Are Our Dream Characters Real or a Part of Ourselves?
It is difficult to talk about dreams characters and locales without falling into the oft-unexamined error of reductionism. We might ask, Is that my anima? Or, Was I really on another planet? We quickly settle on conclusions that may satisfy the mind, but strip the dream of its mystery and possibilities. I believe we need a different language and methodology, governed by a different worldview.
My copy of Thomas Kuhn’s classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is dog-eared and tattered from my frequent visits. Kuhn’s seminal vision undergirds my sensitivity to biased and reductionistic language, particularly when applied to the domains of dreams and non-physical reality.
Years ago, I embraced an approach to lucid dreaming and dream analysis based, in part, on the phenomenon of lucid dreaming. After all, lucid dreaming effectively overturned the assumption that dreamers were necessarily deficient of awareness and agency. But even back in the 70s, when I started writing about lucid dreaming (see Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light), I noticed that writers were already spiraling into categorical language that enshrined lucid dreaming but overlooked the presence of self-reflection and volition in “non-lucid” dreams. Fortunately, I discovered the work of Ernest Rossi, who in 1972 published a groundbreaking work, Dreams and the Growth of Personality.
Rossi’s co-creative dream paradigm (CDP) became the radical centerpiece of an approach to dreams that permits us to view dream images as indeterminate from the outset, and co-created through the interaction between the dreamer and the “intrusive novelty” — to use Montague Ullman’s words— of the emergent and generic dream content. This view of dream creation overturns the “fixed” view of dreams in favor of a dynamic, relational, real-time process.
The cool thing about the CDP is that it doesn’t take a position on the nature or origin of the dream content. You can “bring your own bottle” of theory to impose on the dream imagery, or you can derive your position from the bottom up, that is from the phenomenological “evidence.” I prefer the latter, although I frequently refer to Jungian theory and the chakra system to speculate broadly on the domain(s) of life to which the imagery seems to refer.
By remaining agnostic concerning the origin of the emergent content, one can entertain the possibility of a variety of “feeds” that coalesce into the “malleable interface” (Sparrow, 2013; Sparrow and Thurston, 2010) of what we call the dream—including personal memory, archetypal patterns, and yes…even “non-local” sources. In a paper I published in the International Journal of Dream Research in 2022, titled “Discerning the Ontology of Dream Characters from the Standpoint of Co-Creative Dream Theory,” I explored the possibility that dream characters may partake of independent agency.
As part of my paper, I described an encounter with a therapy client who had died a few years before.
Dream report · Frances
Aware that I am dreaming, I walk along a woodland path, feeling depressed. Each person I encounter seems flat, and the environment appears dull and lifeless. As I continue along the path, feeling increasingly isolated, a former client, who has since died, appears and greets me. Frances puts her arm around me and leads me to a place where we sit down and meditate for a few minutes. When I open my eyes, my mood has turned positive, and the world has transformed. I feel hopeful again, and the world is intensely colorful and luminous. I say goodbye to her and continue along the woodland path. The people around me seem different than before. They seem animated and aware of me, and they acknowledge me in passing.
One might ask, Was Frances a part of me, perhaps my “anima”? Or did Frances manifest soulfully in my dream to help lift me out of my depression? Or both? Significantly, a year prior to this dream, I received a phone call from her surviving husband. Since Frances had met and married her husband after we had terminated therapy, I had never met her partner. He seemed uneasy, and I wondered why he had called. He finally admitted that he felt he’d never fully known Frances, because she had kept things from him. Hoping to get to know her better, he decided to engage in the risky business of going through her private journals. He was disturbed to find numerous entries apparently revealing her attachment to me. This surprised me since I had never detected anything other than a close mutual respect between us.
Following the phone call, a series of dreams ensued, leading up to the above dream. In the dreams, Frances would appear and consistently express her love for me. In each dream, I knew she was dead, and urged her to move on. But she kept returning, more insistent that we should essentially become married in spirit. I persisted in saying “no,” and there was a pause in the dream series. Then she appeared one last time in the above dream. The support she offered me seemed to express a genuine love, as well as an acceptance of our need to continue our respective journeys apart.
Sometimes the evidence for dream character or dreamscape “independence” becomes compelling through repeated dreams. In the paper on dream character ontology, I reported three lucid dreams that occurred within a few months of each other that included details that were puzzling to me.
Lucid dream 1 · Another planet
In the first, I experienced myself on another planet with a woman whose adult daughter asked me to be her teacher. I explained that I was from another world, but she said that wasn’t a problem. I didn’t decline, but wasn’t sure how it would work. As I left them, I followed a man to an area from which I could presumably return to earth. On the way, I asked him, “How is it living here?” He said, “It’s fine. The sun never sets.” I found his answer startling, and upon awakening assumed his answer was metaphorical.
Lucid dream 2 · “52 moons”
A few weeks later, I dreamed lucidly that I was again visiting another world, and as I was preparing to return home, I asked another man in parting, “Do you know of earth?” He nodded. I then asked, “How far is it from here?” He replied, “52 moons.” I found that puzzling.
Lucid dream 3 · Three suns
Then, a few weeks later, I was again on another world, flying beside an old woman and a boy, who were my escorts. We landed atop a mountain where I could see three suns in the sky. Again, I was puzzled. All of this seemed obviously symbolic until I read that Proxima Centauri––the closest star to our solar system––has a planet, Proxima B, that is four light years from earth (52 lunar cycles equals four years), and has one side that always faces its sun! Further, if one were to stand on the surface of Proxima B, one would see three stars--Proxima Centauri and the binary star of Alpha Centauri.
Astronomers have speculated that Proxima B is probably uninhabitable. Regardless, it’s obvious that I did not travel to another planet in these three dreams, but instead experienced an internally constructed dream reality that may have drawn from multiple sources. While we might dismiss the experience as “not real,” or “only a dream,” the co-creative dream paradigm permits us to entertain a complex “both-and” view of dreamscapes and characters. Rather than seeing them as only subjective, or perhaps as “real,” we can instead view them as a synthesis of sources, fluctuating in their ontology through the course of the dream.
When Newton finally solved the problem of planetary motion and dispelled the ancient view that the planets reveal the movements of the gods, we were suddenly alone in a mechanistic universe (Tarnas, 1993). Being a religious man, Newton never intended to deprive humanity of an animated universe; but that was the effect of his brilliant discovery. Whenever we reduce the appearance of life to a mechanistic process devoid of mystery, we lose the dimension of relationship that we yearn for. By accepting that some of our dream visitors partake of nonlocal sources, or at least act “as if” they might be independent, we acknowledge that we may live in an animated universe, populated by beings whose nonphysical aspects are incorporated into the mutable imagery in our dreams. In conclusion, the co-creative paradigm allows for the possibility of partial dream character independence, while safeguarding us from the hazards of either-or thinking.
Copyright © Scott Sparrow, EdD. All Rights Reserved.
