Origin of Dream Characters
How Do Self-Aspects Come to Be?
From Dream Yoga
Think of how phenomena come trooping
out of the Desert of Non-existence
into this materiality.
Morning and night,
they arrive in a long line and take over
from each other,
“It’s my turn now. Get out!
Rumi
How can a Clearly Prepersonal and Irrational Process Produce Transpersonal Results?
On the surface of things, there is nothing rational, much less transpersonal, about interviewing self-aspects. Whether a character from a dream or the personification of a life issue, how is it that we experience both amazing autonomy yet wisdom, support, and nurturance from so many self-aspects? Why do they not take over? Why do they not fragment the waking self that we have worked so hard to create? Why should the whimsical and arbitrary expression of sadness, first as the color green and then as a salamander have any relationship whatsoever to anything? Why should we take precious time listening to the perspectives of an obvious fabrication of the mind? Will that not simply lead us into more dreamlike delusion, samsara, maya, and suffering rather than out of it?
Integral Deep listening is a counterintuitive approach to Integral Deep Listening. It does not seek the instruction of departed masters or the guidance of the White Brotherhood. It shows no preference for saints over toilet seats, for angels over devils.
How Does Chaos Theory Help Explain the Dream of Reality?
Concepts from the field of chaos theory throw light on why identification with other self-aspects expand identity and cause us to wake up. Integral Deep Listening draws fascinating and helpful insights from Rene Thom’s catastrophe theory, Edward Lorenz’s discovery of the first of a series of chaotic attractors, and Mendel Mandelbrot’s depictions of fractal geometry. While such terminology comes from systems theory, mathematics, and the physical sciences, and most properly relates to the external collective quadrant, it is applied here to all four quadrants of the human holon.
Systems and probability theory, physics, and mathematics tend to talk about things as processes possessing more or less energy. Such terminology not only gets us away from static absolutisms and into the real world, it also puts us on the first transpersonal rung of the developmental ladder. It does so by talking about the energy that makes up things and concepts and substances rather than focusing on the form of a thing. For example, we commonly assume hands are solid objects. While this approach is good for common sense tasks, a hand is also made up of molecules, atoms, and energy. This way of thinking about a hand produces new meanings and understandings. Energy medicine tends to approach healing from this energy level of understanding, although it is applied to all memes below the energic with good effect. This first transpersonal level has been called psychic by Wilber and others. I refer to it as energic, because psychic abilities may or may not accompany stable functioning at this meme and because attempts to develop psychic abilities and yogic powers are generally distractions, at best.
Anyone who wishes to evolve to stable life perception from the perspective of the lower transpersonal needs a model of reality that is based on energy, not on forms. This is because forms imply permanence and reality while their departure implies death. But from an energic perspective, there are neither forms nor deaths, only the endless transitions of processes. Chaos theory provides a way to understand human experience that is in harmony with such realities as well as with the indeterminate nature of experience which is foundational to post-Newtonian quantum physics.
What are chaotic attractors and what do they have to do with waking up?
The concept of attractors comes from chaos theory, which views many steady state phenomena as actually composed of fluctuations between order and disorder. Normal sensory perception is a stabilized “average” of fluctuating bits of data, as is the picture on a television screen and the sound coming from a radio. An “attractor” is a state or pattern of activity toward which a system tends to slide of its own accord. For example, consciousness and drowsiness fluctuate when we get sleepy. After being awake for some eighteen hours, consciousness tends to slide toward sleep. After a period of deep sleep, consciousness tends to slide toward dreaming. At the end of the longest dream cycle, consciousness tends to slide toward waking. Think of an attractor as a “tuner,” a device that shapes information signals toward a desired state. For example the multi-faceted eye of a bee “tunes” sensory data to a completely different visual input than do human eyes.
There are chaotic and static attractors. Chaotic attractors are complex states of probability that when depicted, look like funnels or whirlpools. They are states of probability in that at any one moment one can either measure their locations or their momentum, as a particle or as a wave, but not both. The power of this model is that it forces the mind to contemplate a purely energic, non-physical model of reality that has no substance or “real” form whatsoever. It defies a basic premise of Aristotle’s logic, upon which the personal level of development depends and upon which Western empiricism has built its imposing contributions. This is the “Law of the Excluded Middle,” which says that something either is or is not, but cannot be both. What Heisenberg, quantum physics, and chaos theory put in its place is something more akin to the fourfold negation of Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika, the summit of Buddhist expressions of the nature of reality: A thing or idea neither is, nor is it not. It neither is and is not – both at the same time. It neither is not nor is it not. Nagarjuna’s perspective is thoroughly transpersonal and trans-rational. It does not assume beingness or the reality of substances as does the Law of the Excluded Middle. It says not only that there can be something between the states of beingness and non-beingness, but that everything that exists occupies that indeterminent place. While this drives the rational mind mad, it opens consciousness up to the contemplation of sunyata, a state of emptiness of all forms, all formulations, and the ground of all experience. Nagarjuna drew out the logical conclusions of the “Middle Way” of Gautama, and they point to an interdependent, formless, transpersonal worldview, a perspective that chaos theory its attractors also support.
Something on the edge or threshold of an attractor whirlpool, which exists as energy expressed as various states of probability, may move very slowly. If you throw a coin or a marble into a large plastic funnel you will notice the same thing happening. First the coin moves lazily around the outer edge of the funnel, but with each revolution it is drawn down faster and faster around the narrowing rim until it is “attracted” to its point of maximum stability, called a static attractor. A glass spun on its edge will do the same thing. It will oscillate faster and faster, “attracted” to its point of maximum stability. Gyroscopes that spin with internal stability are static attractors. They are so stable that they are used as the core of satellite orientation systems. Paradoxically, non-reality and indeterminancy give rise to very stable experiences of reality and probability. When you are very drowsy, it is normal to enter the hypnogogic state which fades quickly into deep sleep, the point of maximum stability for consciousness at that moment.
Chaotic attractors have irregular rhythms. Examples include weather patterns, stock fluctuations, and the appearance of characters and themes in dreams. While all three of these examples contain patterns that can be charted, in the final analysis, complex states of probability keep actual experience indeterminate and creatively volatile. Consider your normal, waking identity at this moment as a “basin” or “funnel” of attraction. This means that you are perceiving and organizing your thoughts, feelings, and actions right now in a way that is congruent with your normal waking consciousness. When you are exposed to a new idea, you categorize it according to unconscious structures of your waking attractor basin rather than with your dreaming consciousness or deep sleep consciousness. This strengthens your waking sense of self while minimizing, ignoring, or discounting your dreaming sense of self, the perceptual frameworks of other aspects of yourself, or your sleeping consciousness. Other people are, in relationship to your current waking identity, other chaotic attractors. They organize their own feelings, thoughts, and actions in ways that are congruent with their normal waking attractor basin, which is different from your own.
A state of consciousness like dreaming is a good example of an attractor. Who knows exactly what sort of dream will arise? Sounds or lights in the environment of a dreaming person are routinely woven into dream imagery in such a way that dreaming continues, underlying the inherent stability of dreaming as a chaotic attractor, because ongoing experience in the environment is interpreted in such a way that it maintains the attractor basin of dreaming. While most dreams are reflections of chaotic attractors, there is at least one category of dream that is a depiction of the power of an underlying static attractor. Post traumatic stress disorder nightmares are fear-based fixations. These highly predictable repetitive dreams appear to be the products of very stable static attractors, which are much more cohesive and predictable than the majority of dreams, which are more likely depictions of underlying chaotic attractor states of consciousness. This is because dreams reflect predictable themes and predictable reactions by Dream Self while remaining unpredictable in the particular depictions of those themes and associated dream characters.
What happens when you become another?
To fully identify with another person’s experience is to move out of your self-organizing basin of attraction and into theirs. This is rarely done, out of fear of loss of one’s sense of self, but when it is done, it can be transformative. You wake up! Similarly, when you identify with a self-aspect that is the personification of a life issue or a dream character, you move from the attractor basin of your waking self-sense into that of another aspect of yourself. You know that this is the case by the considerable differences in preferences that you express as that other aspect. Of course, one can pretend and one can have partial identification. In both of these cases one has not fully identified with the attractor basin of another.
Chaotic Attractors
What do chaotic attractors have to do with altered states of consciousness?
Consciousness attractor basins co-exist within one another, rather like those Russian wooden dolls that nestle one within the other. We see this in human development.
From birth until about the age of two, consciousness is associated not only with the early pre-personal physical and emotional states but with delta brainwave states of 0.5–4 cycles per second. These are also associated with deep sleep consciousness and the deep sleep attractor basin. From two until six consciousness is most strongly identified with late personal egotism and the development of the early personal social sense. It is also identified with theta brainwave states of 6-8 cps, which are associated with dreaming and the suggestibility of hypnosis. One might say that the dreaming attractor basin arises out of or is nestled within the deep sleep attractor basin. However, it transcends and includes deep sleep consciousness because its perspectives and competencies arise out of and express far greater competencies. From six until about twelve the predominant brainwave state is alpha, 8–12 cps. It is associated with an emergent personal self-sense. At around twelve the predominant brainwave pattern is beta, “active or focused consciousness.” This is a fully-formed, distinct waking attractor basin, which transcends and includes the other three, yet operates “within” their supportive structures. We know this is the case because every night we “fall” back into deep sleep and dream sleep. Consciousness recapitulates ontogeny, just as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
When you get knocked out or go unconscious, imagine that your waking attractor basin disappears into the wall of the physical body attractor basin in which it spins. When you go to sleep at night, this is what happens at first. We quickly descend into delta brain wave deep sleep. The deep sleep attractor basin is, for most people, synonymous with the physical attractor basin. In near death experiences, the “tunnel” that is often reported, may be the dream (subtle) or even the deep sleep (causal) attractor basin. Their sense of self, which is normally anchored within both their waking attractor basin and their physical attractor basin, leaves the “wall” of the physical attractor basin. In out of the body experiences, a person also remains anchored in the waking attractor basin but experiences themselves as detached from the physical attractor basin.
What about lucid dreaming? Imagine that while in a dream you recognize that you are no longer in the waking attractor basin; you are in a completely different one that is governed by different, unknown rules. With the knowledge that you are no longer bound by the rules of your normal waking attractor basin you can choose what you will do and how you will be within this “new” attractor basin. The wisdom of this choice is another matter altogether. Integral Deep Listening assumes that since waking identity is a subset of dream consciousness, it needs to learn from the content of the dream attractor basin, not extend control over it, considering the very mixed results of such experiments in control that humans have in their individual, cultural, social, and environmental relationships.
Alcohol and drugs create chemically induced partial detachments from the normal waking self-sense. What takes its place are emotional, cognitive, and behavioral subsets of this waking self-sense that are normally controlled or submerged. These are usually patterns learned at an earlier age that have been transcended and included in more sophisticated patterns. Without “adult supervision” these come to the fore. It is as if the normal “parent” that is in charge of consciousness goes to sleep. The self-sense remains teathered to the physical attractor basin but functions with passengers, not pilots, in charge of the aircraft. LSD and hallucinogin-inspired altered states are chemically induced detachments from the physical attractor basin in such a way that an awareness of the underlying energy that creates all attractor basins can, on occasion, be experienced. Or they can result in a mere partial detachment from the normal waking self-sense, as with alcohol or drugs. Finally, they can result in a conscious movement into the dream attractor basin, with problematic contact with reality. Mystical experiences of bliss and clear awareness also involve detachment from the physical attractor basin, but are not chemically induced. If they involve trance, the waking attractor basin is gone for the moment; in its place is some combination of the three transpersonal bodies, depending on whether the experience is primarily about control of energy, bliss, or consciousness itself. If the experience does not involve trance, the waking attractor basin participates in an experience that is not teathered to the physical or dream attractor basins. Consequently, there is a greater ability to integrate experiences of formlessness into waking identity.
How are chaotic attractors like the self-aspects we encounter in dreams and in waking life?
Some complex systems, particularly those that define waking, sleeping, and dreaming experience, appear to be poised on the edge of chaos. They shift back and forth between predictable behavior and chaotic activity. You can see this fluidity most clearly in children. In fact, a cynic might say that one of the major results of socialization is to turn a child chaotic attractor into an adult static one. A “liminal” is the edge between one attractor basin and another, but it must be appreciated and cultivated instead of feared and ignored, as is generally the case.. It is a state of chaos that is ripe with creative and evolutionary potential. Such a liminal, or chaotic threshold state exists within your dreams between you as Dream Self and other dream characters. Let’s say that a toadstool appears conspicuously in one of your dreams. When you awaken, you are curious about it, so you choose to “become” the toadstool. To the extent that you successfully get into role and become the toadstool, you approach both your dream and waking experience from the perspective of the toadstool. Such an effort tends to shift consciousness out of your normal waking attractor basin and into that of the “toadstool consciousness” attractor basin. The perspective of the toadstool may be no different than your own waking one, in which case it is called a “dream self surrogate,” because its perspective mirrors that of your own in the dream. In such a case, its attractor basin would not feel much different from your own. You would end up looking at the world pretty much as you already do. The toadstool may, however, perceive the world in ways that are profoundly at variance with those routinely taken by your waking identity. If so, then for at least the duration of your period of identification, your identity has shifted to that of the toadstool chaotic attractor basin. This creates a tendency toward the mergence of these two attractor basins (waking and toadstool), an experience that fundamentally expands identity. Think of it as your waking attractor basin expanding in width and depth. This also means that your sense of self within the dream attractor basin has an expanded awareness, causing it to interact with other self-aspects within the attractor basin, as well as forces from outside, in a less reactive, more inclusive way.
Why would I want to move toward chaos by identifying with something stupid like a toadstool or an alarm clock?
The significance of such an expansion is not to be underestimated. Because of the strong magnetic attraction of your waking identity, which interprets all of your experiences in terms of its sphere of influence, most events in your life will tend to validate your conscious sense of self, including your world view, and your waking agenda. You might say that you pull everything into your waking attractor basin instead of expanding it. It becomes a static attractor instead of a chaotic attractor, and this means the avoidance of antithesis, without which the developmental dialectic cannot proceed. This creates rigidity and stagnation in a self-sense that no longer serves the needs of the other chaotic attractors which together manifest energy in form. Development slows down. Waking identity becomes overly structured and lacking in the flexibility that real growth and creative adaptation require. However, when you identify with a self-aspect like the toadstool, you disidentify with your normal, habitual sense of who you are. You leave your “normal” attractor basin and cross a liminal or threshold into a different one with its own laws of attraction. This occurs regardless of your level of development, although your dominant meme will determine what you make of the experience. This is not a process that you can outgrow, regardless of where you are in your own hero’s journey. Each time that you merge with a self-aspect, regardless of how absurd or irrelevant it seems to be, you will expand your sense of self to some degree. It will become a broader and wider attractor basin. It will become more diaphanous and take on more of the qualities and characteristics of spirit: the formless manifestation of core qualities that do not die.
How can chaos theory help us to understand how life is like a dream?
Chaos theory provides an interesting model to help explain why weird, dreamlike events happen to us in our waking lives.
Jung coined the term “synchronicity” to describe some of them, when events are related coincidentally, but not by time or space, such as when a friend calls just as you were thinking about them or you run into your cousin on a trip to Namibia. Imagine you are an iridescent, clear tornado of energy that reflects all the colors of the rainbow and changes its height and width as it spins. Your spinning, dancing, gyroscopic self-sense contains all sorts of smaller tornados dancing around inside it, connected to the broad, high interior surface of your self-sense near the bottom of each smaller spinning tornado-funnel. Some of these smaller, interior tornados may float up a long way from the inner surface of your funnel. Others may spend their lives out of sight, nestled deeply within the thick, spinning wall of your self-sense. These tornados change color as they dance and spiral up and down inside of you, becoming larger and smaller, appearing and disappearing. These are your thoughts, your feelings, and your physical sensations. They are chaotic attractor basins that are largely conditioned by their existence as a subset existing within the larger chaotic basin called your self-sense. While they do not exist apart from the larger basin in which they live, the energy of which they are comprised does. Their meaning and purpose is provided by their existence within the larger basin of your self-sense. Your body is another spinning, funnel-like chaotic attractor basin that contains your self-sense as a smaller tornado. Your self-sense can be enmeshed in the wall of the physical attractor basin or it can spin freely and largely separated from it. Sometimes you dance around deep down inside it, which is where you started out, as an infant. Sometimes your sense of self is almost completely disconnected with it, as happens when you get lost in a movie or good book, astrally project, or meditate deeply. When you die, the coherence of your physical attractor basin dissolves within the attractor basin out of which it and all other physical attractor basins arise. The consciousness of who you are continues to exist, but not as a tornado inside the physical attractor basin. While that self-sense dissipates, a broader sense of self continues to exist as a potential within the larger attractor basin out of which physical attractor basins arise.
What are these other attractor basins?
Your sense of self spends the majority of its conscious existence spinning and dancing within the parameters set by existence within the chaotic attractor basin called waking awareness. This is your perceived external world. It contains all the forms that impinge upon your awareness while you are awake. Each of the forms dancing within it is made out of spinning spirals of energy, just like you are. They each have their own internal organization. Like a gyroscope, each vibrating and spinning constellation of energy tends to maintain its own stability and integrity over time, giving it a unique form, like a snowflake, as well as individual character, like each dog possesses. As a chaotic attractor basin shaped like a hurricane that is spinning constantly at high speed as it moves across the surface of the waking attractor basin, your self-sense is surrounded by countless chaotic attractor basins that are doing the same. These are the people, animals, buildings, landscapes, and skies that populate your waking world. Some of these, like the land, ocean, and sky, are remarkably stable. Others, like lightening, rivers, and crickets, are short-lived or change quickly.
Now imagine that this waking attractor basin is itself a multi-colored tornado of energy that is spinning somewhere along the interior wall of a larger chaotic attractor basin called dreaming consciousness. It is not bound by the same structures that condition the waking chaotic attractor basin spinning within it. For example, it does not exist in time or space. This dreaming attractor basin wholly contains the smaller waking attractor basin but is only rarely experienced by your self-sense attractor basin, so invested is it with its spinning and its orientation within its waking attractor basin. There are times, however, probably determined by forms of intention of various other attractor basins that quite transcend that of our little whirling self-sense, when the floor of the waking attractor basin merges with the wall of the great underlying dream attractor basin and the laws of time and space that normally apply melt away. These are moments or occurrences of synchronicity. Who is to say that these are not happening continuously and our waking awareness only catches them occasionally?
What happens to these attractor basins when I dream or fall deeply asleep?
As you drift off to sleep, imagine that your hurricane self-sense is slowly drifting upward toward the threshold or edge of its waking attractor basin and crossing over into the larger dreaming chaotic attractor basin that contains both. Like a skier crossing from one watershed to another, the terrain looks the same, but now you are skiing without the aid or security of gravity or marked ski runs! When you dream, you assume that you are still experiencing life in the context of your habitual waking chaotic attractor, but this is a mistake! When you wake up in a dream you are realizing that the rules have changed, because you are skiing in a different chaotic attractor basin. You may have fun taking advantage of what you can do when you can ski without gravity or time, or you can just let your experience unfold and go along for the ride, watching and experiencing. This is one way of describing the difference between lucid and pellucid dreaming.
Very few skiers consciously enter the broader watershed or basin that encloses the dreaming chaotic basin, called the deep sleep chaotic attractor basin. It has no form at all, yet it is different from the basins it contains and provides a grounding or potential out of which all experience and all form arises. Meditation may be thought of as practice witnessing any and all attractor basins.
How can I learn to be conscious in all of these states?
Your self-sense attractor basin can become aware in all of these states by learning to simply merge or identify with these larger basins. This is easier said than done, however, and meditation is largely about learning the attentional stability and objectivity that is required to maintain a conscious self-sense within these other attractor basins. This is made more difficult if you have not had experiences of where you are heading. It would be like striking out on a journey without a map, on faith. Or perhaps you have a partial map, or perhaps you trust the stories you’ve heard. But once you’ve caught a distant glimpse of your destination or met someone who is coming back from that realm, your confidence and determination are much increased.
This is a major purpose of Integral Deep Listening. It is not unusual to be presented in dreams and in interviews with feelings or issues with self-aspects that are personifications of aspects of these larger attractor basins. When you become them you have a direct experience of where you are going. This makes it much easier for you to know where you want to head in your spiritual development.
What does speculation about chaotic attractor basins have to do with my spiritual development?
Chaotic attractor basins provide a fun, new way to talk about some very ancient ideas. They address the nature of the spiraling, swirling energy sheaths or koshas discussed by Hindu Vedanta, the chakras explored in various yogas, the spiritual bodies explained in the spiritualist traditions of Blevatsky, Ledbetter, Besant, and Prophet, the energy bodies of contemporary energy medicine, and the levels of consciousness addressed by the perennial philosophy, which are largely recapitulated and integrated in the works of Ken Wilber. Objectivity, or cultivating the witness, is largely a matter of waking up to who and what we are in relation to the rest of experience. While the cognitive developmental line tends to be one of the more advanced of lines, understanding the spiritual developmental process is not the same as stabilized existence on a higher meme. That requires the transpersonal development of the self-sense and several other core lines such as empathy and ethical development. However, cognitive development is an important start. To that end, we explore better and broader models to help us detach from cultural worldviews that keep us asleep and dreaming. The idea of attractor basins is a broad, energy-based description of the relationship between waking, dreaming, and personal development.
Dream Creation from the Perspective of Each of the Four Quadrants
This is another approach to answering the question, “How do dream group members come to be?” “How is it that aspects of myself are externalized in my dreams and in my waking life?” A coherent and full explanation will take into account your stage of development and all four quadrants of your own personal holon.
The External Collective Quadrant
From an external collective perspective, Integral Deep Listening views a moment of life as a presentation of the intrasocial dynamics of a particular gathering of self-aspects who personify life issues in which they share a common investment. This is true whether the gathering is of dream characters, humans, or yourself and the environment that surrounds you at the moment. Each personifies a particular perspective or role. The study of Dream Sociograms is an external collective approach to consciously reintegrating these perspectives.
An external collective response to the question of dream creation emphasizes how thoughts and feelings manifest both as interacting dream characters, say dream self and a burning house, and habitual patterns of waking thought, feeling, and interaction, like loss of temper. Internal agendas are externalized, whether in dreams or waking, in relationships and patterns of interaction. If you have a fever and your consciousness is consumed with regaining homeostasis, the between your body and the illness may be depicted in dreams, say as a fire or a flood. If such internal conflicts are not resolved, they may be mirrored back more forcefully by the body or perhaps by “karmic” relationships or accidents. If some waking competency, such as meditation, improves the functioning of internal systems, the harmonious relationships are depicted in dreams as reduced conflict.
A friend who appears in a dream certainly is there as an aspect of yourself. They are a dream personification of those qualities internal qualities which are evoked when we are in the presence of our friend. Of course, that friend has an existence independent of our own in a way that our thoughts and feelings and roles do not. This is why we may generally begin dreamwork with the assumption that we are dealing with aspects of ourselves, as long as we acknowledge that this self, at least sometimes, far transcends our waking identity.
Self-Aspects are Roles
Dream Consciousness precipitates your dream group members as a projection of roles and your waking experience as a hall of mirrors reflecting back to you different aspects of yourself.
A role is a constellation of actions, feelings, and thoughts that serve a particular function. Because roles are defined in relationship to one another they have external collective characteristics.
On the higher prepersonal and personal levels, roles generally define who we are. We think we are our gender, race, and cultural identity. In later personal development and thereafter, roles are more like clothes or tools which we wear for functional purposes. They become optional and therefore less real. However, the effectiveness of roles to metaphorically reflect internal relationships, conflicts, life issues, and problem solving strategies is apparently never outgrown. Enlightened masters still take on waking roles to relate to and teach others. They also dream, which means they produce dream images which are in relationship with one another and which functionally personify roles.
Roles related to your recent waking life – parent, lover, employee — are readily accessible and therefore likely to be taken up by your dreaming consciousness. While you might expect that previously experienced developmental roles such as rejected daughter or acting out son are more likely to be present than are less experienced potential roles, such as confident business person, almost every self-aspect conveys potential in some way. Thinking of your self-aspects as muses who are running the drama of your everyday life may be helpful. Every self-aspect has characteristics of prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal levels of development, but remarkably enough, their “center of gravity” tends to cluster around a point somewhere above and beyond your average developmental level. This is another hypothesis that you can test through your own encounter with Integral Deep Listening.
What sorts of intentions might precipitate as dreams? One example might be an inconsistency between friendliness toward customers and impatience and irritability toward family. Another might be the inconsistency between personal and business or work ethics. You may teach your kids to be honest and still cheat your customers, the government, or accept the stealing of the secrets of other nations in the name of national security. If you are a soldier, perhaps you believe killing citizens is murder while killing foreign enemies of the state is justified. These attitudes, intentions, and purposes may not appear to be inconsistent, because different environments call for different responses. However, on a psychological level, these intentions are inconsistent in that they express conflicting values. These inconsistencies are generally unconscious because we experience them in linear time when we are awake, in different life settings and while in different life roles, each with their own state-dependent consciousness. When time and space are collapsed as they are in dreams, dissimilar roles are thrown together in a way that expresses the inconsistency of their underlying intentions in terms of conflicting actions. While you may not experience them as inconsistent, once you eliminate space and time, inconsistent expressions come into direct conflict. Because dreaming collapses space and time relative to waking, these inconsistencies are externalized as dream conflict and dream group members personifying your friendliness toward your customers come into conflict with dream group members personifying your impatience and irritability toward your family. Your respect for the life of your fellow citizen clashes with your dehumanization of national enemies. The shared life issue here might be learning not to let your environment determine how you express your feelings or learning how to be consistent in the expression of your values across all the social and personal roles with which you identify.
Role Disidentification
Every part of yourself that is reflected back to you as a dream character or a waking “other” tends to be seen in one or another of three emotional and functional roles. These are rescuer, abuser, and victim.
These roles are responsible for the majority of the drama of human existence. By “drama,” we mean the unconscious games that fill our lives with excitement, “meaning” and yes, even purpose, but purpose that doesn’t contribute much to our development. Both your dream characters and other people will tend to fall into one or another of these three roles until you have learned to detach from them. Those self-aspects with which you dialogue and which are least caught up in these roles are most likely to be able to show you, through your identification with them, the way out of the dramas that bring noise and pain but not much peace to your life.
One lady dreamed that she was in a cave being chased by a witch that wanted to strangle her and kill her. She threw the witch down a bottomless shaft. She shattered into countless pieces of ice. As soon as she did the client knew that it was her grandmother. When she interviewed the cave, it said that it was her chronic depression. The witch was her self-critical thoughts and feelings. She had been blaming herself for not spending time with her grandmother in the year before she died. Here we see the client as the victim becoming the abuser when she kills the witch, who is also her grandmother. Such internal conflicts and interactional patterns are examples of the external collective quadrant of dream holons.
The Internal Individual Quadrant
From an internal individual perspective, Integral Deep Listening approaches life as the manifestation of your intention and purposes. These are based on your level of development as well as which lines of development are being emphasized, and the particular life issues which are being confronted at the time. Whether you have a typical dream, a nightmare, a lucid dream, or a psychic opening will depend on what is happening in this quadrant. Whether you have a typical day, a highly stressful one, a highly detached and aware one, or one in which you access untapped higher potentials, will depend on what is happening in this quadrant.
Your self-aspects manifest in patterns of dynamic interaction that depict or personify one or more life issue of concern to Dream Consciousness, as creator of your dreams, and your soul, as the ultimate source of your particular waking agenda. The life issues addressed by your dream characters may or may not be important to your waking awareness. Life and dream events are not meant to conform to your waking interests or preferences. They are more likely to reflect the conflict between your conscious intentions, your childhood scripting and your spiritual potentials.
One lady thought the following dream was about her health. She dreamed, “I am in this hospital bed under this plastic canopy that is so close that I can’t move. It wakes me up.” The plastic canopy said, “My purpose is to be rigid, to confine and close things in. I personify her strong-headedness, her will, and her blinders. I am very balanced. I have no health problems. If she were me she would be crisp and new and shiny, able to breathe, balanced. No health problems. No health issues. No work concerns. She will benefit from identifying with me when she feels dissatisfied with work, feeling out of balance with health, family, work, & school.”
This dream provides a rather typical example of how waking awareness often completely misperceives the nature and intent of self-aspects. Far from being menacing, this canopy personified both important weaknesses and strengths. This is a common indication of waking identification with personal levels of development because what we think the meaning of a dream — or of life – is what we assume is important.
Dreaming is not a subset of waking experience. It is easy to think that it is, since correlates for any and perhaps all dream events may be found in waking experience. However, dreaming is much more than this. Waking experience can be and often is a subset of dream experience! As Dream Self, waking identity is subsumed as part of a greater dreaming identity. That is to say, the characters in the dream are aspects of a greater sense of self, of which your dream identity is only one aspect. The hierarchy reverses; what was part during waking life (your thoughts and feelings) now becomes the whole; what was whole during waking life (your waking sense of self that contains your thoughts and feelings) now becomes a part.
Dreaming arguably manifests transformational aspects of ourselves more frequently than does waking awareness. This seems to conclusively demonstrate that dreaming is not a subordinate holon to waking identity. Does that mean that perhaps waking identity is a subordinate holon to dreaming? Hindu and Buddhist traditions are ambiguous about this. They state that dreaming is a more illusory state than waking, yet they often state that waking experience is itself a dream, or like a dream, in that it is fundamentally illusory. Which whole contains the other? Both approaches reflect a state-dependent bias. Whatever state we are identified with at the time is the real, prior, and executive state by which the value of other states is judged! If we are awake, that is what is real; if we are dreaming, that is what is real! The only way to escape this inevitable state-dependent self-centeredness is to learn to identify with that “state” that generates all possible states or, to put it in a mathematical way, with that set of which all other sets are subsets! This is called Dream Consciousness in Integral Deep Listening. It is the formless consciousness out of which dreams precipitate. It is the state out of which the dream of life precipitates. It is not itself a dream or dreaming. Transcending all forms and all possible dreams, it is, by definition, awake.
A Metaphysical Explanation
Ishvara is the Sanskrit term for God as creative manifestation in maya and illusion. Ishvara is a word for the God that we pray to and can have a personal relationship to. This is contrasted with Brahman, which is the essence of all things and is beyond both definition and personal relationships. We might say that the divine within each self-aspect is Ishvara, in that we can have a personal relationship with it. While a self-aspect may be associated with any level, the divine within it will at best be associated with subtle level consciousness. Dream Consciousness, which is not a character in a dream but the organizing and creative force out of which dreams manifest, is analogous to Brahman, in that it is impersonal and embraces all individual dream forms. It is roughly equivalent to causal level consciousness.
If dreaming, like life, is about maya and illusion, then how does Brahman create this wonderful illusion? Following Plato, Wilber thinks that creation or involution is a forgetfulness. For him, it is a forgetfulness of formless non-duality, which is beyond Brahman. To the extent that awareness or consciousness forgets its non-duality it represses its non-duality. Brahman, or Dream Consciousness, then projects that non-duality as Ishvara, or personal divinity, in multiplicity. “Dualism-Repression-Projection; this is the threefold process of maya.”
The perception of separation is an act of creation, since figure and ground exist interdependently, as one. So dreaming the dream of life is a type of narrowed and selective attention which separates objects, called dream images or dream group members, from their non-dual existence as absolute subject. This separation is a dualism that represses the nonduality of the figure/ground gestalt and projects it as form. In fact, image and ground are united in consciousness and separated in thought only.
When you separate figure from ground, things happen. If you don’t separate figure from ground, no “thing” happens. Everything simply is but no “thing” exists. On this level, there is no difference in the creation of dream imagery, on the one hand, and the creation of experience while awake.
When you separate figure from ground, things happen.
Two ladies, one young, one old.
Which do you see?
Now it is one thing to be aware of this principle intellectually and quite a different one to practice non-dual awareness, as any meditator will tell you. Dreams testify to the unconscious nature of the creative process of separating figure from ground by repressing ground and projecting it as a dreamscape with distinct elements. Does this mean that if you stop repressing ground and stop projecting it that dreaming will stop? Some say yes. Absolute Nirvana, as complete cessation, means the end of manifestation, because creation assumes illusion and delusion. But the ideal of the magician fares much better than that of the hermit. In the final analysis, is there really any reasonable alternative to working on “being in the world but not of it?” Of course, this position is itself a dualism of the worst type, separating us, as creator, from our creation, yet it is essentially the stance of lucid dreaming, of vipassana meditation, of the entire concept of witnessing ourselves. Our only option is to witness with as much compassion as we can possibly muster, which brings us to the Bodhisattva ideal.
Wilber quotes Hubert Benoit, the French psychoanalyst and student of Zen, at length regarding how the non-dual becomes dual in consciousness.
Non-dual energy disintegrates into images and their corresponding bodily emotions according to intent or purpose. But it is because images are not localized in dreams to the extent that they are in waking awareness that the laws of space and time give way to glimpses of an underlying undifferentiated organismic consciousness. In a very real sense, in dreaming, we are more closely attuned to the ground of existence than to its individual facts, while in waking, we are more closely identified with figure, with individual facts.
Here, in summary, is the process of self-aspect creation in dreams that follows from these assumptions:
• Disidentification with non-dual spirit expresses itself as dualisms and in the arising of image.
• Dream Self forgets that it is asleep and dreaming and that dream images are self-created. This forgetfulness is repression.
• Particular dream group member roles, actions, feelings, and relationships are projected. This is called “objectification” or “externalization.”
To this we might add a fourth and final step:
• Unresolved life issues are further externalized as personal and work relationships or as accidents and diseases. This is worldly objectification.
The Internal Collective Quadrant
From an internal collective perspective, Integral Deep Listening emphasizes how your various self-aspects interpret their own experience, that of their fellows, your waking life, and their unique relationship to it. Every comment that a self-aspect makes is an interpretation! These interpretations are more likely to accurately depict some aspect of your subjective reality than do your waking interpretations. They are most certainly superior to those of others because the interpretations of self-aspects are innate expressions of your subjective reality.
It is not a matter of having to choose between either self-aspect interpretations or waking interpretations, but choosing both by supplementing internal interpretations with waking and objective ones. The client who was being chased in the cave discovered that she did not have to choose to have an adversarial relationship with the cave. She could respect it and its needs without thereby being obligated to spend her life in it.
Precedence is given to intrasocial interpretations because deeply listening first to the source of our experience is both wise and respectful. For example, the client under the hospital canopy found much of practical value when she did not dismiss its perspective out of hand. However, the interpretations that finally matter are those chosen by your waking identity. This is why self-aspect identification becomes so important. By doing so, the interpretations chosen by your waking identity become more and more a reflection of the agenda of your intrasocial community as a whole. This is because identification with your self-aspects inevitably broadens your sense of self to include their perspectives.
The External Individual Quadrant
From an external individual perspective, dreams are precipitated or condensed out of objectified thoughts and actions of which you are generally not aware. These may be sensations, desires, social roles, and constellations of social roles, systems of thought, energy, or patterning form. Physically, precipitation is materialization as a result of condensation. In chemistry, precipitation is the formation of a suspension of an insoluble compound by mixing two solutions. In dreaming, the two solutions that are mixed (to create a manifesting dualism) are self as subject (proximal self) and the disowned or objectified (distal) self.
This creates an entity, called a self-aspect, which acts in accordance with certain generally unrecognized intentions in relation to its fellows. The word “entity” is chosen advisedly, because self-aspects are generally experienced as substantial, insoluble compounds, just as we experience ourselves and others in waking life.
Condensation in the physical world is the process by which a vapor loses heat and changes into a liquid. It can also refer to the bonding of molecules of a substance to form a larger, denser substance, usually with the release of simpler substances, such as water. Both of these definitions have relevance for helping us understand how dream group members come to be from an external individual perspective. If we think of energy as heat, we might conclude that there is more energy in a unity or synthesis than there is in disunity and antithesis. Although we may observe more energy in the form of conflict between divided parts of a greater whole, this is the externalization of an energy which exists to the same degree, if not greater, in a unity without internal conflict. We see this in vapor, which has more energy (as heat) than it does when it condenses and takes form.
Regarding the second definition, involving the bonding of molecules of a substance to form a larger, denser substance, a chemical bond is a fundamental attractive force that binds atoms and ions in a molecule. The attractive force that creates dreams involves intent, at least when we apply bonding in a metaphorical way to help explain unconscious psychological dynamics. Shared life issues attract and “bond” related life intentions, attitudes, and purposes that are normally separated by time and space. These intentions then precipitate as dreams.
To create and maintain your sense of self you must distinguish yourself from that which is not you. This begins at birth, if not before, and is done naturally, habitually, and unconsciously. That which is seen as “not self” could be anything: the bottle, the floor, mother. What is not self changes as you develop. You differentiate your identity first from matter, then successively from body, feelings, simple social roles, more sophisticated social roles, your sense of self in society, your thoughts, the energy that generates your thoughts, the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic forms that personify the energy that generates all your internal and external reality, and finally from your bare and simple sense of self. What happens to those things from which you distinguish yourself as not you? They are externalized, both while awake and while you dream. No longer experienced as “you,” these aspects of yourself are experienced as “it,” or “them,” or “the other.”
Your Dreams are Organic
Like trees, dirt, flowers, stars, animals, and the wind in nature, your dream groups are an innate component of who you naturally are, springing spontaneously from the wellsprings of your consciousness. To think of your dreams as organic emphasizes their pre-rational yet intrinsically organized nature. This is true even when artificial settings like parking lots, and superficial feelings and actions, like passivity and watching, are central to the action of the dream. The organic nature of your dream groups makes them an outstanding way to learn who you are not – your social roles, for example.
In Dream Sociometry you will learn how to create a “Dreamage,” which is a repicturing of your dream based on the consensus recommendations of your dream group members. This creates a visual metaphor of internal conflict resolution. If such a creation is acceptable to all your dream group members, the result is not a product of your conscious mind so much as it is an expression of a common, broader, and organic will. Consequently, it reflects a pattern of integration that is intrinsic and a vibration that evokes harmony and health among those different aspects of yourself that are invested in the particular life issue. For example the cave, glass, witch and client in the dream mentioned above had no problem with expanding the cave, making it darker, putting a clear stream through it, and basically enjoying its serenity. The cave and witch accepted the client as no threat. This Dreamage metaphorically stated in the client’s own organic language a therapeutic direction out of her depression.
Psychological Origin of Dream Group Members
As we have seen, dream group members are aspects of yourself that you have externalized or separated from yourself in the normal process of developing a sense of self which is distinct, separate, and different. This is why dream group members may seem confusing or threatening—you have objectified them and so made them “not self.” Something that is, by definition, “not you,” is going to seem different at best and horrible at worst! The dream group members that show up in your dreams are determined by the particular life issues from which you are differentiated at the time. For example, if you are angry with yourself for pretending to be more capable than you really think you are in your work, self-aspects are externalized that objectify that split in your own self-sense. If you want the approval of others and feel insecure, these issues will be objectified in your dreams so as to “externalize” the conflict. It is only when this internal objectification fails to be understood and healed that these issues begin to externally objectify. This, of course, is what man has historically tended to do, and so life tends to be experienced as karmic, or as a process of victimization by the other, whether in the form of illness, accident, boss, spouse, parent, war, or natural disaster.
Integral Deep Listening to the Objectification of Life Issues in Dreams
Reduces the Waking Karmic Externalization of Those Issues
For instance, if I am a government official and I am chronically lying to myself, rationalizing that lying to the press and congress is not unethical, because it serves the ends of the Administration, I will first have dreams that will express this issue in different ways. If I ignore or repress this feedback, then the discrepancy between my actions and how I would want to be treated myself will begin to externalize in my waking life as distrust shown to me by others. If these relatively low-grade warnings are ignored, the wake-up calls will grow louder and louder, eventually resulting in a catastrophic loss of integrity in the eyes of others, as commonly happens with government officials. In this sense, dreaming offers an opportunity to understand and neutralize unhealthy ways that you create conflict, first within yourself and then within your personal and public lives. To the extent that it accomplishes this end, Integral Deep Listening functions as grace, in that it both minimizes and avoids the karma of waking externalization.
Not Control, but Power Sharing
Unlike many approaches to dreaming, Integral Deep Listening does not attempt to control dreams. It does not attempt to get rid of “bad” dreams and increase the frequency of “good” dreams. It does not emphasize waking control of dreaming. It does not attempt to focus on “spiritual” dreams and repress “mundane” dreams. Integral Deep Listening does not attempt to bend dreams and dreaming to the purposes of waking identity. As we have discussed above, the history of human consciousness has largely been a story of the progressive bending of the “other,” whether nature, technology, the mind, or other people to the will of waking identity. Integral Deep Listening believes that this one-sided emphasis is inherently destructive. Just like an armadillo doesn’t fly, the ego does not belong in the dimensions of the soul, called the transpersonal realms. When waking identity attempts to take control over dreaming or develop psychic abilities, it’s like a child playing with matches. A part of ourselves that is only one small part of the whole is attempting to control the whole. This is generally disastrous for development. Balance is restored when your waking identity shares power with the organic “other” within, the many aspects of yourself that you have unconsciously disowned, thereby becoming a stranger to yourself.
In some ways, dream experience mirrors the perceptual matrix of waking identity. Because we see ourselves as separate entities we find ourselves surrounded by other identities, some of them people, some of them objects. Because they are “not us,” they pose a potential threat, and this creates unconscious conflict that is expressed as dream conflict. Our assumption that we are separately existing beings creates fear that we will lose our separateness, that we will be engulfed by the other, fragmented, and die. The perceived need to defend against this fear creates various defensive strategies: avoidance, aggression, anger, negotiation strategies, projection, conversion, displacement, and repression. Integral Deep Listening provides us with direct experience of the arbitrariness of objectifying ourselves, whether as dream characters or as unrealistic expectations about others and the world. This is not a hard-wired and arbitrary given. When we take away fear the perception of duality, the attachment to a sense of a separate self lessens and dissolves. Power sharing with other aspects of yourself discloses both the harmful and the optional nature of this illusion.
If you take away the experience that Dream Self exists separately from other dream group members, your sense of the reality of these conflicting dualisms vanishes. Integral Deep Listening uses the “back door” of seeing life as a dream to dismantle your attachment to your sense of self, without which neither fear nor your attachment to dualism exists. This is, of course, what happens in meditation as well. With successive non-identification with the objects of consciousness – the dharmas – you deconstruct your identity. Your sense of existing as an independent, separate being first becomes unimportant; it then becomes nothing to fear losing and consequently, nothing to defend. Your attachment to it withers and dies.
Three Paths in One Method
As we have seen, when you identify with other self-aspects you expand your identity while “thinning” your attachment to waking identity. This is the via positiva in which you identify with the object of your attention,
so immersing yourself within it that you become it; you both expand and lose yourself. You die and are reborn. In this fundamental regard, the ends of Integral Deep Listening and meditation are the same, and when used this way, Integral Deep Listening is indeed a methodology for psychospiritual transformation.
In Integral Deep Listening you also practice the via negativa, in which you disidentify with any and all things perceived. You disidentify first from your waking identity when you become another self-aspect. This is not an easy or natural process for most people, as is seen from the difficulty in staying in role that most people have at first. It is also difficult, in that most students find resistance to remembering to let go of their normal waking awareness and become other self aspects in the circumstances that they recommend in the course of a day. By looking at dreams from the perspective of other self-aspects you are also disidentifying from your dream self, which is your unconscious sense of self when you are dreaming. It generally reflects your waking perspectives. In Integral Deep Listening you also detach from each of your self-aspects, relativizing even those perspectives that seem divine. By continuing, successive, repetitive disidentification from proximate, distal, and potential definitions of yourself, you die to conflict, to fear, and to separateness. You let go. By becoming nothing, you become everything! This is similar to approaches to meditation that employ neti, neti (“not this; not this”). The power of this process is not to be underestimated.
As you follow the injunctions of Integral Deep Listening and then test them against the experiences of other Practitioners, you will employ the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and the eye of spirit to validate the truths that you experience. This is similar to approaches to spiritual development that emphasize the third, or injunctive, strand to seek truth. What is unusual about the injunctive method of Integral Deep Listening is that it teaches, encourages, and supports internal validation and cross-validation at least as much as it encourages external validation with peers in the method.
Undercutting Dualism
The fundamental recurring “myth” that your self-aspects “de-mythologize” is of a false self, broken off from a false other. In waking life, the false self is your waking identity which is experienced as separate from objects and other people. This is a perceptual myth. In dream life, the false self is your dream self, which is experienced as separate from dream objects and characters. Both “self” and “other,” whether in waking or dreaming experience, are false in that they are equally illusory externalizations of a false duality. However, both are real in that they deserve and require respect, acceptance, and their appropriate, timely expression. It is to the lasting credit of Dream Consciousness that it is in dreaming, more than in any other state, that this false dualism breaks down and you discover that your ego emperor has no clothes. The “other” (self-aspects) is transparently self and self is transparently the other! This is an experientially based truth; it becomes clear as soon as we become the dream monster that scares us or the homosexual partner that threatens us in our love for it. This experientially-based truth is not a proposition to be accepted a priori, prior to experience. It is not based on reason or intuition but on testable, repeatable personal experience. Consequently, Integral Deep Listening is fundamentally an empirical rather than a rational or intuitively based method. And, while empiricism is traditionally associated with sense data, it applies to the method of study of any data that is given, whether it is physical, mental, or spiritual in origin and nature, as we have seen above. It is also a fundamental reason why Integral Deep Listening is a transformational practice. By amplifying this basic feature of dream experience there is an undercutting of whatever dualisms that arise in your life.
The split between who you think you are and all that you believe yourself not to be is depicted in dream groups as unresolved life issues or internal conflicts. As these are resolved, dream groups address more and more subtle levels of dualism. However, dream groups do not have to depict unresolved life issues or internal conflicts. Every self-aspect in every dream and every life circumstance is not addressing a conflict. Some dream group members double, and thereby amplify or strengthen, your waking identity when it takes steps to incorporate disowned parts of itself. In Integral Deep Listening these are called synthesis dream groups. These self-aspects undercut dualism because they reinforce those perspectives that integrate rather than differentiate in a disempowering way.
Of course, not all differentiations are disempowering. Perhaps you dream that you are sitting in a chair and it begins to rise into the sky. You discover that you can control it by leaning and by directing it with your mind. You may hypothesize that this dream is about rising above your daily concerns, learning to control your thoughts in meditation, or avoiding daily problems. Which is it? How are you going to know if you do not ask the various dream group members? When you talk to the chair and the sky, perhaps you discover that these dream group members are applauding your efforts to calm your thoughts when you meditate. Therefore, based on their testimony, this dream does not depict disempowering differentiations. It addresses a life issue (learning to witness the contents of your mind) that involves learning to accept a broader definition of who you are.
Can You Ever Know What You Really Need?
“Freud built his entire psychoanalytic system around…the insight that man has needs or motivations of which he is unconscious…Man doesn’t know what he wants; his real desires are unconscious and therefore never adequately satisfied.”
This viewpoint is an expression of Freud’s pessimism, a stance he readily confessed to holding. Integral Deep Listening does not share such pessimism because it does not believe that man’s real desires are predetermined to remain unconscious. Any unconscious desire can be made conscious, understood and addressed in therapeutic, regulative, and transformative ways. Consequently, it becomes realistic to expect that your deepest wants and desires can be adequately expressed. It is in their expression that these wants and desires are seen to either support or detract from the core qualities of spirit. Dream group members, by means of their expression of their preferences, tell you what they want and don’t want, or, we should say, what different parts of you want and don’t want at different times and in different situations. They go beyond this, however, to compare what you want with what you need. What you need is certainly more than sex and survival, which was Freud’s first formulation. It is certainly more than love and aggression, which was Freud’s intermediate position. It is more than life and death, Freud’s final hypothesis. What we need is that which is good, wise, and harmonious for our entire holarchy, with the understanding that this inevitably reaches out to encompass everyone and everything else, both intrasocially and macrosocially. In short, what we need is confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, equanimity, and witnessing – core qualities of spirit. When we have these, we do not even need a sense of self! Dream groups can take us beyond needing; they can and do take us beyond the separation between a self who needs and the other which is needed.
What Does Dream Group Integration Look Like?
There are at least three scenarios in which higher-level integration is found in dream groups. First, it may be that integration pre-exists in the dream. In this scenario, you recall a dream. When you work it up you see that the dream group members have produced a synthesis sociogram. Another way of saying this is that the creative template out of which the dream manifests happens to produce patterns of higher order integration, rather than balancing or conflictual patterns. Secondly, Integral Deep Listening can change conflictual patterns into highly integrative relationships simply through identification, listening, and internalization of the perspectives of other aspects of yourself during the interviewing process. Perhaps you dream of a giant black bat in a dream, as one student did. When it was asked what it would be, if it could become anything that it wanted, it chose to transform into an angel that scored 10s in the six core spiritual qualities. Third, waking identification with integrative dream group members brings integration, as witnessed by the resolution of related waking conflicts and the testimony of subsequently interviewed dream sangha members.
I dreamed of driving by and over buried Roman ruins with my daughter. When I became the ruins they recommended that I become them when I found myself procrastinating about preparing to present Integral Deep Listening to professional groups for continuing education units or The object in all cases is to integrate dissociated self-aspects into an expanded and balanced sense of self.
Exercises
• Think of an example from your dreams of each of the following quadrants: external individual (behavior), external collective (interaction), internal individual (intention), and internal collective (values).
• What do you think of the explanations of dream character creation presented here? Do you agree or disagree? Why?
• How do the three paths, via positiva, via negativa, and injunctive show up in your life?
Summary
• Explanations of dream origination need to take into account the level, line, quadrant, state of consciousness, and dialectical stage of the client.
• Waking identity must share power with prepersonal and transpersonal self-aspects if it is to stabilize in transpersonal consciousness.