Recently Dick Cavett, wrote on his New York Times blog:
“The question I can never find an answer to is the one that makes dreams so mysterious. When you watch a movie or read a story you don’t know what’s coming next. You’re surprised by what happens as it unfolds. You know that someone wrote the book or made the movie.
But who in hell is the author of the dream? How can it be anyone but you? But how can it be you if it’s all new to you, if you don’t know what’s coming? Do you write the dream, then hide it from yourself, forget it, and then “sit out front” and watch it? Everything in it is a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant. And, unlike a book or film, you can’t fast-forward to see how it comes out. So where does it come from? And who “wrote” it?”
I find Cavett’s questions very amusing because they are so to the point. When I had done dream work for several years, I began to realize that the me who dreams the dream is the me I don’t usually know I am. How’s that for a brain twister? Even so, this awareness is what I think Cavett is pointing to in his post.
To explain a bit, an image might be helpful (which is similar to the one Cavett paints above when he says, “Do you write the dream, then hide it from yourself, forget it, and then “sit out front” and watch it?”).
Here it goes: Imagine that you are sitting in front of a mirror and instead of seeing yourself in it, you see someone else staring back at you that you don’t recognize. Boy, that would give you a start, because every morning you’re used to seeing somebody you do recognize in the mirror – and that’s the point. Often you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror of a dream, or yourself as the dreamer, but it is “You”. I would even venture to say that the unrecognizable “You” can at times be even more powerful than “you” (the identity that you think you are).
The renown Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, incorporated this idea into his theory of “the Self”. He differentiated between “the ego” (one’s conscious identity) and what he termed “the Self” (the unconscious center of the human psyche). In Jungian theory the Self is both the center and the circumference of the psyche (that mysterious aspect sometimes referred to as “the mind” – not to be confused with the brain.) Often in dreams it is pictured as a circle or a ball – usually something round.
The famous Taoist, Lao-tze, originator of the Tao Te Ching, expressed a similar, if not the same, idea of the self having two polarities, when he wondered whether he was Lao-tze dreaming of a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming of Lao-tze.
So, dreamers, along with Dick Cavett, Lao-tze, and Carl Jung we take part in a common mystery of dreaming ourselves.