A Triunity of Conscious Remembrance: Writings on Noetic Symbolism

“We can dream about anything, no matter how preposterous, topsy-turvy or unnatural it may be.” Cicero

The three-tiered modes of consciousness, being unconscious, subconscious and conscious are reflected in the synchronous relationship between dream and memory. This is a daily experience from which we may understand the depths of mind on an elementary level. Fundamentally, it is a known fact that all people, and even many animals, are inevitably sent into the subtle realms of dream; it is part of our natural physiology. The three modes are as follows:

1)

Unremembered dreams are phenomena of the unconscious. The subtle emotions that the body and mind feel as a reaction to such dreams are only known by the most acutely aware. 

2)

Dreams that are had, and are known, where the dreamer on waking knows they were dreaming, however cannot remember any specific details apart from references to waking experience, are manifestations of the subconscious. At this point, waking and dreaming states of consciousness meld into a noetic dialogue, an inter-meeting, wherein the fluid exchange of reason and sense are exchanged with imagination and emotion. 

3)

Dreams that are remembered vividly, and dreamt lucidly, are part of the conscious realm. Most people are not fully conscious in their waking life, meaning they are not fully aware and actively engaged in their own lives, as in the source of their own lives, spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically. A conscious dream is more than a physiological memory of the natural, instinctual imagination, it is a gift from the transcendent inner world, a gate into our inmost being, where we contact that which seems at once incredibly strange and entirely familiar, our fully exposed, and whole selves. 

__________

The sting of marshland rushes bruise and cut the soles while tangling the toes in knots of wet, risen moisture. The earth perspires with enduring anxiety under these blank skies. Emitting the hot sweat of gaseous vents through the decaying roots and bacterial soil, I trudge. 

The Pontine Marshes at Sunset by August Kopisch

On the horizon, a large city is burnt to ash. They say it all begin with the conflagration of a movie theatre, and a plane crash that split the small city in two with massive fires extending outwards. Not a soul survived. The earth feels cleansed by the death of a throaty death rattle. The decay of human bodies seems to rise as from the strength of the grasses rooted in the damp, dank shifting ground. 

The Unknown by John Charles Dollman

Above our heads, a plane spews hot trails of ash. A man behind me loads a rocket and stings the plane through its side. I watch as the behemoth machine incinerates in mid-air, crumbling with a hauntingly delicate rush through the death-consuming land. I am surrounded by a feel of homicidal, at once in the horizon, while within the breast of the alive. The air is heavy with fate. 

__________

The rains bear down hard and long
On these deceased pangs, longing to embrace ghosts
Long shied-away, deep within memory’s misbegotten despair

...

The diminished poor bear arms while the rains fall

Calling them home no more to breath

In the air of pure and raw savagery

Beckoning our rice-fought union to work

In undivided shame across river’s breadth

That brings wealth and a name to the American prince

With breast inflamed

Prepared to reason with his shame

And engrave in the desert an unplanned way

Towards brotherhood

...

Freeing spontaneous whispers

To a last pleasurable remorse

Upraised and sacrificed

As great offering to the Klezmer bonfire

Whitewashing the New York tide with Greek verse,

In one soundless escapade towards relaxed state of being

...

Cyclically bridging the human body with the global fate

In one silent orbital wave that resounds instantly in every curve of lost strength

Between arms where the beat follows to our brethren and kin,

A growing and invisible host to our name, thinking up a sound

And so, calling forth the blessed invocation of being

excerpts from "The rains bear down"

Metaphors in the Art of Goya: A Theory of Unconscious Development

The Dream (preparatory drawing) by Francisco de Goya

The Dream (print) by Francisco de Goya

"The dream of reason produces monsters." Francisco de Goya (source)

The purpose for exhibiting the creative process of a master painter as Francisco de Goya, showing his initial sketch, and final print, runs parallel to a theory I have in relation to the role of the unconscious, and its impacts on the life of both the sleeper and the awake. 

Firstly, my theory is founded on lived experience. The foundation is as follows: If a person follows their natural sleep-awake patterns, without conscious intervention, the body cycles through an internal clock more expansive than the twenty-four hour day. Incrementally, each day one wakes later, sleeps later, and eventually earlier. In the course of over a year of practicing this experiment of consciousness, I have found the twenty-four hour clock to be limiting and a mere fixed point around which my sleep and waking cycles orbit, as a celestial body around its true source of gravity. 

Is this an effect of seasonal, environmental, or psychological pressures? The theoretical part now kicks in. With the exhibition of Goya's creative process in visual representing the night of Man, he is accosted by a host of demons, and in turn, upon waking, those demons become monsters of reason. So, if we allow the regenerative natural patterns of sleeping and waking to unfold, with complete abandon and in lieu of the normative twenty-four hour clock, we give way to a natural creative energy sourced deep within our unconscious, that nourishes our very life-breath with the heartbeat of self-knowledge. 

With this, the world of dream is merely a doorway, as is a metaphor or a myth, towards a more holistic regenerative consciousness of self-awakening. 

See related post: In Defence of Sleep: Regenerative Sleep Cycles of Archaic Man

__________

After hours downtown mall. Winter night. Midwestern city. The street is dim, and I stand, as to wait for a companion, or a bus home. Alone, my eyes scan the glass exit doors with a longing nostalgia for company. As I consider my absolute solitude, two prostitutes brush up against me. They closed in out of nowhere. After a moment of disdain, I begin to hear an inner curiosity.

Cocotte on the Road by E.L. Kirchner

"How much?" I ask, imploringly. "500 dollars" she says with a soft smirk. "I don't have that much." I respond, with dry humour, having never intended to act on my curious insides. Surprisingly, my wife steps through the hall behind us and into the background. She sets up her instrument and begins to play. I drift, flying towards the awake. Her unconscious body, her subtle spirit had called me forth, from the fantastic night of isolation.

___________

What of human sound,
The frequent lust to prepare noise in strength of intellectual wonder
and produce unfathomable beauty
            of the entire body
                        descending to and from the ear’s tragic centering
In our musical society, and what to compare “human music” to the grandiose law of nature, expressed in the mere calls of bird and beast revolving their unchallenged voices around the veil of a gross acoustic hall,
            whose rendering dreams an unforgiving welcome to the Earth’s living
            hall,
                        led to a thoughtless demeanor
                                    yet within the mind of man
...

to find a source,
                                                not necessarily of communication
                                                            between human, bird and god,
                                                but a direct connection
                                                            that spells mystery
                                                                        from an inspired gift to all
her sound.

excerpts from "Of human sound"

Myth of the Writer as Artist in the Inner Space Age

Magic Mountain (after Thomas Mann) By Christiaan Tonnis

"Certainly when a writer has acquired the habit of regarding life as mythical and typical there comes a curious heightening of his artist temper, a new refreshment to his perceiving and shaping powers, which otherwise occurs much later in life...myth is the legitimization of life; only through and in it does life find self-awareness, sanction, consecration." Thomas Mann in his essay, Freud and the Future

Within this essay by the great 20th century writer Thomas Mann, author of the famed Magic Mountain, are masterful insights with which to learn the various modes of self-discovery as espoused in the mythic fires of ritualized, eternalized thought throughout the ages. In the ageless struggle towards self-knowledge, the embattlements are often constructed in defence of the outer world, or the world, and in offence from the inner world, or the self. In the midst of those embattlements, lies a field. As Rumi says, "Between right doing, and wrong doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." 

To explore self-knowledge with regard to knowing one's place and vocation is to embark on an inward journey. Only by recognizing the bare truths of our life in the present moment, and proclaiming them as such, and in turn, making them an integral part of the conscious, and waking, mind, can we understand that the truth about myth. 

Myth addresses and reveals the ultimate needs of the human psyche. Myth speaks of the search for meaning in the life of humankind. The final lesson of myth is that the ultimate question for life in the modern world, as with all times, is not, "what is my place in the world?" The essential question remains, "what is the place of the world in me?" Every one is the ONE. You are the world. 

The world is of our own making. We are all co-creators in the aftermath of reason. Work is play, and play is work. Play is the life of the universe at work, also understood as LILA in Hindu thought.   

_________

I walk past a prison in southern California. The air is humid. I can smell salt and chlorine. Why am I barefoot? I bend to look through stone latticework. I see peers, young men and women my age, cleaning a concrete prison campground. A dismal gymnasium? A barren bathing area? They wear radioactive protection, in orange suits and gas-masked. 

Lady in Prison by Raja Ravi Varma

I dart across the road. Barefoot, my feet sink unaware into the freezing water runoff from the prison cleanup. My feet are numb as I walk over a grassy knoll on my way to a gas station. The clear sky is warming. There are gas stations everywhere, and I can't seem to get anywhere close to one. My torso is overheating, and my feet are so frozen I can barely stand.

__________

Touring the phantom cloud

At rest between Celtic shores, distressed by multi-lingual borders and rocky soil, and a northern jail for the barbaric tongues who gouge panicked eyes from the skulls of New World kinds

An orgy of ruthless becoming

Among the equestrian speed, famed by pre-teen daughters of class and medieval French dreams, who cast off the Muslim humidity from Spain’s bound whores, and lust after a secretive world of music in the drum talk of yesteryear’s snoring traditionalism

Yet woken alive

Through non-ordinary literary thought and perpetual action, to finally inundate the worldly risks bedding with our species at once in an archaic passion, straying from the lofty

First World throats of progress

excerpt from "Mad artistry"

Dream Poetry from the Scientific Community

"...in graduate school one of my advisers, I spoke to him one morning, he was doing research on star clusters that have these huge orbits around the center of the galaxy, he said he had a dream the night before where he was one of these galaxies and he was orbiting the center of the galaxy...if you start becoming in your cosmic dream, I want to have those dreams because then you think creatively about what remains to be discovered."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson in "The Poetry of Science" presented by The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science on September 28, 2010

____________

I’m climbing the stairs in a long, thin rectangular building. I’ve been trying to follow a friend of mine who is taking a course with a professor of geography. In the college campus, I seek this professor. When I arrive to the group of students situated outside of a classroom at the very top floor of the building, the professor had already left them to an assistant. Curiously, we move out through a glass door and onto the roof. Interestingly enough, we are at a ledge overlooking the plains of Southern Alberta at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. As we look out towards the horizon, strange mountains have formed, quite unusual to the local terrain. The professor’s voice rings as from above, sounding like a loudspeaker overhead. He tells us about the mountains ahead. They are sparsely topped with fluorescent greens and ruddy earth reds and light browns, forming a seemingly endless carpet of medium-tall peaks at about uniform height draped over with the shadows of roaming clouds. “I have known the endurance in traversing beyond the range.” He speaks to us coldly with matured foresight as to the near impossible natural impasse. As the students begin to clear, my searching eyes see traces of industry. Train tracks appear, passing directly into the heart of the range. 

_________

"A mountain dream is used by the subconscious mind to tell us that we have many obstacles to overcome and they will be large ones and almost insurmountable." (iDream)

_________

spiraled dawn fractured by a scintillation

inspiring madness divine on the cemetery backwall laugh

uprisen as a hand, freakish to the crack of lying dreams

prepared, as spilled ash freezes in a line trembling freer than a rocked flash

“oh god entice this sickness to crash on the empires doorstep

last before the carnage to fall quakes in the morning

with a demonesque call to become the jeering weasel

creaking easily as high distance in fright, and lost”

- excerpt from "Sour Mangrove"