful friend to others. I identify with Fido, that is to say. As for the yellow roses, I find myself suddenly remembering a family reunion from my childhood in which my mother was wearing a dress with a yellow flower print. This was the same day, it so happens, that my mother wouldn’t let me eat my chocolate cake because I hadn’t finished my barbecue sandwich. A possible interpretation of this dream, then, might be that Fido—who represents me—trampling the yellow roses—which represent my mother—is symbolic of my repressed anger toward my mother. Why not just dream about yelling at my mother, then? Once again, like Freud said, maybe I consciously adore my mother and couldn’t integrate such feelings of intense and childish anger very easily into my normal, waking awareness.  Consequently, I let the elephant handle the dirty work, let the unconscious absorb the burden of my undesirable feelings. Here enters Fido and the roses as camouflaged pointers of a sort, trying to sneak these unacceptable impulses past the gate of my conscious awareness.

JUNG AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

Jung agreed with Freud, for the most part, that dreams seemed to represent hidden or unacceptable aspects of an individual’s personality. Dreaming, both men more or less agreed, was a secret balancing act that kept a coded record of the entire individual. Jung, however, distinguished between a personal unconscious, which was more or less the Freudian unconscious, and a kind of shared, or collective unconscious. In Jung’s words, the contents of the collective conscious "have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to hereditary."³ This collective unconscious, according to Jung, was most clearly present in dreams of a particularly powerful, and relatively impersonal nature. Such dreams contained archetypes, deeply implanted symbols repeatedly referenced throughout the history of spiritual belief, myth, art, and folk tales. According to Jung, these archetypes are "pre-existent . . . definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere."⁴ Instead of these personally pesky elves inhabiting the hidden regions of our mind, we now encounter something much more abstract. Rather than actual elves, we might say we encounter the pure, pre-existing idea of, or original mold for, Elf.

EXAMPLE DREAM REINTERPRETED