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Postmodern Dreaming By Richard Wilkerson (www.dreamgate.com)

o Preamble

There has been a growing suspicion and critique of Reason and Rationality in the last century that was pre-figured with the Romantics, given its first technique of investigation with ideas of the unconscious and then fearfully brought into the mainstream culture with the advent of the atomic bomb. The cold war kept us in America believing it was only the Communist who were irrational and needed to be controlled and contained. By the end of the 1960's the rational policies of containment, mutually assured destruction and the cold war were exposed as paranoid delusions. The peace movement, grassroots coalition, novel social contacts, psychotherapies and ecologically minded living offered contact with a productive irrationality. Some felt we just matured in our ideas of what is rational, but others began seeing rationality itself as the culprit.

The pragmatic critique of the Modern World has continued in the America and produced fabulous responses in architecture (i.e. insides of building found on the outside), politics (i.e. grassroots movements) , law (i.e. extreme reform), therapy(i.e. contact with irrational), science (i.e. chaos theory) and alternative culture( i.e. cyberspace). In Europe, the critique has been more intellectual and has produced an even wide variety of social, philosophical, literary and political responses. Generally these critiques, responses and new productions are often called "Postmodern", "Postmodernity" and "Postmoderism", but I want to note that there is no one movement or set of ideas that contain the postmodern. Many would argue that it has nothing to do with the move from rational to irrational.

In this month's Postmodern Dreaming column I would like to give a quick general introduction to the postmodern and how it differs from the Modern and suggest what it might have to do with dreams and dreaming. Later articles will then wander organically, if not randomly, through the Postmodern ideas, reading them together with dreams and dreaming ideas in hopes of producing new concepts, ideas and practices that might enrich both. References and suggestions for other texts and articles are highly recommended for a more complete introduction.

o Forward into the Past

It has been of interest to me for some time that there are a great many parallels between the history of the interpretation of literature/poetry/texts and the history of the interpretation of dreams. Like dreams, early sacred texts were seen as sacred and messages from the gods. While this view continues even today, new streams formed and diverged. The author's intention, what the author meant to say, was seen as important. Others began to view the text separately from the author and saw the meaning resting in the reader's response. Others found the meaning by looking closely at the structure and context of the text, seeking both the archetypal and social forces at play. This sequence follows quite closely the ways of interpreting dreams.

By the 1960's it seemed that all the ways of interpreting a text had been played out and there was nothing much left to do but catagorize these elements. Then a post-modern revolution occurred. Some anticipated it coming. In dreaming Jung, and later James Hillman, began talking about something irrational in the dream image that needed to be encountered to avoid getting stuck in dead categories. They knew that only a break with old patterns offered new pathways. And they knew that archetypes were not just stereotypes. Encounters with the numinous core could strip away old neurosis and open the door to the unrealized. Had the postmodern revolution occurred first in Switzerland, it may have been very different.

In France psychoanalysis was slow to take hold, being seen as a German Project in the irrational. The French considered themselves as coming from the rational tradition of Rousseau. By 1940s and 1950 things began to shift. The Literary Left tended towards Marxism and the structuralist projects of Levi-Strauss in anthropology and Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis had taken shape. In 1968 the country (France) was temporarily shut down by a country wide walk-off of workers and students, backed by the French-Marxist who were at the time denied any political power. But within days the Marxist representatives had traded most of their political positions for government positions and the country was up and running, except for the intellectual Left who felt betrayed and now drifted away from Marxism. It was clear that even the most radical of political groups could be tamed and dominated by the seduction of power. Perhaps, it was thought, that organization itself if the culprit. In literature, philosophy, critical theory, linguistics, psychology, leftist politics and art a radical departure from the values of the past was in the making. This departure was so powerful that a lecture by Jacques Derrida in America in the 1960's lead to a widespread movement of American Deconstruction in literature, philosophy and law. But the intellectual aspects of the movement remained in America mostly in academic, and it wasn't until the advent of the Net that the ideas became more widely disseminated.

The implications for interpretation, of dreams and text, as well as politics, religion, recreation, sex, identity, psychology, play and other social practices are so strange and uncanny that Americans have barely begun to grasp their theoretical implications and significance. This may, as some suggest, be because we already act out so many of the postmodern paradigms anyway, even if without the intellectual baggage. We tend to *make* and *do* things in America. Again, the Internet may be *the* postmodern expression, with emphasis on dissemination, multiple identities, unrecoverable authors, multiple levels of meaning, social practices crossing boundaries and categories once thought to be in-violate, the championing of the particular, organic-order, non-hierarchical, non-human, fluid, linguistic, textual and graphical, and metamorphic.

How like the dream. And here I hope to read dreams through the lens created by postmodern writers. The purpose is not to break down the illusions of the past views in hopes of recovering some hidden truth. Rather the hope is more that these lenses (themselves fictions) we will use for temporary viewing, will move us towards fictions we find more significant, more meaningful, or even to those categories beyond meaning and significance that cannot be named. To move not towards the dream, as if it would finally open up and reveal its secrets, but with the dream, as a co-player in the creation of the improvisational universe that lives between reality and fiction.

I would recommend having one or more dreams at hand as you read through the history I have presented below on dreams and the postmodern. How does each approach change your relationship with the dream image? What does each approach offer or promise? What does each approach tell you about *what* you are interpreting when you do dreamwork? What does each approach say about who the author of the dream might be, and what the author's intentions are? Who is the reader? How much of these questions and answers are dependent on the language we are using?

o The History of the Interpretive Response

There is a correspondence, or at least, strong parallels between the history of literary interpretation and the interpretation of dreams.

The earliest writings include the recording of dreams and their interpretations in Sumerian cuneiform tablets. In these writings, it is assumed that the author of the dream is a god and the the dream is a message to the dreamer. The dreamer, like many a scribe, are seem merely as conduits of the divine or demonic.

And the study of the interpretation of sacred texts, hermeneutics (HERmenOOtiks) which originally referred to theories of biblical interpretations, later came to refer to the theory of interpretation in general. The center of hermeneutics is the belief that the text contains a stable meaning that can be determined and possibly recovered. This was first extended from religious texts to legal, historical, bibliographic and literary texts, but by the 19th Century had been extended to all works in the humanities and social sciences. From this emerged the idea of what is now called "Authorial Intention". Here, the meaning of the text has to do with the author's attempt to use commonly know language to produce a meaning. The recovery of the meaning is found in forming a hypothesis about the author's meaning and attempting to confirm or invalidate this by continual reference to the text.

In Psychoanalysis, the true meaning of the dream text was arrived at by a close reading as well. Results of Free association we added to the patients clinical material and historical background to discover the true meaning of the dream, the true unconscious intentions.

These ideas carried on into the middle of the 20th Century.

By the 1940's an 50's, this interpretive text approach was giving way to New Criticism. There was a shift from history and content to form. At the heart of this approach was the autonomous *image* in the text, independent of the author. The image, such as a poem, could now be analyzed at several levels, the particular image (or poetic line), the genre, or the place in literature in general. The old focus on the intentions of the author were seen now as guilty of committing the "intentional fallacy"(Wimsatt & Beardsley 1954) which sees the appeal to an author's designs as irrelevant to the autonomous structure of a text. Who can really know the author's intention? Perhaps even the author him/herself may not really understand the motives and intentions that went into text.

Conflicts and resolutions in the text were seen as the guiding path into the texts, with the focus on coherence and internal tension. Universal collective patterns were found, and as Kugler (1987) has noted, this literary style reflects more Jung's approach to dreams. The focus on image patterns, the move to deeper collective themes, the discovery of paradox and reconciliation, and the ultimate belief in the coherence and unity of the psyche were as important to Jung as the New Critics. Now all these style have been called into question. Not only authorial intention, but the texts unity, autonomy and ability to reveal some referential truth have been seriously questioned. The first new trend to emerge out of all this doubt was called Structuralism.

o Structuralism

Structuralism is a complex intellectual movement that became important in France about 1950, and included such works as that of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Literary Critic Roland Barthes and psychoanalyist Jacques Lacan. By the 1970's there influence was considerable in England and the United States. The roots of Structuralism are diverse, but usually traced to the Swiss linguist, Fredinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and his theory of language as based on a system of internal differences rather than in resemblances to objects in the material world.

Language, and thus the text and dreams made up of language, are seen as closed, culture bound systems. This new science of linguistics , Semiology, would study all of the signs that make up a culture, their nature, their laws. A key to understanding this systems approach is the idea of words or signs as having both a signifier and a signified. The signifier is the word itself, like "tree". The signifier is seen as arbitrary. I could have used arbre in French, dendro in Greek , silvus in Latin. Or "tree" in English might have not ended up as "tree" but rather "oglot" and we would have all gotten by just fine. And know when someone says "tree" it is "tree" because the way it sounds is *different* than "me", "free", "treat" and so on. Thus the material acoustic sound "tree" is unique because it is surrounded by a whole system of differences. Try describing any object-word in your room, a desk, a chair, a door, without referring to how it is different from another object and you will quickly see how difference plays an essential key.

Now each word or sign also points to something beyond itself. In normal usage we talk about what the word refers to, a particular tree in material reality. But as a sign, it also points to a concept, (as in the concept of "trees") and this is called by Saussure the "signifed". We can think of the signified as the concept or idea that a community of speakers associate with the sound or written word. And again, the relationship between the signified and the signifier is arbitrary as well. Saying "Tree" in one culture may refer to the concept of "Bringing me some fish!"

The point of all this was to constuct a view of language not tied to material objects. The rules are inherent in the structure of the parts. Just like a chess or checkers game, the pieces could all look very different, as long as the underlying structure of the game remained the same. The authors intention (the inventor of chess), the historical shapes of the pieces and the materials they are made up of take a back seat to the rules of the game.

o Structuralism at Work

By the early 1950's and 1960's people such as Roland Barths and Claude Levi-Strauss had extended Saussure's semiological approach to anthropology, literature and culture in general. In the new interpretive vision, the sign's ability to reflect or mirror nature and the human psyche gave way to the study of how the words and images work as a system of structural relations.

In 1949, Levi-Strauss reformulated Freud's unconscious into two parts, the subconscious and the unconscious. The Subconscious is much like Jung's personal unconscious, and Freud's unconscious, full of psychic substances, memories & imagos, and associations collected during the course of life. The Unconscious was (structurally) more like Carl Jung's Collective Unconscious, devoid of images and full of structural laws. Levi-Strauss saw the personal subsconsious like the personal words & pieces of life gathered, while the structural unconscious is what really creates the rules that the pieces play out in life.

By 1953, French psychotherapist Jacques Lacan adopts this idea of the unconscious as full of rules, processes and structural strategies and proposes a three part psychic system, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. "The object as such, attempting to be know" is the Real. We only experience this indirectly. The representations of the object constitute the Imaginary. The Symbolic is more structural and organizes representations into meaningful images. The self for Lacan is a linguistic construction. Language here is extended to mean any psychic capacity for representation. In the act of representation we can represent ourselves thus creating self awareness. However, this ability to represent divides us into a self that experiences and a self that represents what it experiences. The experiential self on one hand is only known because we can represent it, ("I"), but at the same time separate from those representations and excluded from the common world we all share through language/representations. This exclusion leads to an unconscious order of existence, which may be seen as all our unmediated experience.

The structuralist project focused on these representational realms and worked toward developing an objective science of interpretation, capable of revealing the symbolic structures underlying all narratives. But by the 1970's even the main proponents of the movement were beginning to questions the usefulness and desirability of extracting a collection of abstract rules in every narrative and text. Essentially, the text, once categorized and filed in the place of all the narratives, loses its uniqueness and its difference.

o Post-structuralism

A new movement was arising that was to shun the search for structural similarities between texts.

This post-structural movement found its root influences in such thinkers as Hegel, Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida. The key idea was a suspicion of any project of interpretation that tried to ground itself in an absolute, such as truth, reality, self, center, unity, origin and even author.

Whenever we have a set of rules or system, there is always a grand ole idea that stands outside of the structure and informs it, though the grand ole idea is always itself outside of explanation. Derrida point out in a seminal lecture (Derrida, 1966) an example of how these ultimate first principles work in removing themselves temporally, either ahead or behind of the system they explain. An example with dreams would be the theories that posit anterior causes, such as biochemistry, drives, family, trauma, childhood and day residue. All explanation in these systems refer to an event in the past that caused the dream, but is itself never questioned. Or the dream is posited as moving forward in time towards ultimates such as Self, Wholeness, Unity, Death and God. To work, the principles have to be removed and the status has to be different. These transcendental god-terms function as the lynch-pins for the entire Western theory of interpretation.

Derrida points out these are not grand eternal structures we assign to them, but linguistic by products of a naively representational view of language. These terms are... fictions. Useful, but none the less made up. There is no language that is literal, even science. It is all metaphorical. All language is ironic, both revealing and at the same time concealing.

Even dream interpretation systems that simple describe the dream images (such as versions of the Phenomenological approach), certain terms will be literalized and given a privileged status, and all the rest of the terms in the system will revolve around this term and refer to it. Notice in dream theory how these terms are privileged: wish, oedipus complex, archetypes, drives, phallus, desire, imagination, self, repression, compensation. One term is seen as the orgin, such as the Jungian Self, or in Freud, the drives.

Try raising the question of origins without thinking about the origin of *that* origin. It is next to impossible. "Origin" is now the transcendental term and all further thinking about it will refer to it, though it remains outside interpretation itself. Origin now explains everything but itself.

Now this dissatisfaction with central explanatory principles was not new to the Post-structuralists. Nietzsche had been working on this "god is dead" theme since the end of the last century. The post-structural addition extends this idea to language and begins to show how hidden in everyday language, this first principle still exists. As Gilles Deleuze said, all words point to Pharaoh, meaning that there is inherent in our language the implication of center to which it is all referring. And yet linguistically, we never reach that center. Instead there a hole in the center of the universe. Those with faith or a flair for gnostic or mystic contact can say the hole is not empty in the way an atheistic approach might have it, but this must always be either private experience and or belief. Shamanistic approaches try to bridge this gap by providing mediating and initiatory experiences for the sake of the seeker, but these generally lie outside of the realm of interpretative theory and are based on relationships of trust between shaman and initiate, or teacher and student, or guru and disciple.

The shift from structural to post-structural interpretation is that of seeing the text as a closed unity with decipherable meaning to viewing the text as irreducibly plural, swinging from literal to metaphorical significance(s) which can never be fixed to a single center, unity or meaning. When we are aware that the theories by which we see the world are just that, theories, then we can pick and choose among them. When we forget that they are theories, then they become more unconscious and begin to structure our views, fooling us and tell us that they are really real. As James Hillman has pointed out, dreams are so wonderful a teacher in this area, because during a dream we realize that we are in the image, the image is not in us.

Does this all sound a bit like Nietzsche and the death of god? It should as Derrida and the other post structural thinkers are all profound readers of Nietzsche. Not only is the idea of a center looked at with suspicion, but all structure is seen as founded on an untenable paradox found in all Western Metaphysics. And yet there is no call to despair. Though the origin cannot be recovered, the awareness of this leads to a particular kind of freedom, hat Derrida calls "freeplay"

Since these early days of Derrida, many thinkers made the poststructural shift, including Julia Kristeva & Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis, Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau in history, Jean Francois Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze in cultural-political critique and oodles of others in literary and aesthetic criticism. Though each has his/her own unique contribution, the was a general abandonment of explanation of meaning via first causes, origins and orders based on binary oppositions. The idea that there was even a single "me" or "you" was abandoned as well. The idea of a single text is replaced by the word "discourse" generally meaning that anything longer than a sentence erupts into history, breaks into contexts, decenters the subject and distributes a continual flow of meaning.

Even the concept of "man" or "Humanity" becomes a linguistic construct. We have no nature, or more properly, to speak of our Nature is to get caught up in the linguistic binary game of what is nurture, what is nature, and thus it has no meaning outside of this game. All universals that are posited as valid fall into this new paradox.

While this movement was highly involved in linguistic critiques of social and political practices, showing how language figures in the construction of the possibilities of meaning and reality, the larger cultural movement, postmodernism has extended itself into and beyond these initial linguistic and social critiques to include the signyfying practices of the culture at large. In literature, the writer may have the text become self conscious and have the text converse with the story itself. In architecture, what is usually seen only inside a building might be found on the outside. The general significance of the postmodern spills out into the streets and is as relevant there as with the avant-garde. (How like the Dream)

o Sign of the Times

Increasingly important in Postmodern thought is the Sign in Culture. The social order shifts from

productive to reproductive, and simulations and models of reality begin to replace what was once thought to be real. The differences between appearance and reality fade. Representation is replaced by presentation. Singularity of truth is replaced by plurality of viewpoint. Lyotard speaks about the grand narratives being replaced by more local accounts of reality. Just as the emphasis in structuralism moved the attention away from the concrete object to the objects sign, the postmodern continues to move the attention away from the signified (concept) to the signifier or the signifiying act. Like an improvisational jazz movement or a rock and roll concert, the meanings may swirl around the event, but the focus is on the instrumentality or acoustic materiality of the moment.

o Dreams and the Postmodern: A brief account to date

There have been a few attempts by dream theorists to move dreamwork and dreaming into the postmodern, but these are mostly scattered talks and texts. In 1989, Harry Hunt's book the Multiplicity of Dreams was published. In this close examination of the coginitive science of dreaming, Hunt revealed how bias of perspectives also bias the not only the interpretation of empirical results, but choice of the objects of study and the funding as well. Hunt also recognized the core of dreaming as "exterioriz(ing) the processes of cross-modal synesthetic translation and mutual reorganization that may constitute the core of all symbolic intelligence." (Hunt 1989 206).

Here the process of cross-modal synesthetic (hearing colors, tasting sounds) translation and mutual reorganization refers to a post-representational presentation in which meaning is generated in the freeplay of being, becoming and re-becoming. Bert States, in his book _the Rhetoric of Dreams_ explores Dreams and the Freudian Primary Process, (the dream-work of displacement, symbolization, condensation and so on) in literary terms of Irony and other metaphoric shifts brought about by language. Paul Kugler, a Jungian (post-jungian?) and Gordon Globus have both given presentations at the Association for the Study of Dreams on the postmodern and dreams. Kugler attempts to question the limits of dream theory as we move from the modern to the postmodern. Kugler asks of any dream interpretation:

Where is the dream being literal, and where is it being figurative? To what does the dream refer, the inner world, the outer world, or is it self-referential? Who is the author of the dream, biology, a wish, a desire, a deity, or is there no author? How do we develop a dream theory that is itself self conscious? That is, capable of carrying an awareness of its own figural aspects and assumptions? ( its own unconsciousness?). Gordon Globus has been attempting to construct a connectionists theory of mind/brain and apply this to dreaming as a way to move into viewing dreaming without getting caught up in representational thought. In his Neural Net theory, the brain flows, and in this flow of interactive influences there are valleys and hills that we settle for a few moments and experience one of many possible worlds. Dreaming is simply the flow of these neural nets without the constraints of outer stimulation. James Hillman has also attempted to view dreams without importing theories from the past and his _Dreams and the Underworld_ creates a bridge between the structural projects of Jung and the Postmodern psychoanalytic theories that remove the idea of the Self as a central organizing principle to open the individual to a specturm of archetypal influences which may play out on a larger cultural theatre than the therapist's couch.

However, the most explosive and creative venue for postmodern dreaming has been the Internet. Some ideas are more apparent than others. The ideas of the pre-commercial Net have influenced contemporary Late 90's Cyberspace, which include sharing of resources, the acceptance of multiple identities, the encouragement toward the non-familiar, the cooperative spirit of helping one another get these ideas up and out to the public, general trust of chaos and anarchy and relationships bonded by mutual interest rather than coercions. Though most of these concepts have collapsed under the proprietary territorializations of the commercial networks, they are the backdrop that have provided support to what I'm calling America's Postmodern Dreaming in Cyberspace. Here the multiple forms of trans categorical presentation erupt in ever new forms. Typically we catagorize them, dream art, dream work, dream sharing, dream science, lucid dreaming, shamanic dreaming, spiritual dreaming, journey dreaming, psychic dreaming, dream journals, dreams comments, dream inspired poetry and so on. But these dream eruptions generally defy any classification and break many boundaries. At one moment a dream is a journal entry, the next a discussion between people from around the world in a simulated virtual room. Later a picture emerges on a Web site and it is linked to the sleep research laboratories in Cincinnati. An individual following this path may be involved in the meaning of the dream, but they are also involved in the track of the dream, the medium of the text in a chat room, in an email, and on the Web, as a gif or jpeg. This, I feel, has been America's contribution to the Postmodern, a computer mediated anarchical network of discourse vibrating with the eruptions onto its virtual surface.

What seems to be missing is a reading together of the pragmatic American know-how with the Continental discourses on theory. Instead of using new ideas to explain the meaning of what we have done, the idea here is to use the ideas to further what has been done, to break through old concepts and restrictions of the real, to reach, as the surrealist call it, the Surreal.

In dreamwork online we have in many ways already achieved postmodern status. The identity of the player is always in flux and there is an emphasis on play itself as important. We often acknowledge the inability to establish the meaning of a dream for another subject, and thereby all agree from the start that all meanings are really our own. A dream might mean a life style change to one participant, while another may build a new community, another take on social injustice.

We are deeply aware in the late 20th Century of all the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity and chaos. To move into the postmodern is not to transcend this, nor to counteract it, nor even to find the eternal elements in it. Rather, we learn to swim in it, to wallow, to witness as if that is all there is, Samsara is Nirvana. Thus, this column plans no particular direction or schedule. At this moment it appears there is a postmodern attitude, but this may change. Deleuze suggests to 'develop actions, though and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction," and "to prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic." (Preface, Anti-Oedipus).

How like the dream.

-Richard Wilkerson, May 1997

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