by Guy Murchie
DREAM ANALYSIS
The therapeutic function of the dream as the great resolver of mental problems has become widely accepted since psychology joined the sciences. When a young English mountaineer suffered a dangerous slip that left him breathless, though uninjured, he dreamed the next night he had a terrifying fall that almost killed him. And the night after that, he dreamed the same dream again, except that this time, in falling, he tried to clutch a jutting ledge but missed and crashed as before upon the rocks. On successive nights he kept repeating the nightmare, never quite catching the ledge until the sixth time, when he finally got a good hold on it and saved himself. And this succession of dreams, according to analysts, had the important therapeutic effect of giving the mountaineer not only insight into what was at stake should he slip again but repeated experience in coping with it. Indeed repetitive dreams of this sort are not uncommon among pilots, stunt men, fire fighters, soldiers, divers and in fact among all the many occupations that invite harrowing experiences.
Often dream characters seem to represent aspects of the dreamer's own character and thus dramatize a truth he or she couldn't realize unassisted. A young woman under psychiatric treatment for a sexual phobia had a nightmare about a hungry tiger loose in the next room and trying to break through the door to kill and eat her. The tiger of course personified her repressed eroticism. A week later she dreamed she was swimming in a pool with an ugly dog, her sex feelings no longer dangerous but still unpleasant. Next she had a dream of bicycling along a country road until she found a cow lying in the way and had to alight to walk around it, her sex having become not so much unpleasant as a nuisance. The following month she dreamed she was awakened by burglars in her garden and was frightened enough to scream for help. But the 'burglars" wasted no time explaining they were really only baggage men who had responded to her request to have her luggage taken to the station, thereby indicating that her sex feelings, though alarming at moments, were no longer a serious bother and were actually beginning to serve her in a useful way. By the end of her series of dreams, the, progression of symbolic figures from tiger to cow to man had signaled complete recovery from her fears, closely followed by her full acceptance of her sexuality - even on occasion, to her surprise, to the heights of delight!
That is the way dream symbols work. Often they seem trivial or as crassly simple as a punning advertisement that makes its point at some basic level below full consciousness. I heard of a man who dreamed he went through the ordeal of having the sole of his foot operated on to test his toughness: to see, according to his mental associations, if his soul (sole) was strong. And there was the character I met in 1957 in my own dream about a mental institution, who portrayed his irrationality by going into a "Julius Seizure"!
There is also the levitation dream that many people (including me) have repeatedly enjoyed, and which may express not only a distant memory, such as ancestral tree leaping, but perhaps a premonition of our future in zero-G space.' Dreams surely stem from a deeper well than ordinary consciousness and I am convinced that the dreamworld is no mere shadow of the waking world but rather something far more fundamental, universal and continuous, something creatures in all worlds must experience in their various ways, even though right now it remains unestablished whether any of them, except man, enjoys a waking consciousness as full and memory-packed as the kind we are daily familiar with.
Helen Keller's dreamworld naturally endowed her with senses she knew nowhere else, so it became supernormal for her. "I dream of sensations, colors, odors, ideas,' and things I cannot remember," she wrote at the age of seventy-two. "Sometimes a wonderful ... light reaches me in sleep - and what a flash of glory it is! In sleep I never grope but walk a crowded street freely. I see all the things that are in the subconscious mind of the race. When I awake I remember what I have dreamed."
William James too sensed the scope of this hidden realm and declared: "The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also."
HYPNOSIS
A state of mind not easily distinguishable from light sleeping is the hypnotic trance, which, as is becoming well known, can be induced in most people above the age of four by placing them in a relaxing environment and voicing some sort of a soothing monotonous patter such as "Relax. Close your eyes. Make yourself comfortable. You're feeling more rested than ever in your life. You're floating on a warm, soft cloud - sinking gently into a feathery bed - so soft, so drowsy, so comfortable ... You're getting sleepier all the time - drowsy, sleepy, comfy - deeper asleep, deeper ... deeper..."
The easiest hypnotic subjects are obliging, suggestible people who feel secure enough not to mind entrusting their minds to someone else. Such ones can be hypnotized even from a phonograph record of the patter, and it is not rare for certain types among them to learn to hypnotize themselves. Self-hypnosis in fact (despite its difficulties and limitations) is said to be a common accomplishment among the people of Bali and so widespread in many oriental lands that I have heard of people there who had apparently lived through a whole waking lifetime in something described as "a light hypnotic trance." In America, on the other hand, self-hypnosis is well enough established among psychologists that it is not only being researched in psychotherapy but some doctors are seriously trying it out as a technique for easing chronic pain.
Once asleep or in trance, of course a hypnotized subject of any sort may readily be guided into any reasonable present or future activity by positive suggestion, such as "Your right hand feels light and ready to rise. Now it's starting to come up - and up - and up ... " Or "Your lips are dry and you're getting thirsty. In five minutes you'll be so thirsty you'll wake up and go to the basin for a drink - a drink of cool, refreshing water ..."
In a recent series of tests at American University in Washington, D.C., with dozens of men and women, it was found further that when they were allowed to fall asleep naturally, they responded to these verbal suggestions almost exactly as much as when they were put into a hypnotic trance. And even when tested while fully awake, most of them responded to the same suggestions at least halfway. Although it is hard to know why some people (and animals) are so much more suggestible than others, it turns out that suggestibility is virtually universal. Which probably explains why a yawn, a titter or a whisper in a crowded room is so generally contagious.
Nevertheless the kind of suggestions that sink deep into the subconsciousness have proved to be the most potent ones of all. I mean that hypnotic suggestion has definitely been credited with having eliminated pain in major operations, removed warts, created blisters (when the subject was told he had touched a hot stove), raised and lowered skin temperature by as much as 7°F. and turned memory off and on like magic. An example of the last came when a German author wrote a novel about his concentration camp experiences but lost the manuscript several years later, then he discovered he had forgotten almost everything he had written. He was fortunate, however, in meeting a hypnotist for, under hypnosis, the novel came back to him so quickly and vividly he was able to dictate it all over again in a few weeks and completely recover his loss.
If hypnosis is a way of reaching into the subconscious mind, the free and spontaneous expression of ideas is another. And this was accidentally discovered as a therapeutic technique about 1880, when an Austrian neurologist named Josef Breuer, who had been unable to help a mentally ill woman by talking to her when she was under hypnosis, suddenly realized that, when she herself was permitted to talk, she "experienced an emotional catharsis" which progressively improved her. When young Sigmund Freud got wind of this development, he joined Breuer and, through further research, soon discovered that this new "free association" therapy not only did not require hypnotism but probably worked better without it - a key step in the launching of the new science of psychology and its precocious offshoot: psychiatry.
EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION
The advent at the same time of still another branch of psychology called parapsychology or psychic research, supported by such scientific pioneers as William James and Sir Oliver Lodge, the physicist, only added fascinating new evidence, not to say mystery, to the evolving knowledge of man's mind. Which wasn't made any more digestible by one researcher's designation of ESP (Extra Sensory Perception) as more accurately "Error Some Place."
We haven't space here to go into the vast and shadowy realms of occultism adequately, but I must mention that the last few years have evoked a considerably more respectful attitude toward them from established science - like the sober American Association for the Advancement of Science granting the Parapsychology Association an affiliate membership in 1969, the National Institute of Mental Health awarding grants for psychic research in 1973 and the New Scientist of Britain recently polling its readership to find that only 3 percent of 1500 science-minded respondents think ESP an impossibility. And even that 3 percent, if they concluded ESP is impossible because it remains unproven, took the untenable position that the nonexistence of proof amounts to the proof of nonexistence, a logical absurdity.
Among the more astonishing of supernatural phenomena investigated in modern history are the feats of Uri Geller, the young Israeli who apparently bends and breaks steel without touching it, makes the mercury in thermometers rise and fall at will and reads other people's minds with almost infallible accuracy. In 1972 he underwent a series of "cheatproof" experiments at Stanford Research Institute in California, amazing the scientists with such performances as making a balance inside a bell jar respond as though a physical force were applied to it and later correctly naming, eight times in eight tries, the numbers shown on a die shaken inside a closed metal box. It is reported that only scientists handled the box, none of whom knew what number the die showed until Geller each time made his prediction and the box was opened. If the scientists had been trained in detection of fraud, this might have been a convincing, if not a conclusive, demonstration (one way or another), but scientists rarely get interested in the details of deception and seem to have a significant skepticism as to the motives of magicians, presumably because the latter are masters of deception. So, even though magicians (honest ones of course) would logically have been the best judges of genuineness in such a critical performance, no qualified magician was even invited to be present, still less allowed to pass judgment on the reality of what happened. So Geller's standing as a phenomenal subject, to my present knowledge, remains unproven though he may actually be tapping (as some think) a kind of bioenergy (or even cosmic energy) that neither science nor he himself has yet learned to assess.
The case for the lie detector expert Cleve Backster is obviously somewhat different. His results do not depend on his own personal psychic powers so much as on sensitive galvanometers and polygraphs that can be worked by others, including any magicians who suspect him of trickery. At least that appears to be the reason Backster was taken with what may be called skeptical seriousness by many botanists and other scientists when he casually announced in 1969 that he had been testing plants and other cellular tissues for three years with his galvanometer and had discovered a mysterious electrical responsiveness in them apparently akin to the feelings and emotions of animals and humans, even including in some cases an evident telepathic sense that seemed undiminished by any barrier from a lead plate to a thousand miles of atmosphere around the convex solidity of Earth. The most obvious emotion revealed by plants, according to Backster, is "fear," which can be so severe they -"pass out" and become totally unresponsive, as if dead. This "fear" seems to be provoked mainly by threats (such as the approach of a dog) or injuries, including those inflicted on other organisms (like a shrimp being boiled alive in a saucepan) within the "territory" they consider theirs. Backster calls this amazing perception "primary" because, as he says, "we have found this same phenomenon in the ameba, the paramecium and ... in every kind of cell we have tested: fresh fruits and vegetables, mold cultures, yeasts, scrapings from the roof of the mouth of a human, blood samples, even spermatozoa."
While Backster's findings in plant sensitivity remain largely unconfirmed and therefore unacceptable to science as a whole, there is another kind of awareness, on the part of primitive animals as well as plants, that has been studied longer and more widely. It is the creature awareness of various large-scale conditions on Earth; most notably of future weather. Although still far from understood, it is dramatically portrayed in the accompanying graph showing the metabolic rates of potatoes and salamanders (in sealed airtight chambers) during a typical month in conjunction with outside barometric pressure. And it testifies that even the most ordinary organisms of two kingdoms can consistently predict the weather for their localities two days ahead of time!
Basic sensitivities at this level are not generally considered occult, but probably they should be, for similar phenomena have been remarked by many empathic biologists from Aristotle to Linnaeus to Darwin, and perhaps most of all by Luther Burbank, who became world famous as the plant wizard of California and who created more than 800 new strains and species of plants, ranging from the Shasta daisy to the spineless cactus, using a combination of unorthodox science and mystic flower communication he never fully explained. Significantly Burbank was brought up by a telepathic mother and admitted in 1923 in a magazine article: "I inherited my mother's ability and so did one of my sisters." So much so, in fact, that he seldom used the telephone to talk to sister Emma, generally relying on telepathy alone.
As for his plants, he not only hand-pollinated them with intuitive skill but would commune with them daily and intimately like a lover, alternately praising, entreating and tenderly soothing their apprehensions. To persuade one stubbornly prickly species of cactus to quit sprouting its needles, he would gaze on it every morning with loving eyes, whispering mentally, "You have nothing to fear. Relax and trust me. No longer will you need your defensive thorns. I am your friend for always. I love you and I will protect you ..."
He believed that the vegetable kingdom has so far evolved "more than twenty" senses, most of them naturally having to do with each plant's vital relations with things like the wind, rain, soil, and sunlight, rival neighbors and pollinating animals. And he is known to have confided to his close yogi friend, Paramahansa Yogananda, shortly before dying at the age of seventy-seven, that he felt sure all plants possessed minds of some sort, probably simpler than the human mind but in essence the same. He also increasingly saw "men as trees, walking" and seemed to consider this a sign of the evolving superorganism of Earth. Indeed Yogananda specifically remembered Burbank's unique philosophical summation: "I see humanity now as one vast plant, needing for its highest fulfillment only love."
UNIVERSALITY OF MIND
One could sum up mind as a universal aspect of life and energy, an aspect with a relationship to the body mystically similar to the wave's relationship to the particle. And, according to modern religious sources, mind also has a resonance relation to brain cells, which vibrate in response to spiritual energy under laws far beyond the scope of science. This doesn't mean that a few far-sighted scientists are not trying to bridge the gap - such as physicist David Finkeistein of Yeshiva University who for years has been seeking a measurable connection between particle physics, relativity and human consciousness, and recently said, "The way has been prepared to turn over the structure of present physics to consider space, time and mass as illusions in the same way temperature is ... a sensory illusion."
And there are pioneers like Jung who wrote in his Psychology and Religion: West and East, "My psychological experience has shown time and again that certain contents issue from a psyche more complete than consciousness" - presumably meaning intuition, dreams and the universal mind. Which he elucidated in Modern Man in Search of a Soul by adding that "spirit is the living body seen from within and the body the outer manifestation of the living spirit - the two being really one..."<
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All this is a way of saying that science offers us only one of the basic paths to truth and even that path includes such factors as the uncertainty principle, abstraction, polarity and transcendence. Our here-present finite world, in other words, with all its limitations, is profoundly mysterious, confirming Goethe's observation that "remarkable discoveries and great thoughts that bear fruit, do not lie within anyone's power. For they are exalted above all earthly influence." They even could be, in fact, emanations of a cosmic mindscape that permeates the universe - a soul hypostasis that dreams and dreams and somewhen dreams not just our planet but, were we capable of knowing it, all life in all worlds.
Part Three
THE SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE
Chapter 12
First Mystery: The Abstract Nature of the Universe
* * *
A THOUGHT that comes to me as I arc above our world, watching it pensively out of my mind's eye, is that, although Earth appears stationary, she is actually moving in many ways - swiftly, subtly, abstractly. Not only is her blue-flecked surface spinning around its axis at a quarter-mile a second but, as a whole, she is orbiting around the sun at 18 1/2 miles a second and the sun's entire system of planets is drifting through curved space toward the star Vega at 12 miles a second, while virtually all the stars we can see (including Vega and the sun) are swinging at 150 miles a second around the Milky Way. And even the Milky Way, a wheel of stars an unimaginable 100,000 lightyears in diameter, is speeding away from other galaxies at thousands of miles a second, depending on which one you compare it to, in what has been aptly described as the exploding universe.
All these relative motions of Earth of course convey man right along with them, but in an abstract way - without his feeling the effects in the slightest. For this is the world where objects, without much plausible reason, shrink with distance, where thrushes pull up worms to turn them into songs, where an acorn becomes a giant oak in a century because it was forgotten by a squirrel. In other words there is something otherworldly about our existence here - something more than matter, more than the body and mind we have been discussing - in short, something fundamentally and profoundly abstract. And I mention this aspect because it is not at all obvious, indeed scarcely noticed by the great majority of us as we go about our daily lives.
