Dreams and the Real World – by Sergio Ocampo LMFT, SEP
As we touch a stone, a wall, a tree trunk, a flower, our connection to the world begins. The act of walking along a shady path, staring at a horizon with clouds slowly moving across connects us to our world. An ancestral world. A world old, known, familiar, well remembered.
Our relationship to our planet runs deeply in our inner consciousness. It is the stage upon which our waking reality rest. We are closely interlaced with its nature, feel, sense and presence. Without it, our thoughts are baseless, becoming just emotions without a place to lie.
There is another landscape of human experience: it is the realm of dreams that visit us from time to time in our sleep.
It is in our dreams where we extend our earthly reality, perhaps the most symbolic landscape of our humanity. This world, we could say, is the playground upon which anything is possible. It is familiar. It is unconscious yet present. It is a place where we are allowed to delve deeply into a state of expanded consciousness. There is where we experience the objects, emotions, people and places of our lives. It is where we also encounter images of things which are universal in nature, such as the sun, moon, rivers and mountains etc. These figures are known and familiar to us all. They are integral to our human experience and to our societies. They are where our social history lies. Not only ours but that all of those around us. It is the Social Unconscious.
The Social Unconscious is a world described first by Carl Jung, the Swiss Psychiatrist of the early 20th Century. It describes and experience which is a repository of our common, past and present history and knowledge.
When we suffer, the dream world will reflect it. When we love, its avenues will be softened. The same roads, hills, trees, houses, people and feelings in our waking life will be here. These places and things are not only placed there by us, but by all our fellow dreamers. It is a composite of all our daily lived experiences.
According to Jung, this collective landscape and its denizens are also being dreamt of by others. In other words, our personal experience, is deposited in the social unconscious. It can contain our home, neighborhood, pets, friends etc. Others in this dreamers can, and do visit, playing on our street, walking by our house and even meeting our friends and family.
It is a world where we go to continue our human, lived experience. Our aliveness does not stop when we stop to rest. It is continuous, like a stream. Each bend of its flow can either be in the conscious or the unconscious. To our living being, there is no difference. It represents existence. It represents our humanity.
Dreams Come into our Lives…
The inner world and all its many features not only absorb our daily lives, but also projects outward: What we feel and sense in our own dreams will be reflected in our outer world. Have you ever woken up and felt like you got up on the wrong side of the bed? Have there been days when everything seemed to fall into place perfectly?
One could say that this is just chance. That our environment, diet, and disposition bring about such experiences. Perhaps there is a deeper root. Perhaps it is that something inside us attracts certain experiences and people. But, really?
What if we had a dream the night before. A flustered, angering dream. You wake up feeling a slight undercurrent of frustration. You might not remember the dream but the feeling is inside you. As you begin your day, people may feel your discomfort, and perhaps react to it. You might not be aware of this, all you see is their reaction. You then think: “why are people so defensive today?”
Indeed, it is your dreams, your visits to the collective unconscious, which are coming into the physical world. They continue to play out as we are awake, and then continue into our sleep. It is a continuous stream. It is the river of life and experience. There is no difference. It is all the same.
Carl Jung believed that our consciousness, our psyche, lives inside and outside of us. In other words, our reality is a physical representation of our internal world and vice versa.
Our world, and the people who are attracted into it, come as if it were a theatre play. We come together in a perfect place to interact, live and love, to later dream of each other, wading in the stream of life.
No wonder William Shakespeare once wrote: “The whole world is a stage, and all men and women merely players…” To which I would add “The world and our dreams is a stage…”
Sergio Ocampo specializes in the use of Somatic Experiencing and EMDR to help his clients resolve past difficult and overwhelming experiences. His practice is located in Los Angeles, California.Copyright Sergio Ocampo – 2020