[tmbchr]™

Not Just A Dream



If and when I have kids, I am going to do all kinds of weird experiments. Hopefully, most of them will prove to be harmless.

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the reality of dreams. I’ve been getting more and more in touch with them and with non-ordinary states of consciousness in general. But it has been a very complex and strenuous effort to make that connection. I wonder if there isn’t a way that parents could make such things not so very remote for their children.

When a child runs to their parent scared and crying because they had a nightmare, what’s the typical parental response? “Oh don’t worry, sweetie. It’s just a bad dream. It’s not real!” It seems that a great deal of early childhood parenting has to do with delineating borders of reality for the little ones. Such and such is real. Something else is not. It may not always be so overt though when you interact with a child. They may understand what is supposed to be seen as real and what is not simply by what you devote a lot of importance to - whether that importance is positive or negative.

So in this case, my experiment would go something like this: when a kid comes to you crying from a bad dream, how can you turn around their emotional state without discrediting the reality which they experienced? In fact, how can you deepen their experience of multiple modes of reality and provide for them a framework in which to integrate them all together, while still being able to function successfully within society at large? It seems like no small accomplishment, but it may very well be that it is accomplished through myriad small interactions you have with a developing consciousness. There is no such thing as “just a dream” in a spiritual world bursting with vibrant possibilities. How do we keep communion with these realities awake and integral throughout our whole lives?

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16 Reader Responses

  1. proons Says:
    August 26th, 2006 at 2:15 pm

    Check out:
    http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_004/malaya.htm
    http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_004/glor_issue4.htm

  2. martinxo Says:
    August 26th, 2006 at 2:37 pm

    I’ve tried to teach my five year old son the principles of lucid dreaming. The idea is he can call on Spiderman to help him out the next time he finds himself on the run from dream monsters.

  3. Ronin Says:
    August 26th, 2006 at 3:11 pm

    Oh that’s easy, just do what Susan does. When a child comes running scared about monsters, you take the fireplace poker and beat the shit outta the monsters…or hand the child a sword and let ‘em take care of it himself/herself. Pretty soon you’ll have quite a reputation (and not just as Death’s daughter), all the old monsters will be scared of you and you’ll only have to worry about the novice monsters.

    As to nightmares, give the child a dreamcatcher and tell him/her that whenever a nightmare happens just “imagine” the dreamcatcher in a dream. The dream catcher will protect you and give you powers. This has the upside of easily teaching the child about lucid dreaming, as well as giving a good “in” to Native American beliefs and culture.

    As you can see, I’ve thought about this myself. I think having kids would be great…if, that is, I ever have kids…

    Be Good,

    Ronin

  4. djk Says:
    August 26th, 2006 at 4:34 pm

    i think any suggestion that dreams are real would make a child afraid of sleep. i’m basing that on the fact that my childhood fears were completely irrational (weather, certain cartoons, a globe) and as a child i needed a reduction of fears, not an understanding of them.

    that reminds me…when i watched the movie “Dreamcatcher,” i don’t remember actually seeing any dreamcatchers. what did that title have to do with that movie? however, i did see a tiny dreamcatcher hanging off someone’s rearview mirror, tangled around some breast-flashing beads. there’s a message in there somewhere.

  5. Gary Says:
    August 26th, 2006 at 7:47 pm

    Tim,
    I am on my second child and share some of your aspirations for experimentation with this daughter v2.0. Daughter 1.0 was adopted so I couldn’t “do” any experiments on her during the ages that interest me the most, (3-5 years old for past life stuff, UFO’s amongst other things).

    But daughter 2.0 is only 10 months old and I am not sure how I will proceed but suffice to say it will be with extreme caution.

    So far the only experiment I have decided to try that is mostly harmless is one I saw Budd Hopkins do on young children in families where the family claims UFO abduction experiences have occurred.

    Basically Budd videotaped a pre-school aged child who was given 5 or 6 16×20inch images that were hand drawn in the same artistic style. The images were essentially headshots of various generic and pop culture people - a sales clerk, a police officer, spiderman, a woman, a young man, a fireman, a grandmother AND a typical Grey alien. During a filmed play session the cards were handed to the child stacked together with the alien image three or four deep in the stack and the child was asked to make up a story about each image. He had never seen the cards prior to this play session.

    The results were terrifying.

    Obviously, the child could have been influenced by the cultural depiction of aliens however, my child doesn’t watch TV and I can minimize or even completely eliminate such influence on her until I do the experiment. I can hardly wait…

  6. Ronin Says:
    August 27th, 2006 at 12:02 am

    djk,

    I caught that movie when it first came on tv, so its been a while, but I thought “dreamcatcher” referred to the fifth friend, the mentally handicapped guy, the one who ended up saving the world in the end…man, for the life of me I just can’t remember the character’s name…oh well…anyway, thats my thinking.

    Ronin

  7. Alec Says:
    August 27th, 2006 at 3:43 am

    Damnit, Gary, what were the “terrifying” results of the experiment? Don’t make me go look that one up.

  8. Alec Says:
    August 27th, 2006 at 4:22 am

    Tim, I don’t know how this is possible, but it’s an interesting question. Just keep in mind that, before a certain age, kids take things literally. They lack the capacity for abstract thought that (most) adults have. Hence why I’m generally opposed to the practice of teaching religion to youth. I’ve met far too many people who were tormented by guilt and anxiety as children because someone put notions of an omniscient god into their heads before they had the capacity to reckon with it.

    A normal child can’t be expected to comprehend the subtlety of various levels of reality, so you’ll need to dumb it down for them. At the end of the day, it might be that the best approach really is to divide their experience into “real” and “not real”. If they come to you later with a trembling desire to discuss The Great Chain of Being, then you will know it is time. But before then, I think they’ll only get hopelessly muddled.

  9. Rose Says:
    August 27th, 2006 at 9:12 am

    Then there is the approach of validating what children “see” but adults do not. Yes, the dream was real, here’s how to deal with it…. Hello, imaginary friend. Who’s the angel hanging out with you today? etc. I suspect that children “see” more than adults do. The question is whether you give them the language and the tools or you try and convince them of your reality.

  10. Alec Says:
    August 27th, 2006 at 4:15 pm

    Wouldn’t you agree that an important part of development is learning to distinguish between what is real and not real? Of course, most of us here probably consider this a gross oversimplification of the matter, a false dichotomy, if you will. Nevertheless, if we assume the existence of different levels of reality, surely we can make distinctions between them, e.g. gross/subtle, material/astral, etc. But attempting to explain such fine distinctions to a child would be misguided. They simply aren’t congnitively equipped to understand the matter the way you and I do.

    Imagine that your child has two boxes for everything they experience. One is labelled “Real” and the other “Not Real”. Which box are you going to put dreams in? Or, are you going to leave it on the floor?

  11. Jennifer Emick Says:
    August 27th, 2006 at 5:31 pm

    when a kid comes to you crying from a bad dream, how can you turn around their emotional state without discrediting the reality which they experienced?

    The first thing we do is try to lighten the fear factor by ridiculing or putting the ‘bad guys’ in a silly light, or changing an element into something silly. (example: a ninja-star throwing bad guy flings daisies) Then, we try to uncover thye source of the anxiety that caused the dream, which helps him or her to understand why the dream is occurring. My kids know why they have bad dreams, and now have a means of defusing them as well as the ability to identify the causes of the dream.

  12. Crystal Says:
    August 27th, 2006 at 11:28 pm

    It’s not a video game.

    There aren’t levels.

    There are realms.

  13. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 27th, 2006 at 11:55 pm

    Just keep in mind that, before a certain age, kids take things literally.

    Well I think the subconscious mind continues to do this throughout life actually…

    Hence why I’m generally opposed to the practice of teaching religion to youth.

    I actually think that’s the best time to do it because we do openly take these things literally as kids, and I tend to think more and more that the claims of religion really are literally true!

  14. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 28th, 2006 at 12:19 am

    Wouldn’t you agree that an important part of development is learning to distinguish between what is real and not real?

    No, I’m not sure I would agree with that. Or at least, I am not going to accept it as a given without proof in its ultimate utility. See:

    This also makes me wonder about dreams. To an individual who had never before experienced an analog form or or something that represented something else, what would they make of their dreams? For the modern mind, there is a distinction made between “real” and “unreal.” What happens during waking life is (more or less) real and what happens during dream life is not. Where exactly did we get this idea of “real” from though? To the primitive mind, was there such a thing as the real vs. the unreal?

    Perhaps real/unreal is a concept that arises as a result of representational/analog forms. It could be image or it could be language, or it could be somehow a deeper structure than that. I’m toying here with the simplest possible definition of real as: something you’ve experienced. By this criteria, a dream is as real as something that happens while you’re awake. Something “unreal” then is something which you haven’t experienced.

    http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/07/08/representation-reality/

    I’m not actually even sure anymore that you can prove to me that anything really is unreal… All you can “prove” is that something can’t be seen or can’t be heard. But you can’t even “prove” that. All you can do is say that you yourself (or your instruments) can’t see or hear whatever it is, and then I have to take your word for it. And if my experience differs from yours (ie, I can see and hear something) then we’re at an impasse. Culturally, we have deferred this impasse to recognize the experience of “experts” over ourselves to tell us what’s real and what’s not. Or at least what’s important and what’s not. And I’m really uncertain this is a healthy situation to be in.

  15. sketchmonkey Says:
    August 28th, 2006 at 10:36 am

    Tim, if you haven’t already read Julian Jaynes‘ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind push it up to the top of your ‘to read’ list… there is some really profound speculation regarding the ‘evolution’ of man’s conceptualization of what constitutes ‘reality’. Its a real shame that he never completed the follow-up volume to that book…

  16. jil Says:
    August 29th, 2006 at 2:02 pm

    wikipedia on Bicameral mind - interesting
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_%28psychology%29



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