The Johari Window breaks knowledge down into four categories:

“Known to Self”

“Not Known to Self”

“Known to Others”

“Not Known to Others”

When you put these four together in a grid their intersections create four different types of knowledge:

Developed in 1955 by Luft and Ingham, the Johari Window has usually been used to help people better understand their interpersonal communication and relationships in self-help groups and corporate settings.  What if we were to apply it to understanding how we know what we know in dreams?

The result is a three level epistemology:

What we know in our normal waking state.  This is based on our personal experience with dreams and our knowledge of the experiences and views of others regarding dreaming.

What we know when we are dreaming.  We take our waking knowledge and level of development into our dreams, but with several important limitations.  We normally do not know that we are dreaming or that the things that we see are actually aspects of ourselves.

What other dream characters know.  This may be known because they tell us in a dream or  it is inferred from their actions.  It may also be known because we interview them.

While one could do a Johari Window on each of these three levels of dream knowing, the last part of the third way of knowing is of particular concern to us here.  That is because it is the only perspective that is not biased toward waking identity.  Instead, it is biased toward the “knower” that is being interviewed at the moment, whether an elephant, a tree, or a baby’s high chair.  The question that is asked is, “What is known/not known to me/others as this self-aspect?”

Doesn’t the Johari Window break down if the “other” is another part of ourselves?  How can we talk about something that is known to ourselves yet unknown by other parts of ourselves?  In Integral Deep Listening we often meet self aspects that do not share our assumptions, perspectives, and world views.  Our life orientation is foreign to their way of being and in that regard, unknown to them.

The reason it is important to use a method that is not biased toward waking identity is because your waking identity will always validate its assumptions, hopes, and fears.  Whatever world view, whatever understanding of dreams, whatever level of development waking self has, will be the context in which answers are discovered and understood.  Consequently, dreamwork becomes an exercise in narcissistic self-validation.  This is the trap most approaches to dreamwork fall into.

Of course, there is information that is not known to us that does not come from our dreams or from others in our environment. We access that information in Integral Deep Listening when we interview the personifications of feelings associated with life issues.  The result is a growing understanding of how our life is a self-generated dream, illusion, and delusion which is conditioned by social, cultural, environmental, biological, and developmental contexts.  This is not to say that there is no reality, only that our contexts determine what of it is knowable to us.  Therefore, dream narratives are not only night time story narratives.  They can be life narratives too.

What is called the dream narrative is the version of a dream known to your waking identity.

If that same narrative is reported by other interviewed dream characters then the content of the dream is “public.” You know what your inner self knows.  This is as ideal as it is rare.

If parts of your dream narrative are not reported by other self-aspects then those parts have either been forgotten, ignored, de-emphasized, or repressed by those other aspects.  This reflects your waking biases and prejudices that keep you stuck.  The proper response is to recognize them and to consider why other self-aspects do not emphasize them.

If an aspect of the narrative is reported by dream characters that you did not report, then you have a “blind spot.”  This reflects the biases, prejudices, and world views of other aspects of yourself.  The proper response is to consider why other aspects of yourself see things differently.

Aspects of the dream that are not known to yourself or the characters in the dream.  This reflects the possibility of real growth accessible through meta contexts that emerge only through combining what you and other self-aspects only partially know, as is done in the Dream Sociomatrix and Sociogram, by submitting combined findings to objective others.  There are at least two categories of these.  The first are entities external to the dream, whether people or “channeled” entities.  The second is Dream Consciousness: the perspective that created the dream.

Here is a more detailed version of the Johari Window:

When we interview our self-aspects we are asking questions of parts of ourselves that are unknown to us.  Before our lack of motivation turns into a tiger, that aspect of ourself was unknown to us.  It is an unknown area. As we interview it we engage in self-discovery.  If we ask other self-aspects questions about the tiger, we rely on the observations of others.  Together, this is shared discovery.  As a result, what was previously blind, in that it was unknown to us, is seen.  What was previously hidden, in that it was unknown by other aspects of ourselves, is exposed.  Feedback from self-aspects increases those parts of ourselves that are known to us.  Self-disclosure from self-aspects increases those parts of ourselves that are acceptable to us.  Together, the result is that unknown parts of ourselves do not feel as threatening because our experience involves success at both feedback and self-disclosure in dealing with the unknown.

Traditionally, in organizational training exercises involving the Johari Window, lists of self- describing positive and/or negative adjectives are selected about him by both the participant and by his or her peers.  Adjectives selected only by the participant are placed in the facade quadrant.  The challenge for the participant is self-disclosure.  Adjectives selected only by peers are placed in the blind quadrant. The challenge for the participant is to accept and integrate the assessments of others.  Adjectives not selected by either the participant or their peers are placed in the unknown quadrant.  The challenge for the participant is to assess the possible usefulness of these qualities for them.  Adjectives selected by both the participant and their peers are public characteristics.  The challenge for the participant is to grow beyond a comfortable and socially validated self-definition.

A similar, yet different approach is used with Integral Deep Listening.  The list of adjectives is very short.  There are only six, but since they are polar qualities, there are actually six positive and six negative adjectives:

fear  self-confidence

selfishness  compassion

ignorance wisdom

rejection acceptance

chaos peace

drama witnessing

Subjects are not normally asked to self-score themselves in these qualities, although they could.  This is because the emphasis of IDL is on self-disclosure and feedback rather than on the current state of waking identity, which is already well known to oneself and presumably to most self-aspects.   In addition, the self-scoring of waking identity is subjective and relative, and until the experience of these qualities by other self-aspects during the interview occurs, the answers have little meaning.  For instance, someone might score themselves as a “10” in self-confidence, then meet a self-aspect that has considerable more (or more genuine) self-confidence than they do.  The scale does not reflect that difference.

Because the nature of the interviewing process invites self-aspects to transform, they generally score higher than waking identity in most, if not all of these qualities, implying that there exist real internal potentials not previously recognized or owned by waking identity.  These were first unknown, then recognized as previously blind or hidden before entering the public arena of consciousness. The education process is not merely one of increasing the quantity of a quality existing within youself. The meaning of the qualities themselves expands.  For example, most people use love and compassion as synonyms.  When they experience self-aspects that do not, they re-define both love and compassion for themselves.  Many people think they know how to meditate or what a successful meditation is.  When they personally experience self-aspects who score ten in inner peace and witnessing their understanding of meditation often broadens radically.

In The Eye of Spirit describes three types of truth, sensory, interpretive, and spiritual.  Each explores its own realm and makes its own truth claims that are subject to similar empirical processes for validation.  In each case a truth statement is made and steps are provided to prove or disprove it.  Those steps are replicated by peers in the knowledge.  Successful replication by peers means validation.  A truth claim for the senses would be, “Colds are caused by viruses.”  One of the steps of the proof would involve looking at a saliva sample under a microscope.  If a virus is consistently found in those with upper respiratory infections, that would constitute validation.  A truth claim for the realm of the mind would be, “International finance is controlled by the Rothchilds.”  The steps by which this conclusion is reached would be followed by other, independent peers, such as economists.  They would have to come up with a similar interpretation to validate this truth claim.   A truth claim for the realm of spirit would be, “If you  follow the recommendations of self-aspects that score high in the six core qualities you will  find that you score yourself higher in those qualities as well.”  To test this truth claim those trained in the IDL protocol would apply the recommendations of their high scoring self-aspects in their life and see if their own subjective scoring in the six core qualities is higher or not.  In this regard, Integral Deep Listening claims to be a valid, verifiable transpersonal methodology that both predicts and explains the world.

IDL is not a prepersonal approach to spirituality.  Prepersonal truth claims boil down to belief.  They make statements like, “Jesus was the Son of God.” “I believe Quetzalcoatl was the Messiah.”  “I believe the money I deposit in my bank is safe.”  “I believe if I live right I’ll go to heaven.”  Beliefs are mythological stories we tell ourselves that are pre-rational and generally based on unquestioned authority, whether it be the Bible, the Book of Mormon, or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Personal truth claims transcend and include belief. They are belief plus reason.  Here are three examples.  “I believe everyone is entitled to certain freedoms because I want them and reason tells me that the freedoms I want will probably be desired by others as well.”  “I believe the economy will eventually recover because it has every other time.”  “I believe in the theories of evolution and global warming because scientists have amassed huge amounts of consistent evidence in support of both.”  Unlike prepersonal beliefs, personal truths are based on skepticism.  Only those beliefs are accepted that are rationally supported.  Truth claims that aren’t rational do not rise to the level of personal truth claims, much less transpersonal truth claims.  This is the way you can differentiate between prepersonal and transpersonal truth claims.  If a belief system is anecdotal, like astrology and reiki, it does not rise to the level of rational truth.  It is prepersonal truth because when it is subjected to predictive tests by peers there is no statistical validation.  This does not mean that astrology or reiki cannot be very helpful, meaningful and transformative.  It just means that, like most love, it does not rise to a level of rationality, much less transrational truth.  Therefore, when people claim that their methodology is transpersonally spiritual, ask, “Will it pass rational tests of duplicatable results?”  If it won’t or can’t, then it is prepersonal, regardless of the claims that are made for it.

Transpersonal truth claims are belief plus reason plus personal experience.  This is tricky, because prepersonal and personal truth also involve personal experience. The difference is that these personal experiences include the first two types of truth and more.  This is not something that prepersonal or personal truth claims do.  Let us take lucid dreaming for an example. It certainly rises to the level of personal truth, in that Stephen LaBerge has demonstrated in the laboratory methods to prove that lucid dreaming is taking place and these methods have been duplicated by many others.  This does not, however, mean that lucid dreaming is a transpersonal experience.  To be so it must meet yet another truth claim that has to do with experiencing generally agreed upon characteristics of the sacred.  Some of these are the non-dual, bliss, radical freedom, higher level witnessing, compassion, inner peace, wisdom, and acceptance.  Most people who perform the experiment and lucid dream would agree that it provides an experience of radical freedom, at the very least.  Therefore, lucid dreaming meets truth claims as a transpersonal experience.  This is, however, less than meets the eye.  It means that lucid dreaming is a bona fide transpersonal state;  it does not mean that lucid dreamers are enlightened or spiritual beings.  It does not imply that those who can lucid dream have evolved to a transpersonal level of development.

Valid transpersonal truth claims are verifiable and have repeatable instructions.  For example, for meditation: “Observe your breath and imagine a fire in your breath and you will develop Tummo. (Tibetan bodily warming.)”  IDL provides such instructions.  Those instructions are transpersonal because they access states that are transrational and transpersonal but are based on a rational method.  Truth claims that are belief plus personal experience are not transpersonal; they are prepersonal.  An example would be Pauline Christianity, which is prepersonal faith based on a personal experience.  Similarly, Shamanism is prepersonal belief plus personal experience of altered states.  Shamanism is duplicatable but it is not rational; it does not make rational claims. Same with Filipino and Brazilian faith healers.  If I believe everyone is entitled to certain freedoms because I want them and reason tells me that the freedoms I want will probably be desired by others as well and I empathize compassionately with both the presence and absence of those freedoms in others, then I am approaching a transpersonal experience of what is true.  My empathy is not prepersonal sympathy or personal understanding.  It begins to be higher order identification with the core beingness of others.

Dreaming falls into the category of “imaginative” symbolic elaboration for Wilber, which he contrasts with “linear” symbolic elaboration. Linear is one-dimensional, analytical, usually logical and found in books and most verbal communication.  Imaginative is “a pictorial and multi-dimensional symbolic elaboration, and it lies at the heart of artistic expression, of myth, of poetry, of the imagination, of dreams.  It is not logical–at least in the strict sense of the word “logic” — but it frequently carries a meaning, and can be usually surveyed in a glance, such as a painting or icon; in this sense it is quite unlike the first or linear type of elaboration.”

Wilber states that both types of elaboration can be used to point to Spirit.  They do so in three ways.  These ways address both how a dream is described and our criteria by which we determine its truth. If a dream group member such as Ice says it is dormant, unevolved, prepersonal consciousness, it is saying what it is like.  It is naming characteristics of itself.  We are learning what the Ice is, from its own perspective.   This is called the analogical approach to elaboration, or the via affirmativa (the affirmative path) and the statement is a linear elaboration (a verbal description) about an imaginative elaboration (a dream image).  We are being told something about the beingness of a thing; we are saying what a self-aspect is; we are making positive statements about the nature or reality of someone, something, spirit, or God. We use this approach whenever we make a positive statement about what a dream is: “A dream is a personal-individual production of the symbolic level of the Spectrum,” or “A dream is an attempt to organize meanings in ways that most closely correspond to the magical and mythic rungs of the Spectrum as manifested within individuals but as a reflection of external social meanings.” (The meaning, interior collective, Buddha face.), Or, “Dreams are visual products of randomly firing neurons in the pons region of the brain stem.” (The concrete, exterior individual, form Buddha face.)  Or, “A dream is the collective creation of various subidentities sharing a common investment in some life issue or issues.”  (The social, exterior collective, Buddha face.)

A second type of elaboration occurs if Ice says, “I am the absence of all color.”  Ice is telling us what it is not, not what it is.  It is very hard to grasp the absence of all color, which is the very idea of the via negativa. It forces us beyond linear elaboration without substituting another linear elaboration or some imaginative elaboration.  What is left at first seems like a vacuum, but with closer observation is found to be a plenum full of both nothing and everything.   When we say a dream is not a creation of a dreamer, or that a dream group member is not a symbol, we are using the via negativa. Basically it serves to force us out of comfortable identification with some Buddha face: “If a dream is not my creation, then maybe it isn’t a manifestation of my consciousness.”  “I am now out of the knower consciousness face but unsure where to turn.  Do I then look at the dream from outside my own consciousness?  If so, how in the world am I supposed to do that?”

In response to these questions we often simply return to analogical thinking.  While positive statements can help us to think a problem through, they also have a tendency to substitute one thought for another and with it one identification with duality for another, instead of taking us beyond our dualities to Spirit.  For instance, we can talk about God as love, grace, or truth, but such statements are not the same as directly experiencing what these words stand for and point to.  They keep us trapped in our mental signifiers.  Another choice, which many find rather uncomfortable, is to stay in the via negativa, successively discarding whatever dream explanations and meanings come along as being other than That beyond explanations and meanings.  This is what meditation is intended to do and it is what a thorough-going neti-neti (“not this, not this…) approach is intended to do.  Yet another possibility is to embark upon the third type of elaboration, which is injunctive, in that it sets forth a set of instructions for conducting a life experiment designed to provide an experience of the answer one seeks.  Dream Sociometry and the interviewing protocols of Integral Deep Listening is one set of such instructions in the realm of dream yoga.  To the question, ‘What am I to make of this dream?’ it answers, ‘Listen to the dream characters by becoming them and following the protocols, either by yourself, or with others.  Then apply the recommended life changes that make sense to you in your waking life and see what happens.”  While the analogical tells us what Reality is like, the negative tells us what it is not.   The injunctive tells us what we need to do to experience that reality.

All three of these approaches to describing a dream can be used in all four of the quadrants by all three of the eyes of knowing. We can and should use criteria of truth, intersubjective fit, and efficacy of application in the realms of flesh, mind, and spirit.  We can apply those standards not only to our waking holon, but to our dreaming holon as well.

For Wilber, myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.   “To the extent that we form any positive mental conception of God, that conception must be a myth….But to the extent we insist on trying to form images about the Imageless, myth becomes an important tool, provided that we do not confuse the myth with the actuality.”  Of course, confusing the myth with the actuality is what much of dreaming is about and what much of life is about, as maya, as lila, as samsara, as dukkha. Nature inherently forms images to express the Imageless, whether as the natural world or as a dreamscape.  This is the essence of creation, and creation entails illusion when it represents the Non-Dual as duality.

We may conclude that creation is therefore bad or evil, in that it is inherently deceptive, as have many mainstream Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians.  We may conclude that it is acceptable to be deceived and live in illusion, which, when taken to an extreme, is the position of the hedonists, on the one hand, and the masochists, on the other.   When we occupy the middle ground we maintain an uneasy truce with illusion, freely admitting to ourselves that we are deluded and deceived, sleepwalking through life and for the most part comfortable with being deluded, yet all the while working on waking up and seeing through the illusion without thereby discounting it.  If this sounds like a fool’s game, we could do worse than to maintain a certain compassionate disattachment while we joust with our windmills as fervently as we can.

Illusion is not optional.  As maya, manifested reality is illusory.  When we argue about which is more real, waking or dreaming, we are quibbling about degrees of illusion.  We have yet to begin talking about waking up in whichever realm of consciousness we are currently experiencing.  Whether we are enlightened or deluded by either a waking or dream experience is  optional.  This is a necessary consequence of being deluded into thinking that there is a self.  An internal fiction produces external fictions — illusions.

Dreaming has typically been viewed as a realm of relative illusion, called parikalpita by the Yogacarins, an early form of northern Indian Mahayana Buddhism.  This type of knowledge mistakes a rope for a serpent or sees a stick half out of the water and thinks that it is bent.   It is relatively false.  This type of truth is compared with paratantra, what we would call objective truth, which correctly calls a rope a rope and is not deceived by refraction of the image of the stick by the water.  Both of these together form what Madhyamika called samvritti, or dualistic, sensory-mediated knowledge.   Much dream research attempts to determine the objective laws of dreaming, or principles of paratantra truth, to bring it into the realm of scientific knowledge and the relatively true.  “Western intellectual pursuits such as science and philosophy have wandered in the land of samvritti, of symbolic-map knowledge, and their primary aim has been to separate the relatively false knowledge of parikalpita (snake) from the relatively true knowledge of paratantra (rope).  Reality for the West has been paratantra. But although scientific knowledge is relatively true, it is still a form of dualistic knowledge, of samvritti, and from the absolute point of view it is as illusory as any other form of dualistic knowledge.”

Dreaming blurs the dualism of self-non-self, objectivity/subjectivity that we commonly experience in our daily lives.  While it is much easier to make the connection that the other in a dream is an aspect of ourselves than it is to do the same in waking life, it is still shocking for people to wake up to the realization that when they have a nightmare they are scaring themselves.

Following Wilber, people, cells, galaxies, tables, porpoises and indeed all things have at least four aspects: an inside and an outside, singular and collective aspects.  The singular aspect involves how a thing relates to itself; the collective aspect involves how a thing relates to its environment.  Inner combines with individual to form the interior individual quadrant of a holon. A holon is a whole “something” that is part of some larger “something.” The interior individual quadrant deals with consciousness, the private thoughts and feelings of an individual.  Inner combines with collective to form the interior collective quadrant, which deals with culture, the meanings and values that we give our experience.  Outer combines with individual to form the exterior individual quadrant, the behaviors of cells, organs, beings, and solar systems.  Outer combines with collective to form the exterior collective quadrant, which deals with the interactions of groups or social structures.

Interior individual approaches to dreamwork are phenomenalistic and focus on the consciousness of the dream state itself.  Is the dream prepersonal, personal, or transpersonal?  How do we know?  Gestalt, Dream Sociometry, and other methods that use identification with dream elements and dream consciousness are represented by this quadrant. Through identification with some aspect of consciousness personified by a dream tree or burglar we are supposed to get in touch with metaphorically depicted, analogous characteristics within ourselves.  Approaches that look at the impact or application of dreaming on consciousness, conflict resolution, creativity, and other psychological variables fall into this category.  In this respect, Jungian and Freudian approaches are at home in the interior individual quadrant.

In the knower quadrant (internal individual) we can talk about what we know about dreams, what we don’t know, and what steps we need to take to know more completely and fundamentally.

Interior collective approaches to dreamwork are interpretive and focus on the meaning of dreams, dream content, and the cultural context in which dreams occur.  We look to our waking associations or those of supposed experts to tell us what the dream means.  Dream dictionaries, and the interpretations of the Edgar Cayce readings, which approach dreaming as a language to be deciphered, are examples of this quadrant of the dreamwork holon.   This approach focuses on the cultural context in which dream events occur.  It may look at the external cultural correlates, such as archetypes or day residues, as they shape and are shaped by an interior experience.  Approaches that look at the cultural implications of dreaming fall into this quadrant.  Integral Deep Listening emphasizes interpretation not by external others but by internal others – the self-aspects which are interviewed.  The cultural correlates are the values espoused by these self-aspects, as self-rated on a zero to ten scale on six core qualities.

In the judging quadrant (internal collective) we can talk about what meaning a dream has for us, what a dream says when we free it of all our projected meanings, and what steps we need to take to move first to a clearer meaning and eventually beyond meaning to Spirit.

Exterior individual approaches to dreamwork emphasize the physiological correlates of dreaming.  We are interested in observable behaviors.  How many dreams do I recall?  Am I more likely to become lucid at night or during a daytime nap? What’s happening in my brain when I dream?  Is dopamine increasing?  When is acetylcholine jumping the synapses the most?  What variations in EEG and REM are associated with what dream events? Is dreaming an ongoing state of brain activation that is drowned out by waking awareness? Hobson’s neurobiological approach is an example of individual exterior approach focusing on observable empirical behaviors.   We can also do the same about dream character behaviors themselves.  What is done in the dream?  Who shoots who?  How many times?  When do we find ourselves searching for something?  When do we find that we try to escape but can’t move?  Although they are interior to the individual, these concrete events are objective dream occurrences that can be collected, tabulated, and correlated through such methods as content analysis.  We can then draw conclusions about the psychological and social function of dreaming.

In the objective form face (external individual) we can stipulate what the elements of an individual dream are or discuss a specific type of dream, such as a dream of a pregnant woman. We can talk about what we see and what we experience.  We can also talk about what we haven’t seen and haven’t experienced — what we find when we step outside of our identification with our waking identity or with some particular dream group member.  The via negativa is as much the path of disidentification as the analogical is the path of identification, or becoming one with the other.  We can also describe what we need to do to get the answers to these questions: we do content analysis or active imagination or role play or free association in a group.  To describe these methods is analogical.  It is the doing of the methods which is injunctive.

Exterior collective approaches to dreamwork emphasize the social system that is expressed in a dream.  Who is in the dream group?  Who is excluded? How do the characters interact?  What do they do?  How do they not interact?   What sorts of relationships do the various dream group members have?  What sort of technology is in evidence?  What are the geographical locations?  What are the rules of group interaction?  What is the group structure?  What is the group process?  Why?  This is an intrasocial approach to dreaming.

In the group face (external collective) we can talk about how dream group members interact, or the relationships among the dreams of a dream series, or within a particular type of repetitive dream, such as a nightmare. We can identify characteristics of certain groups of dream group members.  This is the analogical approach as applied to the group quadrant of dreaming holons.  In addition, we can explore what we find when we disidentify with one of these groups.  When we accept and follow life-change instructions given by groups of dream group members we are manifesting the injunctive approach in the external collective or social quadrant of a dreaming holon.

Whichever option we choose of these four will determine what we make of a dream.  It will also say something about where we are as an identity in the holarchy, as viewed from each quadrant.

It will be evident to most dream workers that they routinely come upon dream group members that appear to be comfortable on different levels of the spectrum.  A rock appears to be bad because it falls on Dream Self (judgment), part of the Gaia system (group), molecular (objective form) and not yet prehensive (knowing) while a seal appears to be swimming (judgment), a member of a pinniped society with a division of labor (group), manifesting limbic neural capabilities (objective form), and capable of emotion (knowing).  This for the moment ignores the issue of where the rock and the seal place themselves in the holarchy or where the group of their fellow dream group members as a whole place them, or where a group of dreamers might place them.

If you have a flying dream, an interior individual approach will explore what happens in your consciousness while you are flying.  Are you thinking about how high you can get?  Are you afraid of falling?  An interior collective approach will focus on what flying in a dream means.  Are you expressing a desire for freedom?  Is it escapism?  An exterior individual approach will look at waking behavioral correlates of flying, such as the great meditation you had last night, or maybe it was that drug trip or that great sex you had.  An exterior collective approach will look at the functional fit of your flying with your social system.     If you are flying alone, what does that say about your interpersonal experience in relationship to an experience of flying with others?

The experience of dreaming itself is a holon, in that there exist these four same distinct perspectives within the context of the dream itself.  There is the consciousness of the dreamer, Dream Self, the interpretations and meanings he brings to the experience, his individual behaviors, and his interactions with others.  Therefore, in addition to the human holon and the holon of waking experience (specific waking identities), there exists the holon of the experience of dreaming itself.  Within that holon there exists the individual holons of different self-aspects that appear in the dream.  These are generally not disclosed in any depth until a self-aspect is interviewed, with the exception of the holon of Dream Self.  In addition to these, there is the set that includes all of the above as subsets.  Here are the seven holons:

The Holon of Waking Identity: your holon at a specific moment or as an average

The Human Holon: humanity in general The Life Dream Holon: the holon that includes all of the following holons as subholons.

The Holon of Dream Self: the four quadrants of your dream perspective

The Dream Holon: dreaming in general

Self-Aspect Holons: inaccessible unless interviewed

The Waking Holon: the set that contains all possible perspectives accessible from waking

The Life Dream Holon: includes all the prior holons as subholons.

Understanding the differences among these holons deepens our appreciation of the relative insignificance of our habitual sense of self, when considered in the context of an extraordinary multitude of alternative legitimate perspectives.

How can I attain salvation?  This is the central question of spiritual development, whether Christian or Buddhist, Jewish or Islamic, Chinese or Hindu. This salvation may be from sin,  dukkha or suffering, from chaos or from avidya or ignorance.  It may be delivered by sons of God, Buddhas, Bodhisatvas, God, priests, avatars, or the White Brotherhood.  We may even have to deliver it to ourselves.  In any case, salvation is, at its core, rescuing, causing enlightenment to occur within the context of the drama triangle.  What this means is that man’s search for enlightenment has been doomed to failure.  Rescuing by salvation requires a victim and victims require persecutors.  Not only has man’s quest for enlightenment been hopelessly entangled in the drama triangle, it has also been about the glorification of one small aspect of consciousness at the expense of all others.  The self-sense that seeks enlightenment is waking identity.  It does not include many other significant self-aspects, ignored and neglected as insignificant by our self-sense.  It does not include Dream Consciousness.  It does not include the waking holon or the life dream holon.  It rarely takes into consideration the holon of humanity.  Consequently, it is a very narrow enterprise.  Because enlightenment of one part of self at the expense of others is no enlightenment at all, it is doomed to failure.  It is therefore in our own best interest to understand and respect the interests of other holons that make up our larger identity if we are to ever hope to wake up.

Waking identity generally thinks that it is being all inclusive when it vows to love everyone or to not seek enlightenment until all sentient beings are enlightened.  There are, however, contents of consciousness which are neither beings nor sentient, at least not in our usual understanding of these words.  If you are driving in a car in a dream you are not accustomed to thinking about the road you are on as either sentient or a being.  It is there for its instrumental value, a mere prop to give the dream realism.  However, this is merely the assumption of Dream Self – your waking identity as it manifests in your dreams, as well as that of your waking identity, after you awaken.   If you take the time to suspend such assumptions and become the road, you will discover something different: that it is both sentient, in that it has thoughts and feelings, and that it is a “being,” in that it expresses preferences that are in some ways significantly autonomous from your own.  Therefore, it is a device of habitual self-absorption and grandiosity to insist that the road is a part of yourself because you dreamed it.  It is definitely not a part of who you normally think you are, and to say that it is a part of who you “really” are is disingenuous, as practically speaking, that means nothing at all.  We might as well claim that the crazed yet princely Sea Worms of the planet Mongo are part of who we really are.  Dream Self, then, is normally as oblivious as waking identity of the majority of its larger identity.  As a result, it routinely misperceives the intentions of other self-aspects and therefore draws completely incorrect conclusions about not only dreams but about life.

The holon of Waking Identity is your holon at specific moments and as an average.  It is the holon that is normally accessed when you do life, create an Integral Life Practice, psychograph,

or think about who you are in terms of each of the four quadrants.  What is your consciousness right now?  What are your thoughts and feelings?  What is important to you right now?  What are you doing?  How are you interacting with the world?  Your answers to these questions create your sense of who you are right now; your typical answers over time create an average profile of your waking identity, including your average level of development, your average level of development in the self, cognitive, ethical, relationship, empathetic, and other developmental lines.  This is the holon that most efforts at enlightenment attempt to liberate.  This is the holon people try to wake up.  This is the holon that seeks to be free of suffering, generally without consideration of most of the other holons discussed below.  It is the focus of concern for the vast majority of spiritual traditions of the history of mankind.

The Human Holon is different from the Holon of Waking Identity, in that the first is general and common to all humanity while the latter is specific to each individual.  Just as individuals have an average level of development in each of the four quadrants, so our species has an average level of development in each of these areas.  The human holon tends to pull children and individuals up to its level by creating the cultural norms and social structures that support, direct, and reward “appropriate” behavior while denying, ignoring, and punishing “inappropriate” behavior.  The human holon also hinders the evolution of individuals past its level.  It provides the context which limits awakening and enlightenment by denying higher levels through assuming the pre-trans fallacy,

that because society is “normal” and everything that deviates from normalcy must be “abnormal” and therefore primitive and prepersonal.  So society   inherently and inevitably supports reductionism, at least until it learns about the pre-trans fallacy and takes steps to guard against it.  The result is a mostly silent repression of the evolution of the human holon by cultural norms.  The caste system in India, the doctrinal structure of Christianity,   the power of shame within Chinese society, and the power of lobbyists in contemporary American governance are obvious examples.  This pattern is a species manifestation of the psychological tendency by individuals, at least up to mid-personal levels of development, to do the same: to react to, repress, and deny what they do not understand or regard as different.  The Human Holon dreams cultural dreams and nightmares, such as famine, war, and terrorism.

The preferences of Dream Self generally mirror those of waking identity; it is the surrogate for your waking identity within the changed experiential, perceptual, and value structures of the Dream Holon. The Holon of Dream Self is essentially that of waking identity, in that Dream Self assumes it is waking identity, even when lucid, and therefore carries into the dream state the assumptions, perspectives, level of consciousness, misconceptions, delusions, and misperceptions, emotions, and reactivity of the current waking level of development. As Dream Self becomes increasingly lucid, the distinction between Dream Self and waking identity disappears.  If you were lucid all the time, the question would be how lucid your waking identity is in the dream, as there is a continuum within lucidity. The implications of this are significant, and they are very rarely considered.  It is the psychological equivalent of Jared Diamond’s demonstration of the historical propensity for humanity to exploit all environmental resources until its entire social structure collapses.

The holon of Dream Self also refers to the four quadrants of your dream perspective.  What is your level of consciousness while you are dreaming?  Do you think you are awake or do you think that you are dreaming?  Are your dream thoughts and feelings reflective of prepersonal, personal, or transpersonal levels of consciousness?  Are your values and interpretations of your dream experiences premodern, modern, or postmodern?  Are your behaviors concrete or abstract?  Are your interactions expressions of the drama triangle or the Socratic triad?

What is your typical level of empathy in your dreams?

The four quadrants that express who you are in your dreams generally reflect the quadrant preferences of your waking identity. That is to say, the thoughts, feelings, judgments, behaviors, and interactions of Dream Self are largely similar to those you would take in your waking life if experiencing similar circumstances. What both challenges and disturbs Dream Self are those circumstances that arise in dreams that are unlike anything that is experienced in waking life.  It never swallows hairbrushes, flies, changes gender, or interacts with dragons.

What differentiates Dream Self from waking identity is Dream Self’s natural tendency to suspend common assumptions that waking identity does not, within a context of waking impossibilities. For example, Dream Self might not question when a dog has wings, while waking self most certainly will.  This is probably most parsimoniously explained as the resurrection of two-year old thought processes.  While Waking Identity tends to regress in its role of Dream Self, neither are the same as the Dream Holon itself, and it is important to remember this distinction, as we shall see.

If we are to use the term “self-sense,” which Wilber uses to refer to the line of development that most centrally involves identity, then there are significant differences between waking self-sense, which remains relatively stable in lucid dreaming and lucid deep sleep, and dreaming self-sense.  There are other aspects of our self-sense that can be so autonomous as to bring into question any stable or reliable definition of self-sense without consideration of multiple selves with multiple definitions of self-sense that they themselves hold.

Although the holon of dreaming appears to be a subset of the Human Holon, it is fundamentally different from it. While death, embodied existence, and the reality of objective sensory facts are fundamental limiting factors of the Human Holon, they are not for the dreaming holon, since it cannot die, has no physical body, and is not as likely to be limited by relatively unchangeable external realities, like printed words on a page, walls, and gravity.  The Dream Holon refers to the four quadrants of dreaming in general.  It includes the perspectives of Dream Self, all dream characters, and Dream Consciousness as an interviewed self-aspect, but not as the context of all self-aspects.  The Dream Sociogram

depicts a sampling of a Dream Holon.   Through its evaluation one can access considerable information about the consciousness, judgments, behaviors, and interactional dynamics of a particular Dream Holon and about Dream Holons in general.  The exploration of intrasocial reality is most centrally a study of the nature of the Dream Holon.  Every individual has a typical or average level of expression in each of the four Dream Holon quadrants, and the implication is that humanity has a typical or average level of Dream Holon expression as well.

Interior individual approaches to dream holons focus on the consciousness of individual dream group members.  This includes how lucid Dream Self is in a dream.  It also includes the level of consciousness of all other dream group members.  What level is this or that dream character functioning at?  How do you know?  Is the judgment that of your waking identity?  Your Dream Self?  Is it based on the testimony of the dream character itself?  Is that testimony verbal or behavioral or both?  Is it given during the dream or afterward, in an interview?  If it comes in a dream, is it during a dream interview or not?  What is the level of functioning?  How healthy is the level?  A healthy early prepersonal stage is supportive of healing, balance, and transformation in a way that an unhealthy transpersonal level is not.

Interior collective approaches to Dream Holons focus on the cultural context in which dream events occur.  What are the values of the dream group?  Do they reflect drama or inner peace?    Do they emphasize fear or trust?  Chaos or balance?  Self or others?  The dream group culture may support fear, fighting, or lovemaking. How does the intrasocial culture shape waking experience?  Integral Deep Listening evaluates interior collective aspects of Dream Holons by assessing the statements of interviewed dream group members in relationship to the orientation of waking identity, experiential shifts when becoming this or that character, and the results when recommendations of the dream group member are followed.

Exterior individual approaches to Dream Holons emphasize the behaviors of dream groups as dream groups, not as human holons or from the perspective of waking holons.  Here we might study the differences in dream reality and waking reality and why “objective” dream reality is so malleable.  Why do numbers on a watch change?  Why do words on a page change?  The behaviors of Dream Holons as a whole cannot be adequately assessed unless a sampling of its Self-Aspect Holons are interviewed.

Exterior collective approaches to dream holons emphasize the group dynamics of dream characters as members of dream groups and how those are similar to or differ from waking groups.  For example, dream groups generally lack temporal stability; they change or dissolve over time in ways that waking groups do not.  These are observed in the interactional patterns in the Dream Sociogram.

The holon of each individual self-aspect.  While Self-Aspect Holons exist in both waking and dreaming experience, this distinction basically evaporates when most Self-Aspect Holons are interviewed.  There is no survival value, no adaptational advantage for self-aspects to differentiate between dream and waking states of experience.  Therefore, we must conclude that while these distinctions are vital for waking identity, they are basically meaningless for the majority of who we really are.

Self-Aspect Holons are inaccessible unless interviewed. This means that any statement that you make about any self-aspect prior to interviewing it is a projection by your waking identity.  Your statement has nothing to do with the identity of the self-aspect itself.  The common and habitual insistance of humans to confound the two is a convenient and comfortable delusion designed to reinforce the Atman project,

or our sense of self in the face of death.

It is impressive how almost everyone is sure that they know themselves and know what they think, what they feel, who they are, when they never ever, not even once, interviewed one other self-aspect to see if this most common of all assumptions was true or not.  It is obviously better to sleep and die in glorious self-delusion than to risk the possibility that we may not, after all, know who we are.  Interviewing self-aspects is not optional if we are to grow into and maintain stable development in the transpersonal.  While meditation is unsurpassed for the development of the self-line and cultivation of the ability to witness, it does not imply or require equivalent development in other major developmental lines, such as cognition, interpersonal communication skills, or ethics.  The development of such lines is absolutely required if stable maintenance of any transpersonal developmental level is to be attained.  Self-aspect interviewing goes a long way toward making up for deficiencies in other important lines, such as ethical sense and empathy.  Phenomenological identification with self-aspects indicates significant empathy, which deepens as the depth of identification increases.

People can draw any number of conclusions about who you are and why you do what you do by observing your behavior.  However, if they want to know what you think and feel about such things they will have to ask you.  Furthermore, if they think they are psychic and can read your mind, all they have to do is predict what you will say about why you feel and think what you do.  This tests the assumptions of waking identity.  It serves to establish the reality and the authenticity of Self-Aspect Dream Holons.  Dream self-aspect interior individual holon quadrants focus on the consciousness of individual dream group members.  What is the dream garbage can thinking?  How does it feel?  Does it like itself or not?  Do its remarks reflect a prepersonal, personal, or transpersonal level of development?  Is it healthy or not in its particular level of development?   The only way such questions can be answered with any certainty is to ask the garbage can.  Anything less is projection.  Neither dream dictionaries, psychics, nor your waking identity can accurately predict the responses of other self-aspects to such questions.  The same holds true for the other self-aspect quadrants.

The interior collective quadrant of self-aspects address what meanings and values hold true for them. While dream group member preferences collected in the Dream Sociogram reflect interior individual awareness, their elaborations, which are explanations of those preferences, are largely interior collective interpretations.  I may report a dream with a deep, dark, and dangerous hole in my back yard.  The hole itself may report that it is full of precious gemstones and serves as an entrance to a world of unrecognized potentials.  Is the hole a self-aspect or not?  In the sense that I accept it as a portion of who I am, it is.  When I identify with it, I incorporate it, at least for the moment, into my self-sense.  Previously those potentials were unrecognized or unacknowledged by my waking self.  Perhaps my waking self simply did not see them as priorities.  In what sense, then, can they previously legitimately be called part of my sense of self?  In what sense are they part of my waking identity?

The exterior individual quadrant of self-aspects involve their descriptions of their behavior, which often differs in important respects from Dream Self descriptions.  For example, in a dream I once saw a fish dying in the desert, picked it up, and put it in the water.  The fish, when interviewed later, said it wasn’t dying.  It said it was a lungfish and was doing just fine out of the water.  This difference involves more than a wrong interpretation of a behavior; it involves not seeing a behavior. In such an instance, which is usually the case, Dream Self does not share the perspective of another self-aspect.  When it wakes up to that new perspective the result can be transformational.  Another example would be to see a plane flying upside down in a dream but to learn from the airplane itself that it was right side up.  Which report is correct? Which is incorrect?  All we can say is that one perspective is partial and that more perspectives, particularly including those of the self-aspect under consideration, are extremely important, because they may completely change our awareness of what is happening.

The exterior collective quadrant of dream self-aspects provide their descriptions of their interactions with other self-aspects.  A common dream report is that a monster is chasing the dreamer.  However, the monster itself may not report that it is chasing the dreamer at all.  It may be running to catch a train, be in a race, or running from something itself.  It may not be acting in a threatening way toward the dreamer; it may instead be trying to give the dreamer a message, a hug, or ask a question.  It is impossible to accurately describe the dynamics of intrasocial relationships unless those involved in the interactions are interviewed.  Just as the statements of European explorers and pioneers about their relationships with Amerindian peoples served to justify their own biases, so the statements of Dream Self and later of waking identity about their relationships with other self-aspects serve to confirm and validate their own biases.

In Integral Deep Listening we also deal with self-aspect holons that are not dream characters.  These self-aspects are generally components of the Waking Holon, which transcends and includes the human holon.  The Waking Holon is the set that contains all possible perspectives accessible from waking consciousness.  This includes the ability to “become” others and any object of the imagination while in the waking state.  It includes interviewing any non-dream self-aspect.  Examples are Integral Deep Listening interviewing protocols of life issues, interviewing people and events, and physical symptoms. Therefore, the Waking Holon transcends and includes the Holon of Waking Identity, which is our self-sense in relationship to the “other.”  The Waking Holon is distinct from the Life Dream Holon because it involves identification with discrete other perspectives rather than the context which transcends and includes all possible perspectives.

The Human Holon includes those experiences that are common to all humans that are nevertheless human-centric.  That means that they are experiences that reflect human understandings and experiences of consciousness, culture, behavior, and society.  But what of non-human perspectives?  What of the perspective of the sky?  It is not part of the Human Holon, although it is experienced by humans and is very much part of the experience of almost every human.  When we experience reality from the perspective of the sky we are not approaching life from a human-centric perspective.  We are approaching life from the perspective of a non-human self-aspect.  Does not the fact that it is a self-aspect mean that the sky is, in final analysis, an aspect of the Human Holon?  While human and personal perception of the sky makes our experience of it interdependent, it is also reasonable to assume that the Human Holon is merely one of many valid perspectives, and that the real definition of who we are transcends human perspectives.  In order to grow into a self-definition that transcends, yet includes humanity, we must become non-human perspectives.  When we do so we see that life is a waking dream and that identity is polyvalent.  This is not simply a personal awareness, but rather a transpersonal, phenomenological, experience.

Another more problematic, yet vitally important, example of self-aspects that are part of the Waking Holon, are those generated out of life issues, feelings, and colors.  While these are human in terms of origin, they are not when considered from their own perspective, which is what a phenomenological approach provides.  Think of a time when you have been sad because you mourned the loss of someone you love.  If you give that feeling of loss, which is a very human feeling, a color, and then allow that color to congeal into a shape, you will have created something that is experienced as having objective but not physical reality.  It may be a sphere, an apple, a spaceship, or a blue hippopotamus.  Whatever it is, you created it and it is a part of your greater identity.  We know that it is not a part of your Waking Holon, because you cannot accurately predict what it will say.  Is it a part of the Human Holon?  While the blue hippopotamus was created by human consciousness and is therefore part of the upper left, or interior individual quadrant of humans, that is not its own perspective. When you interview the blue hippopotamus it will often, but not always, challenge you to expand your sense of self to become something that is trans-human.  It will freely say that it personifies a part of you, but its perspective will most likely prove to be autonomous in significant ways.  It is part of our waking dream, in that it is part of our waking experience, but that experience is no longer, at the moment of identification, human-centric and much less self-centric.  It challenges us to expand our definition of self beyond our inherited, cultural, and personal definitions of what it means to be human.  This sixth, waking dream, approach to dreaming is an important part of what makes Integral Deep Listening both more than traditional dreamwork and a genuine transpersonal practice.

Once we grasp this principle, we understand that many dream characters are trans-human, in that they reflect perspectives that transcend and include not only personal, but human-centric perspectives.  We discover that the Dream Holon is, with the Waking Dream Holon, a subset of the Life Dream Holon, or two facets of one dream.  The Life Dream Holon precipitates all possible perspectives.  It is equivalent to what is referred to in Dream Sociometry as Dream Consciousness.

It is itself formless, containing no perspectives whatsoever.  In this regard it is either a causal or non-dual state depending on the degree of conscious integration of all previously mentioned holons.

The Life Dream Holon is the holon that includes all prior holons as subholons.  It is also the holon of Dream Consciousness as context, in that it is prior to all possible dream and waking forms, manifestations, thoughts, feelings, awarenesses, and skandhas, with the exception of consciousness itself, which it approximates. As such, the Life Dream holon is pure beingness without identity, pure consciousness as the context or set which contains all data points as subsets.  Formless, yet beingness, it is in this regard equivalent to a high subtle transpersonal perspective.

How do I know if I am truthfully reporting dream experiences to myself?  The answer is that you cannot, but, like the Blind Men and the Elephant, the more perspectives that you consider the closer you are to a full, and therefore more accurate, picture.  Each quadrant perspective has its own truth criteria and each different holon will also provide a radically different perspective.  The interior individual perspective for the Holon of Waking Identity will ask, “What am I really feeling when I am lucid dreaming?  Am I anxious?  Happy?”  “What am I really doing when I am lucid in a dream?”  “If I were avoiding anything, what would it be?”  Emphasis will be on truthfulness, sincerity, and honesty.  How well do I know myself?

The same holds true if another dream group member makes a truth claim.  Let us suppose that in a dream a pug named Max claims he is lucid.  This is a truth claim by one particular Self-Aspect Holon within the Dream Holon.  I can choose to accept it or reject it or I can consult with others, whether in person or from books or psychic readings or dream dictionaries.  If I do so, I am accessing the interior collective interpretations of the Human Holon.  Perhaps as a result I change my opinion of Max’s truth claim.  If I do, the interior collective quadrant of my Waking Identity Holon has been expanded, because now I accept an interpretation of experience that I did not accept before.  I now can imagine that other aspects of myself besides myself in the dream (Dream Self) can be lucid.  If as a result I also change my experience of who I am then I have additionally changed my interior individual quadrant.  While a change in one quadrant strongly implies some degree of change in the other three, those other changes are often not significant enough to be noticeable.  For example, when children learn to walk, an exterior individual competency, they rarely notice the extraordinary changes that are happening in the other three quadrants.  We are exposed to the opinions of others constantly.  While most of the time they do not change our own; on some occasions we do change our opinions. However, even then, it is rare for our internal individual experience of ourselves to expand noticeably.  Such a change to my interior individual quadrant is more likely if I identify with Max himself and ask him the same questions I asked myself above. I am thereby entering the interior individual quadrant of one aspect of my Self-Aspect Holon.  Max’s consciousness becomes my consciousness to the extent that I allow myself to get into role.  I have now expanded my interior individual quadrant of my Waking Holon, regardless of whether his truth claim is accepted by me or not.  His responses to my questions are interpretations of his interior collective quadrant. I now have the benefit of his perspective, values, and judgments, whether or not I agree with them.  Who I am is expanded because I have accepted as legitimate another perspective through becoming it, whether or not I agree with it.

Why seek validation for a truth claim within ourselves?  First, this problem normally does not arise, because we are deliberating about external realities such as the opinions of others or whether a certain sort of medical treatment is right for us.  But there are occasions when either we are confronted with conflicting interior truth claims, as we are by Max’s, or we are facing a hard decision and aren’t satisfied with the information we have.  Should we take the job or not?  Should we marry her or not?  Should we follow the medical advice or not?  In such cases it would be good if we had a clear internal sense of direction.  Consulting with other self-aspects can often provide increased clarity and acceptance of the path we choose.  This is because we reduce inner conflict, which means reducing both anxiety and confusion about our choice.  It may still be a bad choice, but we can be much more at peace with it.

Another reason to seek validation for a truth claim within ourselves has to do with authenticity.  If I am lying to myself, I am most certainly lying to you.  If I lie to you, sooner or later you will reject me or abandon me.  When people get married they promise before family,  community, and God that they are going to be loving and kind to each other.  Of course, they mean it.  Yet within five years fifty percent of those people in the U.S. are divorced.  What happened?  Either they were lying or, much more likely, they didn’t know their own minds. In a sense, they were deceiving themselves.  They were lying to themselves, for any number of reasons.  Because they were lying to themselves, they made promises they couldn’t or wouldn’t keep to others.  This undermines their credibility and authenticity.  If this couple were instead to check out their decision with various members of their individual Self-Aspect Holon and share the results with their future partner,  two more favorable outcomes become more likely.  First, they are more likely to trust in their own decision and in the decision of the other.  Second, because of the depth of authenticity of the commitment, if there is divorce at some point, it is less likely to be viewed as personal betrayal, lying, and selfishness.

While character identification amplifies the interior individual quadrant, character elaborations focus on the meanings and interpretations provided by other aspects of self.  This is an interior collective perspective seeking cultural fit. The interior collective perspective asks, “Is lucid dreaming good?  Is it right?  Is it loving?”   “What sort of congruence does lucidity have with the values of other dream group members?”  “How does lucidity impact the group culture?” The interior collective seeks truth through understanding how individual dream group members fit together in acts of mutual understanding.  Dream group members inhabit not only the same “objective” and empirical dream territory, but also share the same intersubjective space of mutual recognition.  How many of your dream group members mutually recognize one another?  How would you know if they did?  If they didn’t, what would it mean?  If you wanted to change things so that they did share in mutual recognition, what would you do?  Dream group members, to meet the truth criteria of intersubjective fit, have to coexist in the same ethical, moral, and cultural space.  They have to find ways to recognize and respect the rights of each other and of the intrasocial community, and these rights cannot be found in objective matter, nor are they simply a matter of the dreamer’s own individual sincerity, nor are they a matter of functionally fitting together empirical events.  They are rather a matter of fitting the minds and hearts of the various aspects of ourselves together in an intersubjective space that allows each to recognize and respect the other without necessarily agreeing with one another.  To do otherwise is to be at war with ourselves.

Such intrasocial communication builds intimacy and authenticity with transpersonal self-aspects. The result is a meaningful, ongoing I-Thou relationship that deepens and broadens over time.  Through interaction with many faces of divinity you constantly expand your sense of sacred relationship.  Your daily life is spiritualized because you have changed previously profane and mundane relationships, like those with a dream lampost or jar into sacred and transformative ones.  The motivation for cultivating this perspective is, “If I am in conflict with other aspects of myself, I will, sooner or later, probably find myself in conflict with you.  Similarly, if I am at peace, out of the drama triangle, and experiencing the Socratic triad with other aspects of myself, then I am much more likely to do so with you.”

I can also check out the truth claim of Max the pug with my Waking Holon by interviewing the personification of my disbelief.  I can also interview Dream Consciousness to check out Max’s truth claim with the Life Dream Holon.  I can ask other self-aspects what they think of Max’s claim.  The more congruence I find among all of these different holons the more I will experience a sense of inner certainty.   If I find a congruence among Self-Aspect, Waking, Dream, and Life Dream Holons but disagreement with Dream Self, waking identity, and Humanity holons, guess which needs to give?  Shakespeare said, “First to thine own self be true.”  Integral Deep Listening is an empirically-based epistemology.  It provides a direct, open response to fear-based attitudes, cultural norms, and rigid social structures because it grounds individuals primarily in their intrasocial holons rather than in their families, nations, affiliations, or religious traditions.

While the phenomenology of dreaming relies on subjective data guided by the yardstick of truthfulness, dreaming physiology relies on objective data guided by the yardstick of propositional truth. The exterior individual asks, “What is the mechanism by which flying occurs in this dream?”  “What are the physiological correlates of flying?”  “What is the flyer doing and how is he doing it?”  It seeks “objective” truth.  It looks for correspondence with “reality.”  Truth is propositional and representational.  It will look at REM and EEG waves, stage of the General Adaptation Syndrome physiological reaction to dream stress and symbolic correspondences to waking behaviors and symptoms.  The motivation for this perspective is, “If I can’t establish a correspondence between my interior and exterior lives, how can I possibly get my needs met in the world?”

There is no reason why such questions cannot be asked of members of your own Self-Aspect Holon.  Why not ask the air and the ground?  You may never arrive at one right answer, but you will arrive at any number of legitimate and authentic perspectives that present creative and novel approaches to answering your concrete questions about the real world.  Many dream group members have their own definition of reality and evaluate the objective reality of the actions of its fellows by the criteria of correspondence and representation.

A  perspective based on the exterior collective quadrant of the Waking Identity Holon asks, “How does Max interact with other characters in this dream?” “How do the other dream characters view Max’s claim to be lucid in the dream?”   “How does Max’s claim affect the other group members?” “What is the functional fit of Max’s truth claim within the intrasocial community?”  The exterior collective quadrant of the Waking Identity Holon approaches the community of dream group members from an exterior and objective stance, and attempts to explain the status of the individual dream group members in terms of their functional fit with the objective whole.  This approach attempts to situate every element in an objective network that in many ways determines the function of each dream group member.  The truth is found in the objective intermeshing of individual parts, so that the objective, empirical whole — the “total intrasocial system” — is the primary reality.  It is the objective behavior of the overall intrasocial action system, considered from an empirical stance, that forms the yardstick by which truths in this domain are judged.  The motivation for this perspective is, “If my relationships with other aspects of myself aren’t healthy, then sooner or later my relationships with others will hurt me.”

Dreamwork is, at least on the surface, a thoroughly subjectivist approach to describing experience.  It emphasizes such things as consciousness, awareness, psyche, ideas, idealism, inside, interior, mind, the subjective, idealism, introspection, qualities, hermeneutics.    In contrast, objectivist approaches and explanations to describing experience emphasize such things as material, the biophysical, brain, nature, outside, exterior, brain, objective, materialism, positivism, quantities, and empiricism.   Dreamwork starts with the immediacy of consciousness itself.  Direct, personal experience is the source of data, and “the only genuinely direct experience each of us has is his or her own immediate and interior experience.  The primordial data…is that of consciousness, of intentionality, of immediate lived awareness, and everything else, from the existence of electrons to the existence of neuronal pathways, are deductions away from immediate lived awareness.  These secondary deductions may be very true and very important, but they are, and will always remain, secondary and derivative to the primary fact of immediate experience.”

Is dream experience about given objects of awareness (brain events), out of which we construct consciousness, or is dream experience about consciousness, out of which we construct meanings?   Because most approaches to dreamwork anchor their theories to immediate data they take as their starting point immediately apprehended interior states and direct experiential realities.  As a consequence, they are not so much interested in behavior as in the meaning and interpretation of those things and events that are perceived as psychological symbols.  Dream data are symbols that must be interpreted.  The question becomes, “What is the meaning of dreams?”   The objectivist, on the other hand, asks, “What do dreams do?”  “How do they work?” “What is their biophysical function?”  “As brain phenomena, how are they created?”  What is their function within a society and their adaptive function for a mammal?”  The objectivist wants to explain dreams as empirical behaviors; the subjectivist usually wants to understand symbolic experience.   To side with one group or the other is cut off half of ourselves, to severely limit our means of knowing what dream experience is.

1) Dream interpretation (Waking Holon Analysis): Dreamer Holon knower looks at the Dream Holon objective form and projects meanings onto it with the assistance of Human Holon dreaming community (social) validity claims.

2) Phenomenalistic role play:  Waking Identity Holon knower merges with one or more dream group member knower (Self-Aspect Holon) and experiences the group in relationship and in concrete form.  It then reports meanings as commentary elaborations to the Waking Identity Holon, which projects further meanings onto it with the assistance of both intrasocial (self-aspect holon) and social (human holon) dreaming communities and their respective validity claims.

3) Dreaming: Dreamer Holon knower (Dream Self) experiences the Dream Holon as objective form, confusing it with waking experience, and projects meanings onto it.

Lucid Dreaming: Waking Identity Holon experiences the Dream Holon objective form, knowing it as a Dream Holon, and projects meanings onto it.  The Waking Holon colonizes the Dream Holon with its interpretations.

If each developmental holon incorporates, embraces, and includes previously traversed holons, why are dreams such an enigma to most of us?  If they do indeed represent earlier and more primitive ways of perceiving our experience, shouldn’t we have an intuitive grasp of their meaning?  The fact that we do not intuitively grasp most dreams implies that we are either 1) amnestic, as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Plato suggest, or 2) chronically repressing, as Freud and Cayce suggest, or 3) dreams do not represent an earlier way of conscious cognition, or 4) we are applying incorrect truth criteria to our dream experience.

Certainly there is some truth to all of these explanations.  We have forgotten and no longer identify with many aspects of our former selves.  We are estranged from our prepersonal selves, although they remain powerful components of our physical, emotional, and mental natures.  Parts of us get left behind along the way through neglect or internal conflict leading to fixation.    Most of us are afraid of our dreams: we fear that they will prove to us that we are basically irrational, ignorant, or out of control of our own selves, and fear often leads to repression.   Dream cognition is not waking cognition.  It probably never has been.  In other words, Dreaming is built into mammalian hard-wiring. Dreams are, in and of themselves, a prepersonal, destructuralized, and primal form of cognition that is innate.  They did not make more sense to Neanderthals just because there was less difference between their dream and waking mentation.  There were as many differences then as there are now.

We do not understand our dreams because our perspective, which does the interpretation, both during the dream as Dream Self, and after awakening as Waking Identity, represents a minority viewpoint, when considered from the perspective of the consciousnesses (the Self-Aspect Holons , Dream Holon, and Life Dream Holon) that created the dream.  The part is trying to grok the whole; a subset is trying to comprehend the set which contains it. Because Waking Identity only represents one component, one subset, it cannot, by definition.  Its audacity is that it thinks it is one with the whole and therefore understands its contents.  This is clearly not the case, because if it did it would be free from suffering and it would be able to predict the workings of all subsets, including the motives of dream characters and the outcome of interviews with the personifications of life issues.  This it cannot do.

The experience of dreaming itself is interior, individual, and personal.  It is with few exceptions a matter of personal consciousness, manifesting personal thoughts, and feelings within a group of self-aspects perceived as the “other.”  The content of the dream, however, is relatively exterior to dream group member thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are implied by overt experienced dream events.  For instance, we search for our lost keys in a dream.  We assume that the keys are inert metal objects.  However, when and if we identify with the keys, which is an interior individual experience, we may find that the keys have thoughts and feelings.  They may say something like, “We’re not lost.  We know exactly where we are.  We feel angry when Dream Self takes us for granted.”  Character identification, eliciting dream group member preferences and noting their elaborations in the Dream Sociometric commentary are interior individual and collective aspects of the Dream Sociometric process.  Tabulating the preferences of self-aspects and Dream Consciousness is an exterior individual, objective component of the process.

Waking associations and correspondences to the dream, as well as related physiological events are all exterior and individual aspects of the Dream Holon, from the perspective of the Dream Holon and Self-Aspect Holons.  This is because waking associations and correspondences are exterior relative to interior content. Note that from the perspective of waking identity associations and waking correspondences are interior collective interpretations while physiological events are exterior individual behaviors.

The Dream Commentary also addresses interior individual aspects of the Dream Holon.   The Dream Commentary asks these questions from the perspective of each dream group member, “If I could change this dream in any way, would I change it?  If so, how?”  Answers are subjective statements reflecting some degree of sincerity, truthfulness, integrity, and trustworthiness.  However, if the self-aspect says, “Count down one from ten to zero with each exhalation while you meditate,” it is making an external individual recommendation to waking identity.

Statements in these commentaries indicate the values, principles, and relationships various dream group members hold and have toward one another.  This is the dream group culture and entails individual collective aspects of the dream group.  Dream group member conflict always indicates a clash in values or principles and a problem with cultural fit.   The Dreamage is a rewrite of the dream based on a consensus of dream group member recommendations in the Dream Commentary.  If dissent exists regarding proposed changes there can be no Dreamage.  Dreamages reflect the dream group culture as envisioned by an open sharing of the needs and desires of all dream group members, including Dream Self and Dream Consciousness,

as equals.   We are able to evaluate what the cultural fit of the group would be when each is able to affirm and manifest its own aspirations.  This presents a metaphorical depiction of our potential for integration, as visualized by one cross-section of our intrasocial community.

The Dreamage is also a description of dream group member, or intrasocial, relationships.  As such, it deals with functional fit and is interobjective.   The intrasocial structure and functions of dream group members, personal application of the action plan, plotting of sociogram data, evaluation of Dream Sociogram, and individual Dream Sociometric research itself, the social impact of application of the Action Plan, and Dream Sociogram relationships are all exterior collective aspects of a particular Dream Holon, as expressed by a particular Dream Sociometric Commentary and Sociogram.  How those dream workers interact who discuss Dream Sociometry is an exterior collective aspect of the Human Holon.

Other exterior individual aspects of Dream Sociometric dreamwork include.

Interior Individual Exterior Individual

Dreaming Recording, telling the recalled dream

Dream Self thoughts and feelings Recalled dream content, behaviors

element thoughts and feelings Associations

Character identification Waking correspondences

Eliciting dream group member preferences Physiological dream events

Noting elaborations in the  Writing preferences

Sociometric Commentary Tabulating preferences

Dream commentary Data from various commentaries

Personal application of action plan

Plotting of sociogram data

Evaluation of sociogram data

Evaluation of application of action plan

Individual sociometric research

Interior Collective Exterior Collective

Element thoughts and feelings Dream group social structure

toward one another Dreamage group social structure

Mutual understanding Intrasocial systems mesh

Moral development Social impact of application of action plan

Dreamage  Dreamage intrasocial structure

Waking commentary Sociogram relationships

Dream workers discussing dreamwork                      Social relationships of dream workers

How, then can we use Dream Sociometry to validate truth claims in each of the four quadrants?  Let us return to our flying dream.   We could have all sorts of theories about it:

Reflection of a buoyant daytime mood.

Compensation for fears the dreamer is attempting to avoid.

A product of occipital stimulation by random neuronal firings.

A gift from God.

A metaphor for a concurrent out-of-the-body experience.

A fifth chakra liberation experience.

An adaptive attempt to maintain vigilance over our environment during sleep.

A warning.

Generalized horniness.

….and so forth!

We have seen that depending on the quadrant that we approach dreams from we will ask different questions and have different criteria of truth. It is quite possible that an explanation will meet one set of criteria and fail in one or more of the other areas.  What then?  Is it true or not?  Does something have to meet truth criteria in all four areas in order to be valid?  Does it matter whether we accurately know the consciousness of a piece of coal is in order for us to heat a building with it?  Does the life history of Jesus, his death and resurrection, have to be historically genuine in order for it to have a transformative effect on people’s lives?  Is psilocybin morally good because it can expand consciousness?  These are the sorts of confusions that we can get in when we apply truth criteria for one quadrant to another.

Each quadrant requires that a methodology fitting for its own truth claim be pursued.  In any case, the validity claim must be falsifiable.  There has to be some means by which it can be shown to be untrue.  For instance, how are you going to be able to prove that your flying dream is not a gift from God?  Since that claim is not falsifiable, we are wise not to waste our time trying to prove it true.  This is true for all sorts of lovely, satisfying pronouncements, like the one by Leibniz that, “This is the best of all possible worlds” that so outraged Voltaire that he didn’t go to sleep until he had finished writing his biting satire Candide. When someone says, “Things turned out exactly the way they were meant to,” or, “All is in divine order,” or “You can’t trust people,” they are expressing a belief, but that is all.  As a truth claim, it ranks right up there with Alice’s encounter with a hooka-smoking caterpillar on a mushroom in her dream.

But are dream events any better?  How can one prove or disprove Max the pug’s claim that he is lucid in a dream?  How can one prove or disprove anything about the experience of flying in a dream?  Isn’t the most one can say is that, “It was real for me at the time?”

First, an experiment has to be performed.  In the case of Dream Sociometry, a person has to be willing to recall a dream, write it down, create a Dream Sociomatrix, identify with the various dream group members in the dream, write down their elaborations in Sociometric, Dream, and Waking Commentaries, create an Action Plan, and apply it.

Secondly, we evaluate our data.  What do the dream group members say about it in the Commentaries?  This is an internal-collective process.  What sorts of patterns of preferences do dream groups create when we look at the Dream Sociograms of flying dreams?  This is an external-collective process. What is the consequence when we apply some meaning of flying dreams in our waking lives?  This is an external individual process.  What is my internal experience when I go through this process?  Do I score higher than before in the six core transpersonal qualities referenced by IDL?  This is an internal individual process.

Thirdly, we compare this data with others who have completed the experiment.

We do this not only when we consult other students and Practitioners of IDL, but also when we ask other dream group members what they think about our findings and our process.  We are seeking the council of our intrasocial community, our internal Sangha, or spiritual community.  If they are divided, then we can make our own decision and see what happens when we conduct a waking experiment in our lives based on that decision.  If we are mistaken we will get cybernetic feedback in the form of dreams and the perspectives of other interviewed self-aspects.  Or we can take the same issue to other dream group members from other dreams.  Or we can appeal to some external community of experts.  Experts in this case are either

1. Dream group members who demonstrate they are wise, good, and peaceful by consistently either highly preferring other dream group members or by total non-attachment in their preferences.  Do they score high in the six core transpersonal qualities?

2. Those individuals who have used the Dream Sociometric process with their own dreams and so are qualified to give feedback about the methodology.

Let’s say you have a dream of a plane crash.  You have a strong feeling that it’s a literal warning dream and you want to prevent the crash if you can.  What do you do?

First, you find out if there are any identifying elements in the dream.  Who is the carrier?  Where is the plane?  Are there any markings on the plane?  If you have this sort of information, you might attempt to pursue it as far as you can.

Failing that, you can either give up and wait for the crash, or you can see if you can get more information about the plane and the crash out of the dream.  You gather data in the form of elaborations elicited from various dream group members.  Do they think there is going to be a crash?

Perhaps they will tell you when and where the crash is going to be.  More likely, they will do something similar to what happened for one lady – they will tell you that you’ve been overworking and that if you don’t slow down you are going to crash physically.

You then have to validate this feedback in as many of the four quadrants as you can.  Does it feel like a conclusion that is sincere, truthful, honest and trustworthy?  Does this meaning have an intersubjective fit and rightness with feedback from both internal and external peers who know your circumstances well?  Does it correspond with objective feedback – health warnings you’ve been getting from your body or from feedback you’ve been getting from family and friends?   And most importantly, when you apply the conclusion in your waking life,  say, by working forty hours a week instead of seventy-five, what happens?  Do you feel more truthful to yourself and others in who you are in your life?  Does the feedback of dream group members in subsequent dreamwork support and confirm your waking decision?   Do those you respect, whether friends, family, or co-workers, applaud your decision?   And how is your physical health and your work performance?  Are they improved?

It is not surprising that dreams are typically viewed with passing fascination and only rarely with lasting relevance by the great majority of humans.  In terms of the truth criteria of the internal individual quadrant of our waking identity holon, dreams fail the test.  They usually are not sincere, honest, or trustworthy.  While they may seem these things for much of our experience when we are dreaming, when we wake up and find that we were asleep when we thought we were awake, how much less sincere and trustworthy do our dreams seem to us?  How sincere, honest, and trustworthy is a visual hallucination that is also a delusion?  A client dreamed of his dead brother, who assured him that he was alive and would be coming home soon.  The client told his brother in the dream, “If you’re lying to me, I’m going to be really pissed.”  The brother assured him that he was awake, that he wasn’t dreaming, and that he would be home soon.  When the dreamer woke up and realized that he was dreaming he concluded that his dreams were not trustworthy.  Is this a problem of the dream being untrustworthy or a problem with the truth criteria of our waking identity?

Dreams also fail the truth criteria of the external individual quadrant of our Waking Identity Holon.  They are illusory.  Their events do not represent waking reality accurately, nor do they correspond with waking reality.  Humans don’t float through the air and fly.   People don’t come back from the dead.  When my client woke up and found that interior truth did not correspond with external facts – his brother was still dead – he felt betrayed by his inner experience and was angry.  But is this a problem of the dream being illusory or a problem with the truth criteria of our waking identity?

Dreams also fail the truth criteria of the internal collective quadrant of our Waking Identity Holon.  Nobody agrees whether dreams are good or bad, right or wrong, useful or not.  Everybody has their own theory about what they mean and you need to be particularly suspicious when a group of supposed experts get together and agree that your dream means what they all think that it does.  Don’t walk, run in the other direction.  So what worth is a community of experts when it comes to your own dream experience?  There just isn’t any intersubjective fit outside of the cultural expectations that people grow up with that say things like, “Dreams are warnings.” “Dreams are nonsense.” “Dreams are messages from God.” “Dreams are precognitive.”

Dreams also fail the truth criteria of the external collective quadrant of our waking identity holon.  I can live my life just fine without doing dreamwork.  Nothing bad happens to me when I don’t work on dreams.  My friends don’t hate me.  I don’t lose a job.  On the other hand, if I started doing a lot of dreamwork and talking about it, I would probably lose my interobjective fit in my life.  People would think I was strange.  People I used to relate to probably wouldn’t feel so comfortable around me.  Dreams just don’t have much relevance to my social functioning, so they fail the utilitarian test.  They don’t get me better jobs, they don’t find me romance, they don’t make me money.

Dreams give most people the creeps if they pay any attention to them at all.   People who pay attention to them are “dreamers,” and we all know what that means.  Orthodox psychiatry views dreams as delusions based on random neuronal firings.   Enlightened Masters usually view dreams as illusion, makyo, a diversion and a waste of time and energy.   Wilber, at least in Spectrum, generally agrees with the Masters.   In his later works Wilber sees dreamwork as one form of shadow work, an essential component of any integral life practice.

But troublesome questions remain and refuse to go away.  Why is it that something that feels so real, from another perspective, looks so false?  Am I supposed to conclude that dreams are therefore false, or that different truth criteria are at work asleep than when I am awake?  If different truth criteria are at work, how can I reconcile them with those of the holon of my waking identity?  For surely, if I am to become One to myself, to learn to trust myself, and to accept all of myself, I have to come to stop believing in illusions and I have to somehow reconcile these conflicting versions of reality.  It will never do for me to simply dismiss dreams as falsehoods and illusions as long as I keep dreaming them and keep experiencing them, again and again, every night, as true.  I am telling myself I do not believe in what I very much believe in, much as if a drunkard truthfully states she’s not an alcoholic because she doesn’t have a drink in her hand or a healthy hypochondriac truthfully states that he’s sick because he’s convinced a doctor to put him in the hospital.  Lying to ourselves is understandable, but it doesn’t help us wake up.

Many people hold up lucid dreaming, the ability to know that we are dreaming while we are dreaming, as the state of consciousness toward which we should move while dreaming, because there is no longer any delusion.  Dreams may remain illusions, but at least we know them as such.  Dreams then become on par with waking; we know that waking is an illusion as well, another dream state, but we are no longer under the delusion that it has own being, permanence, substance, or reality in and of itself.

Dream lucidity represents an outcome or a fulfilling of the truth claims of the internal individual quadrant of experience in a Dreaming Holon for Dream Self.  There is no longer a confusion of waking truth claims (external individual) with dream reality (internal individual).  Truthfulness, honesty, integrity exist in experience in a way that they did not exist before.  This does not, however, resolve truth claims of dream events and elements, which within their own holon have their own individual external reality subject to the propositional truth claims of that holon.  The issue is no longer, “How do these events correspond to waking events, which I know to be true?” or, “What in my waking experience do these dream group members represent?” but rather, “What are the objective characteristics of this dream group member that are true?”  “What is true about these dream events, when taken for themselves?”  Dream lucidity does not necessarily aid in the verification of such external individual truth claims, although it might.

Will dream lucidity help to determine the intersubjective fit between dream group members?  Will it create greater mutual understanding?  Does it necessarily support goodness?  Does the “right” thing necessarily follow just because I am aware that I am dreaming?  You remain a dreaming ego, just as a drunk becomes a dead drunk.  Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you’re better or wiser.  Just because you’re lucid in a dream doesn’t mean you are necessarily any more aware of what’s best for the entirety of your intrasocial culture.  When the holon of your waking identity fuses completely with your Dream Self Holon you’re simply more free and powerful, and therefore a more potent force for internal and external healing and destruction.   Freedom is associated with confidence, one of the six core qualities.  Lucid dreaming can create amazing increases in this quality without having any impact whatsoever on the other five, consequently creating imbalances among them.  You are now free to colonize the dream state with all of your waking misconceptions while repressing or changing anything about your dreams that don’t conform to your waking truth claims.  How do you know that you have not merely expanded the suffering inherent in your stuck Waking Identity Holon more profoundly into your Dream Holon?  How do you know that you have not merely succeeded in totally ignoring the legitimate truth claims of the Dream Holon and its self-aspects?  How do you not know that you are not simply exploiting your dream reality?

Does dream lucidity result in an appropriate functional fit among your various dream group members? Will you stop having nightmares or conflict in your dreams?  If you do, is that a function of the will of the group as a whole or is it happening because that’s what you want?    How would you know?  Whose group is it, anyway?  Who is in charge?  Who creates the dream?  Who transforms it?  Are you sure you are sober enough to take the role of designated driver?  Obviously, we need to be heading toward a unified consciousness, an identification with all dream group members so that dream relationships represent the will of the one spirit that animates them all equally. When we become one with the dream group as a whole, what possible meaning could manipulation of the dream group have?

Perhaps dream lucidity is not the solution to the truth claims for three of the four quadrants.  Perhaps it is only partially a solution to the truth claims for the internal individual quadrant. If it is not,  what is?

Regarding the internal individual quadrant, what does dream truthfulness, honesty, integrity, trustworthiness look like to other dream group members, not just to Dream Self?  This is an appeal to truth criteria of the internal individual quadrant of the Self-Aspect Holon.  If you were to be able to answer this question you would know yourself as you are known by a continuously evolving series of self aspects.  You would not see yourself as a waking or dream identity.  What would be real would be a multitude of authentic, legitimate perspectives that coexist.  Your job would be to choose among them which ones will most heal, balance, and transform all quadrants of all holons. You are not smart enough to do this alone because your waking identity is a part of the whole.  It is the flea on the tail of the dog, thinking it is the dog and controls it.  If you want to have any hope of ever outgrowing this delusion you have to be informed by those perspectives.  You have to make them who you are.    If you did so, because your identity would be totally transparent, it would be extraordinary and growing in authenticity and intimacy.  With it your vulnerability would be be profound.  This is a different picture from the one we form when we consider lucidity for Dream Self as the criteria for final truth in this quadrant.

Is dream lucidity the end point for the internal individual quadrant of a Dreaming Holon?  If it were, then every dream group member would simultaneously be aware that it was in a dream and not in waking experience.  In my experience, most other dream group members typically have no problem with this.  They do not experience being in a dream state as in any way decreasing their reality, nor are they under any delusion that they are participating in a dream instead of waking experience.  It is simply irrelevant to them.  To them, they are awake, aware, and alive.  They sometimes consider waking to be the dream state.  They consider their state to be that which is more real and less illusory.  Is it?  What would Lao Tze’s famous butterfly have to say about that?

Lucidity is not an issue for other dream group members, on the whole.  It is merely an issue for Waking Identity and its surrogates within the dream group, particularly Dream Self.  As such, how is it not another manifestation of the Atman Project?  Lucidity does not create truthfulness, sincerity, integrity, and trustworthiness for dream group members.  That is because a lucid Waking Identity/Dream Self is no more truthful, sincere, integral, or trustworthy than a non-lucid one.  Usually, dream group members will state that they desire these characteristics (truthfulness, sincerity, integrity, and trustworthiness) in Dream Self and their fellows.  It is assumed that the desired state exists when all of these characteristics occur continuously for all dream group members.  That is, all are truthful, sincere, act with integrity, are trustworthy, and when asked, they state that their peers all do too.  Then, as far as they are concerned, the dream group meets the truth criteria of the internal individual quadrant.  Consequently, the testimony of interviewed self-aspects emphasize expansion of the six core transpersonal qualities rather than dream lucidity.

But the question remains: Could they be fooling themselves?  Could their truthfuness be merely relative from the perspective of spirit?  Could they still be lacking in sincerity, integrity and trustworthiness?  Awareness evolves.  Any degree of consistency in maintaining such a state of truthfulness and trustworthiness among dream group members would necessarily create a profound transformation in consciousness and an evolution in form.  Murphy has speculated about this in The Future of the Body.

The world has yet to resolve the failure of dreams to satisfy the truth claims of the four quadrants. In the East, with notable exceptions, the answer has been that dreaming is illusory.   In the West, the answer has been that dreams are either prepersonal, faith-based magic or they are epiphenomena.  In popular traditions, both East and West, dreams have been viewed as divine messages, warnings, the soul leaving the body, or glimpses of life after death.  In all traditions, the meanings ascribed by esteemed interpreters have all failed the truth tests of all four quadrants.  The dreams in the historical record that are held up as examples of the divine or predictive power of dreams are so atypical as to be exceptions that prove the common rule that the majority of dreams are well worth ignoring.  If there exists anything that threatens our hope for personal integration, for uniting in peace as one humanity, for becoming incarnations of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, it is our avoidance of our dream life.  As long as our dream life remains an untrustworthy illusion, an irrelevancy to be avoided and forgotten, we cannot be and we will not be whole.  If we are unable to be whole to and for ourselves, how is it possible for us to unite as one humanity?  Technology cannot and will not save us from the illusions of our self-created dreams.  Meditation cannot and will not make dreaming irrelevant.  As a species we are not going to get away with simply ignoring and avoiding dreaming, because they tell us how and why we are stuck and what we need to do to get unstuck.  To ignore, avoid, repress, or transcend dreaming is to choose to stay stuck in the Atman Project.

The internal collective quadrant of the Dream Holon asks, “What does dream justness look like?”  “What is cultural fit in a dream?”  “What’s not?”  “What is dream ‘rightness?’”  “What is dream goodness?”   “What is intersubjective harmony?”  “Would we know it if we saw it?”  “How would we know that it is really what it says it is?”

It would be tempting to posit that the end point, the final cultural fit, would be dream groups comprised of members that consistently not merely prefer one another, but love one another, regardless of who they are and what they do.  Such groups create synthesis Dream Sociograms

and do indeed, by their consensual feedback, manifest the truth criteria of the internal collective quadrant.  This would be tested by performing an experiment.  It would be to do whatever dream group members say they require to consistently create such an intersubjective fit.

The external individual quadrant of the Dream Holon asks, “What is true in a world that does not obey the laws of time and space?”  “What is finally objective in a world that lacks objective reality?”  “What representations maintain validity in a realm in which transformations of form are common?”  “Can there even be any propositional truth in such a state?”

The only things that might be expected to be constantly objective in such circumstances is consciousness, one of the five skandhas, and beyond it, formless emptiness, and beyond that, the non-dual. When we talk about the external, when we talk about manifestation in form, we are trying to find the truth in what is most fundamentally a lie – duality.  Keeping these caveats in mind, truth in the external individual Self-Aspect Holon dimension is identification with the non-dual, sacred, and transformative in whatever form manifests at the moment.  In other words, if we are to meet the truth criteria of this quadrant, we know that the dream cat or artichoke are dualistic, and therefore untrue, manifestations of something that is not an object — spirit.   We see this, we know this, and we relate to it as spirit masquerading as form.

One pathway to this state is to perform empirical experiments such as Dream Sociometry.  The object of these experiments is to intend, at all times, in any and all holons, to perceive spirit within form and as the inherent and true nature of form, regardless of what the form is or what it does.  It may kill us; it is still spirit.  It may transform itself into foul-smelling crap; it is still spirit.   We then collect data on what happens when we do this.  We submit our findings to  our fellow self-aspects, peers in the methodology, and our own common sense.

What is the pathway to coherence and validity within each quadrant?  In general, we know that we have a three-step methodology that applies equally well in all four quadrants: 1) Perform an experiment on a falsifiable proposition; 2) Gather data; 3) Submit the data to qualified evaluators for feedback.  If you want to hasten your enlightenment, you would be well to learn the truth criteria of those aspects of yourself that score high in those qualities that are associated with enlightenment.  It would be well for you to listen to their advice about what you need to do to conform to those truth criteria, and do it.

Such self-deception directly threatens the image we want to portray as someone who is control and who knows what they are doing.  It is a direct threat to our sense of security.  Such threats to our self-image provide one important reason why we do not remember our dreams, since our dreams are full of self-deceptions.  We think we are awake when we are dreaming and we think that the things we experience are exterior to us when they are interior creations.  For the most part what you experience when you dream is self-created, in that it was produced by some aspect of your consciousness.  This default position causes you to take responsibility for your self-deception as well as the extraordinary abilities that sometimes express themselves in dreams.  Both are equally important.

Nightmares seem to be bad, self-defeating, and useless.  If this is how we perceive them, whether while dreaming or later while awake, our response to them tends to be to repress, suppress, and ignore them.  However, a nightmare is not so much the cause of of our fear as is our perception of them as frightening.  This occurs when we experience a nightmare as a threat and as something bad.  We confuse dream events with our interpretations of them.  A monster is chasing us and so we get scared.  Our interpretation of the dream, while we are dreaming, is that we are being threatened.  Is that the case?  Have we asked the monster?  What would he say if you were to stop and ask him or her?  Perhaps he would say that he is a threat, that he wants your for dinner.  Or he may say that he is running because he is late to pick up his child from monster kindegarten or that he wants to catch you to give you a message.  You just don’t know until you ask!  So, based on partial and inaccurate information, we conclude that the dream is a nightmare and get scared.  Because that was our dream conclusion we generally carry that interpretation into our waking lives: “Boy, I had a BAD nightmare last night!” It would be far more accurate to say, “Boy, I really chose to scare myself last night!”

This is true for waking nightmares as well as dreams.  Spirit does not differentiate.  We routinely do the same thing in our waking lives: we confuse waking events with our interpretations of them.  Somebody cheats on you or lies to you and you take it personally.  It’s a very bad thing.  How did you reach that conclusion?  How objective is your judgment? There is what happened and there are the multitudes of possible interpretations of what happened.  Which one did you choose to accept and why? Events are neither good nor bad; it is our interpretation of them that makes them good or bad.  This is a basic truth that we know but we fight. We instinctively want to say that tragedy is bad and success is good, that evil is bad and love is good, that unhappiness is bad and happiness is good.

If we want to learn to look at life from the perspective of spirit we will come to look at life as a product of our perception rather than as something “out there” that is good or bad, real or false.  What are examples of waking nightmares?  Post-traumatic stress disorder not only contains nightmares but is itself a waking nightmare.  Traffic accidents, heart attacks, cancer, divorces, and deaths are personal nightmares.  Wars, famines, epidemics, terrorist attacks, and the control of governments by fascists are all socio-cultural nightmares.

To respond to any nightmare with repression, suppression, or avoidance is a very big mistake. This is because it gives the nightmare power.  If the nightmare is self-generated, as it most certainly is, then we are afraid of ourselves, fighting with ourselves, and defeating our own development.  We can see this with the U.S. response to 9/11.  When it responded to the destruction of the New York World Trade Center with war ithe U.S. ignored how its policies created the circumstances that allowed terrorism to grow.  Instead of learning from those mistakes, it externalized its fear and started two wars, one against Iraq and the other against Afghanistan.  The result created a nightmare of death, head injuries, and post-traumatic stress for U.S. soldiers, shamed the nation with torture and other horrible abuses of human rights, and depleted precious national resources that needed to be directed toward rebuilding infrastructure, education, and creating a green economy.

Just as war is an externalized over-reaction to an internal nightmare, so are most fights with friends, lovers, and family.  Unlike national and global nightmares, over which you have little direct control, you can turn your life nightmares into something good.  The way to do so is simple and fairly obvious: instead of assuming that nightmares are bad, assume that they are helpful.  Do so first while awake and then ideally, while you are still dreaming. Learn to assume that all nightmares, in any state, are wake up calls.

When you treat a nightmare as if it were a wake-up call you get completely different results than you do if you assume that it is a threat.  First, you are admitting that you deceived yourself and scared yourself.  You have given up the need to base your security on not being mistaken and not being scared.  Your sense of self has grown to include acceptance of self-deception, fear, and threat.

Integral Deep Listening provides a methodology by which you can take any nightmare and turn it into something positive and productive in your life.  When there is a clear “villain” one can simply interview him or her.  When the entire situation is nightmarish, you can take your feelings about the nightmare, let them become a color or colors, and then watch the color or colors turn into a shape and interview it.  There are examples of this procedure under the post category, “Unding Nightmare Life Scripts” at  the DreamYoga.Com and at the IntegralDeepListening.Com .

You can also interview a number of the interdependent, co-arising parts of the nightmare in order to clearly see that there are many factors that sustain the nightmare and that need to be understood to avoid a repeat in the future.  This approach is called Dream Sociometry, and it is explained in depth at

http://www.integraldeeplistening.com/learn-idl/interviewing-formats/dream-sociometry

Anyone can create a Dream Sociomatrix and Dream Sociogram about any situation.  Mine will be different from yours, but while yours may change somewhat over time they tend to produce relatively consistent patterns for the same person regarding the same nightmarish situation.  You will come to understand how your preferences create your reality and gain the objectivity to stand back from the self-created dramas in your life so that you can learn to witness your life from a stable context of inner peace.

Every night you go through three to four dream cycles, each lasting about twenty minutes, totaling about eighty minutes out of each twenty-four hours. You will spend about 29,200 minutes a year, 2,336,000 minutes over eighty years, or about four and a half solid years of your life dreaming.

Your body doesn’t care if your stress happens when you are awake or dreaming. It can’t tell the difference. If you see a python ahead of you in the twilight on your path, it doesn’t matter if you’re dreaming or awake; in either case, if you get scared, your body will release a cascade of 1,400 biochemical events in your body. Even though you are asleep and dreaming, your body will react as if you were awake, but with one important difference: it can’t run from the snake or physically fight it. It cannot thereby burn the powerfully corrosive stress hormones out of your body because you are dreaming; you can’t move so that you don’t run into a wall or out your window in your sleep. Those powerful stress hormones are like battery acid. If they aren’t flushed out of your body, guess which system in your body they will attack first? They will attack your weakest system. If it’s your digestive system, you’ll get more indigestion, gas, constipation, or upset stomach. If it’s your cardiovascular system you’ll be more prone to high blood pressure, arrhythmias, and heart attacks. If it’s your immune system, you’ll develop allergies, asthma, or arthritis. Those stress hormones are more powerful in causing disease in those eighty dream minutes than similar waking stress events because they just sit there; they don’t get broken down nearly as fast as when you are awake. This is important. It is a significant, widely unrecognized contributor to stress, illness, poor recovery, and preventable death.

Your body doesn’t care if your stress is real or imaginary. You walk closer to your dream python and discover it is only a rope lying on your path. You are relieved, but your body has still gone into the alarm stage of the general adaptation stress syndrome descibed by Hans Selye, M.D.  You have still damaged your physical and emotional health, even though you realized you were “dreaming.”

Your body doesn’t care if you have a small or big dream stress, like that dream python or you have stage fright, or just frustrating dreams of losing your keys. If you automatically trigger the release of this cascade of 1,400 biological events dozens of times each day in your waking life, will that magically stop just because you are asleep and dreaming? You will continue to think stressful thoughts, generate stressful dream scenes, and feel stressful feelings whether or not you ever remember a single dream. We have seen that this damage is greater than waking damage because you can’t run from or fight your stress. Your dream stress does more harm to your health than your waking stress, and you probably don’t even remember when or how you were destroying your physical and mental health while you were asleep.

Both stress and dreaming make you do stupid things. Combining them is like drinking and driving, only worse. Stress causes what brain researchers call “cortical inhibition,” meaning you react instead of respond. You don’t think clearly when you’re stressed; how you respond to others and to circumstances is impaired. You perceive things that aren’t there and perceive things that people do or say in distorted, incorrect, and unhelpful ways. If this is true in your waking life, how much more true is it in your dreams? These misperceptions in turn generate added stress, which in turn do more damage to your health.

Dream stress, like waking stress, keeps you locked in the Drama Triangle. The Drama Triangle is a concept from Transactional Analysis that says that if you play the role of persecutor, victim, or rescuer, you will end up playing all three of them eventually. This is as true in dreams as it is in your waking life. If you are laughed at in a dream you may well feel persecuted and experience yourself in the role of victim. You may attempt to rescue yourself by arguing with the person who is ridiculing you, ignoring them, changing the scene, waking up, or going lucid in the dream and perhaps changing them into something desirable. In any case, because you are engaging in self-rescuing, you remain stuck in the Drama Triangle, which means that you are reinforcing misperceptions that cause stress, illness, and shorten your life.

You are oblivious to your dream stress. This is not only because you don’t remember your dreams. Even if you remember your nightmares you are inclined to think, “It’s only a dream,” and to dismiss it as quickly as possible so you can focus on things that are more important, like getting ready for work. Just as alcoholics can so pickle their bodies that they can drink antifreeze and survive, so you have critical, self-persecuting, self-defeating thoughts that are “normal.” You routinely have dreams that are stressful and reinforcing of dysfunctional belief systems that keep you stuck in ways of thinking that not only make you sick but keep you unsuccessful at reaching your life goals. You will tend to discount these, thinking, “I don’t have nightmares; I don’t find myself in the Drama Triangle often in my dreams.” Stress adds up. Your unknown, unrecognized, minor dream stressors add up. They are making your body burn out faster.

You can learn to stop dream stress. Just as you can learn to reduce and defuse waking stress, you can learn to reduce dream stress. You don’t even have to remember your dreams to do so. As you learn to avoid waking reactivity and misperception, these skills tend to carry over into your dreams, reducing toxic dream over-reactions and delusion. For instance, learning to recognize and avoid invitations into the Drama Triangle in your waking relationships and your thinking will result in less stress, creating less persecution, victimization, and rescuing in your dreams. If in addition you learn productive pre-sleep dream incubation by setting strong and clear positive intentions before you go to sleep every night, you will increase your immunity to dream stress. Do so by imagining or writing down and reading over how you are going to respond to likely stress tonight in your dreams. The most likely stressors are the unresolved worries, concerns, and hurts of today.  Another vital step is to learn to meditate and practice every day. Meditation has been shown to be extraordinarily effective at reducing stress. When you meditate, you learn to take the role of witness to your thoughts, feelings, and experiences, thereby objectifying sources of stress so that they are no longer about you. This will carry over in a general way into your dreams and you may, in fact, find yourself meditating in your dreams. Another powerful tool is to practice Integral Deep Listening. IDL interiewing of life stressors, as well as dream stressors, like monsters, reframes these experiences in ways that transform them from threats into allies in your development.

You can learn to wake up and handle stress in the moment – even in your dreams.  Most people unsuccessfully use the binge-and-purge approach to managing stress. They stress out all day, believing that they can recover when they drive home, listen to music, eat a good meal, watch TV, surf the internet, have a drink, have some sex, and get a good night’s sleep. But they will not get a good night’s sleep if they’ve been stressing out all day. Instead they will have dreams that revisit those stressful events in different allegorical ways in an attempt to resolve them. In the process of dream problem solving they misperceive and over-react, only making the stress worse. Similarly, going to the gym, a yoga class, or chilling out on the weekend is too late to stop the stress response, which happens in the moment. If you are going to stop stress, you need tools to use not only immediately when you become stressed, but before – when you feel stress coming on.

The best way to manage stress is to deal with it in the moment when it comes up. This is essentially what you are doing when you sit down and meditate. You are learning that instead of thinking a thought, feeling a feeling, or experiencing a bodily twitch you can observe yourself thinking feeling, and experiencing. The idea is to learn to replace automatic reactions to your life stresses with healthy responses, moment to moment. You can even do this in your dreams. It is what you do in a dream when you take IDL interviewing techniques and use them to question dream characters instead of reacting to them. To learn more about IDL, read Waking Up by this author, available at Amazon.Com, or go to IntegralDeepListening.Com and DreamYoga.Com.

The Perspective of Chaos Theory

From Transformational Dreamwork

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 dream characters like a monster or angel and the personifications of waking life issues, such as a pit that is a metaphor for some depression you feel.  Integral Deep Listening (IDL) refers to these together as “emerging potentials.”In either case, dreaming or waking, how is it that we experience both amazing autonomy yet wisdom, support, and nurturance from so many interviewed emerging potentials?  Why do they not take over?  Why do they not fragment the sense of 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 some obvious fabrication of the mind?   Will that not simply lead us into more dreamlike delusion, samsara, maya, and suffering rather than out of it?

IDL is a counterintuitive approach to Dream Yoga.  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 Kreacher, the house elf. To understand emerging potentials it is important to understand their differences from both others and wake-up calls.

“Others,” whether appearing in waking life, dreams or altered states as entities, objects or processes, may or may not function as wake-up calls or as emerging potentials. For example, when we normally see or think about another person or a glass of water it does not evoke transformation, nor do we  usually want it to. We want others to act in customary, expected ways, to give us correct change, to stay on their side of the road, to remember their appointments, to be filled with water, not suntan lotion. Most of the time, even when we have an accident, illness, nightmare or crisis, it does not function as a wake-up call. Instead, we deal with it as best we can, are happy to awaken out of it, pick up the pieces of our lives and forget about it as quickly as possible. If we do not the memories are generally dysfunctional or even pathological; we remember as a form of vigilance out of fear of a repetition or to reinforce a life script of victimization. We go back to sleep, dreaming and sleepwalking; we do not experience most people and objects, whether awake or dreaming as wake-up calls.

Similarly, “others” do not typically function as emerging potentials, which refer to others and events that are perceived as wake-up calls and then transformed into perspectives that include yet transcend our own. IDL uses this term broadly, in the sense that anything or anyone can serve as an emerging potential if seen and approached in a context that includes significant empathy. It also uses it in the more narrow and specific sense of a dream element or personification of a life issue that we become in the interviewing process or  later, after an interview, to evoke its perspective in our thought, feelings and actions. Emerging potentials include our own perspectives include our own in that they “know us” at least as well as we know ourselves since they include our waking identity; they transcend our own perspectives in that they add their own perspective to ours. Clearly, all acknowledged wake-up calls do not elicit this depth or quality of response and most encounter with the “other” even less so.

How Does Chaos Theory Help Explain the Dream of Reality?

Concepts from the field of chaos theory throw light on why identification with emerging potentials expands identity and causes us to wake up.  IDL 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 or the functioning of systems, it is applied by IDL 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 can also help us to move to 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 works for common sense tasks, a hand is also made up of molecules, atoms, and energy.  This alternative 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.   The first transpersonal level, which experiences oneness with life as energy and freedom, has been called psychic by Wilber and “the path of the yogis” by various sources.  IDL refers to the early transpersonal developmental level as energic, because unification with the energy underlying the natural order is fundamental to this stage, psychic abilities may or may not accompany stable functioning at this meme and because attempts to develop psychic abilities and yogic powers have not proven to be particular use for escaping drama or generating balanced development.

The perspective of the lower transpersonal is experiential and uses a model of reality that is based on energy, not on forms or “things.”  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, that is “forms,” like your hand, dream characters and your sense of self, 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 location or 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 life exists 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.  An analogy that makes this understanding more accessible is to existence in the present, the here and now, rather than in the past or future. 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 and its attractors also support.

A form, individual or process on the edge or threshold of an attractor whirlpool, which exists as energy expressed as various states of probability, transforms relatively 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. When you are lucid dreaming you are maintaining your attention balanced on the rim of an attractor whirlpool, like a gyroscope that is balanced as a static attractor. When you fall out of that attractor you move into one of three others, spinning down into one or another of the static attractors we call the states of deep sleep, dreaming and waking.

Chaotic and static attractors are therefore two poles of attraction, or the same phenomena looked at from different perspectives. For example a tornado is obviously possesses the characteristics of a chaotic attractor, but it also contains elements of static attractors in the calmness of its center and its relative stability. 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 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, the priorities of life or the reality structuring innate to 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 waking identity while remaining unpredictable in the particular depictions of those themes and associated dream characters. Therefore, we can see how repetitive dreams are also examples of relatively stable chaotic attractors.

What happens when you empathize with another person, dream character or perspective?

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 or inability to empathize, but when it is done, it can be transformative because you have entered, to one degree or another, an entirely different system of probabilities. You wake up to possibilities that did not exist in your attractor basin. Similarly, when you identify with an emerging potential 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 some different perspective that is oriented around a world view or set of probabilities that is more or less different from your own. You know that this is the case by the considerable differences in preferences that you express from that other perspective. 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. The general rule of thumb is that less identification, or full identification with a perspective that is similar to or highly compatible with your own is minimally transformative but relatively stable, since it reflects the static attractor of your normal waking sense of self. However, more or full identification with a perspective that is radically different or incompatible with your own is highly transformative but extremely volatile and chaotic, since it reflects the chaotic attractor of highly dissimilar probabilities. This is why IDL emphasizes multiple ongoing interviews; some are less transformative; those which are more transformative are the most volatile and evanescent because their basins are expressions of probabilities that are widely divergent from those of your normal waking static attractor basin.

What does speculation about chaotic attractor basins have to do with my awakening?

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 leads, in that it creates the perceptual contexts that structure the development of the other lines, understanding awakening is not the same as stabilized existence at a selfless level of development.  That requires the transpersonal evolution of the self-sense, 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. As such, it contributes to a vision logic, or multi-perspectival, understanding of dreaming and lucidity at the doorway to the transcendence of identification with any self whatsoever.

What do chaotic attractors have to do with altered states of consciousness?

Consciousness attractor basins co-exist within one another, rather like Matryoshka, 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 very slow, low amplitude brainwaves 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 an 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. Once developed, the dreaming attractor basin includes and transcends the deep sleep attractor basin as a subset. Perhaps we can visualize this as a subset of probabilities that we “fall into” when our brain waves move toward Delta. 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 to some extent recapitulates phylogeny.

Lucid dreaming provides a further iteration of this developmental progression. Associated with brainwave states of Gamma, or between 25 and 100 Hz, although 40 is typical, Gamma is also seen in advanced meditators and hypothesized to be associated with highly coherent and integrated brain states.

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.  One set of “higher frequency” probabilities has been replaced or overwhelmed by a more stable set of “lower frequency” probabilities. When you go to sleep at night, this is what happens at first.  You quickly descend into Delta brain wave deep sleep. This deep sleep attractor basin is, for most people, synonymous with the physical attractor basin.  In NDEs (near death experiences), the “tunnel” that is often reported, may be the dream (subtle) or even the deep sleep (causal) attractor basin.  In OOBEs (out of body experiences) NDEs and mystical experiences your sense of self, which is normally anchored within both your waking attractor basin and your physical attractor basin, leaves the “wall” of your physical attractor basin while remaining in your waking attractor basin. While your identity remains identified with your waking attractor basin your experience is no longer derived from or dependent upon the probabilities of your physical attractor basin. As a result, probabilities are thrown wide open while the probabilities that create your world view and therefore your interpretations of your experience, remain stable.

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.  IDL 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 tethered to the physical attractor basin but functions with passengers, not pilots, in charge of the spacecraft.  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 induced by drugs.  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 tethered to the physical or dream attractor basins.  Consequently, there is a greater ability to integrate experiences of formlessness into waking identity.

What happens in mediumship and possession?

When states of trance mediumship, possession and decompensation are approached from the perspective of chaos theory you again have a separation your waking attractor from the “wall” of your physical attractor. However, in addition, your identity with your waking attractor itself is suspended in favor of identification with or “attachment to the wall of” a coherent but radically “other” set of probabilities associated with an attractor basin that takes the place of your normal waking sense of self.

How are chaotic attractors like the emerging potentials 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. These “event horizons” are to be appreciated and cultivated instead of feared and ignored, as is generally the case.  These are states of chaos that is ripe with creative and evolutionary potential.  Such liminals, or chaotic threshold states, exist within your dreams between you and 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. Obviously the toadstool is a fantasy that is emotionally and visually evocative of a unique perceptual context that is more or less like your own. 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 be 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 shifts 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 to a smaller or greater degree for a shorter or longer period of time, depending on the intensity of identification and the differential between the perspective of the toadstool and your own.  This also means that your sense of self within the dream attractor basin has adopted an expanded awareness, causing it to interact with other emerging potentials 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.  Your waking attractor basin 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 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.  This will be the case regardless of how much lucid dreaming or meditation that you do, if those activities are undertaken within the perceptual framework of your waking attractor basin, as they normally are. However, when you identify with an emerging potential 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 probabilities and laws of attraction.  This occurs regardless of your level of development, although your dominant meme continues to 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 an emerging potential, regardless of how absurd or irrelevant it seems to be, you will expand your sense of self to some degree.  Your self sense will become a broader, wider yet thinner attractor basin, in the sense that its differentiation or liminal separating and distinguishing it from other chaotic attractor basins becomes flatter, less pronounced, less steep with a slower, more gradual transition from one to another.  You waking attractor basin will become more diaphanous and take on more of the qualities and characteristics of life itself: the formless manifestation of core intentions and 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 microcosmic chaotic attractors are your thoughts, your feelings, and your physical sensations. They are largely conditioned by their existence as subsets 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. Its probabilities condition and limit their range of probabilities and therefore your range of expression and transformation.

Your body is another spinning, funnel-like chaotic attractor basin out of which your self-sense evolved as a larger, less dense tornado, with each representing a range of probabilities that condition the other. 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 the physical attractor basin, 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. Its probabilities cease to exist and no longer condition other attractor basins. The consciousness of who you are continues to exist to the extent that its probabilities are not contingent on those of the physical attractor basin. In truth, we do not know, with theories running from complete interdependence, meaning interdependent dissolution, to complete autonomy. Neither extreme appear to be realistic to IDL; these attractor basins appear to be largely but not completely interdependent. While that self-sense dissipates, a broader set of probabilities continues to exist as potentials within the larger attractor basin out of which individual physical attractor basins arise. Whether these broader sets of probabilities retain enough individuality to constitute a self is debatable. From the perspective of life, as reflected in the comments of interviewed emerging potentials, it does not seem to be important.

What are these other attractor basins?

Your waking attractor basin is different than your self sense because it transcends and includes it both macrocosmically with cultural, social and external sensory attractor basins that are contextual as well and microcosmically with internal sensory attractor basins that are also contextual, despite the fact that your self sense arose out of it. Your sense of self spends the majority of its conscious existence spinning and dancing within the parameters set by existence within this chaotic attractor basin called waking awareness. Its range of probabilities generates 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 and it is not conditioned by conscience or social scripting in the ways or to the degree that your sense of self is. This dreaming attractor basin wholly contains the smaller waking attractor basin but is only rarely experienced by your self-sense attractor basin because you remain so invested in your spinning and orientation within your 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 with different probabilities that condition your experience. 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. This is a paradox, because we have seen how these larger, contextual attractor basins function at lower cycles per second while your self-sense, if it is to maintain its awareness within them, needs to ramp up its amplitude toward gamma, or 40 hz.

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 while remaining aware that it is doing so.  This is easier said than done, however, as any lucid dreamer or meditator will tell you, 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 “skiing” in these larger attractor basins.  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  IDL interviewing. When you do so you take on the probabilities associated with the perspectives and world views intrinsic to these contextual, broader attractor basins.  It is not unusual to be presented in dreams and in interviews with feelings or issues with emerging potentials that are personifications of aspects of these larger attractor basins.  For example, they may exhibit characteristics of the subtle, causal or non-dual. 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 development into greater lucidity.

We begin our development with a need to orient to the needs of our bodies, to become comfortable as emotional beings, and then to take our place in society. All of these developmental goals are relatively external when compared to the subjectivity of dreaming.  For most of us most of the time, such developmental goals take priority.  They are reinforced by our parents, our peers, and our educational institutions, whose common purpose is to socialize us. I am not using this term in a pejorative sense. Before we can become nobody, we first have to become somebody – to master prepersonal and personal life skills and develop demonstrated social competencies. Those who think they can access the transpersonal by circumventing these stages are delusional. In addition, there are both strong adaptive advantages that come from staying in touch with these dimensions as well as strong adaptive disadvantages that we risk if we neglect them.

Children are closer to the world of dreams. They lack the ability to easily separate dream reality from waking reality the way most adults do. They have to learn to do so. Also, the emotionally inspired and metaphorical nature of dreaming is most closely associated with mid-prepersonal development, which is in full flower from the age of two until about four.  However, if parents and older siblings provide a supportive context for approaching dreams and dreaming, a foundation for constructive dreamwork can be firmly laid at an early age. This usually does not happen and as the child develops more of an external, concrete operational focus, they normally “outgrow” an interest in their dreams. Again, there is quite a bit to be said for this. Wilber has shown that development cycles between male, agentic focus on the external and concrete on the one hand and the internal and intuitive communal. If there is no cultural context that supports a return to the communal context of dreaming it is not surprising that these interests and capabilities become latent.

Adolescents may become interested in dreams when they feel self-conscious, unaccepted, and painfully self-absorbed. They often struggle to get comfortable in their own skin as they grapple with who they are in relationship to their families and their peers.  For some, dreamwork may seem to offer a way of getting there.  With dreamwork they don’t have to share their insecurities with others, but yet they feel that they are getting to know why they feel the way they do. Because most people normally outgrow this teenage awkwardness when they settle into the routines of work and stable home life, interest in dreaming usually fades away with the press of school, career, and family responsibilities combined with an increasing sense of who one is.

Adults generally view dreams as intrusions into a good night’s sleep and do their best to repress or ignore them.  Those facing life challenges or transitions may develop an interest in dreams to help them find a partner or deal with their anxiety about a relationship or disease or job, but when the problem fades the interest in dreams usually fades as well.  This also holds true for people with mental disturbances, such as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) which is characterized by repetitive nightmares, among other symptoms. Such people view dreaming as a nuisance at best and a possessive haunting at worst.

People who either are fascinated by psychic phenomena or else have developed some psychic ability are often interested in dreaming. They generally view it as a doorway to greater creativity, freedom and fuller potential, but few know how to make full use of it. Many young people feel insecure and lay claim to their specialness through the cultivation of arcane interests like dreamwork and lucid dreaming, which are relatively safe from the pressures of competition and the standards of social reality. This interest tends to either remain a superficial projection of waking assumptions onto dreams, as occurs with most interpretive approaches and most lucid dreaming, or the interest fades as the dreamer begins to become enraptured with subtle-level archetypes or develop a genuinely transpersonal meditation practice.

Dreamwork is generally viewed as a psychological “shadow” practice in the spiritual community or a way of developing greater freedom and control, if it is considered at all.  Dreamwork may be the royal road to the unconscious, but meditation is the road to enlightenment in the minds of many.  This attitude is primarily due to a lack of personal experience with effectively transformational transpersonal approaches to dreamwork. Advanced meditators are often as invested in the drama triangle and as blind to the meanings of their dreams as non-meditators. This implies that meditation alone does not an enlightened person make, a point Wilber emphasizes in his writings on the importance of the balanced unfolding of a number of critical developmental lines. Other synergistic transpersonal tools are important, such as taking up an integral life practice.

Those who seem to be most likely to maintain an ongoing and deep interest in dreamwork probably share several factors. They are intellectually curious, highly introspective, and view dreams as expressive of untapped higher potentials.  They probably are survivors of a number of crises that dreams have helped them through.  In addition, they often have been influenced by a mentor who respected dreams and did dreamwork themselves.  In other words, personal, cultural, social, and behavioral factors have to converge to maintain an interest in dreamwork within cultures that do not support it.

The holon of dreaming has four aspects or quadrants. These are:

1) External Individual, which addresses the physiological and behavioral aspects of dreaming. It attends to the behaviors of dream group members.

2) Internal Collective, which deals with the cultural world view and individual values which color our approach to dreaming. It is also the realm of our preferences toward our dream group members and, equally important, their preferences toward us, toward themselves, and toward each other.  Do members of this or that  dream group like each other? Do they like each other a lot?  Love each other? Dislike each other?  Dislike each other a lot?  Hate each other?  Do they not care?  Does their compassion transcend having any preferences at all? What values do self-aspects express? How do they interpret their dream experiences?

3) External Collective perspectives address how others affect our dreaming and how our dreaming affects others. It is also the realm of the various distal selves, roles, or “mes” that we meet in our dreams in the form of dream group members.  Do we interact with them in the context of the drama triangle or not?  What influence do they have on us?  What I effect do we have on them?  In the intrasocial realm, this is the context for demonstrating sacred “I-thou” relationships with other aspects of ourselves.

4) Internal Individual, which not only relates to the state of consciousness in which we approach dreaming and experience our dreams, but also with the states of consciousness of our individual dream group members.

Physiological and Intraphysiological

The most basic type of resistance to dreamwork involves an inability to recall dreams.  Generally this is not a major factor with Integral Deep Listening, since not only can dreams from childhood be used just as effectively as one from last night, but imagery and waking life experiences are approached as if they were dreams. Consequently, there is no prerequisite focus on increasing dream recall, and working from other angles often has the effect of increasing dream recall naturally.

There are many physiological and psychological factors that work to diminish recall. Most of them can be neutralized when all four quadrants are supportive with clear intent, attribution of positive meanings and values to dreaming and dreamwork, a supportive dreamwork community (if only from the authors of the sources one consults and one’s own intrasocial community), and a few behavioral changes: the elimination of eating, drinking, and sleeping habits that diminish dream recall while developing the habit of writing down feeling, thoughts, and images upon awakening.

Why do we have trouble recalling our dreams? Is there a physiological need to not recall our dreams? We know that sleeping and waking states utilize different memory processes for short-term and long-term memory storage. The switch-over between these two when we wake up accounts for our tendency to forget, regardless of how sure we are that we will remember a dream. While dream recall does not seem to provide a conscious adaptive or survival function (or we would routinely remember them), it is likely that dreaming “keeps the motor running,” so that we can more easily re-enter waking awareness. There seems to be no good pervasive physiological or psychological reason why we should not remember our dreams. Even advanced meditators who are conscious and aware in both dreaming and deep sleep are not physiologically deprived by not being “unconscious” or by attending to their dream experience.   Lack of recall is impacted by factors like attention, motivation, time of awakening, diet, locus of control, assumptions about their value and many other factors.

What is the source of the common resistance to writing a dream down? Because there is no biological imperative for dream recall, the motivation for remembering them and working with them must primarily be psychological.   Dreams are associated with mental activity, and maintaining the internal vigilance that dream recall requires can feel stressful when compared with the normal unconsciousness of sleeping.

The resistance many people have to sharing their dreams comes from a sense that they have no obvious cultural or social adaptational advantage.  They rarely help you make friends, make better grades in school, help you get over the flu or reach your career goals, despite the many dream books filled with anecdotal accounts of people receiving such assistance from their dreams. In addition, because many dream experiences seem irrational and impractical, people who share their dreams may be viewed as detracting from the maintenance of more pressing needs for the family or community, such as survival, safety, meaningful work, and caring for others. Consequently, socially mal-adapted people are generally the ones who are willing to accept that most others see them as an impractical “dreamer.” What such people need to remember is that those who do not easily fit into society often have opportunities for higher order integration unavailable to those who have learned how to fit in. Their restless sense of a lack of internal balance is a strong and important driver to birthing new, broader cultural definitions of normalcy.

Intraphysiological refers to the sensory and biological components in dreams and the elaborations of dream characters.  You have your own experienced contact with your body and your senses in a dream, and so do your other dream characters.  None of that is readily apparent until you interview them, however.  When you do you are likely to find that most express more detachment from the body than you do. This is because they tend to know and understand that they are mental-emotional realities that, while being impacted by physical states, are fundamentally internal individual quadrant phenomena.  Therefore, they tend to be less concerned with issues of physical health and illness than you are.  Some self-aspects can and will provide information about the body and its processes, but for the most part this is a lower priority since they cannot physically die. Most concerns about physical and biological realities appear to be wake-up calls: a focus on YOUR concerns about your health so as to get your attention so that you will pay attention to something that is a resistance to health, balance, or transformation.

Many dreamworkers resist this idea because they want to believe that spirit shares their values. Spirit wants them to be healthy, wealthy, and a social success. They don’t want to be confronted with any evidence that no, spirit really doesn’t care whether you live or die.  It doesn’t want to grapple with what it means to realize that, from spirit’s perspective, you are alive for it; it is not alive for you. So while it matters a great deal to us whether we live or die or whether or not we feel physical pain, have enough to eat, and have shelter from the elements, it is a waking vanity to assume that such things would or should be priorities for dream characters.  Why should they be?

Behavioral and Intrabehavioral

Most of us not only do not set an intent to recall or record our dreams; we have strong intent NOT to have our sleep disturbed. As noted above, dreams are associated with mental activity, which feels stressful when compared with the unconsciousness of deep sleep.  Sharing and working on dreams are rarely priorities for people with busy lives and pressing external concerns, although with increases in leisure time dreamwork becomes more feasible. Still, for the general population it remains not much more likely to become an important part of our daily lives despite the amazing and profound fact that we spend eight years of our lives in an alternative universe. Our psychological resistance to recall is expressed through many common behaviors, such as going back to sleep, jumping out of bed quickly, or going to sleep too late and thereby oversleeping or waking up tired.  The resistance to writing a dream down is related to the introspective mental focus that recall and writing require first thing upon awakening. At that moment, many people are neither inclined toward introspection, mental focus, or the fine motor control that writing requires. In addition, when we first awaken we often have other behavioral priorities..  We want to shut off the alarm clock, roll over, and get some more sleep, or quickly get up.  Most of us quickly become preoccupied with thoughts about the routines of the coming day.

Resistance to sharing dreams often relates to our disinterest in the dreams of others.  Why would anyone be interested in ours if we are not interested in theirs?   We might think, “I would like to be interested, but I really don’t have a clue why in the world they had that dream about a three-headed baby…” Sometimes sharing a dream is embarrassing.  We may have a vague sense that if we find out why we had it we may find out more than we bargained for.  Why talk about something that may make us anxious or embarrassed?  Do we really want to relive being trapped in a burning house or raising a corpse out of a well?

Intrabehavioral aspects of dreams involve not only your actions but those of dream characters.  What do you do and not do in your dreams?  What do your dream characters do and not do?  If you do not pay attention to such things you do not have the data to ask why things are done in your dreams.  If you are not aware of a behavior you cannot evaluate it, much less change it. You have your own experience of what is done and not done in a dream and each of your dream characters has their own. They may disagree not only about the “why” of things but about the “what” and “when” of things.  We generally wake up with assumptions about what happened in a dream.  We know what the story is.  However, it is not unusual, upon interviewing dream characters, to find that they report different events or a different order of things.  How can we know the “why” of a dream if we do not first know what happened?

For example, you dream that a monster is chasing you.  Based on that dream behavior you draw conclusions about the why of the dream both while dreaming it and then when you are awake.  The dream “why” might be that the monster wants to kill you. The waking “why” might be that you are scaring yourself.  However, when you interview the monster you may discover that he is not chasing you at all.  Perhaps he is running to catch a train.  Perhaps he is racing you.  If he is not chasing you, then your “why” of the dream will change and your entire perception of it will transform. The point is that you don’t know why your dream characters behave the way they do until you interview them – you just think you do.  This is your core delusion, and one that you can prove to yourself to your own satisfaction, if you are simply willing to interview your dream characters.

If you do not interview your dream characters it may be because you prefer your “whys,” your comfortable delusions, to any real understanding of the behavior of others. This perspective is fundamentally egocentric and narcissistic, and it is fundamental to how most humans approach not only their dreams, but life in general.  It is a perspectival prejudice that amounts to a fundamental resistance to dreamwork.

Cultural and Intracultural

Do your values and worldview support dreamwork? If you are reading this then they probably do.  How come?  What gave you those values?  Why do you have them and most of the people around you do not?  Are you driven by curiosity, fear, hope, or the example of others? What factors in your environment support your interest? Do you read books that subscribe to values conducive to and supportive of dreamwork?  What factors keep it from becoming a more important part of your life?

What sort of values support dreamwork?  Certainly there is a value of inner, internal experience. There is a family or cultural permission to value those experiences rather than to always prefer to focus externally. Where did you learn to have such a focus? Who did you grow up with that naturally valued their own interior life?   Most people probably come to an interest in dreaming from a desire to understand and stop disturbing dreams or to use them in some way. They may have an inner need to resolve some life issue, such as sickness, relationship, or finding life direction. Some people are simply curious and turn that curiosity toward the greatest overlooked mystery of our everyday lives.

Regardless of your values, you will tend to have them validated by your dreamwork.  Your own theories about why you dream say more about you than about the nature of dreaming. This is because what you pick out and pay attention to as well as the conclusions that you draw about it say more about your level of development than they do about dreaming per se.

The values expressed by your dream characters are intracultural, not cultural, like yours. Unless they tell you in a dream you merely assume you know what their values are. You only assume how they interpret the world.  Consequently, both in the dream and when you awaken your interpretations of your dream experiences are based on your culture, not theirs.  Because you are invested in your world view and your cultural assumptions you resist making an intracultural evaluation of your dream. If you do you are guaranteed to have your fundamental assumptions about who you are and why you do what you do challenged. Do you want that? Can you handle that? Is your sense of self strong enough to handle direct challenges to your core cultural assumptions?

Social and Intrasocial

How do your family, social, and work groups interact regarding dreams? Are dream recall, writing, and sharing supported?  How do the people in your world interact regarding dreams and dreaming?  Few families talk about dreams around the breakfast table and not many children grow up seeing their parents writing down or pondering their dreams.  It’s not surprising, then, that many children grow up without respect for their own inner life and with very few skills with which to deal with it.

Is dreamwork valued by your family and social groups?  Were dreams and dreamwork given respect, reverence, or time when you were a child? During the course of your education?  At work?  By your friends?  By your family members?  By you?  What sort of example are you setting in these various support groups?

Your intrasocial dimension involves how your various self-aspects deal with each other in your dreams.  Do they ignore each other?  Do they fight?  Are their interactions taking place in the context of the roles of victim, rescuer, and persecutor? If you never form relationships with those parts of ourselves that value dream recall and dreamwork you will lack important internal support for dreamwork. If you do not understand the dynamics of the interactions among the various parts of yourself in your dreams  you will misunderstand how and why you create conflict in your life, including the resistances you unknowingly create to your own health, growth, and happiness.

Strategies for minimizing our resistance to dreamwork

To repeat what we have said above, “Those who seem to be most likely to maintain an ongoing and deep interest in dreamwork probably share several factors. They are intellectually curious, highly introspective, and view dreams as expressive of untapped higher potentials. They probably are survivors of a number of crises that dreams have helped them through.  In addition, they often have been influenced by a mentor who respected dreams and did dreamwork themselves.” There are physiological/behavioral, cultural, social, and consciousness factors that increase our willingness to work with our dreams.

Physiological

We can increase recall by reducing or eliminating those substances which create physiological barriers to recall, such as caffeine, alcohol, drugs, and certain medications. We can enhance  factors which encourage physical receptivity to recall, such as stress!!  Physical, emotional, mental, and interpersonal distress and eustress increase dream recall.

We can also increase our  biological imperative for recall by drinking water before going to sleep! Normally we are most likely to awaken to go to the bathroom at the close of a REM cycle, when we are also most likely to recall a dream.  Tell yourself you are going to sleep soundly but become extremely vigilant just before awakening.

You can reduce your resistance to writing a dream down by increasing your biological imperative by not going to the bathroom and forsaking that cup of coffee until you have written SOMETHING on a piece of paper, such as how you felt when you awoke. Not moving when you first awaken will also help recall.

There is no obvious physical adaptational advantage to sharing dreams, but you can be aware of how sharing dreams supports the reduction of anxiety and stress. Measure your anxiety by considering such factors as rate of breathing, irritability, impatience, reactivity, impulsiveness, insomnia.   Monitor your physical stress levels, grading anxiety 0-10 for a couple of weeks when you are not sharing dreams. Then grade anxiety 0-10 during weeks when you are sharing dreams.  If your dream sharing is successful at reducing your anxiety, you have demonstrated to yourself a physiological adaptational value to dream sharing.

Monitor your overall stress level 0-10 for a couple of weeks prior to undertaking dream character interviewing using the questionnaire format. Then monitor your anxiety level during periods when you are applying IDL action plans in your waking life.  If your dreamwork is successful at reducing your anxiety, you have demonstrated to yourself a physiological adaptation value to dream work.

Dreams are associated with mental activity, which instinctively feels stressful, when compared with unconsciousness.   To overcome this physiological, behavioral, and psychological predisposition it is important to set and maintain a clear intention to be aware and wake up. There are suggestions about this here on this website and elsewhere on the web.   These recommendations are basically instructions in dream incubation, or in establishing the intent to recall and record dreams with pre-sleep suggestions and visualization, as well as to establish the intent to share and work on dreams.

Behavioral

Factors like resistance to recall, writing a dream down, sharing some dreams, or working on some dreams can be addressed by asking self-aspects about the resistance. These can be dream characters that you are interviewing or you may take the resistance itself, turn it into a color and allow that shape to congeal into a shape and interview it.   You are likely to not only gain information about why the resistance exists but specific action recommendations that you can take to reduce the resistance.

Cultural

Typical dream discounts are forms of resistance. These include saying they are valuable but spending little time working on our own, feeling they are a phylogenetic throwback that are irrelevant to daily concerns, meaningless or superficial in meaning. This is indicated by a smug sense that we already know what they mean, that because the dream has someone in it that we were talking to yesterday, that is what it is about.

One basic way to overcome this resistance is to learn to stay out of the drama triangle in your waking life. Refuse to take the roles of victim, rescuer, or victim.  If you learn to stay out of the drama triangle then you will be less likely to see your dreams as in conflict with your waking priorities.  You will not care what others think about your dreamwork.  You are much more likely to not perceive other aspects of yourself in roles of the drama triangle while you are dreaming.

Social and Intrasocial

To reduce resistance to recall, writing a dream down, sharing dreams, or working on your dreams, read about dreaming and share thoughts about it with friends and in on-line forums. Join or start a dreamwork group. Cultivate relationships with dream group members who value these activities.

Our Self-Sense

Listening to self-aspects intrinsically involves power sharing.  This in turn implies a diminishment of control  by our sense of who we are.  We have been powerfully rewarded all our lives for protecting and building up this self-sense. It represents huge adaptive capabilities that we are not going to surrender just because we think interviewing other parts of ourselves is a swell idea.  Fortunately such fears and mistrust, while quite understandable, is not supported by the actual experience of interviewing.  In fact, the opposite occurs.  Most people discover that perceived dream threats are largely misperceived and that dream drama is largely self-created.  In the absence of such misperceptions, dreams and their group members are experienced as largely benign.

Another related source of resistance involves our fear of annihilation. On the surface, dreamwork can seem to be a serious threat to what Ken Wilber calls “The Atman Project.”  “If I identify with all these self-aspects won’t I lose my sense of self? Won’t I deconstruct into some mindless mass of zombiefied protoplasm?”   The actual experience of character interviewing turns out to be something quite different.  What happens is that waking identity takes on the world view and self-sense of disowned aspects of himself.  As a result the self-sense expands and thins at the same time. The self becomes more secure and confident because it represents an ever broadening sample of legitimate internal perspectives.

Resistances to dreamwork boil down to resistances to waking up. Being asleep, in your present state of beingness is comfortable. Waking up is inherently a decision to deal with your discomfort toward growing. With Integral Deep Listening the approach is to expect this resistance as natural and to interview it. Take the feeling of the resistance and see what color or colors it reminds you of. Fill the space around you now with that color and watch it congeal and condense into a shape. Become that shape and interview it using the protocol for life issues found here. By doing so you will be listening to and respecting your resistance instead of fighting it, thereby incorporating it into an expanded definition of who you are. In the process, you are likely to receive concrete recommendations for how to address such resistances in the future when they arise.

I Can Interpret My Dreams

Yes, you can, and you will most likely be embarrassingly wrong. This is because “you” did not create your dream.  Until you listen to the parts of yourself that did, you will probably be mostly projecting your own meanings and biases onto your dreams and pronouncing those to be what they mean.  You can easily test this approach.  Simply take a dream of your choice and come up with your best interpretation.  Write it down.  Then either create a Dream Sociomatrix about the dream, which has the advantage of interviewing a number of characters in the dream, or simply interview one of them.  Compare the answers you get from the characters with your interpretation and see what you find.  If you end up wondering, “How could I have been so wrong?” you are on the right track.  You are beginning to wake up to the fact that you do not know yourself.

Interpretation of your experience is inevitable, so you are going to interpret your dreams.  The question is, “Are your interpretations informed by the preferences and perspectives of those parts of yourself that created the dream or not?”

That dreams are symbolic is one of the oldest, most entrenched, most widely accepted, and most misleading partial truths about dreaming.  We find dream interpretations in Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform tablets, Egyptian hierglyphics, the temples of Aesclapius in ancient Greece, the writings of the Roman Artimidorus,  works on Hindu and Buddhist dream interpretation, on up until the highly influential writings of Freud and Jung in the 20th century.  A look around the internet today will find the majority of resources on dream content taking a symbolic approach.  People seem to associate broad historical acceptance with truth, but then people had broad historical acceptance of slavery, the minority status of women, and the acceptability of forced child labor until modern times.

Viewing dream images as symbols has certain advantages.  It is an evolutionary improvement over a naive assumption that dreams are literal.  It shifts the emphasis from objective truth to subjective meaning, which is an important step in taking responsibility for one’s own experience.   Then too, a study of the meanings that people have given to common life experiences, whether in dreams or in waking life, as Mircea Eliade did in his classic, Patterns in Comparative Religion, helps to create informed opinions, when they must be offered. However, there exist broader approaches that transcend and include a symbolic approach to dreaming.  These in no way negate the value or importance of symbolic approaches; they merely relativize them so that they become one perspective or strategy among many.  This having been duly noted, here are some of the problems created when dream characters are viewed as symbols:

1) Dream Characters are discounted.  If I say that you, a reader, symbolize certain aspects of myself, such as my receptive, learning aspects, I speak a truth that is both partial and misleading.  This is because I am making your beingness secondary to your function in my life.  What I thereby emphasize is what you represent, not who you are. This is backwards. What is most important about you is your beingness itself, not your function in my life, which is of minor consequence to you.  In fact, it is incredibly narcissistic for me to imagine that your worth is primarily about what you represent to me.  This is exactly what we routinely do to dream characters when we assume that they are symbols or approach them primarily as symbols. This is not to say that dream characters are not symbols or that their presence does not have symbolic significance.  It is to say that if discounting is to be avoided, such realities must be placed within a context that validates the character’s being in itself, independent of its supposed meaning.

2) Projections and secondary interpretations are mistaken for truth.  Projections are assumptions, generally unconscious, that we make about people and things, usually to validate life script assumptions that themselves are typically unconscious.  For example, if I assume that dreams are good, I will find evidence that supports my bias and ignore or rationalize away evidence that threatens it.  If I assume dream spiders are symbols of evil, I will favor interpretations that agree with my own assumptions.

3) Once dreams have to be interpreted, I have to find the right interpretation.  Most people quickly find themselves confused by the plethora of conflicting meanings assigned to almost any dream image.  Is fire purifying or destructive?  Is water healing or murderous?  Which is better, East Indian or American Indian dream interpretation?  Freudian or Jungian?  In the final analysis, the interpretation is yours.  How do you know it is right?  How do you know that it is helpful?  Can you trust yourself to judge whether an interpretation is helpful or merely a sophisticated form of self deception?

4) Approaches that represent a particular perspective are biased toward that perspective. Symbolic approaches are egocentric.  They are centered on the perspective of waking identity, not the perspectives of those other self-aspects that appear in the dream or that created the dream.    When our waking self takes an approach to understanding dreaming that is representative of that waking perspective, it lacks the objectivity necessary to see the whole and to get unstuck.

It should immediately be obvious that this is a very self-centered approach to dreams and dreaming.  You are the center of your universe and everything that goes on in your world is designed for you and for your benefit.  This is a “personal” approach to life.  Personal approaches assume that life is “all about me.”  My self and its interests are what are important.  I structure my reality to validate this assumption.  Of course God wants me to be happy, healthy, and prosperous.  Of course I must take responsibility for everything that happens to me, because in some way I created these experiences.  I dismiss all evidence to the contrary, such as the fact that my body routinely does things that have nothing to do with what I want or at times directly threatens my waking agenda by getting sick and eventually dying.  I dismiss the fact that I am not always happy, healthy, and prosperous despite reading many self-help books, go to positive thinking groups, and think happy thoughts.   That I am not happy, healthy, and prosperous is no fault of God’s; I just haven’t watched The Secret often enough.  I need to read one more self-help book and attend one more life-changing seminar by an inspirational speaker.  That will do it.

It is a blow to our narcissism to think that perhaps our dreams aren’t primarily messages designed for us, that our bodies do not function primarily so that we can achieve our ends, that we are not responsible for everything that happens to us, and that God may have better things to do than to worry about whether we should sell or buy a stock, whether someone is or is not our soulmate, or whether we are sick or healthy.  Consider the possibility that your dreams exist for their own purposes and that those interests are often autonomous and take your interests and concerns into account rarely, if at all.  Consider the possibility that your heart keeps beating whether you want it to or not and that your hormones, white blood cells, amino acids and digestive peptides all function quite well without any consideration whatsoever of your interests.  Consider further that your conscious intervention in their realm is like so much back-seat driving; it only serves to interfere with processes it has no business involving itself in.

You can benefit by paying attention to the interests and needs of those aspects of yourself that you interview.  The assumption is that as you help them meet their needs, as you empathize with their interests, you gain allies in your growth while broadening your own sense of self.  This is a core evolutionary task, and any activity that claims to further it, like Dream Yoga, should be carefully evaluated.

While interpretation is unavoidable, it can be approached in ways that minimize the risks associated with partial or misleading interpretations.  Understanding the four main sources of interpretation is essential to this task.

External sources, such as dream interpretation books, books on comparative cultural symbology, such as  Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbols, by Mircea Eliade, and the writings of brilliant observers like Carl Jung, are quartiary sources of interpretation.  They are the least authoritative because they are the furthest removed from the part of you that knows: the you that created the dream.

While your waking identity must finally be the determining voice that decides what weight to place on all interpretations coming from all sources, in the end it is a tertiary source of interpretation.  This is because it not only did not create the dream; it is generally not privy to the scripts that drive the roles of the individual dream characters.  Therefore, your waking assumptions about the meaning of a dream must always be supposed distorted and misleading if they do not take at least several secondary sources of interpretation into account.

Secondary sources of dream interpretation are those provided by the dream characters themselves.  These include not only the people, animals, places, and natural phenomena in your dreams, but visits by deceased relatives, channeled entities, extraterrestrials, and the like whether in dreams or in other states of consciousness.  As discussed above, at the moment when they are directly experienced they are not symbols; they are authentic beings, just like you, speaking freely their truth, whether or not it agrees with yours.  While dream characters may tell you voluntarily why they are in the dream, it is much more likely that you will need to interview them to discover their interpretations.  Most lamp posts and jars don’t volunteer their interpretations – you have to ask for them. When you combine the interpretations of several of such secondary sources you are much more likely to reach conclusions about the dream (or life experience) that approximate its original intent, although that is forever lost to us and can only be partially reconstructed, much as physicists do with the big bang or paleontologists do with fossil fragments.

The primary source of dream interpretation is always the consciousness that created the dream in the first place.  While it can be interviewed, and routinely is interviewed in Dream Sociometry, it is rarely done so in the regular interviewing questionnaire most commonly used by IDL Practitioners.  This is because Dream Consciousness provides a perspective that tends to be causal and without form. Therefore it is not realistic to expect most people to be able to easily access it.  Even if they do, it is singular; there is no “peer” perspective by which to authenticate its interpretations.  Therefore, the danger is that one becomes Dream Consciousness, the perspective that created the dream, and assumes that they now know the truth of the dream with certainty.  This is generally dangerous and always foolish. The only reason interviewing Dream Consciousness is even attempted in Dream Sociometry is that a number of perspectives have previously been interviewed. Each has the benefit of the perspective of the last, generally creating a growth in breadth and width of perspective which makes the testimony of Dream Consciousness appear more credible, as it generally is even broader and wider than any of the component perspectives.  For example, say you have a dream in which one of the characters is God.  Because Dream Consciousness created the dream, in order to identify with that perspective, you would have to identify with a space that includes and transcends God.  This is not easy for most people to do.  In general, interviewing Dream Consciousness is useful for expanding consciousness but less helpful from an interpretive point of view. This is because Dream Consciousness is so broad, so abstract, that it generally does not have the degree of investment in the practical life issues that are generally the business of dreams that is found in the elaborations of self-aspects.  Therefore, secondary sources of interpretation turn out to be more beneficial than the primary source most of the time.  In conclusion, while interpretations are unavoidable, some have more legitimacy than others and it is well to keep this distinction in mind.

Dream archetypes, a popular creation of Carl Jung and one aspect of his theory of genetically inherited cultural images, are a fun way to explore the commonality of roles and symbols among cultures, historical epochs, religions, stages of life, individuals, and dreams. They can also be a useful tool in some types of counseling.  However, the distinction between personal dream characters and archetypes is not supported by the testimony of self-aspects interviewed in Dream Yoga.  This is because this distinction is not innate; it is a distinction made by the waking mind to help it in ways that are largely irrelevant to your self-aspects.  Don’t take our word on this.  Interview your own and draw your own conclusions.

This is a common and ancient misperception about dreaming.  It is based on the assumption that your waking perspective is the true and valid vantage point from which to evaluate a dream when in fact it is not only one of many valid point of view but typically the least reliable of all interior (primary, secondary, and tertiary) perspectives.  This distinction between meaningless and meaningful dreams is an assumption.  You do not know if it is correct or not until you interview one or more “meaningless” characters from several “meaningless” bits of day residue.  For example, one person dreamed about being sucked up in a tornado.  She woke up and thought, “I know what that’s about!  I was watching The Wizard of Oz last night!  Then she interviewed the tornado, which proceeded to tell her that she was getting caught up in the turmoil of her daily life and forgetting to stay centered in the “eye of the storm” of her life by meditating. She came away believing that the dream was not about The Wizard of Oz and that it had a profound and spiritual message for her life.

It is in your best interest if you take a phenomenological perspective toward the relative meaningfulness of any dream.  Suspend all assumptions about the relative meaningfulness of any and every dream and any and every dream character until you have done some interviewing.  To do less is to pontificate and to perpetuate myths about the relative value of types of dreams, views that are based on ignorance.

Some people get in the habit of only paying attention to dreams that have Jesus or Bodhisattvas or white light experiences, or concrete life instructions in them.  They assume that if the theme of a dream doesn’t appear to be spiritual then it isn’t. If a dream theme does appear to be spiritual, they assume that it is a spiritual dream.  Dreams and visions that have spiritual figures in them tend to be more dangerous than mundane ones, because they reinforce our limited waking biases and misperceptions about life.  An excellent example of this is Saul on the road to Damascus.  He got knocked to the ground and temporarily blinded, says the Book of Acts, in the New Testament,

when he saw a bright light and heard Jesus say to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”  Because he took this as an external event and never considered how his own mind might have played a role in generating it, he became a zealot, creating a new religion, “Christianity,” that had little relationship with the teachings of Jesus himself.  In other words, because he lacked the background and the tools, he totally misunderstood the message, with huge consequences for the world that continue to reverberate today.

Beware of any system that claims to be able to tell you what dreams are spiritual and which are relatively mundane.  You cannot know, they cannot know, until at least some of the characters in the dream are interviewed.  When this is done, you will discover for yourself that there are just as many spiritual self-aspects in “mundane” dreams as there are in “spiritual” ones.

Dreamwork needs to be based on theories about dreaming

Jeremy Taylor, a well-known authority on Jungian dream work, postulates five basic assumptions about dreams: 1) that all dreams come in the service of health and wholeness; 2) that no dream comes simply to tell the dreamer what he or she already knows; 3) that only the dreamer can say with certainty what meanings a dream may hold; 4) that there is no such thing as a dream with only one meaning; and 5) that all dreams speak a universal language, a language of metaphor and symbol.  Taylor and I share a belief that regardless of the actual intent of a dream, it is in our best interest to assume that there is some benefit to be gained by looking at that. To do otherwise is to never look in the first place.  The emphasis for Taylor is on meaning, symbol, and the dreamer as both the recipient of the meaning and the final judge of its meaning.  Dream Yoga focuses on multiple perspectives and multiple meanings that coexist.  One common indicator of maturity is the ability of a person to entertain several conflicting perspectives at the same time.  Such a perspective would hold that the dreamer is never able to say with certainty what meanings a dream may hold. This is because those meanings are not within the dream; they are projected upon it by the dreamer.  However, a dreamer can always say with certainty what meanings he or she holds.  These are called biases and prejudices in Sunday clothes, and the sooner that one recognizes them the more likely they are to be able to see beyond them.  Self aspects say nothing about a universal language of metaphor or symbol.  This is a projection, and one that has demonstrated a remarkable survivability.

IDL is itself based on a theoretical foundation, a theory that tells us to defer to the interpretations and feedback provided by those sources most likely to know:  the characters in the dream. While familiarity with different theories can help guide dreamwork, it should primarily be directed by the advice of interviewed self-aspects in consultation with your waking identity and respected quarternary resources.

Dreams require analysis

It is said that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung in his lifetime analyzed over 80,000 dreams. During analysis, Jung kept asking the dreamer, “What does the dream say?”  Both these statements assume that dreams require analyzing. More than that, they assume that the dreamer is the appropriate and best source to go to for information about the dream.  But, of course, the dreamer is one character within the dream, a subset of the set which created the dream.  Asking the dreamer about the meaning of a dream is like asking a flatworm to describe three dimensional reality.   Don’t be surprised or disappointed when you get the two-dimensional response reflective of a flatworm’s reality.   What requires analysis are the responses of interviewed self-aspects and their patterns of interdependent co-origination as revealed in the Dream Sociogram.  Beyond analysis, it takes work to tie these findings back into daily life in a practical and measurable way.  This is the test that changes dreamwork from a parlor game for the intellectually curious or those charged with fear or hope.  It differentiates a post-prepersonal dreamwork from a prepersonal variety while laying the necessary foundation that is required if a truly transpersonal dreamwork is to be attained.

“I will innately know what my dreams mean.”

While you will grow in wisdom as well as other core spiritual qualities, your understanding of your dreams will always be only one perspective of many on the dream.  Other aspects of yourself will always provide other perspectives on a dreaming whole that by its nature is greater than your waking perspective.  Therefore while you may come up with more satisfying meanings for your dreams you will never incorporate those into your waking perspective until and unless you interview a representative cross-section of characters in the dream.   New dreams that come will always transcend and include your waking perspective, causing them to be inherently beyond your waking ability to grasp their meaning prior to interviewing.

“I will become lucid in my dreams.”

Expect that as you wake up you will become lucid more often in your dreams and that you may even choose to remember more of them.   Expect also that you will never become completely lucid in your dreams, because to do so would mean the end of evolution. It would mean that you were totally awake and aware.  Lucidity is about both frequency and degree.  If you interview extremely talented lucid dreamers you will find that they rarely remember a lucid dream every night, although some remember two or three in one night on occasion.  Remember that the average person dreams two and a half hours every night, which means that very, very good lucid dreamers are still spending a small percentage of their time lucid.  You will also find that experienced lucid dreamers are often themselves working on becoming more lucid, that there are forms of lucidity that they have not yet mastered.

“I will stop dreaming.”

This myth assumes that because dreaming is obviously a series of self-created illusions based on delusional thinking (that we are awake when we are not and that we are experiencing objective, rather than a self-created reality), that as we awaken that dreaming must therefore either stop (when we become enlightened) or change into something non-illusory and non-delusional.   The problem with this idea is that it assumes that illusions, delusions, and self-deception is a bad thing and something that we should and can outgrow.  A more realistic view is that we will always be embedded in contexts that are relatively illusory and in which our waking perspectives are relatively delusional.  Therefore, as long as broader contexts exist, you will always continue dreaming.  Those who believe that it is possible to outgrow all contexts carry the burden of proof.  They need to be able to show how outgrowing one context is the same as outgrowing all contexts.  The simple answer is that they cannot; they have simply confused an experience of outgrowing one context with outgrowing them all.

“I will have dreams of receiving teachings from masters.”

Most everybody on a spiritual path has dreams of receiving teachings from masters from time to time.  Even those who are not consciously on a spiritual path can have such dreams.  If you ask experienced meditators about their dreams you will find that they have many other types of dreams, (although they may report that they only remember such dreams).  It is indeed possible to so convince yourself that those are the only types of dreams that you should be having that you repress memories of any other sort.  That would be a pity, because dreams of tragedy, monsters, and fear often turn out to be the master teachers.

“I will no longer have nightmares or bad dreams.”

This is wishful thinking.  It is about attempting to make over dream reality into your waking vision of what reality as a whole should look like.  Because illusion and delusion are built into the structure of human development, so is the Drama Triangle.  This means that you will never outgrow your need to experience dreams in which you are playing the roles of victim, rescuer, and persecutor. Your challenge is to become mature enough to understand that this is a good thing.

“I will no longer have mundane or senseless dreams.”

As you evolve spiritually you will learn that you lack the ability to judge what is and is not a mundane or senseless dream.  You will learn to suspend such biases in favor of listening to whatever is present.  The result is that you will slowly become convinced that there is no such thing as a senseless or mundane dream, that such conclusions only reflect your waking perspective.

“I will know what my dreams mean while I am dreaming them.”

This is your basic problem.  You already think you know what the dream of your life means while you are dreaming it.  You already are sure what your dream means while you are dreaming it.  For instance, you are sure that the ground under your feet has nothing to tell you.  You are sure that your house burning down is a bad thing.  You are sure that the Evil Ghost wants to hurt you.  Integral Deep Listening demonstrates that people do not know what their dreams mean, even if they have been meditating for decades, and that the assumptions that they make while they are dreaming about what is happening to them and how they should respond are generally mistaken as well.

“I won’t be confused, scared, or sad in my dreams anymore.”

This would be a pity, as it would be to live in a monochrome dream universe in which there only exists light but no darkness.  It is as if you were to say, “I will only see the bright and happy colors of the spectrum.  I will no longer see the muddy shadings of colors.”  What is much more likely to occur is that you will learn to look forward to and celebrate such feelings in your dreams because they indicate a major growth opportunity for you.  Instead of wanting them to go away you will grow into a respect for how necessary they are for your continued evolution.

“I will do miraculous things.”

Since you have already most likely flown in your dreams and survived deadly falls, you have already done miraculous things in your dreams.  So what?  Doing miraculous things in your dreams signifies…what?  Miraculous dream events mostly serve the purpose of inflating your ego and your delusion that you really are a special, unique, and spiritual person.  The only problem is that if you interview the crabgrass in your dream you will probably find that it is special, unique, and spiritual, too.

“I will be meditating all the time in my dreams.”

Self-aspects are supportive of meditation anytime, whether in dreams or otherwise.  Meditating in the face of danger or fear is an excellent choice.  However, once this ability is mastered, the ideal response will not be to sit in meditation all the time in your dreams but to experience dream events within and from a meditative consciousness.  Such consciousnesses themselves evolve, expressing more of the six core qualities and bringing more of a sense of abundance, joyful absurdity, and luminosity into your dream experience.

Joseph Dillard

What are four basic approaches to understanding dreams and how can we use them to work with our own dreams more effectively?

A. Narrative Analysis – Understanding the mind as revealed through dream interpretation.

Since Joseph interpreted the dreams of Pharaoh, it has been assumed that waking awareness can accurately analyze and interpret dream narratives. In the final analysis, it is our waking identity that must determine both the meaning and what actions to take based on what we interpret a dream to mean. However, because our waking identity is a subset of the interior consciousness that created the dream, it is ipso facto not in a position to interpret those experiences accurately without receiving input from other invested self-aspects. Interpretations are therefore elicited from other characters in a dream. These interpretations are called elaborations in Dream Sociometry.

B. Social and Intrasocial Expression – Understanding society’s interpersonal, cultural, and spiritual relationship to dreaming.

What a society does with dreaming tells us a lot about the values and the worldview of the culture. Does it discount dreams as irrational? Does it see them as literal? Does it try to bifurcate dreaming, making some dreams true and good while others are false and bad? What you and I do with our dreams tells us a lot about ourselves and the value we put on our interior life. Do we depend on them to guide us and then abandon them when we find out the guidance was wrong? Do we prefer sleep over dream recall? Every interviewed self-aspect has its own interpretation of dream events and its place in them. How do we tell if it is legitimate? What do its elaborations add to our understanding of the dream group’s interpersonal, cultural, and spiritual priorities?

C. Subjective experience – A study of the beingness of specific dream group members and of Dream Consciousness.

Both the experiences and preferences of dream group members are more dualistic than those of Dream Consciousness. We know this from the higher proportion of positive and negative preferences stated by interviewed self-aspects as well as from the greater likelihood of eliciting trans-preferential responses from Dream Consciousness in the Dream Sociomatrix. Because these trans-preferential responses are relatively formless, they provide the dreamer with personal experiences of what causal and even non-dual awareness is like. This is higher order transpersonal experience and spiritual presence.

When we are actually asleep and dreaming we are having a personal, subjective experience of a dream. We are, however, generally so immersed in our dream experience that it is only after awakening or by becoming lucid that we possess the objectivity to appreciate what we are experiencing. Pellucidity, or the ability to continue to dream while knowing one is dreaming, without changing or interfering in the dream, is less subjective than lucidity.

D. Objective Research – Psychospiritual technologies for personal and social transformation.

The injunctive methodology of Integral Deep Listening provides a personally falsifiable method for healing, balancing, and transformation of individuals, families, and groups. Modalities include identifying with self-aspects found in a dream narrative or report, identifying with personifications of life issues or somatic symptoms, and identifying with self-aspects at specified time in waking, dreaming, sleeping, or meditative consciousness.