Spellberg at cabinet on the death of dream sharing protocols in the west
"many of the world’s cultures—especially outside of the modern West—have developed elaborate protocols by which dreams can be shared. "
"what happens to a culture, like our own, that doesn’t practice dream sharing ... ?"
" dream sharing is a protocol for regular renegotiation of what might be termed the social contract of sensuous imagining, the set of images and emotions and unseen realities that govern, even more than abstract ideas,
an individual’s relationship to society and to
the cosmos."
"In the Palestinian Talmud, for instance, it’s made quite clear that when it comes to prophetic dreams, what causes the fulfillment of a prophecy is not the dream itself (or its originator, God), but rather the interpretation of the dream. If a rabbi interprets a dream as foretelling the death of the dreamer and then the dreamer dies, then it’s the rabbi’s fault that he’s died"
"Cicero writes that the dream-obsessed people of Telmessos blamed the interpreters, and not the dreamer, if a dream prediction turned out to be false; it wasn’t the dream itself that was wrong—such a phrase would have made no sense to the dreamers of Telmessos—it was the interpretation that had failed."
"there are many cultures where recounting and interpreting is not the paradigm for dream sharing at all. Instead, dreams are understood to be sites of action; not texts but places, not a coded language but a part of reality. "
"It may be that a key task—hunting, for example—is accomplished in dreams before it can be accomplished in waking life. Or it may be, as among the Wayuu of Colombia and Venezuela, that the trajectory of a dream is altered by being retold in waking life, with the expectation that the next night, the dream itself will change, and, as a result, the person’s waking life will too."
"the generalizations of anthropologists inevitably fail to capture the reality of a community in which myths and songs and ideas are created, negotiated, and modified by individuals, each with a distinctive cast of mind, some of them especially prodigious and brilliant dreamers."
"In many Australian cultures, dreams provide an essential point of connection. Conception occurs when a soul crosses over from one realm to the other in dreams; death doesn’t truly occur until a person is sighted one last time in a dream; dreams produce insights about where to hunt, or they answer a question about lineage; sometimes they give birth to new songs and new rituals; they often provide a stage on which dreamers can glimpse the eternal and world-creating movements of their individual ancestors, whose inner essence their own bodies contain."
" the events of dreams and the events of waking life are required to be somehow in accord. "
"Dream life and waking life do not exist in a hermeneutic relation to one another—instead, they are interpenetrable and complementary planes of existence. Acting in one has an effect in the other—which in turn has an effect again in the first, and on and on in a continuous cycle.
"
" In order to cross trails with an animal in the bush, the hunter had first to make contact with the sun’s path across the sky.”[10] Animals had to be taken (or give themselves up) in dreams before they could be killed in waking life; indeed, the real hunt took place in dreams, and the waking hunt was only its fulfillment or realization. The details constituting this system of dream-knowing were in every instance intimately tied to the practical skills required to survive on the ecological knife-edge that is the boreal forest. "
"A nomadic culture cannot afford to express itself in huge numbers of material artifacts. But a system of dreams and visions, a network of images, a world-picture mapping and ordering the perceivable world, imparted through language, retained in the imagination—this can be carried easily, with no added burden to the back (though presumably the weight on mind and memory is prodigious and requires great training to bear). For a nomadic community, a cosmology and its dream manifestations are as a portable Chartres, a weightless Louvre, a repository of knowledge, history, and advice, of injunctions to change your life or keep it as it is, all expressed in sensuous, globalizing form. This vast place is entered every night and taken along every morning in the mind, and it is both an image of possibility and a theater of action."
"Dreams are instances where the imagination unfurls its full power over us, its capacity to situate us within an entire cosmos. Dreams show how the imagination mediates between perception and action, how it takes our experience of reality and directly transmutes it into a set of possible feelings, desires, and behaviors. And dreams are instances in which these powers of the imagination can be later contemplated, while waking, at a distance. To discuss dreams, tweak them, act them out, try to alter them and manipulate them in waking life—this is an attempt to achieve distance from the imagination’s world-picture so as to study and refine it.
"
"before going to bed, the Ongees narrated to one another their dreams from the night before, and their experiences of the day that had just ended, especially their time spent in the forest hunting and gathering food. But in doing so, they would negotiate the content of their dreams, modifying it so that everyone’s dream accounts might be gradually aligned with one another ... The indigenous explanation for this extraordinary process, Pandya reports, is as follows. During dreaming, the inner self leaves the outer self (the body) and travels the island in order to recuperate the bits of being that a person has lost during the day. These bits of being are most commonly manifest as stray smells, marooned on bushes and trees by the body during its daytime passage around the island. As the inner self collects these smells in the dream, it retraces the path of the body, collecting and consolidating important memories and making observations. The harvest of this inner being is then woven, over the sleeping “body external,” into a spider web that holds in place all the smells, dreams, and memories of previous nights and days, and so allows them to be used in the coming day. When the entire community talks through their dreams before sleeping, then the individual webs are woven together into a single web over the whole community. "
"The Ongees have produced a protocol by which dreams can come to be shared. It permits the negotiation and analysis of the unseen world, its transmission into the public sphere. In doing so, it allows a negotiation of what the society holds in common: not, again, its ideas or customs, per se, but rather the images, scenarios, and pathways by which the days and hours might be divided up and made meaningful. Here is a dream-world that seems to bypass the philosophers’ anxieties. How can they be certain that what they describe and hear is really what they dreamt? the philosophers might ask. To this the Ongees respond by flouting the distinction between representation and reality so flagrantly it seems, at least to this distant outsider, that they do so with self-awareness. The dream exists not as some sealed-off thing that language tries and fails to reach; on the contrary, the transformations that language and discourse effect upon the dream come to be a part of its essence. This helps explain why this dream reporting has to take place in the evening, and not in the mornings. The process is intended for future dreams and future waking: to harmonize previous experiences is not to rewrite history; it’s to build a more coherent future. For one can imagine that a process like this carried out over generations would in fact make the participants’ dreams ever more aligned with one another.
"
"This dream-sharing process, according to Pandya, is now in the past. It declined when the Indian government began moving Ongees onto a coconut plantation, preventing them from sleeping in circles and instead setting their daily schedules to an industrial rhythm of work and sleep ... To do good forest work like hunt, we need to discuss dreams of the forest. We do not dream forests anymore! We are forgetting to work in the forest because we are reminded to get up and work in the plantation! We now dream only of the coconut plantation. We do not have any tonki ti megegatebeh [a session of dream discussions and singing] just a few small “meeting-ey.” "
"the dream-work makes the waking work possible. The dream-world sets the template for behavior in the waking world, defines the parameters within which humans can act. But this does not involve a loss of agency in the waking world. It does not involve a surrender of waking life to the vagaries of the dream, precisely because that dream-world is being self-consciously and deliberately negotiated.
"
"The quarantining of dreams within metaphysics is in fact peculiar to Nietzsche’s milieu, to the worldview of Western philosophy in the phase when it began to call itself modern. Nietzsche understood that for human beings, the perceptual world is not enough; we need another world alongside it to explore the full range of our possible actions and reactions."
"To have abandoned dream sharing, or to restrict it only to the most private settings, as in the therapist’s office, or to think that sharing imaginary perceptions is solely the province of fiction, or the purview of half-mad poets—these are not the signs of a culture that has overthrown the tyranny of the superstitious imagination. They are rather markers of a society that has sunk into stupefaction before the immense power of its own world-dream, by which I mean that human picture of reality that is inextricable from the parameters of human action. These are the signs of a society unable to change or guide that dream with any precision or accuracy"
Read the whole thing:
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/67/spellberg1.phpsidd
