Dreams

I discovered an interesting (to me) and useful document on MSDN. It is essentially a book on Application Architechture. It is quite useful reading, and something I might direct my students to.

Saturday morning and I slept in, something I haven't been doing. The benefit of oversleeping is that I actually woke up with some fragments of dreams. It was, for me, a usual dream. I have an apartment somewhere, that I totally forgot existed. It has many of my lost books and albums. Often the apartment is majestic in its size or view. Often also I am living with my parents still and want to return to that apartment, to get out on my own again. There may be complications with rent--but usually I still am in possession of the apartment even though I have not been there in years and had even forgotten it existed.

I have some ideas about what the dream might "mean," though I am not going to explicate it here. Over the years, I have read most of Freud's and Jung's major works and at various times I have applied Freudian interpretations or Jungian interpretations to my dreams. But in the last several years I have taken a different approach. Now, I don't interpret the images as symbols of some representation of the ID, I just live with them awhile as they are, let them speak in their own terms.

The idea came to me when a friend told me of his recurring dream. He was holding the ladder for his father who was working on the roof. When his father came back to get off the roof, he was no longer a man but a bear. The mind leaps to many obvious interpretations. Freud would see it as Oedipal, Jung probably as an archetype of the shadow. But by not leaping to abstraction, by sticking with the bear, I believe, you get a much richer picture of the relationship. A bear, as the Indians knew, is a complex animal. It is large and temperamental and can strike at a whim. But it is also noble, a hunter, a fisher. It can even be comic and gentle. The bear is a figure of great power. It must be treated with the proper respect and, yes, kept at a certain distance. You can admire, perhaps even love a bear, but you cannot allow yourself to get too physically close to it for your own safety.

There is more in the images of a dream, than in the structure. Nineteenth century science was about finding structures (as is all science actually), so Freud and Jung looked for recurring structures in dreams mostly ignoring the individual richness of particular dream images. (I think this touches at the edges of what might be an important insight into all science, but I am not sure I could clarify it yet, something to do with the apprehension of the unique phenomenon vs the place of that phenomenon in a larger structure. There are hints of this in Heidegger.)

Anyway, enough Saturday musings. . .