In One Ear, Out the Other
I’m re-reading Mary Watkins Invisible Guests and Waking Dreams and I’ve just launched a massive folly project – Collectivedreaming.org – which I’ve been wrestling with like Jacob and the angel.
So, this reflection is likely to say something that I say every single day one way or another, but maybe it will communicate it in some new way which will help those with ears to hear listen little. Or maybe its just me, once again, contending with a chip that has sat on my shoulder for far too long.
We must first feel how our culture raised us to try to abandon all possible awareness of the imaginal quality of our lives – to make us distrust and belittle the imaginal until the common paths to it grew over in a bramble of both confusion and neglect.
~ Mary Watkins, 1976 preface to Waking Dreams
Forgotten pathways feel more essential to me than ever right now.
There are practices our households and communities have engaged in that served us all in living a more reflective, considered and balanced life that modernity has discarded and abandoned. Social technologies that helped communities to hear and respect each other, that promoted awareness of our neighbors and the non-human species that are our relatives.
There are shared cosmological visions that whole human societies organized around, that promoted a collective comprehension of our interconnection, interdependence. But as modernity and white supremacy and colonization gathered steam it blocked off all routes to these alternate cosmologies, too threatening to their own organizing fantasy that white men are the only creatures made in God’s image, and that all should defer to their superiority, their taxonomies and classifications.
All other cosmologies, all other dreams and visions of how human beings should locate their right position on a spinning living planet were suppressed as women’s witchcraft, as demon worship, or as superstitious nonsense.
No other or contradictory wisdoms could possibly exist.
Why pay attention to our night dreams, our waking dreams, our visions and daydreams? They aren’t material. The imaginal isn’t real. Curiosity about such things won’t help you gain more freedom from your fears, your internalized acculturated limitations. They won’t help you imagine into what the world around you says is impossible.
And once enough people had forgotten the pathway to meaningful relationships with their dreaming functions, we could simply decide that dreams were in fact, meaningless. Boring even. Self-indulgent to consider them, or share them or make art from them, a waste of time to talk about them in circles that build compassionate collaborative communities.
Who needs that?
We couldn’t use dreaming to expand our ability to listen to the unfamiliar, to feel our way into life-circumstances that are novel to us. Why should we practice listening to views and images of the world that are contradictory to our own? It’s much easier for us to appropriate whatever bits and bobs we decide are useful from other landscapes, other regions. Take them, strip them down from their cultural, environmental context and plug them into our own zeitgeist and pretend they belonged to modernity from the beginning.
How skilled are you at wandering into the unknown, sitting patiently with discomfort examining and expanding your own personal theory of mind into theory of life, that accepts all ways of being as relatives and branches of one world tree?
It’s all so much easier to dismiss it all as make-believe, and make-believe never changes the real world, right?
Why should we “allow the fantasy beneath to run through us” and sit by the riverbank and watch what it carries with it downstream? Why should we consider the imaginal as an alive, living, unfolding process that moves from human to human from animal to animal from plant to earth to sky and back down again like rain?
Why should we consider our dreams, our autonomous imagination, that operates without our consent, control or permission, that is continuously engaged in making metaphors from the material world to convey something essential about the immaterial?
Why would we be curious about the images that serve as bridges between sleeping and waking, between possible and impossible, between the real and the not-yet-real, between the individual ego and the non-ego? What on earth can exist of any value that isn’t ego?!
There is no need to explore intermediary, transitory, liminal states that escape our sanctioned ways of knowing. Knowledge is what you receive from school, once you have banished your imaginary friends and allowed school yard bullies to rule over your days, when you have abandoned the pretend for the factual, the imaginal for the practical. Let’s call people who still make up stories what they are, shall we? Fools or liars.
But what if the dominance that we believe the ego should hold over our unruly imaginations is just a mirror of the dominance that colonizing cultures believe they are entitled to over lands and people’s that we choose not to understand or respect?
God forbid that there be aspects of our experience, of our own minds, that we cannot control or dominate or fit to our preferred daytime egoic agendas. It is just too unsettling to consider that dreams operate and move through us without our willfully constructing them or even granting permission. Who wants to notice that there are whole, massive, disobedient, feral parts of our own being that do not care at all what we prefer, what we like, what we approve of. Why on earth should we teach our egos to relax their grip, to surrender their dominion over what is real, important and necessary?
Jung writes somewhere about how young children experience dreams as pre-formed objects, magical winds that perhaps a giant has blown into their ears and that pass through their sleepy heads and out again on their way toward another sleeping ear. Watkins notes that the Greeks used to envision gods coming in through the keyhole, to stand at our bedsides waiting to travel with our souls on a fantastical adventure to show us things about the heavens and the earth.
How silly. We don’t need to spend time at the intersection between the worlds and watch what is passed back and forth. What good would that do?
We used to, (and other peoples who we have captured, enslaved, genocided, stolen from, impoverished and dominated still might) think that our dreams come from gods, or demons or from the animals and plants that live on the land we sleep on. But we are quite reasonable creatures by now, so no one should be particularly interested in such spaces where the symbolic and the real co-exist. We don’t need wisdom or knowledge passed forward from the ancestors, saints, or divine benefactors while we sleep. We don’t need to hold up our dreams next to each other to consider how they are interrelated, to see what wider patterns they might reveal together that can’t be detected one dream at a time.
And daydreams are just avoidant, escapist fantasies! They serve no purpose! We know that definitively because our teachers and bosses scold us when our attention wanders off toward the fantastical.
We already know exactly what is meaningful and what is nonsensical you see, we know how to control things and that is why everything is going so well.
It’s not like our collective imaginings have any real destructive or generative capacities. Only the real is real, correct?
The rest is all make-believe and child’s play and the stuff of art and inspiration and pretend. And we all know the imaginal can never impact the real.
Best to just let it all go in one ear and out the other and not waste too much time dwelling on things that no one else can see.
If you would like to explore the new collective dream archive I have been building out, with the encouragement of supportive colleagues and advisors who will eventually succeed in knocking the chip off my shoulder you are welcome to visit and poke around:
