Dreams and Surrealism
RCWilk
o Dreams and Surrealism - from the class "The History of Dreams" see below
"Whoever wants to be creative in good and evil, he must first be an annihilator
and destroy values." - Friedreich Nietzsche
For many of us, when Surrealism is mentioned the image that generally come to
mind is the liquid melting clocks of Salvador Dali. But In Europe, Surrealism
was also a social , political, and poetic human liberation movement that
championed the dream.
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." -Rousseau in _Social
Contract_
Like the Romantics before them, the Surrealists saw that the reasonable and
rational held out a limited view for mankind, and that rationality, reality and
religion had so choked our options for experience that all the marvels and
significance of being were missed. Andre Breton, the father of Surrealism
within the Modernist movement, drew together this Romantic spirit with the new
leftist politics and the discoveries of psychoanalysis. "(Reality) revolves
in a cage from which from which release is becoming increasingly difficult."
(Brenton as quoted by Kelly, 1994)
The solution was the development of practices that challenged the old order
and offered the new in the cast out forms of madness, social anarchy,
disobedience, the shocking and the absurd. However, this anarchy was never
anything more than a temporary technique for merging the social and the
aesthetic, the dayworld and the nightworld the sane with the insane. Waking
and dreaming reality were to come together in Surreality.
In Surreality, the role of dreams was to usher in the astonishing and open up
to new possibilities. As Breton once said considering the amount of time we
spend in dreams and waking like, that there is "disproportionate attention to
waking life." (Kelly, pg 37) The dream is seen as offering a challenge in
ushering in the marvelous. The search was to be a synthesis of dream and waking
in Surreality, neither a compliance to conventional reality nor a retreat into
dreamland.
Sadly, Surrealism itself went the way of many Modernist movements, it became
formalized and choked in its own institutions. Breton's contacts with Freud
were not particularly productive and Breton's analysis of his own dreams fail
to bring to bear the wonderful spirit of surreality offered in other realms.
But the spirit of the movement has endured and has widely influenced not only
postmodern philosophy and practice in Europe but offered itself as a kindred
spirit of the human potential movements in the Americas in the 1960's that
also began to see the reality being served by the mainstream culture as
limiting, repressive and dangerous.
How then can we approach the dream so as to liberate the marvelous on one hand
without sinking into complete unreality on the other? Akhter Ahsen, a
contemporary proponent of Surrealism, offers some modern perspectives and
techniques on dreams and imagery that may begin to give up a clue to the
Surrealist Experiment.
From Ahsen in _New Surrealism, The Liberation of Images In Consciousness_ :
"One gets up in the morning and the eyes are still heavy with sleep. One opens
up the eyes and the light comes in so strong that one dives back into sleep to
avoid the traumatic impact of impassive reality.
The impassive reality can be so traumatic that the mind learns to withdraw
from it. The passivity of an unmoving reality is anti-mind. When you look, the
things stay there, nothing moves. But the mind wants to move. That is the
contradiction. And if the mind has already been bombarded and constrained by
replicas of immovable mental objects, dogmas and frozen belief systems, then
where is the original movements of the mind manifested? Where is the original
face of reality and its strength revealed? Where is the original face of
reality and its strength revealed? How can we get there?" (p118-119)
Exercise: Let us see how some of Ahsen's imagery exercises might be applied to
dreams to bring up back into contact with surreality and contact this original
face.
A. Look at something static in your room, a bookcase or door. Watch it for
about a half a minute and return your attention to it if you drift. Note the
dullness and umovingness of this outer reality.
B. Now pick a dream.
1. Pick an image in a dream and hold it in your mind. If you begin to wander,
bring the image back again and again for about a half a minute.
2. Locate the part of the image that pleases you the most and repeatedly bring
this part of the image back into you mind.
3. Note the place of the image within your awareness, and how the image seems
to be inside the mind.
4. Compare the image to the outer image you had. Which is more pleasurable? The
outside boring world or the new freshness of the inner image?
5. Which part of the dream image gives you a feeling of beauty? Explore for a
moment the beautiful aspects of the image.
6. Which part of the image gives you a feeling of power? What is the source of
this power and how does the dream image reflect this power? How might it be
developed?
7. Now hold this dream image again in your mind a few seconds and them look at
the outside world. Has the outside world now brighten up as a result? Note
how attention on the inner imagination can make the outer world look more
interesting.
8. Experiment with bringing into your dream image various people in your waking
life. Note how bringing them into the image, looking at them in detail and then
viewing them again in the outer world changes the way we view them.
Though Ahsen sees to miss the point that we are in the imagination as much as
the imagination being in us, his delightful array of imagery techniques (this
being but one of hundreds he offeres) still work to bring out the idea the we
can valorize dreamland imagery without getting lost it in, and that there is
place of exchange between the waking and dreaming world that offers us
tremendous sources of creativity and new possibilities in creation of our own
Surreality.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.accesslearning.com/courses/psychology3.html
NOVEMBER 1, 1999
The History of Dreams
Instructor: Richard Wilkerson
This delightful six weeks class gives you both e-mail essays on the history of
dreams and
dreaming, as well as interactive labs and online dream groups to teach you ways
of exploring and
understanding your dreams.
From Robert Van de Castle, author of OUR DREAMING MIND,
"...It is a GREAT course!"
From Roberta Ossana, editor of The Dream Network journal
"Extraordinary and thorough coverage of dreaming from Day One and Multiple
Perspectives.
Truly!"
Course Outline:
Module 1. Introduction and Basic Recall Skills: The Peer-Relations
Approach
Module 2. Ancient Dreams: Messages from the Gods
Module 3. Sigmund Freud: The Dreamwork of the Unconscious
Module 4. Carl Gustav Jung: Mythic Dreams and Wholeness
Module 5. Other Pre- 1960's Dream Theories
Module 6. Frederick (Fritz) Perls : Gestalt Dream Techniques.
Module 7. Mindell and Gendlin: The DreamBody
Module 8. From Couch to Culture: Grassroots & Modern Dreamwork Movements
Module 9. Non-Interpretive Dreamwork: Lucid, Mutual, Paranormal &
Pro-active Dreaming.
Module 10. Dream Science and Dreamwork: Friends or Foes?
Module 11. Dream Anthropology: How Culture Influences Dreamwork
Module 12. Dreaming In Cyberspace: New Trends in Dream Sharing on the
Internet.
For the extended Syllabus:
http://www.accesslearning.com/courses/dreams/dreamhx_intro.html
Class Cost: $29.99 (US)
Registration Online http://www.accesslearning.com/courses/psychology3.html
Questions? You can e-mail me at rcw...@dreamgate.com
Richard Wilkerson
www.dreamgate.com
Publisher & Editor, Electric Dream
www.dreamgate.com/electric-dreams
Web Manager, Association for the Study of Dreams
www.asdreams.org
Kristina
RCWilk <rcw...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:19991013142015...@ng-ch1.aol.com...
They are connected for me. I don't see the outside as boring, and the
internal as necessarily pleasurable. There is a precise and clear
connection in the two for me. I can look at my cupboard, and automatically
see the pleasure in it melding and uniting with other factors, thoughts
visuals, etc. I don't know about everyone else, but this is an automatic
thing with me. I tend to have a harder time seeing the everyday as
"literal" rather than "surreal" as you have explained it anyway. This is
just how I process information, and it has always been how I SEE and
respond, take in things in and around me. Anyway, just my point on the fact
that it does not need be an effort to see the outer as "pleasurable" you
either DO or you DON'T. Having to work on such things seems to me a rather
amusing concept. You either see in the literal form or you speak a deeper
language, that does/can embody surrealism, so to speak.
Kristina.
Yes, this is a good excercise for those requiring some form of imagination.
It would be fun if we could go to the grocery store and buy it. LOL.
Thanks for posting this, it was interesting and somewhat amusing too.
cheers,
Kristina.
Lutegirl
the landscape,and wondered how can I measure the value of virtual reality
versus physical reality when both are manmade creations.
Which has a greater value,physical solidity or thought solidity.Which is more
real,to see or grasp a thought,or to see or grasp an object?
Music is etheric but tangable by thought and memory,the song vanishes once it
stops playing,the shapes forms and colors resigned to memory until played
again.
Where is the box it was put away in?
Andrea
Galactor5
representations of those physical objects and ideas designed to mimic them,
until hacked versions were devise to aim at undermining itself, the great
virtual lie of perpetual mental extrapolation.One program ends with the mouse
destroying the keepers of particulate inheritance and freeing all captive in
the virtual field, while Jesus descends from the sky on a harley to thank them
with endless crayola quiche pie.