The Tyranny of Dreams

The spirituality described in Physical Spirituality is not what most of us are looking for. In an important sense it is dark and hopeless. It is certainly not what I was looking for when I started on my spiritual journey some 50 years ago.

That spiritual darkness - a spiritual basis to our pain and suffering - is something we need to face in order to manage our human condition more skilfully, and the notion of an architective dominion and Planetary Deity suggested by Physical Spirituality is a starting point.

I have come to see such a Planetary Deity playing an important role in our sleeping dreams, and through our dreams, exacerbating the spiritual darkness.

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In Physical Spirituality I suggested that architectivity is even more dominant in our dreams than in our waking lives, to the point where any connectivity in our dreams is only incidental:

"I see my dreams to be even more dominated by architectivity than my waking life. Dreams offer a different reality to our waking reality, and that reality appears to be of an even more concerted architectivity. My dreams often involve logistics - navigating cities, buildings, train and road networks; usually accompanied by a need to reach a specific goal, the path to which is littered with obstacles. While my architective awareness of the dreamscape is relatively unaltered, my connective perceptions appear to be seriously diminished. For example, I seem to able to commit the most heinous crimes in my dreams without compassion - and suffer them without feeling pain. My dreams may be accompanied by satisfaction or frustration, but are rarely accompanied by pleasure or pain. Scenarios can humorous, horrendous or satisfying, but they are never loving or harmonious.

The most obvious clue to the dominance of architectivity in our dreams is the persistent presence of one's separate self as the central player."

and

"So we should take care when imparting a spiritual significance to our sleeping dreams, for that significance (if any) is likely to be largely if not entirely architective. We should take even greater care when attempting to apply dreamtime revelations to our waking lives for they are likely to be seriously imbalanced, and if they do serve a spiritual purpose it is likely to be an architective one. Our dreams speak the language of our Planetary, not the Cosmic, Deity."

The contexts of our dreams are largely drawn from our waking lives, especially the characters that feature regularly and have an architective importance or urgency for us, such as our family members, colleagues, home, work and commuting environments.

Now one of the symptoms of PTSD is the recurring nightmare of a waking trauma. I suspect that our dreams stir and re-arrange the architective ingredients of our waking lives in an interminable but usually mild form of PTSD, where the emotional charge only becomes severe in the case of military and first responders. (I can't help noticing that the German word for 'dream' is 'traum'.)

From Physical Spirituality:

"I see our Planetary Deity taking pleasure in our epic human dramas of heroism, empire, downfall and dethronement, especially when these are richly laced with intrigue, treachery and spectacles of explosive violence. It likes a good story, a grand and complex (architective) plot, and I suspect it enjoys our expressions of these in our theatres. Perhaps our own enjoyment of these spectacles arises from our contribution to its narrative."

In the same way, I have come to understand our Planetary Deity to be the storyteller of our dreams, a spinner of tales, weird jokes and high drama, who finds our dream state, so sheltered from connective interference, to be the perfect stage for its theatre.

Though we and our waking companions are the actors on this stage, the stage is set and the actors clothed in roles devised by our Planetary Deity to perform its spectacle for the night - for its amusement and possibly ours, though we may not be quite so appreciative of its savage sense of humour.

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I dreamt I was on a ship and needed to phone my employer but could not remember the number exactly. So I thought I would try a number that seemed right but as I hit "call" sirens broke out on the ship, and loudspeakers called on all passengers to gather at emergency locations. I approached a senior officer and declared my guilt in setting off the alarm by calling the wrong number. He and other passengers who had overheard were pondering what to do about me and he decided to call the ship's captain for an opinion. But when he called the captain he was told that there actually was an emergency, that the ship's engine had seized, and it had nothing to do with my phone call.

On waking I realized I had been pranked. My tail had been pulled by our Planetary Deity. The dream was a story, a joke, except that the joke was on me. I suspect many of our dreams are the telling of jokes only our Planetary Deity appreciates. It doesn't realize how hurtful they can be to us, especially when there is PTSD involved.

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The cast of dream characters and contexts is not drawn solely from our waking lives. As the narrative of our planet, our Planetary Deity has the lives of others and an entire planetary history at its disposal. It can utilize images from our collective history with a high emotional charge to increase the dramatic effect of our dreams which it so enjoys.

My own experience tells me that the significance of my waking life for my dreams has diminished with time: most waking influences are eliminated after 15-20 years, though some particularly significant characters may continue to make an appearance. Since retiring, there has been little stress in my waking life, and I'm finding that its contexts now rarely appear in my dreams. My dreams now feature material that seems to come from archetypal, historical and transpersonal (but totally Earthly) sources. For example, my dreams are now strange traumas such as participating in medieval battles (in which I could never have taken part) or of persons I have never met or heard of. (I once woke from a dream in which I was being directed to one 'Honeke' as a paragon of virtue. I had no idea who Honeke was so I went to the internet and discovered Erich Honecker.... indeed a paragon of architective virtue.

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The current understanding of dreaming assumes that we are responsible for their content, that our dreams are reflections of our own waking inadequacies, suppressed antagonisms or unresolved problems. Putting the responsibility for the nightmares of PTSD on the dreamer surely facilitates guilt and suicide. Understanding our dreams to be stories concocted by our Planetary Deity means that we can infer nothing about our waking selves, conscious or unconscious, from our dreams, even though they may be acted out by us and people we know, for we are not personally responsible for their content.

Why would we choose the most unpleasant and horrific aspects of our waking lives to inform our dreams, especially as happens with PTSD? Because we consciously suppress them and they need to be aired? Because our unconscious needs to expel them? If we didn't suppress our waking traumas but were regularly made aware of them and brought them out into consciousness along with the groceries on a daily basis, would they disappear from our dreams? I suggest not.

The most horrific aspects of life inform our dreams because our Planetary Deity enjoys their dramatic impact.

What a boon it is that we forget our dreams on waking.

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I had a dream:

My wife and I were preparing for a party we were hosting later in the day. We planned to hold the party in a field on our farm and I needed to clean the field of manure pats, of which it was full. This turned out to be a major effort because the spade I needed for the job just could not be found (in the manner of a common frustration or anxiety dream). Eventually I settled for an inadequate implement that might get the job done. But the delay meant that guests started arriving before I had removed all the manure. Among these was a person I did not know but assumed she had been invited by one of the other guests. She, however, announced that it was her party and not ours because she had leased the field from its new owner. New owner? I hadn't sold it. So I searched out my wife and asked if she had sold the field. Yes, she had, and to a most unsavoury acquaintance of ours known for his crooked deals. Why? Because he had healed a minor pain in her foot.

At this point I woke up, very angry with my wife. Very angry.

Might I not continue that anger in the waking hours that followed? Might the dream not suggest I am suppressing anger to my wife for other, real reasons? Might it not be a sign from the gods that I married the wrong person? Whatever, there is a real possibility that unless I was particularly circumspect about the value of my dreams, it would flavour if not damage the relationship between us.

Well, I am particularly circumspect about the value of my dreams, courtesy of my understanding of the role of our Planetary Deity in staging them. After a moment's reflection, I had no reason to hold my wife accountable for what happened in the dream. I described it to her at breakfast that morning and we both had a good laugh.

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By living an architectively simple life in retirement, in a quiet rural setting, it seems that I have "drained the swamp" of dramatic waking material to a very large extent. At least the personal (as opposed to the transpersonal) swamp. That is, I've significantly reduced the waking architective resources for my dreams, forcing our Planetary Deity to dig deeper into our collective unconscious for my dream material. And as my dreams have dug deeper, characters have begun appearing which I am associating with our Planetary Deity itself (such as the unsavoury dealer in the dream) - the director of the play playing a cameo role.

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We may also make decisions regarding our waking life as we are falling asleep or waking up, or even in the half sleep between dreams, and these decisions can be heavily influenced by our dream state of mind. Or one's dreams may simply flavour one's waking mood, at least for an hour or so after waking.

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Are images from our dreams subsequently expressed in our bodies? Might a waking pain in the (physical) neck arise from the incorporation of, or reaction to, dream imagery?

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Knowing that our dreams feed off our daytime architective activity, we can reduce their effect by calming our daytime architective activity, taking off the emotional edge that our Planetary Deity likes to exaggerate. I deal with my dreams by not acting on them, stopping them when they turn ugly (if I can) and certainly not letting them stop subsequent waking connectivity.

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It's not only in dreams that our Planetary Deity tells its stories. Our Planetary Deity is after all the organizer of the entire waking Earthly architective extravaganza, the impresario of despots, the unleasher of wars and the conjuror of pestilences.

I see our Planetary Deity as a story telling God, a director of epics, a dramatist of the spectacular. Our lives are its theatre, and in our dreams it has free reign.

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I had a dream in which a woman asked me "What is going on here?" to which I replied "I don't know. Don't ask me, ask It" (referring to the director of the dream - our Planetary Deity).

At which point, another character entered the dream, took the woman aside and gave her what must have been a satisfactory explanation - which I didn't hear!

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Regardless of whether it is our Planetary Deity participating in our dreams, their overwhelming architectivity means that any spiritual aspect we may propose for them is not cosmic.

In particular, when we dream about a departed person, we should not interpret their presence in a dream as a genuine visitation from that person, for our dreams are overwhelmingly architective and any post-mortal influence a person may have (other than as a material legacy such as a tombstone or classic work) can only be purely connective. The presence of a departed person in a dream is, like any character drawn from our waking lives, only a costume in a fictitious drama orchestrated by our Planetary Deity.