Dream Workshop: The Royal Road to... Us

"In my dream, I found myself flying up above the field. I looked behind me and saw that I had wings. They were large and beautiful, and they fluttered rapidly. I had turned into a butterfly! It was such a feeling of freedom and joy, to be so carefree and fly around so lightly in any way I wished. Everything in this dream felt absolutely real in every way. Before long, I forgot that I was ever Chuang Tzu. I was simply the butterfly and nothing else."

Chuang Tzu's Butterfly Dream

Chuang Tzu's awakening from his "butterfly dream" has driven himself into a sea of confusion as he ponders on the distinction of being a butterfly or being Chuang Tzu himself. The foundations of reality are so fragile, so brittle, that a mere dream can keep us wondering whether what we see or hear or smell or touch is real or not, whether all this is not also a dream.

Dreams have been puzzling us since the first human beings slept. Hence, prophesies, the predictions about the future, superstitions, all these are but the interpretations of dreams passed onto us since the dawn of day. It was not until Freud, that he started to describe dreams as the "Royal Road to the Unconscious", that instead of understanding more about the world, or the future, we understand more about ourselves if we take a good look at our dreams, the latent content, and the manifest content, our unconscious desires, or our unresolved past, all bubbles up in the vulnerable state of mind in our sleep. Some dreams are bizarre, others terrifying, and we call them nightmares. But some of our dreaming experiences are as real as our waking life's experiences, and some of them can evoke intense emotional responses, can bring lots of meaning to us and they can be remembered for the rest of our lives.

As Psychology students, without much experience with dream interpretation or analysis, what we initially thought when we entered the workshop is that we expect a lot of tips on how to interpret symbols or dream images in our dreams. What does flying mean? What does a tree mean? Is it a symbol or a manifestation of my desire for a penis? And so, with great curiosity, some of us skipped a few of our last classes of this semester in order to plant ourselves at the front seat and watch it all roll, in the workshop called "Dream, Radiant Children of the Night: Understanding in Psychotherapy and Life" (ps: Sorry Dr Anasuya and Miss Bawany).

Miss Evon was delivering a welcome speech to the participants

Dr. Erik Craig, a very warm and humble existentialist

This workshop was conducted by Dr. Erik Craig (a licensed Psychologist from New Mexico), organized by our lecturer, Miss Evone and her assistant. After a brief introduction about Mr Erik Craig, the workshop started with a sharing session about our dreaming experiences, and the most common dreaming experiences that we shared is our flying experiences. The most astonishing part is that our dreaming experiences might share a common theme (such as flying) but every single one of them is subjectively different and each of us experience a dream in diversely different ways: some can control the speed at which we fly, some can't; some float instead of fly; others fly at a high altitude etc. 

Let the journey begins

But much to our surprise, Dr Erik Craig revealed that there is no systematic guidelines to analyze one's dream as it's a very subjective and wonderful personal experience. Instead, as psychotherapists, or counselors, or psychologists, we should follow our clients not by interpreting the dreams and then throwing back the analysis to them, but joining the clients along with a journey of collaborative exploration, and that follows the clients instead of stringing along the client. After all, it is the clients themselves who are the expert of their lives, we are only there to help them when their view of life is muddled by obstacles, and so too with dream approaches, as we are there not to provide systematic answers but to help them make sense of their own dreams, to provide some tips on how they should continue on their journey towards understanding, and letting them integrate this understanding into their waking lives.

Participants were enjoying the refreshment

Dr Erik encourages us not to be bounded within the steps in understanding others' dreams during the session. When Dr Erik was once approached by his client and the client asked Dr Erik which psychotherapy approach is he using or following in order to understand his clients' dream,  Dr Erik calmly replied that he was neither following Freud nor Jung, but that he is (to quote his words) "following the client". This is a clear example of how pragmatism is fully utilized to wonderful effects, because instead of being stuck in any dogma or rigidly applying theories in an authoritarian manner, one should instead understand the client as a being, a being with a past, living in the present, moving towards the future. Theories are seldom perfect, and most theories will find a loophole, where exceptions are made, or being made. So, follow the client, let her/him guide us, as we gently support and guide them, pulling them up when they are down.

Dr. Erik Craig was demonstrating the Free-Association technique with one participant.

Joining this workshop makes us appreciate more about my dream, and makes us realize that there is more to our dreams than just unresolved fears and desires. Dr Erik thought us that there are four ways in understanding and interpreting dreams:

1) Remembering Dreams
2) Exploring Dreams
3) Understanding Dreams
4) Integrating Dreams

1) Remembering Dream

First, you need to remember your dream. 
Yeah, this is the most important part, because you know... how can we understand our dreams if we can't even remember them? Our dreams are quite easy to forget because the first few moments after we wake up, we are still in an unclear state of mind, and so, if we didn't make an effort to remember or record our dreams during those few moments, the dream is likely to vanish from our memories, leaving only a few traces of it.

Dream Journalism
So, do prepare a journal or a log beside your bed or under your pillow, and every time you woke up from a dream, write down any vivid details of your dream. Jot it down with the date of the night of the dream. This technique is used in many other behavioral therapies or cognitive therapies as we jot down our behaviors or thoughts that is of our concern. There is no need to describe the dream in its entirety, just a few fragments that will result in accurate remembering will do.



If you want to remember your dream, write on your note that you are going to remember what you dream and then go to sleep. You have to be interested about yourself and your dream and this also increases chance of remembering your dream.







2) Exploring Dream

Second, think about your dream and explore the content of your dream through multiple perspectives. For example, if you dreamed of a pink elephant, describe about the pink elephant, what does it look like, or what is your feeling associated with dreaming about the pink elephant.

There are four common approaches in exploring our dream world, which you can try as described below:


- Free Association (Frued & Jung)




Think about your dream (such as a pink elephant), and SAY WHATEVER COMES TO YOUR MIND, then try to associate it with other words, memories, or images.

- Imaginative Method (Jung)

Imagine the happening scene in your dream and also imagine what will happen in your dream, what comes next? It might lead you somewhere.










- Dramatic Method (Perls)

Adopt yourself into any thing or roles that appeared in your dream. For instance, if you dreamed of being chased by a tiger. Put yourself into the perspective as a person who is being chased by a tiger and also try to put yourself as a tiger who is chasing the person. Try to act it out with different roles respectively and you might get more than you ask.




- Descriptive Method (Boss)

Definition: What is an X?
Description: What are X's like?
Differentiation: How are X's different from Y's?
Specification: What was this X in your dream like?
Response / Relation: How do you feel about X's? Does it remind you anything in your waking life?

For example, if you dreamed about a snake trying to consume you, try to question yourself, what is a snake, or what are snakes like in general, or what is this snake trying to accomplish through consuming you. Questioning yourself in these few ways without engaging in intellectualizing it can let us gain more clarity and insight about the dream.


3) Understanding Dream

After exploring your dream, if you can somehow grasp the overview of your dream, then try to ask yourself about the dream and its relationship to your waking life. Is there any significance about the dream?  How does this in anyway relate to your waking life? Is it about anything specific in your life (e.g. relationships with others, obstacles, burdens, concerns etc.)?

One thing to note, don't just simply use any methods, or advice from books, or rigid methods to understand dreams, and instead, try to understand it through life's perspective, because dreams are a part of life, it is an extension of it, and more often than not, to understand dreams is to understand life itself, as we move on to integrate the dreams into our lives (as described in the next stage).


4) Integrating Dream

You can integrate the dream into your real life, perhaps it is a sign about your real life difficulties, our dreams about a potential future, or even conflicts within yourself... (I am not going to predict what it means to you, even the psychotherapist might only facilitate your understanding process without imposing any interpretation or meaning to your dream, you are going to figure it out because it's your dream. :D )


So, after understanding our dreams, what are we to do with this knowledge? Well, we can integrate it into our lives. Take for example, if I myself understand this dream to be somewhat related to my relationship with my family, I can use this understanding to try to mend my relationship with them, or to appreciate these ties of blood, or to create more intimacy, etc. 

Some of you might recall dreams that were joyful, exciting, and even funny; while some recall dreams that were frightening, horrifying, emotionally intense, or saddening. But, dreams, notwithstanding the fact that they are conjured up by us, is still a part of us, and is as real as any experiences we have in our waking life. We don't dream for nothing: dreams tell us who we are and sometimes it gives us more than we can ask for.

Participants were taking photos with Dr Erik Craig

Our group photo with Miss Evone and Dr Erik Craig

This is a wonderful workshop in that it provides us not only with some ways to further understand our knowledge of our dreams, but also, it breaks our stereotyped expectations of how we viewed dream analysis. Dreams are not just about mandalas, or archetypes, or sex. Dreams are not just about death or monsters. Dreams are us, and that's why it is valuable, because in the safe confines of sleep, with all its privacy, and its personal nature, we understand life, and we understand ourselves more. Dreams are not just the royal road to the unconscious, dreams are the road to us, our being. It is our past, our present, and our future.

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I hope you enjoy reading this write up about a wonderful workshop that we had attended last Friday (21 November 2014). We have a good time, and we really appreciate the effort that Dr Erik had put into this workshop and how it ends on a satisfying note.

Tender is the night, that we shall dream and dream on. And fragile are the dreams that we seldom remember them, that they shall vanish into thin air. From us we come, and for us they shall return, unconsciously, unbeknownst to us. Rare are those that we shall remember for the rest of our lives, but precious are those that we shall carry on with us, moving us, and pushing us forward as we plunge on into our lives. So, we shall end this article with the short saying by Dr Erik Craig, and in all its simplicity, in all its elegance, it is moving to us: So, farewell, until next time, and "Sweet dreams".

Book Review: "Stoner"

I love books. I love the touch of my fingers upon paper, sometimes coarse, sometimes fine, and I love the smell of ink and bleached paper as I flipped through the pages, which produces a scraping sound whenever my nails scratched through the surface of each page. Every book that I read will be yellowed on one side, and occasionally, the spine will be creased and folded through countless hours of opening it, creating lines upon it; and I hated it when it happens, because I liked my books in perfect condition, even after I have despoiled the secrets within. Ever since I was young, I have acquired the habit of reading, and while many others will prefer to spend their time to expend their physical resources and to breath in the air of the natural world, I crouch in a corner of the room, planted myself on a sofa, shifting into weird positions once in a while to find a comfortable position, while I devoured each sentence with a ferocity and intensity that is inexhaustible. 

Language is at once the most magnificent inventions that our common ancestors has came up with, yet it is also exasperating in that it confines us within its boundaries, with its rigid structures and rules. While we read, we are often struck by a rapturous sense of liberation, in that we can experience sensations that goes beyond mere symbols; and yet, paradoxically, language suffocates us, for we know it is the only means of communication we have, and we have to adhere to its sadistic domination on our lives. And yet, putting aside the sense of suffocation, reading is one of the most exhilarating experiences one can have, since it permits me a chance to transcend my current boundaries, and instead, offers my mind to wander through unknown landscapes, sometimes benevolent, sometimes hostile, as I witness the interpolation of words and phrases, transforming my vision into a recorder of other minds - a voyeur of minds.

While reading this book by John Williams, one of the most underrated writers in American literature (who (un)fortunately have received a revival of attention towards his works after his death), I was somewhat struck by the affinity I felt towards its hero, William Stoner. Maybe because it is our similarities, in which we both share a passionate love towards the written, the expressible, and the equally inexpressible. Or maybe it is because of a similarity of temperament. Who knows? I would love to be the acquaintance of him, to converse with him in the matters of books, and he could be my mentor, because I am but an amateur when compared to Stoner's expertise.

Such is the vivid psychological description in which the writer, John Williams, provided which not only made me feel a connection between me and a fictional character, but also to make me feel as though this person can exist (and indeed, must exist) in a time like ours. Set in the 1930s, in the decades in between both World Wars and the Prohibition as well as Depression era, Stoner, the hero of the book, is originally studying to become a farmer in order to help with his family at the farm. But after a fateful encounter with an English professor, in which the mystique of language possesses him like an unavoidable storm, he decides to change his profession and venture forth into the realm of literature. In the course of his life, he encountered life changing events, such as falling in love with a woman of his dreams, marrying her while discovering after the marriage that the woman is psychologically unstable, and the marriage will soon deteriorate into a toxic one. He will wade through academic politics, with a sworn enemy which is the chairman of the faculty. He will lose his daughter, which he prized very much, to his wife, as the battle between both creates collateral damage in his daughter, Grace, changing her life for the worse. He encounters death, through war, disease, the Depression era suicides. And he will have a love affair with a young instructor to alleviate his pressures which he encountered at home, creating scandals in a sexually repressed society.

This is a quiet novel, centered around an insignificant life, maneuvering slowly through decades of Stoner's life as he wade through crises, poverty, familial and political conflicts with a stoicism that is all the more remarkable for his meager upbringing. His affects will change through the course of his life from passion, desire, infatuation, care, and love, to mere indifference as he surrendered himself to the ever changing time, and Destiny. His life seems to be a sad, miserable one, as he himself knows the insignificance of it all, as he realized that Time will stop for no one, and that all efforts that we make will ultimately lose its meaning in our final confrontation with the Grim Reaper. His struggles are universal in that we all will face it, sooner or later.

That is not to say that he had not once lived. For he lived all right. He lived not despite having to struggle with every single blow that Life has landed upon him; he lived in spite of it, in that he sees life as ultimately worth living, even when all the evidence tells him the contrary. Here, interpretations may differ, in that some will believe that his life is an unlived one. After all, he had chosen the wrong woman to marry, abandoned his parents to pursue his own passions, losing their love, lost his daughter to a toxic marriage, lost his promising career as a literature professor to a stupid conflict of office politics and denoted to teach only freshmen classes, lost his love affair in which he discovered the possibility of profound love once again in scandalous adultery to (also) office politics and the restrictions of the society. So many losses, no wonder many perceived Stoner to be a failure, one to be pitied and empathized with.

But another interpretation can also be made (such is my interpretation). For on the contrary, his life is a complete one. Who says that a life of completion must be a perfect one? A life with no struggles and suffering is in fact one that is unlived. For life is a struggle, from the moment we see the first rays of sunlight, to the last breath that we drew, all presents itself as a challenge, and we drag ourselves day upon day so that we might enjoy our victory against our failures. Stoner lost many things, and many of the things he lost are unjustifiable, and it incites our anger to see that Life has treated him so unfairly. But he gained many things as well, that we cannot deny. Life is a trade-off: we lose somethings we might cherish a lot in the past, but we also will gain (or regain) things that we will come to love in the future. For isn't it the love of literature, the love of the world, the love of his job, the love of his daughter, the love of the young instructor - Katherine, the lost love of his wife, and the stoical endurance of all things that are unfortunate but soon too will pass, that defines him as who he is? We are not defined by the things we own, we are defined by what we do. And Stoner, in this regard, lived, and lived to an extreme extent. For despite everything he lost, he nevertheless acquired the only thing that cannot be lost, and will never be snatched away from his possession - love. And this is not only romantic love; no, it is a love that is more profound and encompasses Life in its entirety. 

It is a miracle to see such simple materials (the life of an academic) be constructed into a novel, and it is equally another bigger miracle to see that John Williams succeeded in crafting a perfect novel from such simple materials. To put it simply, I enjoyed every single moment of the reading experience, and I regret I have not sooner read it, for it has already been sitting on my shelf for a long, long time. One comes to realize that from an insignificant life, such as Stoner's, one can learn magnificent truths, truths that are integral to living, to existing, and are as universal, as it is significant to all humankind. History more often than not, neglects to record meager lives such as Stoner's into consideration. In History, the portraits of the few outlasted the mass, and the conflicts, the battles, the struggles of the masses will soon be forgotten, a simple fleck of dust in the vast flux of Time.

Such is Life, can we rebel against that fact? Maybe not. But maybe, like Stoner, we can learn to endure it, to live our lives to the fullest, to witness the unraveling of it all, even if we might revile against some parts of it, even if after some years, maybe a decade or more, our existence will be forgotten, and our death will be no more than a reminder for all of our mortality, that vulnerability to oblivion. Well, such is Life. That's how it is.

Movie Review: "Interstellar"

In a cosmic scheme of things, our actions are but nothing, and all our struggles and sufferings are reduced to an insignificant nuisance. A sudden supernova, or the onslaught of a black hole and everything we once cherished will be gone, forever, in the blink of an eye. Humans like to find good and evil in everything, even in Nature itself, as if attaching labels to it comforts our anxieties towards a mysterious phenomenon in itself, as if it makes the Unknown known. But Nature doesn't care, it is indifferent to our survival. One can't say that Nature is good anymore than one can say it is evil. To label and call it thus is to commit the folly of anthropomorphism at its highest order, a human tendency to be exact. If one day the human species is to be extinct, the Earth wiped back into a clean slate before the arrivals of the first homo sapien, the universe will not care.

Faced with such an indifferent and occasionally destructive universe, we are forced to find our survival on Earth through our own pondering and adaptability. And so we come to tame Nature, the one and only untameable entity. We come to force Nature to do our bidding, to take into our own hands as we see fit, and to harness resources to ensure our survivability. This is all good and well, after all, we did survive millenia through our "intelligence" and consciousness didn't we? This anomaly in Nature, this sudden mutation, this human species, has suddenly become the apex of evolution, and acquired a hubristic view of our own capabilities, and constructed an ever optimistic view of progress. But what if our pleasures of the here-and-now, the present, obstructs a longer view of the future? What if we aren't prepared for the consequences of our current debauchery? What if the myth of progress is ultimately a fiction? We love to live under fictions, stories constructed to veil us into action, so that we will not lose our sight on what is deemed socially appropriate. Because Truth, the hard Truths that are potentially devastating, are seldom welcomed. Much like what Nietzsche said, we only accept the Truths that we would like to accept - harmless Truths.

Now, more than ever, we are increasingly aware of the possibility of a wide-scale extinction, because of our out-of-control waste of resources. Nature is a self-correcting system, a system that will rebalance itself to accommodate its current situation. What comes around, goes around, and we will pay for our own debauchery. It is in such terms, that we come to grips again  with the notion of our survival. But what is survival? Is it the survival of the species? Or is it the survival of the individual? The contradictions between the absolute and the relative are irreconcilable, as one is the achievement of an absolute end through the deployment of every means, while the other is much more harder to realize. To realize the former, one merely need to colonize another inhabitable planet, and through the risk of playing God, one creates a "New Earth", while disregarding the survival of those that are left behind. The latter is harder to realize because to do that, we must move our entire species (a few billion people, not much) to another planet, while the former is efficient in that we need only a few cells, and a few test tubes. It all comes down to what we cherish, the survival of those around us or the survival of a species in its entirety. But as human beings with the baggage of emotions, can we really come to the cruel decision of surviving a species, an abstract conception at its finest? Are we not bound to those that we love ultimately, and to save an impersonal species that we may not meet in the future, doesn't that seem all too detached from us? To gain a larger perspective, to see the survival of the species as our final goal requires us to have the vision of God, or to be simply, a madman, one that will incite scorn, however noble our goals were.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

This stanza from Dylan Thomas' poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night", is recited throughout the movie. And through its multiple recitations at different points of the movie, it creates a repercussion that is still felt in me several hours after the viewing of the movie. In its simplest interpretation, it is a reminder that we, and the characters in the movie, shall not forget the true goals of our species as a whole, that we shall resist our extinction with a full blown rebellion, a "rage" that will burn even God and the universe, so that we can achieve survival, to defy the "close of day" and the "dying of the light". Such is the power of our drive to survive. But our struggles on a cosmic scale are but a parable to our personal struggles, and it is only these that matters, as we face a vertiginal sense of futility in the face of the universe. And taken on a more personal level, doesn't the stanza itself also meant death, and the tyranny of Time?

Because despite its cosmic contemplation, its wide panorama of beautiful astrological entities, its dazzling vistas of the universe (the wormhole in particular), its philosophical view of mankind's survival, civilization, and progress, and its dizzying techno-babble on quantum physics, aerodynamics, and astrophysics, the film is, in its naked form, a film of our human condition, one that is personal, and filled with more humanistic themes rather than scientific ones. It is a film about loneliness, separation by long distances, and desperate longing: a loneliness of a father separated from his son and daughter by who-knows-how-many lightyears away; the loneliness of a man stranded on an alien planet, despaired by the lack of human contact; the loneliness of a woman, longing for her lover, with the certainty that he is dead in another planet. It is also a film about how we fill up the gap of our loneliness, because Cooper, the main protagonist, who left his daughter behind in order to find a new hospitable planet to replace the decrepit and dying Earth, and Professor Brand, who let his daughter went on the mission, essentially exchanged roles in that Professor Brand now acts as a surrogate father to Murph, the daughter-left-behind, and Cooper now acts as a protector of Amelia Brand, the daughter of the professor. It is through these pseudo-relationships that they found intimacy: for the professor, he can finally exercise his paternal love now that he has lost his real daughter to the vacancies of space; as for Cooper, a human contact in the deep silence of space is all he can cling for, in order to not lose his sanity to the vast quietude of the vacuum.

But ultimately, I think, it is a film about Time. Time, in a traditional sense is linear in structure, as we move along the constant lines of Past, Present, and Future. But with the introduction of philosophy and more recently, quantum physics and quantum mechanics, we get a more and more complicated and convoluted picture of Time. I am no quantum physicist or astrophysicist, so I have no reason to display my ignorances here in order to convey false messages, and can't confirm the scientific accuracy of this film. But this much I know at least: in that Time is a concept that we are, implicitly or explicitly, aware of, and the passing of Time is as much a source of anxiety as it is a source of despair. Professor Brand once proclaimed a witticism in this film that is tinged with obvious hints of fear, that "I am not afraid of death. I am an old physicist, I am afraid of Time." We fear Time because with each moment passing away, our body rots a bit. And with each breath I took, I gain some life, I live for a moment longer, but I take one step further into the realms of death.

The penultimate usage of the notion of Time is precisely in the film's usage of Einstein's theory of relativity, in which "time dilation" creates "an actual difference of elapsed Time between two events as measured by observers either moving relative to each other or differently situated from gravitational masses". What this means is that if there is a difference of gravitational pull and or velocity between two different places, then it will bend Time (spacetime) and distort it, making Time on both places run at a different pace. So in the film, there is a moment where Cooper and co. landed on a planet that floats beside a rotating black hole, making the gravitational pull there immense in contrast to Earth's, and the implications for this is devastating, as an hour on that planet constitutes seven years on Earth. With such knowledge, comes a heavy burden on how we use that Time. Because every moment is monumental, every minute is the passing of several days, or several months elsewhere. As I sit here on another planet talking with my friends, people on Earth is dying of respiratory problems or facing extinction. We usually take Time for granted, because for all we know, Time will continue to flow on... until that is, if we faced the immensity of Time, or if Time ceases to flow again. But if Time is relative, so too are our human interests. That's what makes life itself interesting isn't it?

Somehow I suspect that this film is a personal one for Nolan. Because in his previous films, with the possible exceptions of "Memento" or "Insomnia", all his films are of an impersonal nature, constructed with the precision of a statistician or a logician, without much care for his characters. Rather, the emphasis is on the storyline, the plot, the screenplay. As much as I admire "Inception", its cold atmosphere can't suck me in and immerse myself within it like "Interstellar" can. Maybe it is a sign of maturity, or maybe it is because of the brilliant and intense portrayal of Cooper by Matthew McConaughey (I have loved his acting since "Dallas Buyers Club" and "True Detective"). Maybe...

Christopher Nolan

Matthew McConaughey

But in watching this film I was reminded once again of the amazement, wonder, and awe in the face of the universe, when I watched Kubrick's marvelous "2001: A Space Odyssey", or Carl Sagan's "Contact" and "Cosmos", or last year's magnificent "Gravity". All these differ in their themes, but all of them unite in that they all portray the beauty of the universe, the transcendent nature of our cosmic contemplation, as well as the horrors of a vacuum space, and the insignificance of our trifles in the face of such magnificent indifference. All of them simultaneously combine the horror with the beauty, the smallness of our being, and our capabilities to perceive, even if only for a little, a glimpse of the nature of the cosmos.

We are explorers on Earth during the dawn of Time, and someday, maybe not too far in the future, we may be cosmonauts, living, travelling, and even conversing with other, maybe higher, beings. But until that day, we must concern ourselves with this Earth, tend to and care for this home which has catered to us since our beginnings. For now, we are nothing in the face of the absolute immensity of the universe, the abyss that is our surroundings, as our rage is not enough for us to be ravaging conquistadors, and old age is our symptom, so we will always go gentle... into that good night, into that eternal slumber that awaits us all at the end of our short journey.