Today I dreamed that I was drawing a boundary. I changed something in my life because I could no longer go along with it. My dream gave me an image for this that I could easily understand. Dreams have always occupied me. I dream a lot, colorfully, whole stories; I work through situations, dream of things I would like to do but that are impossible in so-called reality.
A few years ago I was at a conference. There was a dream-and-trauma researcher there who invited us to come together in the mornings and explore collective dreaming. We associated images in order to penetrate a collective subconscious. It was more playful, without scientific pretensions. But it made us all think. Is there another reality we can reach this way? I find the thought exciting. More interesting than Freud’s macho reduction of dreams to ancient images of sexuality. I always had a problem with Freud: women were supposedly hysterical, culture sublimated sexuality, we all suffered from an Oedipus complex, and so on. That is presumptuous, indoctrinating, know-it-all, patriarchal, and so on… Of course, this is now very sharply abbreviated. C. G. Jung had more to say: the collective subconscious, a shared imagery of human consciousness, an ocean of shared experience and wisdom. With Freud, everything seems to come down to a therapist healing his patients because he knows the problems and puts them right in his patients. A little like a mechanic repairing a car. The mechanic knows its construction and can put the car right again when something has gone out of adjustment or something has broken.
Why is it so difficult for us to imagine that there is a consciousness in which we merely participate? A consciousness that is indeed capable of becoming conscious of itself, but is not reduced to that?
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