Dreamer (David Comfort)

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“We are all made of dreams, and our life stretches from sleep before birth to sleep after death.”
Shakespeare, The Tempest

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The human brain specializes in figuring things out. But, after thirty thousand years of homo sapiens inquiry, countless cosmic mysteries remain – God, gravity, the electron, black holes, dark matter, etc. Not least of all, we have yet to understand the instrument of our understanding: the mind itself and its two dimensions: Consciousness and Unconsciousness. 

In his essay, Concerning Human Understanding (1690), British empiricist, John Locke, defined Consciousness as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.” Two centuries later, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and his protege, Carl Jung, studied sleep as the primary dimension of its presumed opposite: the UnConscious. But since sleep is animated by dreams, many recalled, implying subliminal consciousness, UnConsciousness might be more accurately understood as another dimension of awareness, or AltConsciousness.

In aboriginal and ancient cultures, unlike in modern, dreams were not dismissed as illusions or phantoms of the Unconscious. Instead, the most important were thought to be ”timeless-time” messages from the dead or the gods themselves; hence, the source of revelation and divination, they were considered sacred. Moreover, as Joseph Campbell, Sir James Frazier, Mircea Eliade and other scholars have shown, there is an uncanny cross-cultural correspondence among these mythic dreams.

In ancient India, the cosmos was believed to be the creator Vishnu’s dream. According to the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad: “In deep sleep man and god are the same.”Ayurvedic physicians went further, claiming that life itself was a dream, thus waking consciousness – what we now call “reality” -- was illusory. Among the most important early Hindu disciplines was Yoga Nidra, today known as Lucid Dreaming. Guided by the Pali Commentaries and Milinda Panha, Buddhist monks also practiced dream yoga in their quest for Nirvana and Phowa -- awakening at the time death.

Two of the most important Egyptian divinities were Tutu, god of tombs, as well as Anubis, god of dreams and the underworld (later replaced by the resurrected Osiris). The root of the Egyptian word for “dream” – rswt – meant “to be awake” since it could impart divine wisdom and guidance. Divination and dream interpretation priests, known as “The Learned Ones of the Magic Library,” were the most highly valued prognosticators for the pharaohs. 

Dreams were no less important to the Sumerians, Persians, and Assyrians. From 3000 BC on, Mesopotamian monarchs constructed dream temples and necropolises. Seeking divine advice, comfort, and healing, people came from far and wide to sleep on the “dream beds.”  The temple elite, dream-traveling psychopomps, were known as the Kamacarin, or “those who can transfer themselves [to the otherworld] at will.”

For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the relationship of dreams, divinity, and death was particularly intimate and based in myth. Thanatos, the god of death, and Somnos, god of sleep, were the sons of Nyx, goddess of night. The brothers dwelt in the underworld and here Somnos fathered Morpheus, god of dreams. Like the Mesopotamians, the Greeks and Romans flocked to their own dream schools and shrines, hoping for guidance from Morpheus (aka Somnia) or his relatives. Temple overseers, Iatromantes, were identified by their arcane specialty: The Dream Senders (Oneiropompoi), Air Travelers (Aithrobates), and Wonder Workers (Thaumatourgos). Necromancers included Corpse Oracles (Nekyi ) and ventriloquist priests who talked to the dead (Engastrimythos).

The first Interpretation of Dreams (Oneiroceritica) was written in the 5th Century BC by Antiphon. Attempting to elevate analysis to a science, Artemidorus Daldianus expanded on Antiphon with his own five-book Oneiroceritica, revealing the symbolic and allegorical nature of dreams, especially the incestuous and unearthly.

Since ancients believed nocturnal visions came from the gods who created everything, lived in eternity, and knew the future, they valued divination above all. In the Apology, Plato asserted that Olympians conveyed their intentions to mortals in sleep. Even his more sober and scientific student, Aristotle, wrote in On Prophesying by Dream that some could indeed be precognitive but based in reason, though he admitted that explaining the most otherworldly “surpasses the wit of man.” 

God’s nocturnal messages were less mysterious to the monotheist Hebrews. “Listen to My words,” He told His first priest, Aaron, Moses’ brother: “When there is a prophet among you, I reveal Myself to them in visions, I speak to them in dreams.” (Numbers 12: 6). Subsequently, the Almighty communicated with Daniel, Samuel, Solomon, and others in this way.

The first to be so honored was Jacob, whom the Lord later renamed Israel. In a dream, Yahweh showed the Jewish patriarch a ladder to heaven -- Himself above, angels below -- and promised him the Promised Land. (Genesis 28: 12-14). On his way there, Jacob wrestled an angel all night, and at dawn rejoiced, “I have seen God face to face and lived.” (Genesis 32:31). Due to his own godliness, Israel’s eleventh son, Joseph, was released from Egyptian jail as an AltCon expert. “Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell me your dreams,” he urged Pharaoh and his advisors.

In the most consequential ancient dream, at least to Christians, God appeared to the other Joseph, ordering him to flee to Egypt with his pregnant fiancée, Mary, lest Herod kill the child. Later, He visited a second time to assure the sleeping carpenter he had not been cuckolded since Mary was heavy with the Holy Spirit. The virgin herself wasn’t surprised since the angel Gabriel had already appeared to her too, foretelling the immaculate conception.

Due to biblical stories such as these, the early Christian, Tertullian, wrote in On the Soul: “The greater part of humanity receives its knowledge of God from dreams.” Later, in On Dreams, Bishop Synesius of Cyrene seconded the founder of Western theology, writing: “Because of them we can communicate with the gods…. For many people dreams are their most precious treasure.”  

Changing the course of history, Nebuchadnezzar, Xerxes, Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, and many others made state and military decisions – both favorable and disastrous -- based on the interpretation of nocturnal theater by court oneiromancers. The famous biographer of many potentates, Plutarch -- who later became a Delphi priest -- claimed dreams were a “higher reality,” and thus as important, if not more so, than material events. Caesar was of the same mind. He decided to cast the die and cross the Rubicon after dreaming of sex with his mother, indicating that the motherland would be his. However, the night before the Ides, his wife, Calpurnia, dreamed that he would be assassinated, and he apparently took if for menstrual raving.

The year before the stabbing, the Roman senators, hoping to keep their heads, had declared Caesar a god. After his funeral in 44 BC, Caesar’s Comet came by, Augustus identified it as his uncle’s spirit, thus proving his divinity. Though the tyrant was believed to have retired to Elysium heaven, Dante later relocated him to Purgatory in the phantasmagorical Divine Comedy. 

Earlier, Homer, Ovid, Virgil, and other Hero Journey poets -- likely inspired by their own dreams -- had recounted the otherworld trips (katabasis) of Orpheus, Adonis, Dionysius, Heracles, Hermes, Odysseus, Aeneas, Abraham, and Enoch.

The last noteworthy celestial tourist was Mohammad himself. Falling asleep in his Hira cave, he was visited by Gabriel in a true dream vision (al-ruya). “God commands you to come before His majesty,” the angel told the former merchant. “The door to the Seven Heavens is open and the angels are waiting for you.” Aboard the heavenly steed, Buraq – a white, winged mule with a peacock tail and a woman’s face – the prophet flew from Jerusalem’s Rock of the Dome on his Isra and Miʿraj night journey. After meeting Moses, Abraham, and Jesus, Mohammad proceeded to Heaven where Adam himself revealed to him the secrets of time and duality. Finally, he descended to Hell where he encountered Malik, the angel of death, surrounded by infernal beasts and the damned. Then he awakened, recorded the Quran dictated to him by God, and founded what was to become the second largest world religion, Islam.

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According to somnologists, sleep was quite different for pre-light peoples than for moderns. Old sleep, called polyphasic, was periodic during day and night, and its dreams often remembered; new sleep, called monophasic, is generally uninterrupted and its dreams often forgotten. Thomas Edison’s invention of the electric light bulb in 18791 was in part responsible for the transition since light disrupts the release of the sleep-regulating hormone, melatonin. Phones, televisions, computers, and other modern marvels further advanced our illuminated man-made world widening the gulf to the shadow world.

When Isaac Newton, considered by many the most consequential scientist in history, released his revolutionary laws of gravity in 1687, many considered “action-at-a-distance” an occult idea, so dismissed him as a madman, especially considering his obsession with alchemy and the discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone. Later, when Michael Faraday introduced electricity, this second action-at-a-distance force was considered otherworldly too.

The Industrial Revolution was accelerating at the time, and two different entertainments had become all the rage in Europe and the States: Science shows and Magic shows. Inventors such as Faraday demonstrated marvels with magnets and electric motors; impresarios such as Harry Keller and Howard Thurston awed audiences with levitation, telekinesis, and calling up ghosts. By the end of the 19th century, western culture was galvanized by opposing, but oddly related, fascinations: Science and Spiritism. The roots of the latter could be traced to the mid-1800s when Buddhist literature captivated such European metaphysicians as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and was popularized by Theosophical Society founders, Henry Steel Olcott and Madam Helena Blavatsky.    

Sigmund Freud came of age at this critical time. A hardcore materialist, the doctor’s goal was to create a therapeutic science of the mind free of subjectivity and what he called “the black tide of occultism.” Having suffered debilitating palpitations, nightmares, and depression as a child, the father of psychoanalysis began his career as a neuropathologist. Finding trauma “repression” at the core of neurosis, he turned to hypnotism as a patient anti-repressant, despite the dubious reputation of mesmerism’s founder, Franz Mesner, an animal-magnetism evangelist like the Theosophists. Freud’s experience with trance states, and the influence of his colleague, Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious, led him to the unexplored ocean of human experience -- dreams.

At the turn of the century, long after the Antiphon’s and Artemidorus’ Oneiroceritica, Freud published his own Interpretation of Dreams, its theories based on Greek myth. The doctor asserted that dreams were a form of wish fulfillment, usually sexual, created by the Unconscious -- the underworld of the Id and repository of the Ego’s repressions.2 After attending a sell-out production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, he introduced his Electra and Oedipus Complex theories – the female desiring sex with her father, the male the same with his mother, after killing his father. These ideas, in turn, led him to reduce all human motivation to the Life Drive (Eros) and Death Drive (Thanatos). “Our dreams convince us of the power of these universal complexes,” Freud concluded.

Some wonder if the doctor, though an atheist, was unsuccessfully repressing the effect of his strict Hasidic upbringing by attempting to universalize the causes of his own neuroses. He seemed to think he had put his own psychological house in order, so his theories didn’t apply to him even on small matters. He argued, for example, that cigars were penis surrogates, and tobacco smoking a masturbation surrogate -- except, despite his nicotine addiction, in his own case. While writing his Interpretation, he dreamed of a patient with a malignant mouth, but refused to consider this a foreshadow of the oral cancer that drove him to suicide forty years later by means of the opiate named after Morpheus. 

Convinced of the unimpeachability of his weltanschauung, Freud looked for an apostle early on. He found him in Carl Jung whom he called his “adopted eldest son, crown prince, and successor.”3 But Jung couldn’t abide his mentor’s psychosexual monomania for long. He allowed that some dreams could indeed be expressions of taboo instincts or wish fulfillments.4 But, on a deeper level, he considered the most profound “self-representations” of the aboriginal, innate Unconscious “corresponding to the mythic land of the dead, the land of ancestors.”

Freud took this as occult heresy. Early on, declaring “I cannot lose my authority!”, he had begged his protege, “Promise me never to abandon my sexual theory… We must make a dogma of it, an unshakeable bulwark.”5 When Jung declined, Freud insisted his “betrayal” was motivated by his Oedipal death wish toward an authoritarian father figure.

Annoyed with the facile, self-serving diagnosis, Jung told his mentor he needed to express his own “creativity.” When Freud scoffed at this idea too, Jung changed tack. 

“Professor, now let me tell you with the greatest respect,” he said. “Everyone knows, after all, that you are extremely ambitious.”

Earlier, the psychoanalyst had conceded, “I don’t deny I like to be right,” and called this a “sad privilege of old age.” But now he was flabbergasted. “Me?! ‘Ambitious’? Anything but that!”

After a six-year collaboration, the two pioneers parted company bitterly. Freud vented his spleen, dismissed Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, Seven Sermons to the Dead, and subsequent titles as “the work of a snob and mystic… with no new ideas.” He also called him an anti-Semite and serial adulterer.

Bristling, Jung dismissed Freud as spiritually dead and “his own worst enemy” – in short, a “tragic figure” at odds with his own “original goals.” Adding insult to injury, he called his former mentor an Extrovert – the western personality type he regarded as infinitely inferior to the eastern self-reflective Introvert such as himself.

Freed of Freud’s shackles, Jung called himself “a doctor of the soul.” Viewing rationalism and lack of introspection “the disease of our time,” he suggested embracing dreams as a bridge to the spirit world. “The more of the Unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious [in dreams], the more of life we integrate,” he wrote in his memoir. An alchemy scholar hoping to make his own Philosopher’s Stone, he spent the rest of his career trying to unify his waking self with his dream self to arrive at a complete, harmonious life.

Toward the end of it, he had heart attack and an NDA (Near Death Experience) dream. Suspended from the sky, he marveled at the earth, from the Arabian desert to the Indian Himalayas. “The whole phantasmagoria of human existence was stripped from me,” he later recalled, “… a sense of annihilation predominated, as if having been pillaged… Life and the whole world struck me as a prison!” Disappointed that he was fated to re-enter the corporeal, he grimly concluded: “Now I must return to the box system [of intellectual compartmentalization] again.”

Unlike Freud, Jung had no doubt about immortality. Believing that God and the UnConscious were intimately related, if not one, he looked forward to a reunion with the “primordial womb of the UnConscious” where “the mind continues life after death in its spiritual body.”

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Psychologists, like philosophers, have forever strived to escape the subjectivity and uncertainty of their profession and make it into an objective, predictive science. At the very same time Freud and Jung were trying to create a science of the mind and dreams, physicists were struggling to determine the very nature of reality. Their predecessors, Democritus through Newton, presumed it was solid 3D matter in space and time. Then, after a dream about the speed of light, Albert Einstein rocked the world with his e=mc2 equation, proving that mass was super-condensed energy.

The theory didn’t become real for anyone, including the horrified Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project colleagues, until the nightmare of Hiroshima. The nuclear blast, fueled by matter weighing less than one-third of a U.S. dime, dematerialized tens of thousands of Japanese at ground zero, burning their shadows into the pavement. Further out, delirious charred “alligator people” walked “ant-like,” breathing like “locusts.” Further out, a blast observer recalled, “When you put your hands over your eyes, you saw your bones in your hands and in your fingers.”6

Arriving hard on the heels of Einstein’s explosive macro-cosmos Relativity physics, quantum physics revelations about the nature of micro-matter were no less breathtaking. Based on these two breakthroughs, physics was transformed from a materialistic science to a dynamic science of four synergistic forces. As a result, all former certainties about “reality” became suspect, some concluding that the reality of reality is that there is no reality. “Modern physics takes a definite stand against materialism,” wrote Werner Heisenberg, father of the Uncertainty Principle, perhaps the most subversive concept in the history of “hard” science.

Making Uncertainty even more uncertain, Heisenberg’s friend, Niels Bohr, proved the Complementarity Principle which stated that the observer is not independent of the observed, but has a profound effect upon its nature and behavior. Bohr received the Nobel in 1921 for his discovery of the structure of the atom which he had first visualized in a dream. As a chemist, he was indebted to his predecessor, Dmitri Mendeleev, who had dreamed the elemental Periodic Table. Later, biologist James Watson, attempting to determine the architecture of DNA, dreamed of a spiral staircase, and received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for revealing the double-helical structure of the gene carrier. 

Among the most visionary and intimidatingly brilliant early 20th century theoretical physicists was Wolfgang Pauli. Einstein called him “a worthy successor,” the press called him “the Pope.” Unlike his more sedate colleagues, Pauli was a womanizer, a carouser, a bar brawler, and an I Ching enthusiast. Fearing that he might lose his mind after the suicide of his mother and his divorce from a promiscuous cabaret dancer, he contacted Jung, by that time a world-famous and much sought-after doctor of the soul. For the next decades, the two enjoyed a lively correspondence regarding the correlations between the unconscious mind and the mysteries of energy physics. Arguing that the most important scientific undertaking was the “construction of a new reality,” Pauli said that he hoped “physics and psyche [matter and mind] could be seen as complementary.”

Pauli sent Jung 1300 dreams replete, according to the analyst, with “archaic and archetypical” content. Based on them, the two men co-wrote The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (1952). An eminent mathematician, but anonymous reviewer, called the authors “utterly mad.” While Jung stubbornly pressed on trying to unlock the mysteries of the psyche, Pauli proceeded on a parallel track trying to unlock the mystery of Nature’s 1/137. He believed this recurring fraction in electron measurement that expressed the nexus between mass and energy, the physical and nonphysical, might be the skeleton key to the cosmos itself.  

While obsessively pondering the eureka number, the Pope of Theoretical Physics pulled a unicorn from his hat – a chargeless, near-massless particle that penetrated “solid” objects at near the speed of light. Its name: the neutrino. “I have done a terrible thing,” the visionary confessed. “I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.” A possible building block of dark energy dominating the cosmos, no one knew if Pauli’s ghost particle had first arrived in one of his otherworldly dreams.

No one knows either if, in the last two weeks of his short life, finding himself in Zurich’s Red Cross hospital Room #137, Einstein’s successor died in his sleep and dreamed the solution. According to his wife, the genius’s last words in #137 were: “Now I would like to still speak to only one person: Jung.”

As for Jung, just before he joined Pauli in the hereafter three years later, his own last words, celebrating his lifelong search, were: “Let’s have a really good wine tonight.” Hours after he drew his last breath, lightning struck the tree outside his house under which he’d often sat, thinking and daydreaming.

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Today, the Holy Grail of science is the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) reconciling astronomic and quantum laws to arrive at a single, seminal cosmic force. A leading GUT, String Theory, postulates vibrating energy strings in eleven dimensions. Born and raised in 3D, it is all but impossible for man to imagine any phenomenon beyond height, width, and depth, just as it is difficult to imagine anything outside our ultraviolet vision, a tiny sliver of the light spectrum. 

Nevertheless, scientists speculate that a 4D creature could appear, disappear, and change shape at will. Outside the straight jacket of our paltry five senses in a finite material world, might dreams be the closest thing we have to a 4th dimension experience?

In them, Time and Space -- the bedrock of what we call “reality” -- are quite different. Interior dream time is inexact, distorted, dilated, and events can follow one another instantaneously often without apparent relation or cause. Interior dream space can be claustrophobic or expansive, and its objects -- animate and inanimate -- can appear, disappear, and shapeshift suddenly. In waking life, objects and events are somewhat controllable and predictable, in sleep far less so.

Psychologists identify the three most transformative waking experiences as ASC (Altered State of Consciousness), OBE (Out of Body Experience), and NDE (Near Death Experience). Dreams always contain the first two, and sometimes the third, especially for the ancients. In the Bible, death was called sleep. When Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants passed, they went “to sleep with their fathers.” Later, Jesus told his disciples, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.” (John 11:11).

The first literature to dramatize the ancient dream-death nexus was the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (2000 BC). After his feral friend, Enkidu, dreams of the underworld and dies, the grief-stricken Gilgamesh is told by the sole survivor of the Flood -- Upnapishtim (like the Noah of Genesis) -- that to escape the same fate and become immortal, he had to avoid sleep. Falling into AltCon REM for seven days, the legendary hero failed and, before perishing like Enkidu, declared: “From the days of old there is no permanence. The sleeping and the dead, how alike they are, they are like a painted death.”

Was this merely ancient superstition or, as Jung believed, a revelation of the primordial collective Unconscious? Might it be said that dreaming, both yesterday and today, is the closest thing to being dead, or being dead is the closest thing to dreaming?

“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths,” said Joseph Campbell.

Though we compliment ourselves for being enlightened and progressive these days, isn’t it likely that the mythic literature on which our religions are based were born of dreams? Consider the miraculous and hallucinatory myths, Mesopotamian, Asian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman. Consider the Bible, the foundation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: its tales of talking snakes, parting seas, raining manna, prophets disgorged by whales, virgin birth, walking on water, the phantasmagoria of the Final Judgement and Second Coming – under black sun and blood moon, trumpeting angels, flying horses, falling locusts with human faces, women’s hair, lion’s teeth, and scorpion tails. (Revelations 6-9).

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Waking from a dream in which he became a butterfly, the Taoist master, ChuangTzu famously wondered, “Am I man dreaming I’m a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I’m a man?”

Today, only a schizophrenic, a Jungian, or a quantum physicist might wonder the same. If dreams are real, reasons the modern man, when I dream of being shot, why do I wake up without a bullet hole?

ChaungTzu, Jung, or Pauli might reply: Because your waking world reality is a construction based on the conceptual fantasy of matter in space and time. But as science now tells us, particles are convertible to massless waves by means of heat. In short, again, matter (from the Latin, mater, meaning mother) is compressed immaterial energy. In this sense, isn’t every man an ice sculpture in a frozen world, turning to vapor with heat, then, according to the law of conservation, becoming the energy from which it was originally born?

Beyond the physics of the question, it is only by comparison to a matter-based world that the immaterial dream seems fantastic. If worlds were reversed and man spent two-thirds of his life dreaming, would the “real” world seem so real? In a lifetime, the average person spends about twenty-five years sleeping while experiencing up to 150,000 dreams. Most, the rare archetypical no less than the more common personal, are never remembered. Many regard sleep as a kind of coma, restorative for the body perhaps, but otherwise a waste of time. Holding this view, the person who survives to the age 90, feels that he has lived only 60 years before the Big Sleep.

On his death bed ChuangTzu said: "I take heaven and earth as my inner and outer coffins, the sun and moon as my pair of jade disks, the stars and constellations as my pearls and beads… What shall be added to it?" His disciples were puzzled though, after his butterfly dream, he had told them, "Someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream. Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things -- how dense!”

When Bodhidharma attained Enlightenment, the emperor urgently summoned him to the royal palace, demanding to know what wisdom he had gained.

"There is no noble truth, there is only emptiness," replied the first Zen patriarch.

"Then, who is standing before me?" the emperor asked.

"I know not, Your Majesty,” said the awakened man.

If, after his dream, ChuangTzu’s disciples had asked him who the dreamer was, he surely would have given the same reply.

Every night each of us enters a magic theater, becoming an actor in fantastic, minutely detailed, ever-changing mysteries, journeys, quests, and trials, often filled with people and creatures we have never known or even imagined. Who is it who writes, directs, and produces such movies?

The dead or the gods themselves, thought aboriginals and ancients.

But we moderns can only say:

I know not, your Majesty.

David Comfort is the author The Insider’s Guide to Publishing (Writers Digest). His other nonfiction titles are from Simon & Schuster and Kensington. His literary essays appear in Pleiades, The Montreal Review, Stanford Arts Review, and Johns Hopkins' Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, and The Philosopher (UK). His short fiction appears in The Evergreen Review, Cortland Review, The Morning News, 3:AM among other journals. He is a Pushcart Fiction Prize nominee, and finalist for Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren, Narrative, and Glimmer Train Awards.

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