Systems dreams – welcome to my pre-linguistic mind.
Imagine if you could erase all dialogue, all faces from your dreams yet still have deep, meaningful dreams, even more so.
Imagine a world that is purely spatial, logical, a 3D world in which you exist as a bodyless entity, as if you have entered the pure cognitive workings of your own brain.
Imagine you are surrounded by colors, forms, spatial placements that are more central or peripheral, more in your experiential foreground or background and there are strange conjoining mists, lines and markers on those lines which you sense are telling you about conceptual connections, shared features and differences, how distinct or vague and undeveloped the relationships between these symbolically represented pure concepts are.
Imagine a world where music is represented only spatially in a vacuum of silence and that whilst it’s a visual world its one not seen but felt. Imagine a world so logical and mathematical that it speaks more of the crux of things in one dream than words and characters could capture in a hundred.
Welcome to ‘systems dreams’. These are part of my dream repertoire and are represented by artworks on my site which I have put in a category called Neoteric (they’re also in a current Art Exhibition).
Who knows where these strangest of dreams come from –
A compartmentalised and fragmented mind?
Rapid Cycling Bipolar?
Kinesthesia?
All of the above as part of autism, or is it part of ARTism?
Sure, I have other dreams, almost always without dialogue. My dialogues are almost always emotional, felt dialogues that are known interactively but not spoken – sort of telepathic if you like – but don’t come running to me for a tarot reading, I’m talking about dreams and how I dream.
I have dreams where I have other bodies, not my one. I’ve been other genders, ages and other animals. I’ve been part of the elements, been part of the wind, the ocean. I’ve had prophetic dreams (no, put that tarot away, it ain’t my thing). I had lucid dreaming in which I feel temperature, smell my surroundings and can alter the dream yet not wake up, turn it on an axis, zoom in, erase characters, alter events, even order myself to wake up.
But systems dreams are probably the most awesome. They are also the most useful.
When I encounter conversations, events or articles I can’t consciously understand, monitor or retain at the time I encountered these things, the systems dreams seem to take the presented concepts and represent them symbolically in very basic representational colors, forms, textures, placement, size and then draw the various connecting lines and shared or contrasting or opposing features running between various concepts. In the days and weeks after the systems dreams, new systematised ways of thinking in relation to concepts I’ve never understood or consciously learned about, unravel and I’m along for the ride. It’s like a virtual classroom where nobody speaks but the awarenesses on a most basic and essential conceptual level are passed on.
If only real schools worked like this, bypassing linguistics and going directly to the pre-linguistic systems those linguistics later are used to represent.
And better still, I don’t even need illicit drugs for this (who knows, perhaps such things would reduce these functions anyway).
🙂 Donna Williams *)
This is really great, and probably at a very deep level of dream structure. I have been doing work with my own dreams for years, and more formally since 1998. I have studied with another Australian (ex-pat) named Robert Moss. He has written 5 or so books about dreaming and dreamwork. The books “Dreamgates” and “Dreaming True” probably come closest to the material thay you posted. As an integrative physician, I have been teaching my patients to work with their dreams, and I have also taught a few workshops in the methods I have learned from Moss (www.mossdreams.com).
Dreams
With my great interest in psychology for many years, I have become interested in studying my dreams so I could better understand my subconscious. This could reveal the inner workings of my mind to understand myself better.
I tend to forget most of my dreams and I remember only a fraction of them. Most mornings I do not recall any and sometimes of what I do remember are so vague or fragmented that they can not be retained in my mind.
My dreams tend to bring in people and things from out of the context into the scene. Even people that have died many years earlier appear in my dreams. For example, my late maternal grandmother and my late father sometimes appear in the scenes and they had died in 1972 and 1991 respectively. In addition, places or situations appear out of the context as well. For example, I dreamed that I was back in high school as a student. I graduated from high school in 1976. I also dreamed that I was still living in places that I was in many years ago. I dreamt about my grandmother attending a retreat with me and my father taking classes with me.
I tend to dream about most frequently of the things that occupy my mind the most. For example, throughout my adolescence and early adulthood when I was battling food addition and compulsive overeating a lot of my dreams revolved around food. Ever since I overcame my food addiction and eating disorder, when food was on my mind all the time, food has been appearing in the scenes a lot less. During the last past several years, most of my dreams revolve around traveling or being at retreats with groups of people. Journeys have been on my mind most of the time as I love to explore new foreign places and I am on a spiritual journey for personal growth to improve my lot in life and to better encourage others.
My dreams tend to match the emotional states that I am in. For example, whenever I am dealing with anxiety, of which I dealt a lot with in the past, my dreams would have anxiety provoking scenes with abandonment, falling, or missing any type of connections. Whenever, I am feeling good my dreams tend to be much more harmonious.
Sometimes dreams provide me with lessons and encouragement. For example, I dreamt about running in a race that I had no confidence in, but I persisted and ran anyway with encouragement and it paid off with a win. In April 2004, I dreamt about attending a church when a skit was performed that portrayed characters sitting around and not living up to their potentials and that they need to develop their talents and share them with the community. During that time, I was just realizing that I need to work on organizing my time so I could be more productive to work on my writing and my artworks more. This was a right divine message presented at the right time in my dream.
Dreams tend to provide windows to the soul and can give us hints of what is troubling us and messages of what we could do. I have a few books on this subject that provides good insights. I have been analyzing my dreams of what I recall vivid enough for many years now and it is very helpful to learn from them.
Thanks Donna.
I dream symbolic dreams with, often, corny plays on words and concepts (can’t think of any examples now I want to of course) (I am more verbal than Donna in my thinking, but this isn’t easily spoken much and I can’t write as much as Donna either.)
I was fed up with nightmares so I dialogued with my subconscious and told it not to scare me out of my wits and the dreams are now more palatable if I remember them at all. I recommend this procedure to everyone.
Yes, I have another blog article on lucid dreaming and I think speaking to one’s own subconscious is a major therapeutic form of ‘praying’ whether one does it in mental words of urges.
I was heard to speak in my sleep a few times in early adulthood but the language was apparently quite hilarious in that it was not any recognisable English and was apparently all tumbled, as if the order of sounds and words was random. I’m not surprised because when I’m stressed I’ve sometimes spoken like that briefly as the sequencing gets a little shot, especially if I’ve messed up diet or gone off glutamine. I’m certain its quite an effort to consciously construct sentences in the right order when sequencing isn’t natural.
🙂 Donna *)
Thank you so much for this … It’s the first time I’ve found someone else who dreams in systems like I do!!
My daily thinking is in systems and shapes too, which I can then zoom in on to open up areas, which become pictures (in 3d, and usually the whole thing is constantly moving and fluid unless I choose to stop it). It’s like opening up files to see what’s in them. I can categorise very well, and once I’ve filed something, it’s with me forever.
The only times I think in a verbal way is if I’m reading (it keeps my mind on the job!), or if I’m remembering a part of a conversation, but that is always with me watching the person speaking in my memory, and so is still visually-based.