Dream Trip

Dream Trip

If we suppose that telling a story – our story, the story of ‘I’ – is a process that is important in the therapeutic healing, development and change process, then a reasonable question seems to be: how do we help clients to know of and tell their stories to themselves and  to us as therapists?

Put another way, how can we work with the aesthetic object, the symbol and container that creates itself in the telling of it?

I believe, as Bion claimed, that we dream both by day and by night. This is a process that is the nature of ourselves. As Shakespeare put it:

We are such stuff

 that dreams are made on,

And our little life is rounded with a sleep.

(Tempest, IV I, 156)

So, what is the dream and the dreaming process, a dream and the stuff of a dream?

‘The peculiar value of a dream, and the dream-level of an artwork, is that it cannot be invented by the self; it is a gift from the gods – or a curse’ (Meg Harris Williams, The Aesthetic Development: the Poetic spirit of Psychoanalysis p.135-6)

‘Dreams are the psyche’s attempt – with a varying level of aesthetic achievement – to symbolize it’s present emotional conflicts in order to reorientate itself towards external and internal reality’ (ibid p.136).

One might say that a dream is a narrative, a given narrative. There is linking (as Bion described it) between internal and external states, consciously and unconsciously. We can consciously think up a story about ourselves in the external world, for example ‘I am a teacher who came into teaching because…’ Then this story needs to match up with unconscious internal states, to link at boundaries (of internal/external; conscious unconscious; closeness/separation).

The dream though cannot be invented by a conscious sense of self. As such a self, we have to wait for the linking, the boundary area where the dream appears. This may appear as a revelation or reverie in a waking state, or a night dream in a sleeping state. The form is usually cinematic and symbolic. For example Murakmi’s description of his protagonists’ revelation of himself as a little boat, when the waters clear to reveal a great depth at the bottom of which lies a volcano (The Second Bakery Attack).

Such a story simply cannot just be made up: it’s necessary to be in a state (Bion would say reverie) which allows the possibility of such revelation. Then it is necessary to work on the possible meanings of it and how it might link with conscious, rational thought. Further, how the rational thoughts can be fed back to the boundary for absorption by dream processes.

Consciously – unfortunately or fortunately – we have the capacity to hold out against the dream process, though we are unable to stop it. It goes on whether we like it or not. And our actual situation as a person may be revealed to consciousness when, as with Murakami’s character, the waters clear and we realise the actual depth of what is happening and the strength of the volcanic forces involved.

We dream both by day and by night as Bion put it. There may now – in addition to this ‘aesthetic evidence’ – be some scientific evidence for this. I can’t quote the references for this at the moment because I haven’t got access to them currently (in Singapore). Essentially there are different states of brain activity both within sleep and in waking states. However, an underlying state has been observed in both waking and sleeping states and this may be the physical equivalence of dreaming, if such separations of the physical and the state of psychic operations is meaningful.

Quoting Murakami, from a book he wrote on the Tokyo underground gas attacks, in the context of the idea of giving up one’s ego to a guru:

 ‘If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can’t live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others.

Now a narrative is a story, not logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realise it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are the whole and you are the part. You are real and you are shadow. ‘Storyteller’ and at the same time ‘character’. It is through such multilayering of roles in our own stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world.’ (pp. 201-2 in translation Underground, quoted in Jay Rubin Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words p.244 quoting from Murakami’s Underground).

I might say that the multi-layering of stories is like Bion’s idea of linking containing states. We need stories for the individual, the family, society. In our western society it can be argued that our stories have become more fragmented and split off from each other. Though fairly obviously this is a broad generalisation as in a multi-cultural society there are many religious beliefs, along with scientific beliefs and literature and art continue to provide a powerful presence.

So, how can we help our clients tell their stories? How do we enter a state of reverie with our clients?  I think we have to start with our own processes as therapists. I’ll focus on that in my next piece.

Trikora beach Bintan

The Last of England

My aim in this blog is to write a series of 'occasional pieces' during our travels, with professional colleagues in mind.

This is the first one.

The Last of England

In Haruki Murakami’s story ‘The Second Bakery Attack’ the protagonist of the story and his wife are hungry in the night. There is no food in the refrigerator. But this is a special type of hunger. The protagonist experiences the special hunger in the form of a revelation, which occurs in a few seconds. I would call this a ‘reverie’. He presents it to the reader in the form of a ‘cinematic image’:

‘One, I am in a little boat, floating on a quiet sea. Two, I look down, and in the water I see the peak of a volcano thrusting up from the ocean floor. Three, the peak seems pretty close to the water’s surface, but just how close I cannot tell. Four, this is because the hypertransparency of the water interfers with the perception of distance.

‘This is a fairly accurate description of the image that arose in my mind during the two or three seconds between the time my wife said she refused to go to an all-night restaurant and I agreed with my ‘I guess not’. Not being Sigmund Freud, I was, of course, unable to analyse with any precision what this image signified, but I knew intuitively that it was a revelation.’ (p.38, The Elephant Vanishes, trans. GB 2001).

This little boat, and my leaving to travel, I associate with Ford Maddox Brown’s painting ‘The Last of England’ (Birmingham Art Gallery). The image focuses on a couple (in 1855) sitting on the open deck of a storm lashed boat on a choppy English channel with the white cliffs of Dover about to recede behind them.

I might describe this as the difficulty of leaving for an extended period, the loss and letting go of work, place and identity. I’ve jokingly thought of this as pre-holiday tension, or PHT. It’s something that Bion refers to as an experience of ‘catastrophic change,’ the fear that such change (any change) might well bring about the death of the sense of self; this sense of self. It’s what many of us fear I think, and many clients. Despite age and experience, it always surprises me that with the prospect of change and moving out of my comfort zone I can be gripped so powerfully with such fear. The volcano is perhaps not very far beneath the surface. There are plenty of them in the physical world of Indonesia, where we are going first, though not, hopefully, active on the island of Bintan.

Of course the positive and exciting side is the possibility of new experience. Sartre refers to the need to let go of the idea of having to create a substantial self. The future is always a choice of being-in-the world (ref. Betty Cannon, and I must have read that somewhere in Being and Nothingness during one of my several attempts to read it).

What we are is the ‘stuff that dreams are made on’ (The Tempest). That’s for my next ‘occasional piece’.

Later with Murakami’s ‘I’ protagonist, the sea waters cloud over (lose their transparency) again and he is less anxiously bobbing on the quiet waters.

Once I’m on the plane there then has to be a letting go – there’s nothing further one can do about what is being left behind.

Hopefully, when we take off, the clouds will form underneath and the volcano will be far below.