Dreams as first-tier experience

[Recently I decided to re-read past journals, starting from the most recent and working backward, in an on-going attempt to recapture things I may tend to forget. I haven’t gotten very far, but already, an interesting development.]

Saturday, August 4, 2018

3:20 a.m. Tired of lying in bed, not needing more sleep at the moment. But what to do? Watched a tedious Netflix movie last night and resented the time it took, though God knows I wasn’t doing anything constructive with it.

Am I getting depressed? I realize I have no idea what is going on around me politically or socially, and have no way to find out. Despair at long distance.

For the longest time, I have relied upon these conversations for a sense of purpose and of achievement. Absent them, nothing. That isn’t good.

An old pattern, an old problem. Doing as a way to validate being.

— Re-reading journal 114, I come to that dream of July 19 that had me so exultant, so exalted – only to bring me crushingly (the word I used) to earth when I realized I had been dreaming.

But – had you?

Well, that was the question, yes. Had I? Or was it a higher perception interpreted into a dream? It sure was a disappointment to realize that I was here, in 3D, rather than the dream’s reality being the reality I was in. Can I – should I – take it as encouragement that sort of backfired?

Instead of looking for the cause, look to the reality. You were so happy! You were free of so many hampering circumstances. Only, when you awoke, you tried to make 3D sense of it all, and of course could not, because symbolic reality does not translate into prosaic reality.

I lost something just then, a glimpse I got while still writing out your words.

Yes, just concentrate on it. “Symbolic” is the word, because it reminded you of John Anthony West writing on Symbolist Egypt.

Yes, it did, but that isn’t quite what I glimpsed and lost. It was a way to explain the relation—

Oh yes. First-tier, second-tier, third-tier experience.

That’s right. A dream may be considered to be a first-tier experience just as much as any 3D physical experience. And like any first-tier experience, it may have second-tier effects. That is, first there is what happens, but that is always of the moment and so – from the point of view of the ever-moving present moment – ephemeral. The effect that the first-tier event has, its second-tier effect upon your psyche, will always be what is important. A blow to the head may hurt; its second-tier effects (and we don’t mean any continuing physical trauma) will determine if it is important to you or not.

If I understand it rightly, this is (or may be) what Dion Fortune meant, in saying that modern phycology had gotten an idea of this reality, but was holding it from the wrong end of the stick. Psychology reads dreams as expressions of the psychic reality of an individual – as is undoubtedly true – but does not seem to suspect that the dream may be truer in a way than the 3D reality it illustrates.

No, slow down a little. Try again. You aren’t on the wrong track, but it needs more careful stating, and better for you to do it – and thus lock it into your understanding –than to be merely given it.

Well, this dream reassured me that my reality really exists, that I am not stuck here as it sometimes seems, that what I know can be experienced.

[The dream, as recorded Thursday, July 19, 2018, at 2:20 a.m.

[I was so exultant! But then –

[I slipped out of a church service; it was evening, I guess. I was aware of people watching me, or anyway they might be watching me, but I didn’t care. I set off for home. I was barefoot but that didn’t seem odd. I began walking, only I was slip-skipping, traveling a little above the trail, which led through the woods. I was so exultant: I was flying, and this time there could be no doubt about it. All the way home to what was Rita’s house, and I walked the last little way, up a small hill, carrying something in front of me (a chair?) that I had been carrying the whole time. When I entered the house, Matt and Sarah and the kids {i.e. my daughter and her family} were there, it was Christmas night and a couple of presents were still unopened.

[But then I realized that I was in the recliner on the first floor, in p.j.s and a robe.

[So crushingly disappointing. Yet still I suspect that it means something.]

But then one wakes up, and must decide, what does the dream mean? Is it only wish-fulfillment? Does it symbolize important non-3D realities? So I suppose it is a pioneering instinct. It is a reassurance from the future, and/or from a wider part of the present moment.

It is a first-tier fact, rather than, as it may appear to be, a reaction to 3D mental and/or physical events.

“Rather than”? Couldn’t it sometimes be, “in addition to”?

Perhaps. But the important point here is that a dream has its own reality and is not merely a symbol of something, just as an idea has its own reality and is not something you made up.

So when we react to our dreams –

You remember “When you wish upon a star.”

I do every so often. That was a magical event for me, for no particular 3D reason I ever saw.

It came because you would need it. Tell the story.

I was a boy, watching a Walt Disney TV show. I don’t remember what the show was about, but at the end, with little apparent connection, a man’s voice sang these magic words –

When you wish upon a star,

Makes no difference who you are.

When you wish upon a star

Your dreams come true.

When you wish upon a star,

Makes no difference who you are.

Anything your heart desires

Will come to you.

When you wish upon a star,

Makes no difference who you are,

When you wish upon a star

Your dreams – come – true.

It almost brings me to tears, so many years later, because I vividly remember how that song penetrated my core. I can’t remember if I felt exalted or reassured or what, but something in me clung to that message of desperately needed encouragement.

Disney as dream, you see. He organized and institutionalized a dream factory for just that reason. That was his function, to encourage, to cast out lifelines in a desperate time.

Well, God bless him. It certainly worked for me. And it reminds me of my friend Robert Clarke, saying how much cheerful optimistic American films helped in the depths of the English hard times of the 1930s and 1940s. This puts that in a different light.

So there is your “doing” for the morning.

Well, it helps, always. Thanks.