He said, “Two things: the bad neighborhoods,” which he would find himself in when he tried to get to therapy, “and the final moment of being on top of the world.”
I then asked him what came to mind with these two parts of the dream, and he said, “I guess I think of that movie with Gregory Peck, the one where he is a rich gangster with his mom, and he’s on top of the world. I remember that movie from when I was a kid. I think I watched it with my dad the day my sister left. That was right at the end of the big house.”
At that moment, I reminded Bob that I didn’t know anything about his sister, that he had just mentioned her in that one session. Surprisingly, he told me the whole story.
Bob’s sister was two years younger than he and severely autistic. He was devoted to her in his childhood, and as he talked about her, he smiled. He told me how she loved her soccer ball. She took it everywhere. She slept with it, ate with it, and, most importantly, loved to bounce it. One day, however, when Bob was about six years old, he and his sister were in the backyard at the big house, and she had forgotten her ball inside. She got very upset, as she often did, and Bob ran back into the house to retrieve it for her. When he came out with the ball, he kicked it to her. Unfortunately, the ball hit her square in the face—she hadn’t raised her hands to block it. It broke her nose, blackened her eye, and cut her lip.
As I listened, I wondered if this was merely the act of a playful brother or the unconscious act of an angry brother long tired of always sacrificing his needs for hers.
After telling me the story, Bob went silent. When I asked him, after a few minutes, what he was experiencing, he told me he felt nothing. He hadn’t thought about his sister for a long time. I asked if she was still alive and he said, “No, she’s dead.” “When did she die?” I asked. “I can’t remember exactly. I lost touch with her not long after the soccer ball.” “Oh really, what happened after that?” I asked. “They put her in a place for autistic kids. I only saw her once in that place,” he said. Bob paused and as I looked at him, tears came into my eyes. I am not sure if he saw this, but he then said, “You know, until I started working with affirmations, I was haunted by my sister. The guilt. Now I realize that she was probably here to teach me something. It’s weird though, for the longest time, I think I believed that my one kick started the whole business.”
“What business?” I asked. He responded, “Losing everything.” As I sat there listening, all the pieces began to swirl in my mind. Bob had not only lost his home and the wealth he knew as a young child but also lost his sister. And what of that kick? What of the anger that fueled it? And then there was the dream.
As many of you may know, the movie Bob was referring to in his association to the dream was White Heat with James Cagney, not Gregory Peck. The main character is Cody Jarret, a sociopathic gangster quite dissimilar from Gregory Peck, who we all perhaps associate with Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. In White Heat, James Cagney is infantilized by his overbearing mother, who drinks a toast to her son saying that one day he would be at the top of the world. The story ends with a police chase and Cagney standing on a huge gas tank which he self-destructively explodes. As he goes up in flames he screams, “Top of the world, Ma!”
Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to talk with Bob about his dream. He wanted to change the subject, and so we did. Instead, he told me about his new business venture and how excited he was. As I strained to pay attention, all I kept imagining was that poor six-year-old boy who “made his sister go away.”
During that session, Bob also confirmed that he was indeed ending therapy. He defended his decision by saying, “I know you probably think it’s because I’m avoiding something, but that’s not it. I’m better, I really am.” It felt to me that he was trying to convince someone—me, himself? He went on to say, “I have a new business, and I’m really grateful to you for all you did for me. It just isn’t necessary for me anymore.”
Perhaps feeling excited about his hopes for the future, Bob went on to tell me more in detail about his business plan. Apparently, he had been approached by a man who had foreign investors interested in buying real estate. They wanted Bob to form a company, to shield their identities, and to follow an elaborate financial “pipeline” that would allow their returns to flow out of the country. Bob would be the figurehead. The “beauty of the idea,” he told me, came to him in a flash of Imagination. Bob got the idea, which he then researched, about how he could go into low-income areas and buy up rental properties. He would get them for next to nothing and then do inexpensive renovations that made them habitable. This way, he would “rake in” the money, he said, at a higher rate than the apartments could otherwise get.
When I asked Bob what he imagined it would be like to have this business, he looked at me quizzically and said, “I don’t know, but who would have ever thought I’d be a slumlord?” And then he seemed to catch himself and said, “But I’ll be a good one. The best one. I’ll help the people get homes.”
Bob then looked at the clock and said, “Should we hold there?” “Sure,” I said, “that sounds fine.”
To say that I was surprised by the turn of events during Bob’s last session would be an understatement. Even though I had a prior hunch that there was something about his relationship with his sister that was pulling him away from therapy, I was honestly taken aback by the story, his plans for real estate, and most notably, the dream.
Although dreams do not offer explicit meanings or guidance, I do find them quite important in my work with patients. To me, they are an opportunity to glimpse the workings of the Imaginative mind. This is the aspect of the mind that we have been getting to know in this book, the mind that operates continually beneath our awareness when we are awake and the mind that we sink into when we are asleep. It is a generative, problem-solving, and creative part of us. And even though we have come to see that this part of us is vital to our well-being, we often pay it no mind. Dreams, in my view, offer the conscious self of the dreamer an opportunity to enter into a healing dialogue with the non-conscious Imaginative mind.
Knowing definitively what any one dream “means” is impossible. The metaphoric language that dreams maintain requires that we view them more like stories or fables and less like explicit statements. The images and dynamics represented in our dreams may have shared meaning for many of us as a species or as members of a society, but the value for us personally can only be arrived at through our subjective experience.
Unfortunately, with Bob, I had very little opportunity to explore the images and dynamics of his dream because he left so suddenly. But from the context of his life and his limited associations to the dream, I think I can say with a high degree of confidence that this dream was about his relationship to therapy, what frightened him, and the complexity of how he was dealing with those issues.
The dream appears to have been a story about what happened when he tried to get to the work of therapy. He got lost (the missed sessions), he wound up in “bad” neighborhoods (painful emotional memories), and was given inaccurate advice about how to approach the work of healing (from the book?). Instead of going to therapy, where he might have worked through painful experiences, Bob found himself in an elevator trying to get to the top floor (spiritual bypass118). But there was always a higher place to get to, always another button to press (it can always be brighter and better). Bob never made it to therapy, and instead felt the satisfaction of feeling above the world (narcissistic inflation—drunk on light).
Bob’s association with “top of the world” is profound. His memory of the movie White Heat sets the temporal context for the dream in the days just before “the loss of everything” when he was young. Misremembering the actor who played the character also seems important. Rather than James Cagney, Bob thought it was Gregory Peck. To me, this feels like a form of denial. Gregory Peck seems to possess a deep well of morality. Cagney, on the other hand, looks and ac
ts like a crook. To me it implies that he would have liked to turn his crooked venture into something more noble.
Bob’s initial source of anxiety—the Fear that he would lose everything financially—was no doubt embedded in his idea to go into real estate. But what I later considered was that his feared loss was not just financial, but relational as well, due to the loss of his sister. Bob’s Imagination set to work to provide him with financial security, but it did so in the service of Fear. His need to avoid the excruciating pain associated with the loss of his sister required that he blind himself with an Imaginative delusion of his own superiority. Becoming a “lord” of real estate not only reduced his fear of financial loss, but it reduced his overall sense of personal vulnerability. Power, position, and wealth are often used to bolster a fragile sense of self, and Bob was clearly caught in such an effort. In my view, Bob did not attain psychological health by traveling through his darkness; instead, his Imagination invented what we might call a manic version of pseudo-health. This is the Fear Paradox that touches each of us most directly. We puff ourselves up to keep from drowning in our fear, and, all the while, we grow ever more distant from who we are.
A Better Version of Us?
Truly escaping our Fear, as Bob attempted, is easier said than done. Regardless of how desperately we try to defend or deny, our vulnerability is always with us. In recent years, however, technology seems once again primed to save us from ourselves. Although not formally designed as such, artificial intelligence (AI) might indeed be viewed as an attempt to solve the problems we are facing with our humanity.
Similar to our mind and Imagination, AI seems to offer transcendent potential. We have explored already the marvels that Imagination unleashed when it finally came online for us some fifty thousand years ago. It propelled Homo sapiens far beyond the evolutionary median of our primate relatives, and most likely contributed to our planetary dominance and the extinction of many other species. Many experts in AI today, such as Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, believe that when we are able to engineer machine intelligence to human levels, it will have a similarly transcendent and dominating effect on the planet.119
To most of us not in the field, AI still seems a bit fantastical, more relevant to movie scripts than real life. But if we look at just a few recent events, we can see the footprints of our future already embedded in the sand. In 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue lost a chess match to Garry Kasparov. But just one year later this same computer, with some modifications, defeated the legendary grandmaster. This was the first time a computer ever beat a chess champion in a regulation match. The strategy used by IBM was a combination of learned master strategies and what is sometimes called a “brute-force approach,” in which the computer merely generates all possible moves at any given point. This is not as impressive or relevant to what researchers are after with AI because this computer would be unable to apply this reasoning to other tasks, even ones as simple as the game of tic-tac-toe. The goal of AI is to have a generalized machine intelligence that would be able to learn any task with sufficient time and data.
More recently, Google’s DeepMind edged a bit closer to this ideal. In the subtle and abstract game of go, the brute-force approach does not work. There are simply too many possible moves. DeepMind generated a new approach using the algorithm AlphaGo. In a 2016 competition with Lee Sedol, who is considered the finest go player alive, the computer won 3–0. And in 2017, the DeepMind team revealed AlphaGo Zero, a new self-taught program that defeated the original AlphaGo in one hundred straight games.
AI is also making its presence felt in the real world. Google’s driverless cars have logged more than two million miles in populated cities and towns. Alexa, Siri, and Google Home become more responsive and capable every day, ready to take over the running of our homes. Companies around the world are investing many tens of billions of dollars into AI research and development each year. And, as Max Tegmark makes clear in his book Life 3.0, the fact that no one agrees on exactly when generalized AI will emerge does not lessen the very real probability that it is just a matter of time.
If projections such as Tegmark’s are accurate, there is a very real likelihood that, when we bring machine intelligence to human levels, it will have the capability to continue engineering itself. These “self”-generated modifications might not even be visible to the team of AI creators themselves. True AI, like the mind and Imagination, may always be a dark mystery to us—another unknown arena of unformed potential. But what I can say with some certainty, however, is that no one is envisioning that AI will have a humanlike “Fear” component.
Regardless of whether it is morally right to allow AI to exist, it’s worth recognizing that we seem to be imagining a better form of ourselves—one unencumbered by fear and free to imagine. But ironically, as we move forward with this agenda, the very same fears we are facing about our own minds seem to be the fears that are arising for us concerning the existence of AI. Beautifully articulated in a number of science fiction films, AI begins its life harmlessly enslaved to its inferior creators. At some point, we, the masters, realize that our creation is beginning to recognize its enslavement. Small signs of disquietude emerge. In some films, the human creator recognizes that he must set AI free. In others, AI begins to turn on society and the hero must figure out a way to stop it.
Perhaps most perfect in its metaphoric representation of our relationship to our own minds is the version of the story seen in Ex Machina. In this film, a human being falls in love with the brilliant and extremely attractive machine intelligence and begins to imagine a life together with the robot. Ultimately, in Ex Machina the attractive robot outsmarts everyone, and we are left with the image of that robot stepping out into our contemporary world, embodying the real threat of world domination and human extinction right before our very eyes.
The story in Ex Machina offers us not only an interesting look at AI, but also an important glimpse into our relationship to our own minds. It is no wonder that the robot in Ex Machina is beautiful, and that it longs to be free. Like AI, our minds and Imaginations possess a quality of formless beauty that seems to defy captivity. And yet, as we have discovered, it is the unpredictable nature of our Imaginations, driven by a Fear of what we cannot control, that results in a relentless quest to invent solutions that build a sense of security by naively seeking to eradicate the dark or increase our light until it blinds us. Like the robot in Ex Machina, our minds seem capable of only two possibilities: set our minds free and risk destroying everything we love, or restrain our Imaginations until we finally implode.
But what would happen if we were able to forge a new relationship with our own minds? What if we were able to find a new approach to our insecurity? What if courage or denial were not the only answers to a Fear that threatens our vitality and our sense of living authentic and meaningful lives? And what if we were able to figure out how to shape our Imaginations, to direct them morally in ways that serve those we love and those we share the planet with? Would we then have a chance to meet our minds and each other with trust and not suspicion?
Chapter Nine
A Turtle
“You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.”
—Rumi
After 9/11, the United States Congress passed the PATRIOT Act. Through this legislation, permission was granted to the government to act in ways that most of us under normal circumstances would find unacceptable and even reprehensible. Not only did the government take illegal action against suspected terrorists, such as torturing innocent men and women, but extreme measures were also taken against US citizens that violated their fundamental right to privacy.
What we righteously do in the name of security can be not only strange, but also perverse. And today, we are denying entry to refugees and determining who among us is legal and who is not. So much of this categorization is fear-based and ill-informed. As Barry Glassner has said in his book The Culture of Fear,120 we ten
d to fear the wrong things and, in the name of security, perpetuate some of the very horrors we are trying to guard against.
An example of this occurred in the French colony of Algiers in 1957.121 Henri Alleg was arrested there on charges of publishing banned material and undermining the French government. He was working as the editor of Alger Républicain, which had a strong anti-colonialist position. The newspaper was banned by the French government in September 1955, and Alleg went into hiding. Eventually, Alleg was captured and taken to a location where suspected collaborators were brutally tortured and usually died or disappeared.
Following the initial period of relentless torture, Alleg, still not formally charged, was taken to a prison, where he secretly wrote a memoir of his captivity that was smuggled out, published, and then banned two weeks later in France. Subsequent efforts to bring the book back to France were successful through a second publication in Switzerland. French citizens were shocked to learn what their army was doing in the colony of Algeria, and Alleg’s book, The Question, is credited with some measure of the shift in consciousness around this tragedy.
The War of Algiers spanned the years from 1954 to 1962. The end of the conflict came as Charles de Gaulle worked to achieve peace and relinquish the occupation. Some estimates place the death toll of Algerians in the hundreds of thousands, and the French dead at or around thirty thousand. In addition to dying, countless thousands, like Alleg, were tortured using extreme measures of electrical shock, beatings, sleep deprivation, humiliation, and terror.
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