Identity And Dreams

To have a sense of personal existence distinct from others may be unique to human beings, and in large measure due to the learning of language. Jung and Neumann’s studies of the historical development of identity suggest, in an evolutionary sense, that having an ‘I’ is still a very newly acquired function. This makes it vulnerable. It is also noticeably something which develops during childhood and reaches different levels of maturity during adulthood. Although it is our central experience, it remains an enigma – a will o’ the wisp which loses itself in dreams and sleep, yet may be dominant and sure in waking.

In dreams, our sense of self – our ego, our personality or identity – is depicted by our own body, or sometimes simply by the sense of our own existence as an observer. In most dreams our ‘I’ goes through a series of experiences just as we do in waking life, seeing things through our physical eyes, touching with our hands, and so on. But occasionally we watch our own body and other people as if from a detached point of bodiless awareness. If we accept that dreams portray in images our conception of self, then dreams suggest that our identity largely depends upon having a body, its gender, health, quality, the social position we are born into, and our relationship with others. In fact we know that if a person loses their legs, becomes paralysed, loses childbearing ability or is made redundant, they face an identity crisis. But the bodiless experience of self shows the human possibility of sensing self as having separate existence from the biological processes, ones body, ones state of health, and social standing. In its most naked form, the ‘I’ may be simply a sense of its own existence, without body awareness. Dreams also show our sense of self, either in the body or naked of it, as surrounded by a community of beings and objects separate from the dreamer, and frequently with a will of their own.

If we place the dreamer in the centre of a circle and put all their dream characters, animals and objects around them; and if we transformed these objects and beings into the things they depicted, such as sexuality, thinking, will, emotions, intuition, social pressure, etc., we would see what a diverse mass of influences the ego stands in the middle of. It also becomes obvious that our ‘I’ sees these things as outside itself in nearly all dreams. Even its own internal urges to love or make love may be shown as external creatures it has a multitude of ways of relating to. If we take the word psyche to mean our sense of self, then in our dreams we often see our psyche at war with the sources of its own existence, and trying to find its way through a most extraordinary adventure – the adventure of consciousness. In this adventure – very like the Odyssey – the psyche meets all manner of creatures, people, demons, temptations. It travels into dark places, climbs to the heights of wondrous experience, discovers magical powers. One of the functions of dreams can therefore be thought to be that of aiding the survival of the psyche in facing the multitude of influences in life – and even in death.

Another aspect of self which is depicted so vividly in dreams is the way we create our own Heaven or Hell in life. When we realise each aspect of the dream, each emotion, each landscape and environment are materialisations of our own feeling states, we begin to see how we live in the midst of a world – thoughts, feelings, values, judgements, fears – largely of our own making. Whatever we think or feel, even in the depths of our being, becomes a material fact of experience in our dream. In the world of the psyche we are the creator, for we shape with the magical powers of the mind, with the streaming energy of sexuality, and with the colours of our emotions, whole worlds, and multitudes to fill them. From this experience we might say that our life is a dream.

This is not saying our life is an illusion or unreal, but that the great loves we feel, along with their jealousy and passion, the sense of our own success or failure, the struggle and pain we strive to survive, all emerge out of our feeling states. The feeling and mental states are our own private universe like a dream. They are our own private ‘dreams’ we colour our life with, weave an intense story about ourselves with, and live within and feel have enormous reality – and yet are as insubstantial as a thought. It is almost certainly this inner universe religion speaks of as heaven or hell. Finding some degree of direction, mastery or harmony within this world of our own being, is the great work of individuation or maturity.