I wonder what the people who post in the Dream section think of this little primer:
http://www.thymos.com/tat/dreams.html#xxxxxx? Do many Jungians over react in interpreting dreams?
Hi Kafiri,
You sent me this chapter from Scaruffi's book a while back and it has had a very strong influence on my evolving dream theory (many thanks again for that!).
For instance, Scaruffi writes:
at the end of the 19th century the British neurologist John Hughlings Jackson realized that a loss of a brain function almost always results in the gain in another brain function. Typically what is gained is heightened sensations and emotions. Jackson, virtually a contemporary of Darwin, explained this phenomenon with the view that the brain's functions have different evolutionary ages: newer ones took over older ones, but the older ones are still there, we just don't normally need to use them as the newer ones are more powerful. When we lose one of the newer features, then the older features of the brain regain their importance. Jackson had the powerful intuition that a single process was responsible for a "balance" of brain states.
This is not unlike the most recent installment of my growing theory that I have called the "super-adaptive instinct" (I wrote about this in the Anima Work forum). Of course Jackson's notion is a more general and neurological one than my psychological adaptation of it. With the super-adaptive instinct, I am proposing that "newer" brain functions (here, specifically I am thinking of an "instinct" for ego-development) don't so much "take over" older ones in an eclipsing sense, but in a coordinating sense. So, the super-adaptive instinct is the coordinating instinct that organizes and utilizes the other, more archaic archetypal instincts (that Jung was mostly concerned with), putting them to use with the idea of adapting them to human social living (and the cognitive niche, our informational evolutionary environment).
It is therefore the super-adaptive instinct that is behind the "re-manufacture" of the ego when the ego's prevailing strategies have proved maladaptive (and a neurotic complex has formed). The super-adaptive instinct is what the alchemists called, Mercurius, the transmutational spirit of the Work. It is what "dissolves" the maladaptive ego (the Mercurial Bath). But also what drives it to find a more conscious and functional connection to the Self. Like Mercurius, it is the instinct behind all consciousness-making that wills the organism toward equilibrium/adaptivity with its environment.
Here is another bit from Scaruffi I found useful (and adopted):
There is growing consensus among neurobiologists that remembering and forgetting occur during dreams, that REM sleep is important for consolidating long-term memories
In the past I referred to this as "making dreams into mandalas" . . . which is a process of contributing to the automatic long-term memory consolidation. Such memories prove more useful to the organism when they are increasingly valued and connected with other memory-value constructs. This process of organization/consolidation is always going on unconsciously whether we are awake or asleep. But while awake, we have limited conscious input into it, as working memory is already heavily taxed with information streams.
I'm guessing that our dreams tried to reshuffle these memories into complexes that can then be variously valuated. By working with our dreams, we become part of this process, and when our dream work "clicks" and we start to see how our psychic process is put together, how it relates its various parts to one another, we get a rush of numinous valuation. We have found a piece of our personal mythology . . . and then what was once just a chaotic smattering of images becomes a mythic complex of valuated memory, and part of of core identity.
I also wrote about this more extensively not long ago in
Dream Work for Cognitive Health.
The following idea of Jouvet was especially meaningful to me as well:
Jouvet was also a pioneer of the theory that dreams have a function: to derive crucial action patterns from the genetic program of the individual. REM sleep provides a means to combine genetic instructions with experience. Sleep and dreaming are a survival strategy.
Jouvet thinks that a dream is the vehicle employed by an organism to cancel or archive the day's experiences on the basis of a genetic program. This explanation would also reconcile the dualism between hereditary and acquired features: how much of what we know is innate and how much is acquired by experience? In Jouvet’s scenario, an hereditary component is activated daily to decide how new data must be acquired.
In particular, Jouvet showed that psychological differences across individuals are maintained by a sort of continuous reprogramming that takes place during REM sleep. This process wipes out "certain aspects of what we have learned", while reinforcing the "unconscious reactions that are the basis of personality".
It was after reading this that I decided to talk about identity and the ego in terms of "strategies". This seems to be the most accurate and useful term for what is happening with "consciousness" . . . and it makes perfect evolutionary sense.
More on this:
The American neurobiologist Jonathan Winson expressed this concept in a more general way: dreams represent "practice sessions" in which animals (not only humans) refine their survival skills.
...
From this evidence, Winson deduced that REM sleep must be involved in survival-critical behavior. Early mammals had to perform all their "reasoning" on the spot ("on-line"). In particular they had to integrate new information (sensory data) with old information (memories) immediately to work out their strategies. Winson speculates that at some point in evolution brains invented a way to "postpone" processing sensory information by taking advantage of the hippocampus: REM sleep. Theta rhythm is the pace at which that ("off-line") processing is carried out. Instead of taking input from the sensory system, the brain takes input from memory. Instead of directing behavior, the brain inhibits movement. But the kind of processing during REM sleep is the same as during the waking state. Winson speculates that this off-line processing is merging new information with old memories to produre strategies for future behavior.
Theta rhythm disappeared in primates, but REM sleep remained as a fundamental process of brains. In humans, therefore, REM sleep, i.e., dreams corresponds to an off-line process of integration of old information with new information.
My intuitive disagreement (or simply revisioning) of Winson's idea holds that we should remember that survival strategies (adaptations to our evolutionary niche) for humans are not as simple as flight/fight or hunting/mating, etc. These are strategies for the information-rich environment we evolved to adapt to. I think that our strategies are thus more abstract and complicated . . . and that this demands the sense of self we call the ego as a kind of coherence of strategies, a hierarchy or interrelation of ego-strategies.
The instinct (super-adaptive instinct) behind the formation of this "non-local" ego consciousness is on one hand self-preserving (a survival instinct), but also highly flexible and of necessity "super-adaptive", because it has to deal with such a complex flux of abstract, interrelated strategies. The complexity of the informational environment.
This leap I disagree with:
Dreaming is an accidental feature that let us "see" some of the processing, although only some: a dream is not a story but a more or less blind processing of the day's experience.
Our observation of dreams may be "accidental", but a commitment to dream work proves that the dreaming process (including our reflection on it) is quite useful. I'm not certain how "intentioned" the dreaming process is by the Self (or whatever neuroscientists might prefer to call it). I don't think the Self is specifically proposing new strategies to replace old ones. I suspect it is closer to trying to find ways to fit old and new strategies together in potentially valuable ways. I don't think it is completely random. That is, I think there is some kind of intelligence to how such valuated relationships between memory complexes are proposed. But there is a little bit of a feeling of "trial and error" to it. That is, I don't think the Self has the One Answer proposed as a dream, or that it is a magic puzzle we have to solve in order to become enlightened.
I get the feeling it's more like a proposal: "How does this sound to you? Can we fit X to Y and Y to Z like so?" If the connection is reinforced with valuation, the the answer is "yes".
Dreams help eliminate useless memories. Therefore, according to Crick, we dream what is worth forgetting.
I understand what Crick is getting at, and I do think dreaming is long-term memory maintenance of a kind, but I disagree with the statement above.
There are a lot of other interesting things in this chapter, but I have to run for now. I'll just mention one thing worth chewing on.
Since we know animals (like dogs, for instance) dream/experience REM sleep, what can this tell us about the functioning of our own dreams? Re-strategizing or consolidating long-term memories could work pretty much the same way for us as for other dreaming animals. But this also suggested (if my theories proposed above and detailed elsewhere have any validity) that dreaming animals have something like an ego. That is, their waking consciousness doesn't do all of the memory consolidating they need in order to function adaptively . . . suggesting that they have a selective working memory structure much like we do . . . a focus (and therefore a compensating "unconscious"). Does this focus "cohere" into a sense of self? I don't know.
Thanks again, Kafiri!
-Matt