Schools of Sleep

"Somewhere in between the Cinderella school of dreaming and the darker dreamscape of “The Matrix” lies Stephen LaBerge, an expert in a technique called lucid dreaming..."

This is the first line from a recent ABC News article on lucid dreaming [via Technoccult]. While lucid dreaming is a fascinating and worthwhile practice for anyone doing dreamwork (it was the discussions on lucid dreaming in the film "Waking Life" that got me fascinated with dreaming to begin with, or was it reading too much "Little Nemo in Slumberland" when I was a kid?), this distinction between the "Cinderella" and "Matrix" schools of dreaming is somewhat fascinating, and probably deserves further comment. Not knowing what the ABC journalists meant by these terms I will try to unpack them myself.

In the story of Cinderella you have a young girl in a destitute familial situation who, through the help of a dream-like fairy godmother, is transformed into a beautiful princess and lives happily ever after. Dreams aren't necessary to the story's plot, but the idea of self-transcendence through fantasy has many dream-like connotations, particularly in the Jungian sense of the individuation process. On the other hand, the Matrix features a young man who, through the help of a dream-like revolutionary leader, is made to realize that he is living in a constructed reality and that modern life is really only a fabrication concealing a much more destitute world. Dreams are only slightly more relevant to this plot, and though there is a similar idea of self-transcendence, it is to a waking up from illusion, and not an escape to a deeper happily-ever-after fantasia. In both cases however, the primary point is that real life, or waking life, is not so real after all, and there are ways we can wake up from it. Similarly, lucid dreaming espouses a body of techniques for realizing that you are dreaming, within your dreams, and thus take control of them as if they were real life. On the opposite end of that spectrum we have buddhist philosophy and dream techniques that espouse that our waking life is a dream that we can wake up from in order to more fully take, or relinquish, control of our lives. I suppose the point that the article's writers were making is that there are both feel-goody and nightmarish kinds of dream interpretation and reality manipulation, and somewhere between the two might lay the abillity to tell just what is actually going on in our pscyhes.

Personally, I take a rather different tactic to dreamwork, feeling that learning to take control of your dreams is perhaps not the most important aspect of dreaming. Certainly it can be fun to decide to fly, but I suspect that there is a reason we dream the things we do, that if dreams are taken on their own terms we might be able to learn something more about our lives that would have an effect on how we live while awake (and consequently, while we're asleep). To this end I am inclined to look at dreams as active and personal symbol systems, remaining uncertain about the universality of Jungian archetypes I instead try and take the imagistic contents of my dreams as being multivalent expressions of my individual thought processes (though these of course have been influenced by culture and my life to a degree that certain symbols that appear for me might appear for other people in an archetypal way, but they may mean something very different to both of us). Taking these symbols as a system, I try to interpret both what they might mean for my waking life, in a similar manner to techniques of free association, but also try to take them as a larger, creative expression on the whole. That is, the various symbols that come up in my sleep can be pieced together to form a narrative, a personal mythology that can be interpreted on that deeper level, not just to say something about my day residues or childhood dramas, but about the way I live my life, the desires and fears I choose to act out as they are founded in the myth of my dreams. Perhaps a simiar approach is suggested by James Hillman in his "Dream and the Underworld," and one project I spent many nights working on was to symbolically journey to the underworld, drawing on the symbols of various myths and legends of the descent narrative in order to find my way to the bottom of my own subconsciuous fears, and thus no longer need to be afraid of them.

The problem that I see with lucid dreaming is that by actively trying to control your dreams, you are not letting them give as full expression to what is going on in yourself, and that they might actively cover up such deeper psychological rifts without allowing you to work at or understand what is actually going on. I argue, from my own experience, that by looking at the symbols of your dreams, as they are presented to you, you can change your perceptions on your life, and thus, by being able to focus your attention on more positive, life-affirming things, your dreams will end up reflecting that shift in consciousness and such lucid acts as flying will arise naturally when you sleep.