Smithing, in its most limited sense, is the art of working metals into useful objects or forms with aesthetic value. This sense of the artful use of something takes the word beyond the province of metal work and into forms such as “wordsmithing” and “songsmithing.” In this post, I want to focus on the idea of “dreamsmithing.”

In metal smithing, the “work” consists of various activities such as forging, smelting, refining, hammering, filing, in addition to more specialized processes (e.g. robotic machine tooling). Hard work, and what is “worked” is always the metal, or stone, or whatever material the artist—the smith—happens to be working on.

The first thing to consider about dreamsmithing, as I want to use this term, is that it is an art. It is an art that works with what a dream presents. Dream as metal, dream as materia.[1] Most people who pay any attention at all to their dreams, generally focus on trying to discern the meaning of a dream. Often this search for meaning takes the form of seeking the help of a professional dream worker whose work comes in the form of interpreting the dream to achieve the sought-after meaning. Hard work of a different kind.

Interpretation and meaning are like the utility function of metalworking: the making of useful things like knives, swords, plates, and cups. It is useful to get the message of the dream in the form of meaning. This utility serves the ego in various ways: bringing insight, motivation for change, a sense of personal growth, relief from suffering, a sense of purpose. Most people who relate to dreams at all use dreams in relation to these conscious intentions. This is natural and cannot be gainsaid.

What then of the aesthetic aspect of dreamsmithing?

Some years ago, while in Florence, I visited the Galleria dell’Accademia, intent on seeing Michelangelo’s David. As one enters the main hallway, one sees David standing resplendent in the yellow light of the rotunda. The statue was a magnet drawing me to it. Like others, I took pictures of David from all angles, all the while feeling that my obsessive gestures were covering over a deepening anxiety over something not done. Michelangelo had brought this magnificent figure into the world out of stone. I was reduced to taking its picture, an uneasy dependency on his creation. The more I clicked, the more I appropriated his creation, the more I felt I was doing something inappropriate.

As I was leaving the Galleria, feeling more despondent than elated, I finally saw what I had neglected to see upon entering. Lining the entrance hall were a number of Michelangelo’s unfinished statues. I was transfixed to the point of forgetting, forgetting to capture them with my camera. They were rough figures, struggling for existence as if trying to escape their stone prison. I sat down next to one of these figures and touched it, touched what Michelangelo had touched and chiseled. I felt an overwhelming urge to kiss the stone! I was feeling love.

If we take seriously what Michelangelo said of his sculptures, then we must conclude that a piece of stone carries within it an image which is revealed through the artist’s imagination and then “freed’ into existence by the sculptor’s chipping away the stone prison. It is as if the image in the stone calls to the artist through the imagination and sets the artist on a quest to bring the image into existence.

Are these elements of Michelangelo’s “stonesmithing” applicable to the aesthetic aspect of dreamsmithing?

I believe so. In many ways, the dream as such is like Michelangelo’s raw stone. We are not satisfied with the dream itself either from the perspective of utility or of art. This dissatisfaction is what motivates the search for meaning, the seeking of interpretation, as well as “something else.”

For Michelangelo, there is something within the stone. Likewise, there is something within the dream. This something, whether in stone or in a dream, is revealed through the imagination. This is what led Jung to discover what he came to call “active imagination.”[2] When imagination leads the way (in contrast to conscious intention), something is revealed that could not have been anticipated by conscious expectation. Then, “working” with these revelations, like Michelangelo’s chipping away the stone, becomes the task of the dreamsmith. The hidden something within a dream can be missed. It is often little more than an inchoate “call,” and is often lost altogether as one pursues meaning.[3] It is only through imagination that this call can be “magnified” to form the substance of a “quest.”[4] The quest, inherent in the dream, cannot be arrived at from the utilitarian aspects of dreamsmithing. It can only be revealed through the process of imagination, brought to bear on the dream.

Another difference between the utility and aesthetic aspect of dreamsmithing is that utility tends to keep one rooted to what is already known, while the aesthetic aspect always brings something that orients to the future. Jung’s collected works and seminars are good examples of the utility aspect of dreamsmithing. His Redbook is an extraordinary example of the aesthetic aspect of dreamsmithing. As Jung noted, his prolific public work had its roots in the imaginal experiences of his aesthetic dreamsmithing. This is a good example of how the future is born from the imagination.

When I first began writing about “keys for the future of dreams,” I had reached four key words when I had a dream that told me I had to add afifth word. Furthermore, the dream insisted, it had to be a fifth “C-word.”

Having learned that there is more wisdom in obeying the orders of dreams than in refusing them, I consulted the I Ching “dream gourd” that has become part of my daily practice.

The dream-gourd answered my query with Hexagram 3 (Zhun, tr. “beginning”). From the etymological pictograph, I discerned that the best C-word to convey the sense of this image was “cultivate.” This led to my question: What do we do in our own lives and in relation to the lives of others to cultivate dreams?

In this post I intend to explore this question, as I promised.

One way to deepen any exploration is to begin with an analysis of the etymology of the words one is using. In the previous post, I showed how tending to the etymological image in the I Ching produced the idea of “cultivate.”

So, now, let’s look at this English word. Most of the time, a word’s dictionary definitions do not add much to the word itself that one already knows. For example, one definition of “cultivate” is “to improve or prepare land, as by plowing, for raising crops.” But another definition, “to nurture, foster,” when applied to dreams, adds a nuance: to nurture and foster dreams. So does another definition: “to seek the acquaintance.” “To seek the acquaintance of dreams,” is likely a phrase one has not heard of before. We might even put these two ideas together: To nurture and foster dreams, seek their acquaintance.

The Indo-European root from which cultivate (as well as culture and many other rich words) derive is k^wel-, which has the basic sense of “circling with.” (imagine oxen turning, back and forth, ploughing the field). Circling with a dream. Note the “with” here, the sense of something done together. None of these phrases carries the idea of something “done to” the dream. Nor is there any sense or emphasis on possession, as when we say “my” dream. The dream is of something “other,” and our proprietary clutching is not warranted. This otherness may be experienced as threatening, pleasing, numinous, nonsensical, shrouded in mystery, or a hundred other such cognitive and emotional sequalae that follow awakening from the dream. If one is interested in dreams at all (probably a different kind of 1%), one’s interest seems to focus primarily on what does this dream mean and how can I profit from this meaning? I don’t believe that this common mode of relating to dreams is what is meant by “circling with a dream.”

How then to cultivate dreams in ourselves and in others?

At this point, I’d like to ask each of you reading this post to read the chapter entitled, “The Dream Wants a Dream,” in Psyche Speaks. Just mentioning the chapter’s title is sufficient to give a sense of this cultivation: a dream wants a dream. This idea itself came from a dream, and to take it seriously is to seriously consider that dreams themselvesdesire. Freud developed the idea that dreams mask and hide our true desires and that this hiding and masking helps us to maintain some degree of sanity. Jung rejected the idea of masking, but accepted the idea that dreams are expressing our desires in plain sight. But my dream (“A dream wants a dream/A poem wants a poem”) asserts something else: that dreams themselves (as well as poems) desire. This echoes Baudelaire’s assertion that the only proper “criticism” of a work of art was anotherwork of art.

As I argued in Psyche Speaks, this wanting, this desire on the part of dreams, poems and art (and, of course, much else as well), is eros in waiting, waiting for us to act in return.

In Jung’s most important letter, written to Herbert Read in 1960, Jung writes:

We have simply got to listen to what the psyche spontaneously says to us. What the dream, which is not manufactured by us says is just so…It is the great dream which has always spoken through the artist as a mouthpiece. All his love and his passion (his “values)” flow towards the coming guest to proclaim his arrival…What is the great Dream? It consists of the many small dreams and the many acts of humility and submission to their hints. It is the future and the picture of the new world, which we do not understand yet. We cannot know better than the unconscious and its intimations. There is a fair chance of finding what we seek in vain in our conscious world. Where else could it be?

Just about everything that is important to me in Jung’s psychology is embedded in this letter and its implications. Some implications: everydream is carrying the future, every dream is an aspect of the coming guest, every dream desires us to act on the “hint” of the dream.

Yet, look at the present world, so devoid of being informed by the unconscious and its intimations, so demanding of everyone’s consciousness to be focused on and tethered to “out there.”

Pokémon Go, in a few days’ time, has already “captured” the attention, the frenzy, and the actions of more people than are relating to their dreams. Think about what this future portends.

…to be continued…

http://ralockhart.com/WP