Richard Lloyd Jones: They can be weird or totally logical. Recurring or one-off experiences. Most of them we dismiss the moment we wake from them. But some of them stay with us like messengers that have something to tell us. And it's significant that the greatest psychological investigators placed a lot of stock in them. Today, we will too. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the clarity of dreams.
But first, one thing I've learned since moving from Canada six and a half years ago to study with Norberto Keppe at his International Society of Analytical Trilogy is you've got to be flexible. They do things differently down here. It's not like North America where we're raised with the business-like mantra, plan the work and work the plan. Things down here operate much more by inspiration.
And this is happening again. For the past few weeks in the program, I've been talking about our International Congress on Analytical Trilogy here in Brazil from July 4th to 6th, 2008. And any of you who come to join us for this great event will be invited to stay on with us at our hotel conference center for a few days after the event for some study and working sessions on Keppe's science of psychosociopathology.
Well, any event we hold at our hotel is phenomenal, and this will be no different. More information is at our site, www.trilogycongress.org. And if there's anything more you need to know, just write me, rich at richjonesvoice.com. But now we have another exciting event to let you know about, too, and it's in the U.S. We are conducting the World Congress on Analytical Trilogy in San Diego from September 24th to 27th, 2008.
This will be another great event, and information on that is available at www.wcatus.org. And now you have your choice. Come on down here to beautiful Brazil and experience the science of Analytical Trilogy in the center of the work and where our companies are and all that's going on down here, and it's a lot, believe me. Or fly into San Diego and join us there.
If you need help making your choice, I can help you with that, rich at richjonesvoice.com. One thing I do know, with 81% of Americans in a recent CBS New York Times poll saying the U.S. Is headed in the wrong direction, it's pretty clear a new orientation is needed. And here on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, and pretty close to the 40-year anniversary of Robert Kennedy, too, may I suggest that Norberto Keppe's work carries on from their extraordinary efforts, but with something the others didn't have, and that's a profound understanding of human psychopathology.
Why, when we all know we should stop war and feed and educate people and stop killing and torturing people we fear, why don't we stop? Keppe's science can answer that question and give us a means to really effect change in the human condition. But we'll have more on that in our next radio program. Today, dreams. Sari Koivukangas is a teacher here in Brazil who has many years' experience with students in our psycholinguistic method of teaching.
Dreams is one of her specialties. Sari, we're calling this the clarity of dreams. Except our dreams don't seem so clear. You know, one minute you're walking beside a river and the next minute you're in an attic playing with a train you had when you were a kid or something. So how can we say that dreams are clarifying in our lives?
Sari Koivukangas: Right, Richard.
How about you? Do you remember your dreams? Not
Richard: very much anymore, I'm afraid. But
Sari: did you know that we dream every night? Yeah. Well, the thing is that we don't remember the dreams because of our censorship. We censor very much this perception. And many times you may have noticed that right when you wake up in the morning, you still remember part of your dreams.
And then it just gets blurred and you don't remember it anymore. This is a sign that when we sleep, we are less censored. And when we are awake, the censorship starts taking over. I notice it
Richard: this way, Sadi, I'll have an idea when I wake up in the morning about how to solve a problem or how to have a communication with somebody.
But as I go through the shower process, having breakfast, brushing my teeth, the idea gets less and less clear. But censorship of what? What are we censoring?
Sari: We are censoring our internal life. And that's why it's so interesting to speak about dreams, because we are speaking about our internal life, of which we don't know much. Dr. Kepes says that we are what we don't know about ourselves.
Meaning that we really don't know who we are. Many people say, well, I know who I am. I know myself. But in practice, it's not quite that way. For example, a person who loses his job hardly ever knows the reason. I mean, it could be for the economic reasons. But let's say that he's a kind of guy who doesn't work properly, comes late, It always goes for a coffee break.
When he's fired, he has no idea why it happened. He will think it was the bosses against him or there was kind of conspiracy against him. But the other people, the colleagues, they usually know what was the real reason. So there are many things. We have no perception at all.
Richard: Well, this leads us into a conversation of the fact that we have parts of us that we have no contact with.
This
Sari: inconscientized part, maybe we should talk about that first, because it's useless to analyze dreams unless we know what that's all about. So tell us a bit about that. Well, we could say that that fantastic discovery came from Freud, and this is very valuable in Freud's work, that he discovered that there is something in the human being that he or she is not aware of.
Of course it was not originally his idea. It comes from a German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. But Freud was the person, the scientist, to scientifically prove that there was this, what he called the unconscious.
Richard: How did he prove that?
Sari: Well, he proved this through three ways, actually. One of them is hypnosis. So when a person is hypnotized, he has lots of capacities that normally he's not aware of.
You may know even And blind people, they can see or you can be hypnotized and they give you an onion to eat and tell it's an apple and you will eat it as if it was an apple and very, very interesting things. And he has even the famous example of Annie O.
Richard: Probably many of our listeners have no idea what that is.
And so talk about Annie O. What is that case?
Sari: It was a case of a person who came to do analysis with Freud and her situation was so that her father had died recently and she had an arm paralyzed and could not move. And talking to her, Freud discovered that just a little bit before the father had died, the father had asked for a glass of water, which he kind of refused to give to him.
And she had lots of guilt feelings that she wouldn't like to deal with. And then she paralyzed her arm. But in a hypnosis, she could move the arm normally. And once she got out of the hypnosis, she was paralyzed again. But this gave fantastic scientific evidence of something inside the human being that we are not very much aware of.
Richard: There's two other proofs you said.
Sari: The slip of the tongue. When you're supposed socially to say something and you say something else. For example, you go to the funeral.
Richard: Very embarrassing sometimes.
Sari: Right. You go to a funeral, you're supposed to say, well, I'm sorry, the person has died, but somehow you just say congratulations because this is your real intention. Maybe you are happy, the person's gone. Well, you might have these kind of feelings which you socially try to hide, but they are there.
And the third element really was dreams, because in dreams we can see, for example, that we have in our daily life, we have some problem, we don't want to deal with this. And during the night when we're sleeping and dreaming, it just pops up all the time, maybe in different form or in a symbolic form, but that's what we're dealing with.
Richard: Yeah, it must be mostly symbolic because they don't make any rational sense many times, right?
I mean, sometimes the dreams tell a literal story, have a beginning, middle, and end. But most of the time, like I said at the beginning, one second you're here, the next second you're in another part of the world or something. It's completely
Sari: disjointed. Originally, human beings should be like that. And in the dreams, we are more in contact with our essence, which is out of time and space.
And this is also interesting information about the essence of the human being.
Richard: You're saying that the dream can be more literal than we think.
Sari: Right. It's quite interesting also many times with the spiritual experiences or nightmares. The people say, oh, it was just a dream. But in fact, when we dream, we are more in contact with our real reality than when we are awake, although we see it totally inverted.
Richard: When I first came to Brazil, Sadi, I had some very strong dreams. And I was Talking to Dr. Keppe over breakfast one time and I said, oh, I had this strange dream, completely unreal, and I told him the dream and he said, are you sure it was a dream? Just like that. And that stayed with me for six and a half years, what he said to me.
Because is it really a dream? Or is it something more linked to reality than we think?
Sari: Right, so to know our reality, it's very important to analyze the dreams. And it's interesting to see for example nightmares. And when we are awake we think like that, we love consciousness, and and of course I want to know more about myself, but through the nightmares we can really see how we react in front of our consciousness.
So when you're running away from motif, or a gorilla is coming after you, or a monster. These are actually elements from our interior life. Yeah, this is
Richard: fascinating. Do you have some specific examples that we could begin to analyze? Are you prepared to do that, to help us
Sari: to understand that? Sure, sure. And when we analyze dreams, there are, of course, different views.
The ancient Greek, they would see dreams as prophecies, which is one very interesting aspect of dreams. For Freud, they were like repressed desires that you could not fulfill during daytime, so you dream about them. And for Jung, another famous psychoanalyst, considered them more like spiritual questions, like collective unconscious and things like that he would speak. But for Dr. Koeppe, the dreams are repressed material from our interior, where each element of a dream is an aspect of ourselves.
So, through dreams, we can know a lot about ourselves. For example, a very common dream. Women dream that the husband is betraying them. And then they wake up and in the breakfast they start a fight with the husband. But if we analyze this deeper, what are these aspects in her interior? So this dream may show how she betrays herself, her essence, the truth, the beauty, her values.
And she goes against what would be good for her.
Richard: That's interesting.
Sari: And in the dream, this appears. So
Richard: it's not like a literal betrayal from the husband, but a betrayal of herself, of something inside her she doesn't want to acknowledge.
Sari: Right, because she's having the dream. Let me
Richard: just ask the question before you give another example. Are there universal themes, like every woman who dreams about betrayal from her husband, is it the same interpretation or is it different for every
Sari: person?
Of course the person has a in analysis has a personal interpretation, and the analyst knows the client. So I mean this kind of books where you I dreamt with the tiger. What does it mean? They are not really valid because for one person tiger can symbolize one thing and for another person it can be a danger, for another person it can be beauty.
Richard: Or peace or freedom.
Sari: Right, right. So, of course, through associations of ideas we go deeper to the psychic life of the person.
Richard: And this is interesting in a difference between Keppe and Jung. Jung would believe in sort of archetypal images and dreams, that if you dream about this particular image, it's the same for everybody. And Keppe doesn't do that at all.
Sari: Right.
But we can see universal concepts, too, as we understand what is psychosociopathology. For example, the question of envy, which is the human desire to destroy what is good. So if I tell somebody, oh, you want to destroy what is good in your life, the person will say, no, I want goodness, I want progress, I want money, I want friends. But in practice, we see that people go against goodness.
And this perception is very censored. But in dreams, this appears, as well as the question of inversion, that we exchange what is good for bad and what is bad for good. And
Richard: this is a big shock, I think, for all of us to think that there are intentions for destruction that we have that we're not conscious of. We were talking a little bit about this in our last podcast, analyzing war and trying to analyze the destructive nature of the human being that we don't perceive.
So this issue of envy you're talking about is really, I think, a valid one because we don't perceive that. And so what you're suggesting is that in our dreams, and I'm sure there are other ways this appears, but in our dreams is one way that our real intention or our real attitudes can appear, right, in symbolic or even literal form. For
Sari: example, many times my students, they ask, oh, teacher, I dreamt like this.
Oh, it was horrible. I dreamt that my mother died or somebody, a loved person died. And they get like really worried about this. And then talking to them, I usually ask, well, What idea do you have about your mother? And it's kind of universal concept state there. Oh, my mother is everything. My mother is loving, it's love, it's goodness. So, what does the dream reveal about this person's inner life?
It shows that the person kills love and goodness in his or her interior and in his or her own life.
Richard: A way of eliminating, right? And so the elimination of love in the real life shows up in the dream as the death of a mother or another loved one.
Sari: Right. And in the dream, we perceive more because we are less censored. And that's why when you wake up in the morning, you still remember a bit of your dream and then it disappears.
Because when we dream or when we sleep, we receive more scalar energy. We receive more energy to our structure which is very healing even a little child knows if you're sick what should you do? You go to sleep, even animals do this, because we resist less to this scalar energy when we are dreaming, and that's why we have a better perception of reality, because
Richard: we block this scalar energy a lot while we're awake through our attitudes, our behaviors, our inconscientized intentions that we don't perceive.
When we're sleeping, we're relaxed, we have much more perception of these things. Give us a couple more examples of sort of standard types of things that people dream about.
Sari: Many people dream with disgusting things, right? Like snakes or cockroaches, and they feel very much like, let's say, a big aversion toward all these things.
Richard: Disgusted even, right?
Sari: Yes, but it's quite interesting to try to understand what these elements are in our interior, the bad intentions, the negative feelings, and how difficult it's for us to face all these things that we actually feel and that we don't like to to perceive, that we are having these feelings and these thoughts and these intentions.
But if we fortify our interior and become more tolerant towards the perception, the nightmares also they tend to go away. It's it's kind of common also people say that when you're having like very hard time in your life and you go through many difficulties, when you sleep you sleep and have beautiful dreams, and the opposite happens to you when you think everything is just fine, you just have horrible nightmares.
And this is due to our inversion too, because we think that when we are perceiving the problems then we have lots of problems, and when we don't perceive the problems then we wouldn't have problems. So perception of the problem
Richard: is a very good thing. Yes, we've talked about this with Cláudia Pacheco many times, but before we talk about another dream, Sally, let me come back to this point you were making about bad intentions, that we don't have good intentions because of our envy, our inversion.
What do you tell your students when they dispute that? They say, wait a minute, teacher. I don't have bad intentions. I want good things. I'm trying to develop in my... I'm here studying English, for heaven's sakes. I'm here trying to develop. How do you address this with them? Because I know there are many listeners who are also saying the same thing. I can feel
Sari: it.
Well, we have to start from the point that we started, that this is unconscious. So it's not very logical, Richard, and it's very difficult to perceive. How we can perceive this denial of goodness, this how we sabotage our life, is through the results. So if the results are good, my intentions are good. If the results are bad, it's because the intention is bad.
It says in the Bible that by the fruit shall you know the tree. And here in trilogy, we would say that through the action, you know the person. So you can know the person's intention by the results of his actions. What about if you
Richard: have a dream that comes true? Oh,
Sari: that's also very common. It's perfectly natural and normal and let's say many people have these dreams about future happenings.
The world history is full of them. You take the Bible, the Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and you have Joseph in Egypt and many, many others. To many people that I speak to, they say that sometimes they dream things. Commonly it might be an accident that they tramped off, or even in the places that they go later on they say wow I saw this in my dream.
So now we come back to the question that our being is outside time and space, so we could capture these ideas telepathically or simply from the future or from the past. But there again we think this is like the fantasy and not that this is the real reality of the human
Richard: being. We think this is kind of a fluke, an exception to the rule, right?
Right. This must be true then when people, like I remember Paul McCartney telling the story of waking up, having dreamt the song yesterday. He woke up with the melody in his head. This must be the same experience.
Sari: Right. Doesn't it ever happen to you that you have a problem to solve and you just don't find a solution for it, and then you go to sleep and you wake up in the morning and you say, Eureka!
Yeah, this is also because we have all the knowledge we need in our interior and we just block it, but in the dream sometimes we have more access to it.
Richard: Are you saying we could have these perceptions while we're awake? It would be possible for us to have these kinds of perceptions?
Sari: Right, right.
Richard: Even these kinds of experiences maybe? Right.
Sari: If we were not so censoring, not so afraid of perceiving the reality, to see the problems and to see the goodness, because we also censor a lot of good things.
So sometimes in the dreams we go to such a beautiful places, we have such a great happiness or such a great affection that we don't experience this when we are awake. But we could, it's just a question of stopping the censorship. Another other thing that happens quite frequently that people tell that they have like visits from the family members who have died, or and it seems to be more common especially when the person is about to die, so many of the family members come to his or her dreams, which is a total reality that we have to deal with.
And with children, this is very common. The spiritual questions, they seem to have much more perception. So in their dreams or at night when they tell their parents things about spirits or monsters, and this is a reality and we should help the children to deal with this. But what usually happens is that the parents say, no, there is nobody, stop speaking about silly things, and this also increases our censorship.
Richard: Are you saying the spiritual world is much more present than we think?
Sari: Right, it's present everywhere, all the time. And it says that our perception of it is not very clear. So that when somebody says that they have this spiritual contact, the others say, oh, you are crazy, or they are hospitalized, or you go to the psychiatrist. Whereas these people, when they have this perception, the perception means consciousness, it's good.
So they are more insanity than those people who don't have the perception.
Richard: What about people who don't sleep? It's pretty hard to have dreams if you're not sleeping. Right. What
Sari: about this insomnia thing? Insomnia is such a big problem. I have heard that here in Brazil, 60 million people suffer from insomnia. Good heavens. And it has something to do with our fear to enter in contact with reality.
Our fear to enter in contact with our interior life. And if the person is able to fortify this courage to be in contact with him or herself, it will help him to get asleep.
Richard: How do we do that, Sari? How do we build our strength to want to see this so that we help ourselves to sleep? I've had friends who've suffered from insomnia.
It's a debilitating thing because you want to sleep, you're desperate to sleep, but you can't. And your suggestion here, and I've heard Dr. Keppe talk about this too, about this being a way to avoid the consciousness that we have when we're sleeping, when we're less censored. This is a very important thing. How do we strengthen ourselves to be willing to face what's going on inside?
Sari: Well, of course, the best thing would be to do analysis in Dr. Keppe's clinic, but it's not possible for everybody. So, maybe they have to satisfy with your podcast and the
Richard: literature available.
Sari: But I think the understanding of these questions helps the person a lot. Many of my students, when they come to study at Millennium, or they tell me that when they once started, they didn't used to have any dreams.
And after some time studying these questions the censorship lowers and they are able to sleep, because I have many students who were not able to sleep, they are able to sleep, they have less diseases or they cure from the diseases they had, and as a whole the quality of life improves. Let's think
Richard: about, just as we're coming to the close here, Sadi, any more examples of sort of traditional dreams or traditional themes that run through dreams that we could talk about here to help people understand?
Sari: People dream many times that there is some problem, like they are on the street without the shoes or there is something wrong with them. They are naked. It many times has nothing to do with the sexuality in itself, but it's all more the manifestation, the fear that the person has when he has to put out his mask and to see his imperfections, and the terror that we feel when we have to face some imperfections in our lives.
And this is censorship that immobilizes the people.
Richard: Yeah. Okay. Any others?
Sari: For example, sometimes a person dreamt that he was driving a car in a high speed with no brakes. And the dream was showing, actually, the way he conducts his life. Goes like crazy everywhere. And it has not a real good sense.
Richard: Right, it doesn't keep within the limits, it's always going beyond the limits, trying to surpass the limits all the time.
Sari: Many times we dream with some kind of house. Once I dreamt that I was going down to a mine, and deep down to the mine I was very scared, and we would have to go deeper and deeper, deeper down to the mine, and I was scared. But there were some other people that were encouraging me to go deeper and deeper. And the dream was showing the fear that we have, actually, to have this contact with our interior.
Richard: When we see the truth of ourselves, the bad intentions we have, and the good things that we block and don't want to see, resist, reject even from our lives, how does that make us better? Well,
Sari: of course, it's a big relief. And it also recovers the psycho-organic structure. So it will help us to cure from the illnesses we may have. It's the way to development.
So the sensation is a little funny because for develop you have to see the problems, the blockages, the negative part, but not in order to stay in these negative things, but to see how we are blocking our real life, the happy and beautiful life we were created for.
Richard: It's a common theme running through Keppe's work, beauty, truth, goodness. Keppe has stated that the purpose of his Analytical Trilogy is to lead the human being back to the goodness for which he was created.
Can't think of anything more praiseworthy. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Talk to you next time.
