The Descent into Dreams
New Orleans, January 2007
A whole world inside us is asleep. We wake to it but rarely.
We glimpse and barely remember. Or we don't understand what we've seen.
A third of our time on earth we've spent sleeping, with little to show: an image, a face. Only rarely does a dream come that wakes us to ourselves.
Will our lives someday be forgotten as we have forgotten our dreams?
I know there is a conscious mind and an unconscious. But I don't always think about what that implies—that more than half of who I am and what I am is completely unknown to me, except in fragments and glimpses, images and dreams.
Is it possible that all we don't know about ourselves includes also the most important thing? That our self-knowledge is trivial by comparison, and yet we use only our conscious awareness to guide our lives? And so we miss receiving great gifts that have been waiting for us all along.
To receive these gifts, we must learn how to dream, which sounds easy enough. But I mean dreaming with a purpose, learning to use dreaming as a way to depth. That proved difficult, at least for me.
I had to make a wayward pilgrim's progress to the dream because I had so much to unlearn—and I am a slow unlearner. The progress falls into three parts, which I've titled "Images," "Interpretations," and "Dreams."
First I had to learn the true power of images. Then I had to unlearn the ancient reflexes of interpretation. Only then could I explore the world of dreams.
In part one of this book I introduce my first teacher, an eighty-seven-year-old Algerian-born mystic living in Jerusalem whom we students called Colette. My encounter with this powerful personality was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure full of strange, hilarious, and sometimes harrowing incidents, like the time she tried to lengthen my arms an extra inch. But she taught me the valuable ancient practice of directed waking dreams. This practice reverses the flow of ordinary thought, taking words back to images. By this reversing, I understood for myself, as she often said, that "images are sovereign in the mind."
Part one, then, deals with one obstacle to dreams, which is the habit of thinking in words; part two concerns the habit of interpretation, which is another barrier. I introduce Marc Bregman, my teacher of dreams as Colette was my teacher of images. We struggled together over a puzzling dream about reading a book, a huge blue book that seemed to be a commentary on Genesis. Before I could fully enter the realm of dreams, it seems, I had to unlearn the habit of interpretation. This habit is so thickly and deeply rooted in ancient history and religion and modern psychology that it feels like the only and natural response to dreams. But there is another approach to dreams, and this is what I needed to learn.
So in part two of my wayward progress, I dig up the roots of interpretation in Genesis and follow them where they lead: to the influential dream theories of the rabbinic sages and Church Fathers, all the way to Freud. I learned for myself how in every age, interpretation has repressed the power of the dream.
Only then could Marc Bregman teach me to undo interpretation and enter directly into the world of dreams, the journey explored in the third part of this book. Here he proved as shamanic a master as a contemporary American can be who wears red flannel shirts and hunts moose and drives a Chevy Avalanche.
What I experienced in dreams became not only real for me, but the touchstone for what is real.
But to explain that paradox more clearly, I have to back up and give a brief spiritual and personal history of who I was when I met him.
To all appearances I was awake the summer...
