Occulture

by Carl Abrahamsson

  On a very basic level our existence is all about reproduction and pushing life onward within our own species. That could seem to be a quite dull and hopeless existence but the human being, as an advanced cultural phenomenon, can at least find comfort in personal qualities and traits as the foundation for individual harmony. We apparently nurture a need to feel meaning and purpose. And to a varying degree we also do have the possibility to achieve these in our lives.

  What it all boils down to is survival. Our bodies need to survive for as long as possible, and our greater collectives too. And on the individual level it’s equally important to feel substance and meaning to be able to survive emotionally.

  With this in mind we can see how our two waking thirds are very adapted for survival. We deal with what needs to be done to provide nutrition, protection, and shelter, and we work together with greater or smaller collectives to create a solid base for survival.

  Is it then unlikely that the sleeping and thereby dreaming third is also a part of this survival strategy? Of course not. In fact, this could be the most important third of them all.

  Sleeping isn’t merely a passive resting but allows for the physical organism to very actively repair itself after two-thirds of stressing, wearing, and tearing. And consciousness enters another and higher gear to facilitate for other forms of information exchanges and reasonings. This too is to facilitate the survival of the totality.

  To consider dreaming as a merely neurological process of order after a day of exposure to fragmented impressions, possibly with some unfulfilled desires thrown into the dream stew, is a presumptuous and demeaning example of how our contemporary times denigrate individuals to utilitarian units inside a soulless collective.

  However, we’re not supposed to be dealing with zeitgeist criticism here. Not this time. So let’s stay with the function of the dreaming. Just as we communicate with our near and dear ones, work colleagues, and others during the two waking thirds in specific and conventional ways, the very same things happen with other consciousnesses during dreaming. The function of the dreaming is communicating, reflecting, reasoning, and instructing.

  The questions then arise: With whom? From whom? About what? The most common piece of criticism is that it’s not possible to prove that the dream sphere is mainly instructive since empirical experiments haven’t been created to validate the theories. Well, not yet anyway. On a realistic level, though, this critical perspective fails. Only a fraction of all users can in detail explain how the Internet works on an empirically acceptable level, but that certainly doesn’t stop them from communicating with each other, not seldom with entirely strange or new acquaintances and in new ways, and not seldom with the conscious purpose to learn about something or someone, and while at it also learn more about oneself.

  A fragmented dream recall is a big problem and it’s predominantly a cultural one. In many cultures where dreams and dreaming in general are given a higher status, the recall is more detailed, denser, and longer. In our own sphere, we often wake up via aggressive cell phone signals and thereby lose out on a soft hypnopompic agitation. If one is aware of it, there’s always the possibility to adapt one’s waking up a bit. Softer alarm signals and clocks with pulsating light are a few examples. It’s interesting to see how this has recently been implemented in transcontinental flights. Instead of brutally just switching the lights on in the cabin when it’s time to prepare for landing, soft, pulsating, and psychedelic multicolored lights now bring the passengers “back” to a waking state. Incidentally (?) these airplane models are called “dream liners.”

  It’s totally possible to approach one’s own dreaming. The first step is simply to value the meaning of the dreaming in itself, not merely as an intellectual or mental perspective or approach but by integrating the process as being absolutely essential, that is, necessary for living. A dream diary or notebook by your bedside is good, or perhaps having a little tape recorder that you can just talk straight into. That is interesting for the sake of dream substance but also because you consciously leave the hypnopompic comfort to be able to “report” to yourself. It’s a self-disciplined method that leads to increased recall on all levels: frequency, intensity, length, and so on.

  Another central aspect of valuing is the interpretation process. We live in the midst of a post-Freudian and sometimes post-Jungian world of interpretation, and many of their theories and models are totally dominant today. Many of them are still useful, but the most important thing is simply that you interpret your own dream. The analyst or therapist hasn’t dreamt your dream. You dreamt your dream. If the interpretation isn’t mainly yours to as great an extent as possible, there will be an inherent level of distance and abstraction that complicates deeper understanding.

  If you’re aware of and accept that all dreams are instructive, the process in itself becomes an incentive to work harder. It’s not only fun, fascinating, and exciting but also potentially essential when seen in relation to the survival instinct. In this “cosmic ultraholism” you, as the dreamer, communicate with an overall and permanent life force or intelligence through your own active filter (being a synthesis of concepts like human being, individual, sleeping environment, cerebral and emotional processes).

  There are good reasons why dreams often use symbols or aestheticized seed in these instructive displays. The pioneering intuitions of Freud and the early psychologists were correct: the two waking thirds are based on programmed behavior and a hierarchic structure. It’s a simplified way of thinking and a simplified communication that’s based on nuance-less causality. Here, only straight messages work, and if one message contradicts another, the vaguer or weaker of the two will give way, even if you know on a deeper and more emotionally resonant level that that option was actually the right one. This is why there is another kind of language in the dream sphere.

  We can extract this level of “anotherness” to an esoteric sphere of various human exploits in history, not seldom focused on extraordinary inner experiences: occult science, initiatory rituals and teachings of fraternal organizations, magical societies, individual psychonauts, and so on. Human symbolic worlds have been consciously created (or translated from the dream sphere) to bring a certain knowledge or tradition onward in as pure a form as possible. That is, as untainted as possible by vague and causal human language, which also has a tendency to change with time.

  The hypnopompic state (that is, when you drift out of sleep and into waking) is generally more difficult to control mentally than the hypnagogic (that is, when you drift from the waking state and into sleep). The reason is of course the feeling of pleasant well-being that sleeping means to most of us, and the enormous attraction of the dreams themselves.

  Another way of increasing both recall and a general contact with the dream sphere is to express it in an artistic form. This doesn’t mean that the method can only be used by artists but that you use methods that are suitable to give form to what you’ve dreamt and your own interpretation of that. The dream notebook could be seen as the most primitive example, but an interpretive text can lead to more. It’s the same for drawing or painting—the recreation of the dream sequence in images. The reason is, as mentioned before, twofold: you get a better reflection surface for concrete interpretation and you thereby value the process as such.

  In one’s own interpretation of the dream lies also the possibility of changing the perspective. Consider that the dream you have experienced and remembered perhaps wasn’t dreamt by you at all but that it is something that was presented for you from the outside, like an existential gift.

  To give an outer form or shape to something inner is classical magic. To give form to something desired through artistic work like poetry, drawings, paintings, sculptures, or whatnot is to awaken life within the desire. That goes for nightmares too, although hopefully the other way around: the expression creates a catharsis of the undesired. The creative externalization of dreams apparently has therapeutic qualities of many kinds; this has been
integrated in some segments or schools of psychology in different forms of art therapy.

  The question is if it stops there, if it only stays at this “phase one,” meaning that it’s liberating to see what you’ve dreamt in a new way. I would like to argue that both frequency and intensity in this process increase the dream-sphere contact interface in itself. Recall becomes easier, which facilitates more efficient interpretation work. It also brings an increase of general existential stimulation in the form of fascination and joy, which I absolutely ascribe to the literally essential function of dreaming. An analogy: you can eat various kinds of junk food under stressed circumstances or you can consciously eat good and nutritious food under relaxed circumstances. What you choose will affect life as a whole, not only the alimentary system and its work as a purely physiological phenomenon.

  We often appear in our own dreams. This indicates not only a personal presence in a kind of poetic flow of irrational wishes but can just as well indicate an instructive process. What you experience in the dream is meant for you and no one else. The identity and recognition of one’s own presence is a language that activates receptivity for messages from the dream sphere.

  Under normal circumstances we awaken with and in dream frag-ments, fascinating and attractive for sure, but they fade so quickly in that we often unwillingly approach the waking state. We are quite often so stressed already here that we don’t even have the time to treat the frustration concerning the evanescence of the dreams. But do the dreams still linger on somewhere inside us? Are all dreams stored like our sensory impressions, in an enormous dream bank? If dreams aren’t just loose fragments of memories but, as I argue, very concrete and individualized transmissions from much higher frequency levels, then perhaps it’s possible to improve one’s reception and simply receive more? The ether is full of an enormous amount of frequencies and messages that our senses cannot register, but they’re still there: radio, television, wireless Internet, telecommunications, spy signals, and many other things. In that sphere, it’s a question of adapting existing technology to be able to receive what is relevant to the communication in question. Our receiving technology when it comes to the dream sphere is the brain, and it can definitely be trimmed and calibrated to receive and interpret more. A lot more.

  As often in life when it comes to mind-expanding or potentially life-changing experiences, modern individuals have a hard time taking their own experiences seriously enough to allow them to become concrete and meaningful parts of a life in creative flux. In the dream sphere, it becomes doubly problematic: we are raised in a culture in which this sphere is not given a high priority, yet the word itself indicates many ideal forms for us—dream girl, dream boy, dream team, dream scenario, and so on. And we’re all on very deep levels endlessly fascinated by the attraction of the dreams but generally powerless in approaching them. We also live like slaves in the digital dictatorship of entertainment, in which we’re swamped by symbols and dreamlike films and images. This is something I perceive as distinctly weakening our own dreaming.

  It’s not unusual that creative people have a good and active relationship to their own dreams, regardless of how concretely they work with them. We shouldn’t just mention the strict, sleep-based dreaming here but also active imagination, daydreaming, hypnagogic states, hypnopompic states, and deep forms of meditation. Again, this is not only for or by artists. Many scientists, engineers, philosophers, writers, and others who live by thinking in new ways often feel a kinship with the attraction to the abnormal within dreaming. On a general level though, these people are exceptions rather than rules.

  But it hasn’t always been like that. Even in the West, dreams used to be more integrated. During antiquity, Greek physicians often consulted dreams in their diagnostic and healing work. Plutarch’s stories of antique Greek and Roman lives are filled with integrated dreams, on religious as well as personal planes. A lot of people probably associate this systematic or prioritized dreaming with so-called primitive cultures, as is the case with magic in general. A big difference between then and now is that dreaming used to be collectively integrated in almost all the world. Today we dream alone. Well, at least in our cultural sphere. In Tibetan scholastic Buddhism advanced dreamwork is integrated in meditations and other forms of inner work, with basically the same goal as for everything else that is striven for: to see through the dream mechanisms and try to leave these and everything else behind in an enlightened state of nirvana.

  Mark Twain and many other inspired authors have claimed that telepathy is completely normal and that the dream sphere is that place in consciousness where you can travel freely as you will, even in time. All that’s needed is basically that you (a) value the process, and (b) start working with it.

  The engineer Edison was close to addicted to his hypnagogic moments, as he learned early on that his best ideas came while in hypnagogic states of mind. After having worked in a very high tempo mentally he usually allowed himself what he called catnaps. He sat in his office chair with two steel balls, one in each hand, then drifted off. When he fell asleep properly the balls fell to the floor and the sound woke him up. Very often he had a new idea clear in his mind then.

  Quite often these eureka moments come after an intense intellectual work process that the person in question then sets free in a dream sphere. Einstein had been thinking about his theory of relativity for ten years, and when his epiphanic moment eventually arrived, it arrived after a dream that drifted into a hypnopompic state. Here we can see an analogy to traditional magical thinking, in which a work of will culminates in a ritual, after which you set the desired effect or result free to find its own manifestation where and when it’s suitable.

  Goethe, Wagner, Brahms, Puccini, and hundreds if not thousands of other prominent artists of different kinds have all admitted their debt to either dreaming proper or hypnagogic states of mind.

  Kekulé, the man who discovered the benzene molecule in 1890, did this in a revealing dream in which a snakelike being moved around in a, to Kekulé, molecularly applicable way. The facts were already inside his rational intellect but he needed to have that final detail presented to him under irrational circumstances. It’s interesting how these key moments are never spelled out, so to speak, but always come in a symbolic form that makes the lock unlock. It seems as if the symbolic world of images is richer and often more efficient that rational clarity.

  Art history is of course filled with people who’ve created remarkable things, and I think most of you know this sphere better than that of benzene molecules. We have to mention the surrealists, who not only jumped out of dreams in terms of inspiration but also to a great extent externalized the dreams in their artworks. This may have increased their personal dream contacts. But they also helped to undermine the conservative, destructive, and postindustrial consciousness of the Western world. The strong and often erotic surreal images and texts, to a great extent inspired by Freud and psychology in general, created a higher level of tolerance of “inner spheres” and “dream languages.”

  A more contemporary example would be David Lynch, whose surrealistic inspiration, and that stemming from his own transcendental meditation and his own dreams, has contributed to so many masterpieces. When Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks starts dancing at the diner and says “Isn’t this music dreamy?” it becomes a little piece of a mosaic of a new use of language. When something is strange, eerie, irrational, and dreamlike, we say today that it’s a “Twin Peaks moment” rather than using a stricter reference to a dream atmosphere.

  It can indeed be dream promoting to be exposed to other people’s dreams and their creative externalizations of them. You get rid of some negative rationality under controlled circumstances in a cultivated comfort zone. But the effect will be much greater when you actively start working on and with your own dream sphere.

  Let us now finally toy with the idea that what we do during our two waking thirds is simply to move the biological being onward. We add nutrition and work
for survival and at the same time get really tired, all of this simply to make possible and optimize the most important third of our lives—that of sleeping and dreaming.

  Some of us are more or less individuated and we feel a harmony in our lives and work. How can that be? Isn’t it possible that it has to do with an optimal placement of individual capacity in a greater totality of a life-affirming movement? Aren’t we all actually receiving information about these things in the instructional moments of our dreams? Is the basic problem simply that a weak recall obstructs an increased awareness about our own capacity and our own existential potential? I would absolutely say so.

  Summing up then:

  Dream recall is possible to extend by an increased valuing of dreams by immediate notes, interpretations, and artistic externalizations.

  It’s extremely important that the interpretation of the dreams is your own.

  Consciously prioritized dreamwork in general brings increased dream response (frequency, strength, resonance).

  The dream sphere is not only made up of fragments of memories or wishes that the brain as a neurological composite tries to process to recreate “order” during sleep. Dreams are not exclusively irrational expressions of subconscious desires.

  The dream sphere is beyond time and space and outside causal, logical (that is, man-made) structures.

  The dream sphere contains directed individual messages containing information and advice in regard to behavior on individual and collective levels. A simple analogy is ether-based media and wireless Internet, where you have a sender and a receiver, and which requires a specific technology.

  18

  Collective Mysticism

  It’s Probably a Myth

  Originally a lecture delivered at the Babalonium Gathering, Skåne, Sweden, 2014.