Does anyone remember Little Nemo? Before your time? The cartoon had a revival in the '70's but was originally published as a full-page Sunday comic in The New York Herald starting October 15th, 1905 through July of 1911. The cartoon character Little Nemo, modeled on the son of the artist, Winsor McCay, is lured out of his room for adventures in "Slumberland". His dreams are a rich catalogue of nightmares, a profusion of extreme fantasy images rendered with such explicit definition that the dream is captured in all its surrealistic exactitude[1]. His mother and father are complete strangers to the dreamscape and attribute his waking in terror to insolence or indigestion. In one strip, Little Nemo is sitting in his bed as it slowly begins to sink into the floor. Deep in a cavern, he is greeted by a court jester who tells him the Slumberland princess is crying for him. To reach her he must walk on a narrow path through a forest of huge mushrooms without touching one. After walking some hundreds of miles, he becomes nervous and stumbles against a mushroom stem. The mushroom breaks into pieces and starts a chain reaction of other mushrooms breaking apart and burying him. He calls out, "Papa, I'm getting squashed, I'm getting mashed, papa oh!" The last panel shows him sitting with his father who tells him, "Didn't mama tell you not to eat that raisin cake last night? Now go to sleep son!"
The idea that dreams are the product of indigestion and residual thoughts from the day before was popular during the rise of science as superstition was being sifted out of our minds. Today, dreams are still considered by many to be a byproduct of consciousness and no more important than one's tonsils or appendix. To the skeptic, dreams are just an artifact of evolution.
In his book Interpretation of Dreams written in 1900, Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of modern dream analysis, wrote that before the rise of scientific skepticism, dream analysis was approached in one of two ways. The first of these, which Freud designated as "symbolic", emphasized interpreting the dream en mass, as a whole. The second, which Freud called "decoding", approached the dream in detail by taking up each of the separate elements of the dream and translating their meanings according to some predetermined code. Both these systems were independent of the dreamer. Thus if you and I both dreamed of a snake slithering in the grass, the snake would have the same meaning in our dreams, perhaps an evil force trying to seduce us[2].
Freud felt strongly that dreams were meaningful. His breakthrough was to see that the meaning of a dream was unique to the person. Returning to the snake in the grass, for me the snake may have a meaning of being sneaky. For you, it may represent the phallic image of male sexuality. And for another, it might express a desire to go unnoticed. Although there may be cultural generalities that translate into common dream images, the meaning of a dream comes from the unique psychology of the individual. Freud sought an "objective, theoretical, methodological" approach to dream analysis using a modern scientific approach. Freud tried to balance the experientially based aspect of dreaming, drawing its authority from the life history of the dreamer, with the theoretically based aspect that was independent of the dreamer, which sought out the latent content of the dreams. My understanding of the snake in my dream might come from a mother who manipulated me who, like a snake, I couldn't catch in the act. Yet Freud would say that there were unconscious forces working in my dream that give another meaning, say sexual attraction to my mother, that I didn't know was there and suppressed from rising into normal waking consciousness. To seek out these hidden meanings, Freud used the technique of free association.
Carl Jung, a student of Freud's, took his work a step further by theorizing that dreams have meanings that extend beyond the symbolic realm to the metaphoric. He analyzed dreams the way one might gaze on a work of art or listen to a poem or music. For him, dreams were the voice of the divine expressed through symbols that had universal currency. Images that appear in dreams all around the globe such as the mandala, the divine child, the fool/trickster, and the shadow, expressing multi-leveled meaning both individual and universal, he named archetypes. The snake in the grass might include in its dimensions of meaning a trickster who leads us away from the safe pasture and into new experience. What I appreciate about the Jungian perspective is that it sees dreams as a wellspring of meaning. Some particularly rich dreams can yield up endless treasure. And even the simple ones.
My dream instructor in California, Rev. Jeremy Taylor, relates the story of a student in one of his classes who couldn't come up with a dream. After much encouragement, he said that all he could come up with was that his dream was a dull slate gray. Upon group investigation of what the dull gray meant to him, he revealed that he was unexcited about being in seminary, bending to the pressure of his father to have him follow in his footsteps. Much of his life had a gray cast since it was too frightening to resist his father's influence. This was a major revelation to the student. He discovered many aspects of his life had a dull gray color and he later dropped out of seminary and charted a new course for his life. Even the simple dream image can be laden with meaning.
The last school of dream analysis I'd like to mention this morning derives from the work of Medard Boss, a Swiss psychiatrist who studied for a time both Freud and Jung. He later went on to develop an existential-phenomenological perspective. Freud, Jung and Boss form the core of much of modern Western dream interpretation. Boss is probably the least known here because of his writing style. Freud was a good writer and easy to read. Jung is not so easy to read but readable. Boss is almost impossible to understand unless one has a predilection for Germanic philosophical writing styles. Boss argued that the Freud and Jung concepts of the unconscious were contradictory and un-provable. He advocated the approach of basing the understanding of a dream on the actual content of the dream. Thus a snake in the grass is a snake in the grass. In the person's relation to the dream image, the meaning will be found not in the content of the image. Only by expanding my feelings about the snake without the introduction of snake symbols outside the context of the dream, will the real meaning of the snake image surface.
The field of dream analysis extends far beyond the turn-of-the-century theories discovered in Switzerland. In Native American practice, popularized by Carlos Castenada, the dream world is viewed as an alternate reality. In Tibetan Buddhism, one's dream world can be used to practice "dream yoga". One can work toward enlightenment day and night. One can also become lucid in one's dreams, take control and begin to guide them intentionally. A dream researcher at Stanford University, Dr. Stephen LaBerge, has been doing this since the late 1970's and has developed techniques to induce lucid dreaming. "With lucidity comes an astonishing exhilarating feeling of freedom" writes LaBerge, "the knowledge that you can do anything, unbound by any laws of physics or society."
In one lucid dream, LaBerge was driving a sports car down a lovely country road when he spotted an attractive female hitchhiker. Rather than seek a sexual encounter, he resolved to experience "the highest" instead. Once he announced his intention, his car sprouted wings, transporting him up through the clouds into a "mystical realm, a vast emptiness that was full of love, an unbounded space that somehow felt like home". Spontaneously he began to sing with "ecstatic inspiration", amazed with the exceptional range and quality of his dream voice, as if he were embracing the entire cosmos through its resonance. "Upon awakening", he reported, "from this remarkable lucid dream, I reflected that it had been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life, of profound significance. This dream gave me a vastly expanded sense of identity."[3]
In a magnified form, this is the treasure available to every dreamer who seeks awakening in the depths of slumber. Whether the content of our dreams is the result of indigestion or from some far-off realm of an alternate universe or just neural-net waste discarded from a brain overloaded with sensory stimulation (as proposed by DNA researchers Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison), how we combine, sequence and react to these images is unique to us. Remembering and reflecting on the combinations, sequences and reaction can yield great fruit for personal and spiritual growth.
I was in Boston last week at a start-up seminar for ministers in their first settlement hosted by the UUA. When you wonder what your Annual Program Fund money is getting us, this is one example. The seminar was a good chance for me to step back from my activities here and see the larger picture. How am I serving as a leader in this congregation? What is working and not working? What are these other ministers doing or not doing that I should be doing or not doing?
I also knew that I'd be doing this sermon on dreaming. So I went to bed each night with the intention of having a dream that would teach me about my ministry. One interesting phenomena of dreaming is that setting one's intention to have a dream gets results. This is especially helpful if one can't remember one's dreams. LaBerge, the lucid dreaming researcher, recommends a number of techniques to use right before falling asleep to increase the probability of a lucid dream.
The first few nights nothing came. My dreams were a confused mishmash of dim barely perceivable images. This was frustrating, especially after having reviewed some vivid dreams from a dream journal I kept ten years ago. Saturday evening I spoke to Philomena about her trip to Fort Lauderdale to take the Social Work Licensing exam, which she felt she passed. But she had car trouble and had to replace the battery. We had spent an enormous amount of money on her car in Buffalo and this created feelings of worry and concern.
That night I dreamed about driving a car that wasn't going very fast and had a sort of jerky motion. I stopped and got under the car after jacking up the front to see what was the matter. Two wheels in the front each had a wide circular shower head type contraption coming out of each tire connected with a hose. The shower head had little suction cups on it like the underside of a bath mat. One of them was clean and didn't stick to the ground. The other was sticky and oozing a fluid which I recognized as transmission fluid.
I woke up realizing that the dream was a good example of how residual worry of the day infects the dreams of the night. But upon reflecting on the dream while writing this sermon, I began to see the image of the two tires had powerful meaning for my ministry. My dream request had been answered.
I began to see the car as a metaphor for this congregation and the two wheels with the shower-head suction cups as a metaphor for ministry. The one on the left side that didn't stick helped provide extra traction and stability for the car without holding it back. This was the helpful role I provided as the minister. The oozing transmission fluid caused the one on the right to be sticky. I realized that this is one view of my responsibility as a minister, to transmit the faith in every aspect of what I do. But too much of this causes things to get sticky. Perhaps my doing too much and being overly involved in the life of the congregation was slowing things down somehow. My attachment to ways that I think things should be done gets things stuck. The connection between transmission fluid and stickiness gave me a great image of reflection.
And I'll bet there are layers of meaning in this dream that I haven't discovered. One of the values of gathering as a group to share dreams is the chance to hear how other people interpret one's dream. Just as a piece of music, art, poetry or prose can be analyzed for deeper levels of meaning by those who did not create them, so the insights of those hearing the dream can open inner doors of discovery for the dreamer. But only the dreamer knows whether the suggested interpretations have validity.
This is why I am organizing a six-week dream group. We will keep a journal of our dreams for that time and then share one of those dreams each week. Then one or two people will have a chance to have the group work on their dream together. Please speak with me after the service if you're interested in joining the group.
Dreams are full of transformative metaphor bubbling up to the surface of consciousness. Engaging the metaphor through dream analysis can change the course of one's life.
A couple I know were attending a dream group in California. They were in the midst of planning their wedding when she brought this dream to the group. She had dreamed that she was in an aircraft hanger which was on fire. Everyone was panicking and she ran to get out as fast as she could. She ran so fast that she could barely breathe. Upon opening up the dream images, she starting talking about her misgivings about the wedding, about not being ready yet. This was an intense moment for the group as the couple used their dreams as a way to examine whether their marriage would be right our not. Both found messages of doubt in their dreams and decided to call the whole thing off and separate. And I'm happy to say that I've kept up with both parties and discovered that they have found satisfying relationships or marriage, seeing the unrecognized awareness that guided them in their dreams.
We all have heard the dream of Martin Luther King. Joseph helped the pharaoh understand his dream of seven fat cows and seven thin cows and gained his favor. The man who invented the sewing machine attributed his discovery to the image of cannibals cooking him in a pot, poking at him with spears with the hole in the wrong end. Dreams are an inner stage for our life to be transposed into theater. And it's free - no admission charge. And it's always personally relevant. And paying attention improves the quality of the production. I encourage you to take a seat in that theater and enjoy the effortlessly created extravaganza. By doing so, perhaps your dreams will come true and your nightmares can be prevented from becoming true or coming back!
Copyright (c) 1995 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved. = = W o = z I f G 5 ` I / d d e E J . j ; _ d T T C / x g K S 8 $ $ s K P > 3 # m r ] F 6 % s < ( t [ a M! M! ! ! 3" " " "# m# # # # 5$ $ $ % `% % % % 9& & & $' q' ' ' ' ' "( k( ( ( F) ) ) ) * ^* * * L+ + + + 7, , , - n- - - . . ]. . . >/ C/ / / 30 }0 0 1 c1 1 1 K2 2 2 2 2 F3 3 3 3 .4 z4 4 4 5 W5 5 5 6 6 U6 6 6 6 7 a7 7 8 K8 8 8 19 9 9 9 : X: ]: : : I; ; ; 8< < < = a= f= = = = | d T $ M! ' - 3 9 = } ~