Wilber’s Art Theory and Dream Yoga
(From Transformational Dreamwork)
(Much of the following language and many of its ideas are lifted directly out of an excellent article by Ken Wilber, originally published in Wilber, Ken. Transpersonal Art and Literary Theory, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1996, Vol. 28, No. 1, p. 74.)
Much of what Ken Wilber says regarding the meaning of art, whether visual or literary, can be applied to dreams and dream interpretation. This is because dreams are innately an artistic production, an expression by dream consciousness of man’s inherent creativity. In art we find a easily accessible bridge between the waking delusion of dreaming and the dreamlike nature of waking life. Approaches to dreamwork basically fall into the same categories that Wilber delineates in art criticism, and each has strengths and weaknesses that are similar to those characterizing various classical approaches to art criticism. There are about four different basic answers to the question, “What is art?” These are represented by the various schools of art criticism. Each of these throws light on the question, “What is a dream?” The four perspectives are expressions of one or another of the four quadrants of the human holon.
The perspective provided by the external quadrants is that art is imitative or representational and its meaning is to accurately portray its object. This view dates back to at least Plato and Aristotle. The dreamwork correlate is to those schools that say that dreaming basically represents something else — waking life issues, the soul, repressed desires, biochemical reactions, and so forth — and that the worth of a dream, or its efficacy, comes from the clarity with which it does its representing. Dream elements are symbols. This is the symbolic interpretive school of dreamwork, represented by dream dictionaries, Freud, Jung, Cayce, and their contemporary disciples. In and of themselves, dream images have no meaning. Those waking or physiological events which they depict are what is meaningful, and a dream is significant only to the extent that it accurately depicts real, objective events. For instance, if a dream clearly depicts a health crisis, it is more meaningful than one that does not. If a dream clearly reflects or imitates the day residue which preceded it, it is more meaningful than a dream that distorts the events of the previous day. If a dream accurately portrays the future, it is more meaningful than one that misleads us about the future. If a dream is a real communication with a deceased relative or contains divine archetypes, it is more real than the average dream because it depicts real things in a representational and non-symbolic fashion. Dream symbols are representations of realities; literal dreams are accurate representations. In this approach, dreamwork is meaningful to the extent that it faithfully portrays the object of the dream. But this assumes that we know what the object of the dream is when this is, in fact, basically conjecture. Just as all approaches to art are not imitative or representational (for instance conceptual, expressionist, minimalist, surrealist, and so forth), all dreams are not imitative. In fact it is an assumption that any dream is an attempt to imitate anything. Also, imitation for imitation’s sake makes documentary photography the highest form of art. It would mean that the dream that is an exact imitation of waking experience, not adding anything new, would be the most creative and artful dream. But then the dream would not offer anything other than a reflection of waking experience. It would not be a unique but merely an approximation of waking awareness. Whether that is the case or not, such a perspective does not accept a dream on its own terms. Instead, its worth is based on how much it conforms to waking expectations of what is real and valuable and what is not. Is that a helpful definition of dreaming?
In summary, we may say that while there are certainly representational aspects of dreaming, this view by itself is limited and reductionistic. The representational approach assumes that the value and meaning of dreams lie in the external individual and collective quadrants. It amounts to a what Wilber calls a “flatland” approach which reduces the significance of a dream to that which is valued by waking identity.
2. If a representational approach to dreaming and art is reductionistic, perhaps their meaning lies in their ability to express the motive, personality and life of the dreamer and artist. This is the expressivist school or art, represented by such theorists as Benedetto Croce, R.G. Collingwood, and Leo Tolstoy. Art is the expression of the intentions and feelings of the artist. It is not simply the imitation of an external reality but the expression of an interior reality. We can thus best interpret art by understanding the original intention of the artist. “Collingwood made the original intention of the artist so utterly primary, that the inward, psychological vision of the artist was itself said to be the actual art, whether or not that vision ever got translated into public forms.[i]” This approach to art interpretation gave rise to hermeneutics, still perhaps the most widespread school of the interpretation of art. It holds that the key to the correct interpretation of a visual, auditory, or literary piece of art is the recovery of the maker’s original intention. This includes a psychological reconstruction of the author’s or artist’s original intent in its historical setting.[ii] Proponents of this approach include Emilio Betti and E.D. Hirsch.
But artistic motivations are hardly a superficial matter. Since at least Freud many people have accepted the idea that many human intentions are unconscious. The art critic, to be effective, must be a psychoanalyst. The meaning of art becomes the particular set of unconscious intentions thought to be affecting the artist, and so we may have racist, sexists, elitist, speciesism, anthropocentrism androcentrism, imperialism, ecologism, logocentrism, phallocentrism each put forth as the “true” meaning of the work of art.
It is not very hard to find parallel approaches within the dreamwork community. There are all sorts of unconscious formative factors that now come into play if the true intention of a dream is to be unearthed. The dreamer exists in an economic context, for instance, and a dream will reflect these economic realities, and thus the correct interpretation of the dream involves highlighting the class structures in which the dream is produced. Feminists have made the case that the true intentions behind art are those of gender and that Marxists and other economic interpreters of art are driven by unconscious or thinly disguised intentions of patriarchal power.
The meaning of a dream lies in its ability to express the life of the dreamer. This usually means the waking life of the dreamer, and it is assumed that the dream has its referents in the personal waking experience of the dreamer, although group and psychic factors may be easily factored in as well. Consequently, in order to understand a dream, we have to understand the original intention of the dreamer. We have to ask, “What were you doing the day before you had the dream?” “What issues have been on your mind lately.” “What sorts of childhood traumas did you experience and how are they expressing themselves in your dream?” The assumption is that dreams are so inscrutable precisely because most of these intentions are unconscious. Just as in literary theory, the application of this approach to meaning has unleashed a flood of pet interpretive frameworks. The dream is symptomatic of adaptive challenges, cultural expectations, social roles, interpersonal dynamics, and so forth, and its proper interpretation requires that the dream interpreter know about these things. The dream is symptomatic of larger currents that the dreamer is largely unaware of — sexual, economic, ideological, cultural, spiritual, developmental. A valid interpretation of the dream decodes and exposes the hidden intentions of the individual as expressed in it. In summary, expressivist approaches to dream interpretation boil down to projection by the interpreter onto the dream of a particular agenda which the interpreter believes was the actually intent of the dream. What this actually discloses is not the meaning of the dream but the prejudices of the interpreter. This approach involves a projection of the values and meanings of the interpreter onto the motives of the dreamer. As such, it reduces dreamwork to the internal collective quadrant of the dreaming holon.
3. If there are problems with art as representation and art as the intention of the artist, perhaps its true meaning lies in the work itself. This is the formalist school, represented by Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, Courbet and the Impressionists (Monet, Renoir, Manet, Pissarro, Degas) who attempted to capture “immediate visual impressions,” the emotions of the artist being quite secondary at best. Founded in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, this school is represented in music theory by Eduard Hanslick and in the visual arts by Roger Frey and Clive Bell and in literature by the American New Critics (Wimsatt and Beardsley) and by the post-structuralists (Derrida, Paul de Man, Hartman, Lyotard). For formalism, in general, the meaning of a text or an artwork is found in the formal relationships between elements of the work itself. A valid interpretation of the work involves the elucidation of these formal structures. The intention of the artist is irrelevant. Neither does the meaning of the art lie in what it may represent about an object or express about the artist. Interpretation should center first and foremost on elements intrinsic to the artwork considered as a whole in itself.
Content analysis and phenomenological approaches to dreamwork assume such an approach. External referents are minimized. It is less important what is going on in the waking life of the dreamer or what the unconscious intent of the dream is, or what the dreamer is attempting to express. The emphasis is instead on an evaluation of the formal or structural relationship of the dream elements themselves, one to another. While consideration of formal elements is invaluable, many find it too rational for something as visceral and affect-laden as a piece of art, particularly when that creation is a dream. Formalist approaches kill the dreamer by reducing her to irrelevance. Such an approach can reduce dreams to external and objective facts and their relationships.
4. Perhaps then, the meaning of a dream is not found in the dreamer’s original conscious and unconscious intentions or in any specific features of the dream itself. Perhaps it is only found in the looking. Perhaps the primary locus of the meaning of the dream can only be found in the responses of the viewers themselves. According to this view, the nature and meaning of art is to be found in the history of the reception and response to the artwork. A valid interpretation of the artwork consists in an analysis of these responses. “…the interpreter, not the artist, creates the work.”[iii] Adherents of this approach are Martin Heidegger and his hermeneutic philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the foremost theoreticians of aesthetics, and Jacques Derrida. Interpretation of art is about the language and history, both personal and human, of the viewer. “The artwork is the sum total of its particular historical stream, not something that exists by itself, outside of history, isolated and self-regarding, existing only because it looks at itself; rather, the only way we know the artwork is by viewing and interpreting it, and it is those interpretations, grounded in history, that constitute the overall art.”[iv]
So what matters is not what the dream means, but what it means to us, the viewer of it. By looking at the dream we are disclosing our meanings, not those of the dreamer. This creates a highly subjective, almost solipsist, approach to dreamwork. While honest in that it owns its projections and imparts no meanings or value to either the work or its creator, few would want to refrain from a thoughtful consideration of either the work in and of itself or of the consciousness which created it. This is a very strong internal collective approach to dreamwork: only the meanings I project onto the dream can be accessed; they have to be the meaning of the dream, for none other is accessible. One problem with such an approach is that there are other accessible meanings of any dream. When we take the time to leave our solipsism and interview dream characters we find a multiplicity of other meanings that sometimes conflict with but always enrich our own.
If art theory is a spirited attempt to decide exactly what the center of art is so that we can locate the meaning of the artwork and then go on to develop valid interpretations of the art, then dreamwork theory is the attempt to decide exactly what the locus of a dream is so that we can locate the meaning of the dream and then go on to develop valid interpretations of the dream. Each of these views of what art is, what a dream is, may be seen as a context, with each different context conferring a different meaning on a dream and dreaming. It is not that any of these contexts is not true, it is just that each is partial. Each context makes its legitimate contribution. The vanity comes when the part believes that it is the whole and knows the whole. Instead of spiraling downward into postmodern nihilism and narcissism, with all meanings relative and indeterminate and all interpretations egoic projections, we can view each dreamwork context as a valid and truthful perspective, itself anchored and subsumed by yet more valid and truthful perspectives.
To find the center of a dream is to situate it in its various contexts. These include:
• The original intent of consciousness as creator of the dream. This must take into account waking and unconscious, prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal, physiological, cognitive, affective, and spiritual, developmental stage, and so forth. These can be inferred by taking a careful history and evaluation of these factors, but an even more direct approach is to ask the characters in the dream, including the consciousness which created the dream itself. While we can never be sure that we have arrived at the original intent of the dream, a consensus of internal opinions regarding the intent is more reliable than the opinions and interpretations of the persona of the dreamer or of dream interpreters. (internal individual factors) .
• The dream itself, in both its form and content. This is essentially a consideration of external individual factors in the creation of the dream.
• The history of reception and response to the dream by the dreamer and by other viewers (interpreters) of the dream/ These are internal collective factors.
• The wider contexts of the world at large, economic and technical, linguistic, cultural, and spiritual, without which specific meanings could not be generated in the first place. These include the biochemical, astral, causal, and subtle sheathes in which the dream exists. This is basically a consideration of external collective factors in the creation of the dream.
So what is the meaning of a dream? Any particular meaning of a dream is simply the highlighting of a particular context. How do we interpret a dream? Any interpretation of a dream is the evoking and elucidating of some highlighted context. How do we know if our interpretation of a dream is justified? Justifiable interpretation means verifying that a particular context is indeed real and significant, a justification procedure that, like any other, involves a careful look at the total web of evidence. To understand a dream means to enter it. It is basically a process of identification, in which I stretch my own boundaries and broaden myself by broadening my context.
While there is no one right interpretation of any dream, since there is no end to the contexts in which a dream may be placed, there remain plenty of incorrect ones. Dreamwork, like other forms of interpretation, is falsifiable, and must be if it is to have any lasting validity. We test our interpretations in Integral Deep Listening when we initially state what we think the dream means. This acts as a pre-test by which we can assess our self-awareness after we have listened to what our dream group members have to say, and by which we can assess our ability as an interpreter after we have listened to the dream group members of our clients.
Meaning is about interpretation. Interpretation is secondary to the raw, vital apprehension of the dream itself. This may be the original experience of the dream, which can frighten, amaze, sadden, or anger us. While we may reinter that experience upon its retelling, a surer way is to identify with the characters in the dream and re-experience it from their perspectives. It is the vital, direct experience of the dream which transforms us. It is the direct encounter with life, giving ourselves totally to it, allowing ourselves to be transfixed by it, which gives purpose to any search for dream meaning, to any interpretation. Before mind is spirit, and before interpretation is identification. Do not, in your blindness, mistake a part of the elephant for the elephant itself. Spend much more time taking in the marvel of the elephant than in arguing about what it means.