Dream Life & Waking Life: Both are Creations of the Person

There is a growing appreciation for the variety of dream phenomena, such as the
creativity in dreams and their sometimes transpersonal aspects.  Older theories
that generally ignored such facts are being replaced by newer ones that attempt
to account for such phenomena.  Most recently, Gordon Globus, M.D., Professor
of Psychiatry and Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, has taken
a stab at integrating such perspec- tives as psychoanalysis, transpersonal
psychology, cognitive science, and phenomenological philosophy in a pleasantly
person- able statement of a view of dreams that readers of Perspective can live
with. 

That dreams are a creative experience is one of the main factors that he wishes
to explain.  The author rejects the notion, in existence before Freud made it
law, that dreams are merely rearrangements of past memory experiences. 
Instead, the author claims that dreams are created "de novo," meaning from
scratch.  In defending this position, he finds himself arguing that our waking
life is also an experience that we create, thus placing his work close at hand
to the metaphysical perspective that claims that we "create our own reality." 
Both realms are created "in the image" (meaning "in the imagination") of the
person, in the same way God has been said to create the world.  The symmetry
between the creative aspect of both dream existence and waking existence, and
the "divine" role given to the person, is pleasing both to the ancient Buddhist
and modern spiritual metaphysician. 

The question is, how does this modern, scientifically grounded theoretician
justify such a metaphysical basis to dreams and waking life?  He does so by
reference to both the leading edge theories of perceptual psychology and
certain philosophical traditions.  Perceptual psychology has long abandoned the
camera analogy to explain how we see things.  Plato's concept of the archetype,
the transpersonal, non-material "ideas" that govern the actual ideas and things
that we experience, has gained new favor in modern thinking about the
perceptual process.  Instead of theorizing that our perceptual mechanisms
"photograph" what is out there, modern work has forced the theory that we
already "know" or "suppose" what it is that we are trying to perceive, and then
we search and analyze data bits according to their significance and fit to what
we are attempting to "perceive."  Meaning and intention are more significant to
perception, in modern theory, than light waves and photo-sensitivity.  In other
words, the creative and subjective processes in perception are given more
central prominence, and the physics of perception are accorded more the status
of tools than primary determinants.  Similarly, the philosophy of science has
been arguing that facts, as such, do not exist; rather theories--in other
words, intent- ional approaches to creating meaning--are what determine which
data bits constitute facts, and determines whether or not the data bits will
even be noticed.       Perhaps such philosophical abstractions seem cloudy or
irrelevant, but the mechanistic, sensory-based, objective approach to
perception (whether in visual perception or scien- tific knowing) has been
undergoing radical changes.  Fans of the transpersonal dimension of life who
assume that the eye sees like a camera have an unnecessarily tough time trying
to justify as scientific their views on ESP.  Realizing how scientific and
philosophical views on perception have evolved makes ESP seem more natural than
supernatural.  Thus the author's work does us a great service.  It provides a
readable  treatise on how one can argue, on the basis of both scientific and
philosophical grounds, that dreams, not to mention our lives, are pregnant with
meaning (sometimes transpersonal meaning), and deserve our attention.

Source: Dream life, waking life: The human condition through dreams.  Published
by the State University of New York Press, 1987. 

