The modern psychological explanation is that we fashion our own dreams.
I actually think this is untrue. The sensory experience of our lives may help to provide a structure for the dream, yet this is very far from actually making the dream.
If we instead were to view dreaming as a journey, wherein one can be led to other places for reasons of predilection and destiny, then dreaming has something very important to say about reality, nonreality, and our place within them.
Your redbrick houses may well have the attribute we would characterize as real. I hope the structures I dream don't. They are invariably ominous even Satanic.
As I was thinking about dreaming and the workings of the mind something triggered a memory from a week or so ago which referred to the phenomenon known in English as Dreamtime which is a short hand for native Australian cosmology. Apparently, the word was coined by a 19th century anthropologist and does not do it justice. This is not least because there is no homogeneity amongst those peoples. They have 250 different languages and the cosmologies vary accordingly.
Nonetheless it seems to convey an essence of their spiritual beliefs which are highly complex and seem to blur the distinction between what a post-Enlightenment materialist might think of as reality and another dimension. There are, perhaps, two lessons we can draw from the existence of the phenomenon.
First, Western cultural arrogance - which you might think is predominantly monotheistic - is unjustified. Even those supposedly “primitive” beings held a comprehensive cosmological perspective at variance with our own. Apparently, in some concealed journals Capt. James Cook described these people as inordinately happy.
Secondly, Hamlet may have been on to something when he admonished Horatio about phenomena in heaven and earth.
I know a Danish guy who's really into animism and says that the aboriginal people (generally; and he's certainly not the type to ignore cultural diversity among groups) have an extremely profound way of understanding the human place in the cosmos. It's a subject I know very little about. But I think Australians are extremely fortunate to have (if they would recognise it) a living tradition or collection of traditions of spiritual connection to the land that goes back 40 thousand years or so. I think the land or environment is (spiritually) more important than ethnic distinctions so that non-aborigial Australians have equal access to the spirit of the place as the ancestral natives. But it depends on whether they can drop the Abrahamic or post-Abrahamic supremacist mindset and open up to that spirit. What I do know a bit about is Australian folk and ghost stories. In these you can really get a sense of genuine connection between even the descendants of European colonists and the spirit(s)of the land of Australia.
The modern psychological explanation is that we fashion our own dreams.
I actually think this is untrue. The sensory experience of our lives may help to provide a structure for the dream, yet this is very far from actually making the dream.
If we instead were to view dreaming as a journey, wherein one can be led to other places for reasons of predilection and destiny, then dreaming has something very important to say about reality, nonreality, and our place within them.
I think so too 🙏🙏
my dreams bore even me
Your redbrick houses may well have the attribute we would characterize as real. I hope the structures I dream don't. They are invariably ominous even Satanic.
I've seen some of those too, though thankfully not often!
As I was thinking about dreaming and the workings of the mind something triggered a memory from a week or so ago which referred to the phenomenon known in English as Dreamtime which is a short hand for native Australian cosmology. Apparently, the word was coined by a 19th century anthropologist and does not do it justice. This is not least because there is no homogeneity amongst those peoples. They have 250 different languages and the cosmologies vary accordingly.
Nonetheless it seems to convey an essence of their spiritual beliefs which are highly complex and seem to blur the distinction between what a post-Enlightenment materialist might think of as reality and another dimension. There are, perhaps, two lessons we can draw from the existence of the phenomenon.
First, Western cultural arrogance - which you might think is predominantly monotheistic - is unjustified. Even those supposedly “primitive” beings held a comprehensive cosmological perspective at variance with our own. Apparently, in some concealed journals Capt. James Cook described these people as inordinately happy.
Secondly, Hamlet may have been on to something when he admonished Horatio about phenomena in heaven and earth.
I know a Danish guy who's really into animism and says that the aboriginal people (generally; and he's certainly not the type to ignore cultural diversity among groups) have an extremely profound way of understanding the human place in the cosmos. It's a subject I know very little about. But I think Australians are extremely fortunate to have (if they would recognise it) a living tradition or collection of traditions of spiritual connection to the land that goes back 40 thousand years or so. I think the land or environment is (spiritually) more important than ethnic distinctions so that non-aborigial Australians have equal access to the spirit of the place as the ancestral natives. But it depends on whether they can drop the Abrahamic or post-Abrahamic supremacist mindset and open up to that spirit. What I do know a bit about is Australian folk and ghost stories. In these you can really get a sense of genuine connection between even the descendants of European colonists and the spirit(s)of the land of Australia.
Simple in its elegance. I love this! 👏👏👏👏👏💜💜💜💜💜😊😊😊😊😊
Thanks Aria!!💚💚💚🙏🙏🙏🍀🍀
I agree, and I feel something close to the same, but regardless stay a dreamer. I intend to
🙏🙏💚!!