Don’t Ignore Your Dreams

There are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing, which is a theory I think is absolutely absurd. Because there's nothing random about dreams. You know, they're very, very structured and very, very complex. And they're not like snow on a television screen or static on a radio. Those things are complicated.

And then also I've seen so often that people have very coherent dreams that have a perfect narrative structure. Now they're fully developed in some sense, and so that just doesn't—I—that theory just doesn't go anywhere with me. I just can't see that as useful at all. So I'm more likely to take the phenomena seriously and say, well, there's something to dreams.

Well, you dream of the future and then you try to make it into a reality. That seems to be an important thing, you know? Or maybe you dream up a nightmare and try to make that into a reality, because people do that too if they're hellbent on revenge, for example, and full of hatred and resentment. I mean, that manifests itself in terrible fantasies. You know, those dreams—then people go act them out. These things are powerful, you know?

And whole nations can get caught up in collective dreams. That's what happened to the Nazis. That's what happened to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. It was absolutely remarkable, amazing, horrific, destructive spectacle. And the same thing happened in the Soviet Union. The same thing happened in China. It's like we have to take these things seriously, you know, and try to understand what's going on.

So Jung believed that the dream could contain more information than was yet articulated. You think artists do the same thing, you know? Like, people go to museums and they look at paintings—Renaissance paintings or modern paintings—and they don't exactly know why they're there. You know, I was in this room in New York, I don't remember which museum, but it was a room full of Renaissance art, you know? Great painters—the greatest painters. I thought maybe that room was worth a billion dollars or something outrageous, because there were like 20 paintings in there, you know? So priceless.

And the first thing is, well, why are those paintings worth so much? And why is there a museum in the biggest city in the world devoted to them? And why do people from all over the world come and look at them? What the hell are those people doing? One of them was of the Assumption of Mary, you know? Beautifully painted, absolutely glowing work of art. And there's like 20 people standing in front of it looking at it. And you think, what are those people up to? You know, they don't know. Why did they make a pilgrimage to New York to come and look at that painting?

It's not like they know why it's worth so much. I mean, I know there's a status element to it too, but that begs the question: why do those items become such high-status items? What is it about them that's so absolutely remarkable? Well, we're strange creatures. So I was trying to figure out, in part, well, where did the information that's in the dream come from? Because it has to come from somewhere.

You could think about it as a revelation, you know, because it's like it springs out of the void and it's new knowledge. And it's a revelation you didn't produce; it just appears. But that's—see, one of the things I want to do with this series is, like, I'm scientifically minded and I'm quite a rational person, and I like to have an explanation for things that's rational and empirical before I look for any other kind of explanation.

And I don't want to say that everything that's associated with divinity can be reduced in some manner to biology or to an evolutionary history or anything like that. But insofar as it's possible to do that reduction, I'm going to do that, and I'm going to leave the other phenomena floating in the air because they can't be pinned down. And in that category, I would put the category of mystical or religious experience, which we don't understand at all.

So artists observe one another; they observe people, and they represent what they see. They transmit the message of what they see to us, and they teach us to see. And we don't necessarily know what it is that we're learning from them, but we're learning something—or at least we're acting like we're learning something. We go to movies; we watch stories; we immerse ourselves in fiction constantly. That's an artistic production. And for many people, the world of the arts is a living world, and that's particularly true if you're a creative person.

And it's the creative artistic people that do move the knowledge of humanity forward, and they do that with their artistic productions first. They're on the edge, and the dancers do that, and the poets do that, and the visual artists do that, and the musicians do that. And we're not sure what they're doing—like we're not sure what musicians are doing. What the hell are they doing? Why do you like music?

You know, it gives you a deep ination of the significance of things, and no one questions it. You go to a concert; you're thrilled. It's a quasi-religious experience, particularly if the people really get themselves together and get the crowd moving, you know? There's something incredibly intense about it, but it makes no sense whatsoever. It's not an easy thing to understand.

Music is deeply patterned, and I think that has something to do with it because reality is patterned and deeply patterned in layers. And so, I think music is representing reality in some fundamental way and that we get into the sway of that and sort of participate in being, and that's part of what makes it such an uplifting experience. But we don't really know that's what we're doing; we just go do it.

And it's nourishing for people, right? I mean, young people in particular—lots of them live for music. It's where they derive all their meaning, their cultural identity—everything that's nourishing comes from their affiliation with their music, and it's part of their cultural identity. So that's an amazing thing.

The question still remains: where does the information in dreams come from? I think what it—the where it comes from is that we watch the patterns that everyone acts out. We've watched that forever, and we've got some representations of those patterns. That's part of our cultural history—that's what's embedded in stories, in fictional accounts of the story between good and evil, the bad guy and the good guy, and the romance.

You know, these are canonical patterns of being for people, and they deeply affect us because they represent what it is that we will act out in the world, and then we flesh that out with the individual information we have about ourselves and other people. And so it's like there's waves of behavioral patterns that manifest themselves in the crowd across time.

The great dramas are played on the crowd across time, and the artists watch that, and they get intimations of what that is. And they write it down, and they tell us, and then we're a little clearer about what we're up to. Now, like a great dramatist—like Shakespeare, let's say—we know that what he wrote is fiction. And then we say, well, fiction isn't true. But then you think, well, wait a minute, maybe it's true like numbers are true.

You know, numbers are an abstraction from the underlying reality, but no one in their right mind would really think numbers aren't true. You can even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things that they represent, right? Because the abstraction is so insanely powerful. Once you have mathematics, you're just deadly; you can move the world with mathematics.

And so it's not obvious that the abstraction is less real than the more concrete reality. And you take a work of fiction like Hamlet and you think, well, is that—it’s not true because it's fiction. But then you think, wait a minute, what kind of explanation is that? Like, maybe it's more true than nonfiction because it takes what the story that needs to be told about you and the story that needs to be told about you and you and you and abstracts that out and says, look, here's something that's a key part of the human experience as such, right?

So it's an abstraction from this underlying noisy substrate, and people are affected by it because they see that the thing that's represented is part of the pattern of their being. That's the right way to think about it. And then with these old stories, these ancient stories, it seems to me like that process has been occurring for thousands of years.

It's like we've watched ourselves and we extracted out some stories. We imitated each other, and we represented that in drama, and then we distilled the drama, and we got a representation of the distillation. And then we did it again. And at the end of that process that took God only knows how long—like, I think some of these stories, they've traced fairy tales back 10,000 years, some fairy tales in relatively unchanged form.

And it certainly seems to me that the archaeological evidence, for example, suggests that the really old stories that the Bible begins with are at least that old and likely embedded in a prehistory that's far older than that. You might think, well, how can you be so sure? And the answer to that, in part, is that cultures that don't change—like the ancient cultures, right? They didn't change as fast as they stayed the same—that's the answer.

So they keep their information moving generation to generation; that's how they stay the same. And so we know, again, in the archaeological record, there are records of rituals that have remained relatively unbroken for up to 20,000 years. It was discovered in caves in Japan that were set up for a particular kind of bear worship that was also characteristic of Western Europe. So these things can last for very long periods of time.

We're watching each other act in the world, and then the question is, well, how long have we been watching each other? And the answer to that, in some sense, is, well, as long as there have been creatures with nervous systems. And that's a long time; you know, that's some hundreds of millions of years, perhaps longer than that. We've been watching each other trying to figure out what we're up to across that entire span of time.

And some of that knowledge is built right into our bodies, which is why we can dance with each other, for example, right? Because understanding isn't just something that you have as an abstraction; it's something that you act out. You know, that's what children are doing when they're learning to rough-and-tumble play; they're learning to integrate their body with the body of someone else in a harmonious way—learning to cooperate and compete. And that's all instantiated right into their body.

It's not abstract knowledge. They don't know that they're doing that; they're just doing it. And so we can even use our body as a representational platform. So we've been studying each other for a long time, abstracting out what is it that we're up to. And that's—that's what is it we're up to. What should we be up to? That's even a more fundamental question.

If you're going to live in the world and you're going to do it properly, what does "properly" mean? And how is it that you might go about that? Well, it's the right question, right? It's what everyone wants to know. How do you live in the world? Not, what is the world made of? It's not the same question. How do you live in the world? It's the eternal question of human beings, and I guess we're the only species that has ever really asked that question, because all the other animals, they just go and do whatever they do. Not us; it's a question for us.