The Doorway of Dreams

I'm staring at a blank screen, my head swirling with thoughts, as always. These thoughts are like currents, driven by hidden forces, intermingling,  surging into mighty waves, sinking deep into whirlpools and vortices. These are what Patanjali calls the citta vrttis, "modifications of the mind", of which the yogis try hard to neutralise.

But I'm here at Starbucks Taipan today, not trying to quell these waves; instead, I'm observing them, attempting to discern patterns in their movements, speculating on the mechanics of their manifestation. Part of their energy is channelled here into these words--snapshots of my mind at this particular point in time. 

I am awake now, and the egoic Self is like the forces of wind and gravity, churning the waters of the mind, seeking an unattainable equilibrium. When we are asleep, the senses are turned off, allowing the ego not to react to them and giving the turbulence a chance to settle down. They diffuse into a pseudo-random restlessness, carried by the day's momentum. 

And this is my personal theory of dreaming: the cortex is merely attempting to read patterns in these residual mental movements. Just like the phenomenon of pareidolia, which is our tendency to impose familiar images on random patterns like cloud formations (animal shapes), burn marks on toast (image of Virgin Mary) or even the front of cars (smiling or scowling faces). 

Pareidolia is the mind's pattern-recognition ability, essential for navigating the environment, while seeking food and avoiding predators. Hyper-sensitised image recognition is just a small part of it; we also tend to find meaning and connections between unrelated events, a phenomenon which psychologists call apophenia. 

Well, dreams are simply pareidolia and apophenia, applied by the mind on mental static. Stories woven out of the interplay of virtual forms, generated by the pattern recognition instinct of the mind.  However, they are not random, for the residual energy is driven not only by the momentum of the day's thinking but also by our subconscious impulses, which are now freed from the suppression of the conscious mind. The Freudian and Jungian interpretations of dreams, if applied with care and subtlety, can be quite revealing of our hidden impulses. 

Just like how nature sculpts patterns into rocks, clumps water into clouds in the sky, churns oceans into waves, all in accordance with the laws of physics, the electrical impulses of neurons pulsate with their peculiar network dynamics, forming familiar recurrent patterns, symbolic images, which Carl Jung identified as archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.  

Dreams hint at the tendencies of the mind, which is the source of all our future actions and hence their prophetic nature. If meteorologists can forecast weather from the mere observation of clouds, so can a good psychoanalyst or analytical psychologist reveal a person's inner motivations and actions from the interpretation of his dreams.

The yogis have long understood the latent power of dreams as a tool to tackle one's samskaras--latent subtle impressions that, given the right moment, will manifest as thoughts or actions. Practices like Yoga Nidra and Tibetan Dream Yoga are specific techniques that allow the adept to observe these forces during sleep, thus allowing them to release them optimally.

Dreams are doorways to our subconscious, accessible to us every night. To walk those dreamscapes with awareness is to catch a glimpse into the architecture of our very souls. So dream on, and awaken each day with deeper insights into yourself.