This is the final part in the series of postings examining the Wisdom of the Dream conference put on by the C.G. Jung Institute of Boston this past fall. The discussions of the other speakers and presenters in this series can be found by clicking these links:
William Ventimiglia, Robert Stickgold, Erik Goodwyn, Jill Fischer, Soren Ekstrom
In this final post I will be looking at the talk offered by Kimberley C. Patton called, “Divination Through the History of Dreaming.”
Dreaming The Future
Kimberley Patton is Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion at Harvard Divinity School and the author of several books including Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity.
She specializes in ancient Greek religion and archaeology, and has research interests in archaic sanctuaries and in the iconography of sacrifice.
Patton’s talk at the conference was dynamic and compelling, and wove together many of the themes introduced by the earlier presenters.
In particular, she was interested in exploring the notion that dreaming is less about the past or even the present, but an event that points toward the future.
The idea that dreams refer to the past, as in Freud’s concept of day residue, or that they describe the present day functioning of the individual, which is a core aspect of the Jungian dream model, is a very modern idea. In the history of religion and ritual, says Patton, dreaming a meaningful dream was usually understood in terms of the future.
The Reality of the Dream
In studying the phenomenology of the unconscious, C.G. Jung found that what we experience consciously as “past, present, and future” is relativized in the unconscious into a mysterious unity, a kind of timelessness. This, says Patton, is one of the main aspects of dreams that has impressed traditional cultures historically.
Dreaming breaks the bondage of naturalistic time and space.
This is a very disturbing experience for modern individuals. We prefer to see ourselves as primarily rational beings, a perspective that Jung felt was “one-sided.” To imagine that what we experience in our own minds is not under our conscious control, that we are visited by autonomous experiences called dreams and fantasies is too anxiety provoking for the modern, rational individual.
Western attitudes, explains Patton, have therefore tended to approach dreams as primarily self-referential, about the dreamer. The dream is not really real to us, but something derivative of our waking experience. It is “only a dream.”
Traditional cultures, on the other hand, tend to take dreams very seriously as containing objective information from a separate realm of being. Jung’s word for this separate realm was “psyche” and by that, he said, he was referring to something ultimately mysterious:
“The psyche is the greatest of all cosmic wonders.”
Jung makes a similar point to Patton’s about the seriousness and reality of dreaming when he says:
“What we are pleased to call illusion may be for the psyche an extremely important life-factor, something as indispensable as oxygen for the body — a psychic actuality of overwhelming significance.”
According to Patton, traditional cultures do not talk about “having a dream,” rather one “sees a dream.” That is, it is not a personal possession but an experience, an encounter. Dreams are experienced as places and events, as real — though different — as the “real” world outside.
Dreaming and Divination
Patton described how the universal experience of dreaming was central to giving birth to religion, largely due to this attitude of seeing the dream as real.
These religious structures, then, served as a kind of infrastructure, so to speak, in which dreams could be received and understood. They were understood, that is, as expressions of the divine, as a form of divination.
Traditionally, dreaming has been thought to bring higher knowledge, usually of the future, and very often of new healing practices.
Patton points out that Jung’s approach to dreams is very close to traditional understandings of dreams. For instance, it should be noted that Jung felt that dreams often have a “prospective function.” That is, they anticipate the future.
Jung also saw that our general tendency to dismiss dreams as meaningless is due to the frequency of illogical and otherwise strange images that appear in them. For Jung, these images have a symbolic, not a rationalistic, logic:
“The symbol in the dream has more the value of a parable: it does not conceal, it teaches.”
Patton makes exactly the same point:
Postmodern Dreaming
The infrastructure of a religion or a traditional cultural form provides the context in which this enigmatic language of dreams can be understood. It also provides the means by which the new “higher knowledge” and forms of healing can be lived. Says Patton:
“The future that dreams predict can only come into being when lived by the community as part of its religious life.”
Of course, we live in a postmodern world in which the traditional, unified cultural and religious forms no longer hold. We do not have the religious or philosophical frameworks for interpreting dreams at a cultural level. We are left to interpret dreams on our own.
For Patton this means that we have become alienated from an ancient source of knowledge. For this reason, she sees enormous value in the practice of Jungian psychology and other disciplines that take the dreaming psyche seriously. Dream practitioners are necessary, says Patton, because:
“Someone must help the dreaming human race with their dreams.”
The Wisdom of the Dream
A lot of credit must go to the organizers of this conference for putting together such a rich and exciting line-up of speakers. This was a great moment for the C.G. Jung Institute of Boston and I am very proud to be associated with them.
The Wisdom of the Dream conference was a stimulating experience and has clearly lived on in my own psyche for weeks as I have returned to it over and over in this series of posts. It looks like the following tweet from the end of the conference turned out to be prophetic. I must have been dreaming into the future when I wrote it.
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