Sunday, October 14, 2007

Dreaming ourselves

In many surprising ways, the new age practice of mythic dream interpretation relies on popular modern myths concerning subjectivity and communication. First, the whole processes, particularly that of the use of lucid dreaming as a mode of self-discovery, seems radically committed to the processes of recovering a unified subject from the divisive, fragmenting power of the unconscious. The unconscious reveals that egoistic rationality necessarily fails to describe the whole range of human emotion and psychic activity: more than we care to admit, our thoughts have no basis in abstracted rationality. The process of translation (which I will talk about later) commits dreams and ideas back to a ‘one mind’ with desires, goals and needs understandable in terms of an ego. It recovers the unknown, unreflexive nature of self into an empirical practice

The process of translation reveals its own difficulties and missteps. First, the commitment to determining objective symbols suggests a misplaced faith in human grammar to explain the world. The recovery of the unknown into nouns with qualities and verbs with desires prioritizes a form of knowing composed in the massive process of organizing human relationships on a large scale. The process of producing meaning through a regular means discounts the idiosyncrasies and selectively communicative nature of dreams. The description of the world dream interpretation provides scripts unconscious desire in the garb of a specific language with a specific grammar; in the case of English, this becomes the noun – verb – object form, with a myriad of implications concerning human agency’s relationship to a lived (static?) world. this plays an important role in the appropriation of the unconscious into the conscious world, a process of escaping and losing meaning perhaps best left unsaid.

Duncan

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