Dreams

Today I dreamed that I was setting boundaries. I changed something in my life because I could no longer bear it. My dream provided me with an image for it that I could easily understand. Dreams have always fascinated me. I dream a lot, vividly, entire stories, I process situations, I dream of things I'd like to do but that are impossible in so-called reality.

I was at a conference a few years ago. There was a dream trauma researcher there who invited us to come together in the morning and explore collective dreaming. We associated images in order to penetrate a collective subconscious. It was rather playful, without any scientific pretensions. But it made us all think. Is there another reality that we can reach in this way? I find the idea exciting. More interesting than Freud's macho reduction of dreams to ancient images of sexuality. I always had a problem with Freud, that women were hysterical, that culture sublimated sexuality, that we all suffered from an Oedipus complex and so on. That's pretentious, indoctrinating, know-it-all, patriarchal, etc... Of course, that's very abbreviated now. C. G. Jung had more to say: the collective unconscious, a common visual language of human consciousness, an ocean of shared experience and wisdom. With Freud, everything seems to boil down to the fact that a therapist heals his patients because he knows the problems and puts them right in his patients. A bit like a mechanic fixing a car. The mechanic knows the bodywork and can fix the car if something has gone wrong 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 capable of becoming aware of itself, but is not reduced to it?