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The folks at PBS asked me to be a guest blogger for their “Remotely Connected” blog. I blogged about the upcoming NOVA episode, “What Are Dreams?”

Read my post at the Remotely Connected blog

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I just finished reading Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

In the spring of 1957, when he was eighty-one years old, C. G. Jung undertook the telling of his life story. At regular intervals he had conversations with his colleague and friend, Aniela Jaffe, and collaborated with her in the preparation of the text based on these talks. On occasion, he was moved to write entire chapters of the book in his own hand, and he continued to work on the final stages of the manuscript until shortly before his death on June 6, 1961.

A good bit of this book blew my mind, but especially this part:

I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors.

[...]

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.

[...]

I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I care out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls.

[...]

The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me.

We are a collage—a remix—of our ancestors. We have spiritual DNA, as well as physical, and our lot in life is to answer the questions posed by the people who came before us…

The NyTimes ran a piece on dreams today that included commentary from Roger Knudson, a psychology professor at Miami who really helped me out quite a bit when I was trying to figure out my senior project. At that time, we talked a lot about men, specifically the idea of men living without women, as I was trying to write a novella about a father and his two sons living together after a divorce (snooze). But we also talked a lot about dreams, and Roger introduced me to the work of archetypal psychologist James Hillman. Here’s a bit from the fascinating article:

“Back to life” or “visitation” dreams, as they are known among dream specialists and psychologists, are vivid and memorable dreams of the dead. They are a particularly potent form of what Carl Jung called “big dreams,” the emotionally vibrant ones we remember for the rest of our lives.

Big dreams are once again on the minds of psychologists as part of a larger trend toward studying dreams as meaningful representations of our concerns and emotions. “Big dreams are transformative,” Roger Knudson, director of the Ph.D. program in clinical psychology at Miami University of Ohio, said in a telephone interview. The dreaming imagination does not just harvest images from remembered experience, he said. It has a “poetic creativity” that connects the dots and “deforms the given,” turning scattered memories and emotions into vivid, experiential vignettes that can help us to reflect on our lives.

The idea of the “poetic creativity” of dreams got me thinking about comics and dreams, and how comics can do dreams really well — you can be trodding along in a narrative, and suddenly slip into a dream state. I was trying to come up with some good examples, but all I could think of as far as examples were David Heatley’s dream comics and Jesse Reklaw’s “Slow Wave,” which is actually a comic strip illustrating the dreams of other people. If anybody can think of any others, I’m just totally blanking at the moment.

Anyways, I love the idea of dreams re-connecting us with people who are out of our lives (either alive or dead), who visit us in visions. The bottom line is, dreams can be useful.

Apart from an effort to understand the physiology behind the content of dreams, what do we do with big dreams? If we ignore them, said Dr. Knudson of Miami University of Ohio, “we discount our most valuable resource in understanding ourselves.”

America is not a country with a ritualistic approach to grief. Many employers offer as few as three days off after a family member’s death. Dreams of the dead keep alive our connections to lost loved ones.

“Big dreams, those dreams that stop you dead in your tracks, are for precisely that purpose,” said Dr. Knudson, whose father died three years ago. “They pull us out of our headlong rush forward. They yank us back down from our schedule books and our jobs.

He continued, “I don’t want to get over my father. That’s not to say that I want to suffer on a daily basis or that I don’t want to understand that he is dead. But I look forward to dreams in which my father will come again. What does it mean to ‘get over’ it? I think that is crazy.”

It’s the craziest thing: one of the reasons I lost contact with Roger my senior year after some cool visits was because of his father’s death. And there I was this morning with my breakfast taco, reading about him.

Once again, there are no coincidences.

“There is a widespread refusal to let children know that the source of much that goes wrong in life is due to our very own natures– the propensity of all men for acting aggressively, asocially, selfishly, out of anger and anxiety. Instead we want our children to believe that, inherently all men are good. But children know that they are not always good; and often, even when they are, they would prefer not to be. This contradicts what they are told by their parents, and therefore makes the child a monster in his own eyes.

The dominant culture wishes to pretend, particularly where children are concerned, that the dark side of man does not exist, and professes a belief in an optimistic meliorism. Psychoanalysis itself is viewed as having the purpose of making life easy—but this is not what its founder intended. Psychoanalysis was created to enable man to accept the problematic nature of life without being defeated by it, or giving in to escapism. Freud’s prescription is that only by struggling courageously against what seem like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence.

This is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence—but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.

Modern stories written for young children mainly avoid these existential problems, although they are crucial issues for all of us. The child needs most particularly to be given suggestions in symbolic form about how he may deal with these issues and grow safely into maturity. “Safe�? stories mention neither death nor aging, the limits to our existence, nor the wish for eternal life. The fairy tale, by contrast, confronts the child squarely with the basic human predicaments.”

—Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment