APOCALYPSE: The Withdrawal of Gravity (objectively!)
This essay presents a new method of working with dreams, more relevant to the reality of our times. This method springs from the understanding that throughout history dream interpretation was and had to be based on a culture’s shared pre-reflective understanding of the logical structure of the reality in which it is embedded and from which dreams emerge in the first place. The background logical structure that has informed and stabilised Western culture since antiquity is the inner/outer distinction. In order for us to make sense of any dream, a shared understanding of the configuration of the inner/outer distinction was necessary. We could then teach our children that distinction to avoid madness as best we could, or we could initiate certain individuals (shamans for example) into becoming a conscious embodiment of the received reality structure. Shamans thus could perceive the connections between inner and outer aspects of reality. They could then bring healing to a culture which otherwise could easily begin to favour one or the other poles (usually the outer aspect of reality)….
In this essay, I describe a confrontation with an apocalyptic dream that, in its “choice” of language, refuted any interpretation that invoked the traditional inner/outer configuration of reality. The words presented in the dream resist any interpretation that valorises the private inner world of the dreamer. They forced me to approach the dream in terms of the cultural practice dominating our discourse around truth and reality, i.e., scientific discourse. I had to take a leap into the unknown in order to make sense of a dream which presented concepts that correspond to objective reality (outer only)—our reality!
The dream is suggesting an impossibility in terms of our reality and any dream method that invokes obsolete configurations of the inner/outer polarity cannot adequately address this impossibility. After all, as I said earlier, all dream methods historically had to make an initial appeal to the unquestioned configuration of reality within which we existed in order to make any sense of the culture’s dreams. My dream was “asking” me to make sense of a logical impossibility, given our reality whose logic is that of exteriority only. I had therefore to risk a very different approach to my dream — one that springs from the “unquestioned configuration of reality within which we exist today”, a reality that exclusively privileges exteriority, now called objective or scientific reality. [from the Preface]
