The Global Village Voice: Dream Vision in the Information Age

This Pale Blue Dot: Dream Vision in the Global Village

We live on a pale blue dot in the dramatic vastness of the cosmic stage of the universe. It is this cosmos and the pale blue dot that dreams and Dream Vision speaks to us about in our nightly mentations. Carl Sagan's This Pale Blue Dot (see video) provides us with a perspective in which we can view ourselves and our relationship to the cosmos. Many Dream Visions have expressed this literary notion, such as that of the Roman philosopher Cicero's Dream of Scipio in which the literary character Scipio Aemilianus has a cosmological dream journey. Dante's Divine Comedy speaks to us of a poets journey and descent into the darkness of the underworld of hell and his ascension to the heights of Heaven. Mohammad's cosmic magic carpet Dream Vision journey which still organizes the Islamic community is another such dream. Mohammad's dream inspired by the archangel Gabriel the chief messenger of God, was intended to create a theological dialogue between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. What happened to that dialogue? What happened to that dream?

Dream Vision has always provided a durable literary device for understanding and communicating the mysteries of the mind and humanities relationship to the nature of the universe. A characteristic of Dream Vision is a narrator of a story who falls asleep and dreams. In them, the narrator meets a guide. When I collected the dreams of many people, it became evident that all dreams represent life journeys that require a guide. Using Wikipedia print pages and You Tube videos I present to you the reader and viewer topics which are relevant to this inner journey.

The opinions expressed in the Wikipedia print pages and You Tube videos you watch that are part of this article, are not necessarily the opinions of the International Institute for Dream Research (IIDR). Instead they serve to provide a communication forum for the marketplace of thought and ideas  on the Internet. They provide a cosmological journey narrated by a variety of narrators and narrative points of view. Some of which may be reliable, others may be seen as unreliable or outdated. My own narrative point of view can be found in my book Mysteries of the Dream in the Global Village: A Cultural Guide for Dreamers, Dreams and Dreaming.

The Wikipedia print pages and You Tube video collage of sound and image represents a digital polyphonic frame story in the sense of Mikhail Bahktin's The Dialogic Imagination.  I have provided a polyphony of dreams, visions and voices, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict. Out of these you must create and develop your own voice and vision. This Wikipedia and You Tube montage of the world represents the conscious dreaming that we call the imagination. The dream, too, is such an artwork. To illustrate such an artistic polyphony of voices we can watch and hear the music video; 

Global Village Voice: The Inner Tube of Dream Vision     

The International Institute for Dream Research website has had visitors from 162 nations. This article is intended for all the visitors of the Institute who are in search of understanding. See and hear the voices and the faces from the past, and the present. See and hear Americans, Canadians, English, Spanish, French, Germans, Russians and so on. This poetic synechdoche of Dream Vision created by electronic media, connects the polyphonic parts and the whole of humanity and can provide creative insight and build roads to peace in the Global Village.

The natural process of dreaming is washing over the planet as we speak. The daily tide of dreams and dreaming amounts to about 27-billion dreams (an average of four dreams a day, multiplied by 6.8 billion people). Yearly, that amounts to potentially 9-trillion dreams, an ocean of dreams populated with dramatic creatures and dreamscapes. In words attributed to Christopher Columbus, "...the sea will grant each man new hope... his sleep brings dreams of home."

If we were able to screen these dreams in the right focus, we would understand ourselves, the world  and the dream world better. I call for a global research program to examine our dreams. What would such a program find? The dream world is becoming a postmodern cybernetic bricolage or patchwork of dreamscapes, but it is also much more. I predict that we would find the quality of our literary devices of communicating, and a life chart of our communicative choices of genres and themes. We would find how the history of human communication has brought us here.

Nature provided us with a communication device, an inner global media channel which allows us to process and envision our memories, relationships, feelings and experiences. Turning the dreams of the 6.8 billion living on the planet inside out and view them, enables us to enter the individual and collective depths of our experiences which is our Inner Tube of dreaming. If we assume that the average person living in Western society lives to 75 years of age, and has four dreams a night, the number of dreams that person will have potentially approaches 110,000. If we were able to collect all these dreams, what would they tell us about the Inner Tube (the dreams stored in our unconscious and involuntary memory) intersections of the individual and the community? The dream as media has and is being influenced and shaped by economic and political forces operating in the Global Village.

Dream Vision in Western Civilization 

Cliford Geertz Interpretation of Culture believed that symbols guide the dramatic action of individuals and cultures. We inherit the symbolic tools, techniques and structures of communication from past generations. Ruth Benedict "Patterns of Culture" provided an anthropological perspective to human development, in which society impresses its prefigured culturally embodied framework of communication of ideology, metaphors, norms, expectations, and values on the individual as the child enters the culture. 

Since the beginning of Western Civilization in ancient Greece and the Holy Land, dreams and geopolitics (view video) have played a vital role. We find this dream and politics connection in the Iliad, Homer's tale about the Trojan War. We also find the importance of dreams and visions in the Old Testament such as the Biblical story of Jacob's Ladder. The oracle at Delphi, as the oracle at Jerusalem have shaped the history of Western civilization. We have been told that we are living in a post-Cold War era where a Clash of Civilizations (see video) is taking place. We can view this clash of civilizations as a clash of dreams and Dream Visions. 

Dream Vision in the Information Age    

  • We live in a time of the Information Age. The effects of the Information Age can be seen in our dreams. The media effects of the electric revolution and the Information Age is re-shaping our concepts of mind. These effects were studied by the Canadian communications expert Marshall McLuhan who believed that a "re-tribalization" of man was taking place. Electronic media (see video) was making the world smaller (CBC video clip). McLuhan coined the term "the medium is the message" (see video)  where he envisioned Our World (CBC video June 25, 1967) the Global Village ruled by satellites and electronic media . For Marshall McLuhan War and Peace in the Global Village (see video) media we need to better comprehend the psychological dynamics of life in the Global Village to understand the nature of war. Ironically McLuhan's theory of the future of war in the Global Village was inspired by the narrative structure of James Joyce's Finnigan's Wake, which is a literary work that was weaved together by the artists visionary use of dream associations.   

Globalization: The Shaping of the  Marketplace of Dreams 

  • The transformation of political and economic forces by technology has changed our world. As McLuhan foretold, we appear to be on a path towards some form of re-tribalization. We can see how globalization has been primarily driven by the marketplace seen in the media (view video). 
  • This global economy (see video) we live in is rapidly changing into a corporate environment shaped by the technological sounds, images and icons of corporate media (watch video) 
  • A variety of authorities have commented on corporate influence on the human mind such as Richard Restak (view video) and Naomi Klein's No Logo (see video).

Dream Vision in the Global Village 

National literatures have been shaped by Dream Vision, or is it Dream Vision that has shaped history and national literatures? This chicken or egg causality dilemma of dreaming rings through all the arts, sciences and philosophy. The ancient Greek epic poet Homer Iliad uses the literary device of the dream as a tool for the Gods to communicate to the characters involved in the Trojan War. In ancient Rome, The Dream of Scipio by Cicero later inspired other philosophers, writers, and musicians like Boethius Consolations of Philosophy, and Mozart Il sogno di Scipione. 

In England the poet Caedmon and Chaucer, shaped the English literary canon via their Dream Visions. Shakespeare inherited these national myths. Legend tells us that Caedmon began his spiritual journey after a Dream Vision. Caedmon retold the tale and poetry of the dream to clerics, who pronounced the dream to have been a spiritual gift from God. Beowolf is in part a Dream Vision, as is Chaucer's Parlement of Foules, one of many that he wrote. 

As Peter Ackroyd Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination says, "The dreamers of the tribe were highly praised because in their state of charmed sleep they were able to unite heaven and earth." From its Old English beginnings, English literature is replete with oneiric drama. The Pearl, Langland's Piers Plowman, The Dream of the Rood, The House of Fame, and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen have become mainstays of the English national canon. John Milton's Paradise Lost and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress added new visions. As Shakespeare says, "To sleep, perchance to dream -ay, there's the rub."

In Russia Fyodor Dostoevsky, who dealt with the poetic heights and depths of existence, often uses dreams in his work. In the short story, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, a man, wandering the streets of St. Petersburg, reflects on the absurdity of his life. Returning to his apartment, he is about to commit suicide. While contemplating this, he falls asleep and has a cosmic vision that transforms him. Upon waking, he devotes his life to truth and utopian ideals.

In Italy Dante's epic poem Divine Comedy, and in France The Romance of the Rose provide further examples of the archetypal literary canon of Western Dream Vision. In Germany Walter Benjamin The Origin of German Tragic Drama traces the sources of melancholy to dreams and Dream Vision. In Canada the Dream Vision found in Margaret Atwood's Journals of Susanne Moodie inspired Northrop Frye to write The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. It could be said, that the dreams found in the Mackenzie King's Diaries stand at the centre of the Canadian Dream Vision literature. All these works have provided a perennial philosophy and guiding light for billions of dreamers of the dream. 

We have come to a crossroads in the Global Village. If humanity's adaptive faculties fail to move towards tribal peace, then we can write our apocalyptic epitaph. Misanthropy and nihilism are real, but we need not be doomed. We can move away from darkness into the light. As Marshall McLuhan, possibly alluding to Plato's metaphor of the ship of state, tells us, "There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew." We are all in the same boat. The question is whether we should be a ship of fools. Can a peaceful dialogue and Dream Vision among civilizations take place?  

Conversations Great and Small: Setting the Literary Stage 

The Great Conversation is inspired by religion, politics, literature, art, science, music, and philosophy, and has been undertaken by (mostly) Great Men, though this male domination has been much amended (by the feminist movement) in the past two centuries. The Great Conversation takes place today between the White House and the Kremlin, between world leaders, at diplomatic missions such as the United Nations and the European Union, in government legislatures, in judiciaries, participants in world movements (in art, environmentalism, feminism, human rights), in the executive offices of multinational companies, universities, the Vatican, churches, military alliances such as NATO, in academic publications, in online discussion groups and websites. The media (the Internet, TV, movies, radio) such as CNN provide the current outlet for the Great Conversation, but every night Dream Vision advances it by showing what remains constant and what changes. 

The conversation not only involves great dreams or great men, but also the ideas articulated by the general public. Word of mouth travels and binds the real and the fictive into this epic theatre and communal spectacle, making conceptual street maps. Behind the Great Conversation is a people's history and culture. The origins of a people's history are rooted in our prehistoric past. In The Savage Mind, Claude Lévi-Strauss recognizes that primitive thought is based on a need for order that creates a mythological structure. Ritual, animism, and totemism are the mythological icons, signs and symbols that bring order to the primitive mind's linguistic universe and ancestral memory. To some anthropologists, animism is the basis of philosophy and language. According to E. B.Tyler in Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, animism originated in dreams of life, death and survival. Communal ritual dreams and fantasies mythologically ebb and flow in film, radio, and TV, and even in water-cooler gossip. Dreams reflect and embody people's underlying mythological fears, hopes, and desires. 

A people's history is a sub-genre of the historical novel, attempting to make transparent events from the perspective of ordinary people, often the oppressed, persecuted, the discriminated against, the poor, the nonconformists, and the otherwise forgotten. The mythic constituents of modern Dream Vision are not so different from those of primitive humans, except that we have the aid of mass media and information technologies. As a communication gestalt, an organized whole that is more than the sum of its parts, a people's history contrasts with, and often opposes, the view that history is only made by Great Men. The dreams received at the International Institute for Dream Research gives voice to a people's history, an everyperson's history. 

The Child arrives at This Pale Blue Dot 

Children are born into family, culture, language, and a historical marketplace of ideas, mythology, and ideology. There are 193 countries (give or take) on the planet, and more than 5,000 different languages. Each child born today must unconsciously learn a cultural milieu. Each has the daunting task of becoming. part of the story called civilization. Each child must begin to develop a philosophy of mind, renewing the conversation and story of Dream Vision begun in prehistoric times. As Jean Piaget's Play, Dreams and Imitation, has shown, the child is innately motivated by play to build a theory of the mind while constructing a language code. The proliferation of literary codes found in dreams implies conceptual production, circulation and exchange, an economy of cultural signs and continued poetic expansion and contraction of meanings. The text of the dream is a cultural conceptual semiotic space where the individual and collective ritual communication codes of thoughts, feelings and memories about life, death and survival attempts to circulate meaning. 

Shagra Zim, in Cognitive Development of Children's Dreams, reports on dreams' developmental aspects. Zim's research asks two principal questions: Is there a developmental adaptive trend in children's dreams? Does this trend follow Jean Piaget's genetic stage theory of cognitive development? Zim answers "Yes" to both questions. Children's reports of dreaming suggest that the child has a passive observer role. Only later does the child become an active performing artist whose characters, plots, and scenery in dreams become more complicated. The child's initial egocentric viewpoint evolves so that others begin to have a larger part in dream interactions. The child's role can grow, develop, change and mature from the egocentric to the sociocentric viewpoint with its multiple adult interactions.

We can find numerous You Tube videos that act much as a Psychology 101 class, here are some of them;

The child's socialization (see video) is featured  and surrounds the chicken or egg debate of nature and nurture (view video).

  • Julia Kristeva (watch video) explored the poetic language acquisition of children as it relates to the child's sense of self.
  • Jean Piaget (see video) was a modern pioneer in attempting to understand child's cognitive developmental processes.
  • The Harlow Experiments have made the importance of the effects of parental deprivation (view video) of nurturing visible.
  • The behavioural experiments of B.F Skinner (watch video) led to his theory of operant conditioning.
  • The attachment theory (view video) of John Bowlby (see video) provides a theory for the development of love (watch video) and identity (view video). 

Scientific Mysteries of Memory, Sleep and the Dreaming Mind 

In 1979, I had a hypnogogic vision in which I saw how memory operates. Comparing the rudimentary neuropsychological understanding that I possessed to the actual process of memory in the vision, I saw that the then current theories in the academic literature were primitive to the extreme. In the dream, I realized the so-called experts were using bearskins and stone knives to understand a process that is an artistic marvel, an amazing work of nature. 

Rene Descartes is considered to be the founder of modern science and philosophy, an architect of the modern world. On the night of November 10, 1619, Descartes had three dreams. His meditation and interpretation of the dreams led to the dream argument and the scientific method revolutionizing the way Western man thought about himself, the cosmos he lived in, and his dreams. In the dreams, Descartes found two basic books: one of learning, and one of poetry, and this led him to attempt to unify philosophy as both an art and a science. Descartes dream of a unified philosophy of art and science has remained unrealized, with film and the internet we have moved closer to the realization of this dream. 

          You Tube: The Science of Dreams and Dreaming 

Finnigan's Wake: The Artistic Doors of Perception 

Bettina Knapp in Dream and Image tells us that "The unconscious as a helping device in man's artistic and scientific quest may be looked upon as a function of the mind or as a new world-a kind of fourth dimension in which a new space-time orientation comes into existence." Many dreams received at the IIDR speak of the artist's desire for growth and development. For Freud, the dream was a plastic art form, where life and living were creatively sublimated or not. The art history of Western civilization from the ancient Greeks to the present is an odyssey and metamorphosis of Dream Vision and the philosophy of mind. For Elisabeth Lenk in Die Unbewusste Gesellschaft (The Unconscious Society), the dream is a theatre that expresses the artistic currents circulating within the mind of society. Lenk believes that the theatre of consciousness and the dream no longer commune, leading to the loss of the artistic soul. The artist attempts to create a consciousness that reintegrates the dream. In totalitarian societies, this freedom is replaced by a theatre of marionettes. 

The art of dreaming has been explored and experimented with through a variety of ways, one more modern path was that paved by the artist Salvador Dali's lucid dreaming techniques Slumber with a Key; Part 1 Part 2 . In Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold tell us that we can be empowered by knowing that we are active perceivers, and that what we experience is created by our imagination. Thus we can wake up in our dreams and influence unfolding events. Lucid dreams can provide a vast artistic stage for transforming the familiar objects, people, and situations of everyday life into a "saturnalian festival." 

In the 1950s, Huxley's The Doors of Perception explored the use of drugs in which perception is altered because the nervous system filters reality and conveys a "reduced reality." Aldous Huxley (see video) Doors of Perception (video Part 1) Part 2. Huxley's book predated such popular treatments as Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I do not advocate drug use except for medical purposes. Most of us self-medicate, as is our right, but drugs are usually, though not always, used to escape reality and can only add to the person's alienation. The expense of drug use and the risk to one's health must also be considered. Natural ways to stimulate such biochemically produced drugs as endorphins in your body, by techniques of meditation and yoga, can allow you to move more freely through various states of consciousness, producing greater awareness of consciousness itself. 

In Joyce's Finnegans Wake, we find a Tower of Babel of mother tongues, cultures, mythologies, and words that meet, collide, and merge into one river, one ocean, one cosmic dream. So it is with Dream Vision, which looks, sounds, and feels like someone privy to the nightly mentations on the planet. If it seems strange, is because it is strange to our waking awareness. The stream of consciousness method informs the text and reader using the literary and cultural storehouse of language, metaphor and puns, created out of the dream fragments of the images of philosophy, theology, history, astrology, sociology and alchemy. 

In Finnigan's Wake, literary cycles of metaphors, allusions and puns are dramatic plot devices used to underscore the nature of cosmic jokes and facilitate laughter in the fish out of water plotline. Finnigan's Wake is the ritual comic side of the celebration of the artistic whole of history as a dream in search of redemption. Wake provides an endless epic cycle of reading and dreaming, it is the stuff history and everyday Dream Vision is made of. Each of us partakes in the cosmic dreamscape of Finnegan's Wake and the literary storehouse of the cosmological codes of language. 

The Moveable Feast: Dreams, Nightmares and Dreamscapes  

Dreamscapes help to absorb the poetry of life, death, and survival. In Western culture, rites of passage structure and regulate the acquisition of knowledge, summarized at the end of life by such forms as elegies, eulogies, epitaphs, and obituaries. Life-writing (and creative writing) enables the writer to present life in all its states as, in Ernest Hemingway's phrase, "a moveable feast." We are all diners at the feast, and the dream is our menu. 

In his essay Sociology of Dreams, Roger Bastide believes that the study of dreams should ask two interrelated questions. First, what is the social function of the dream? Second, how does the sociological framework of dream thought operate? Freud had already shown that even the most absurd dream was part of mind and personality. Bastide suggests that Freud's definition of dream-work should be extended to include a civilization's heritage and its social system. Just as Freud repersonalized the dream, Dream Vision resocialized it. Society furnishes the communication framework for the dream's thought, emotion, sensation, and memory. Bastide believes sociology should study the life cycle to follow how social structures influences mind and body. 

The You Tube videos presented in this section provide a variety of narrators such as Freud, Jung and Lenard Nemoy (Star Trek fame). As a pioneer of modern dream research, Freud entered the world of dreams armed with scientific tools of thought, submerging himself into this world below the surface of the conscious mind. 

Freud and Jung 

Dreams and Nightmares 

  • Leonard Nemoy narrates Dreams and Nightmares Part 1 Part 2 Part 3                       

Varieties of Dream Interpretation             

          The videos in this sub-section provide numerous perspectives on dream interpretation.   

Science Fiction: Global Utopian Dream or Dystopian Nightmare? 

The communication devices of the historical stage, (such as mise en scène and mise en abyme), organizes the spectacle of sociey into a gestalt of paradigmatic frames of mind that circulates through our conversations. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards: 2000-1887  is a utopian Dream Vision that attempts to allegorize the story of hope in a socialist future to a disillusioned American audience. As a response to Bellamy, William Morris' Dream Vision News from Nowhere critiques Bellamy's socialist vision.  

To the modern mindset, Franz Kafka's work signals the nightmare of cruelties within the family, the stigmatizing and alienating force of bureaucracies, and the sense of hopelessness, powerlessness, estrangement, and isolation felt by urban dwellers. The Kafkaesque points to the existential nightmare in which the character is bewildered by the workings of the mind and social reality and has trouble charting a course of action, even if only to escape the nightmarish cityscape. In the first sentence of Kafka's The Metamorphosis: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." The incomprehensible oneiric forces at work that transformed Samsa remain a mystery. In Samsa's tale, only the mysterious terrible sense of the nightmare are assured. 

For Ernst Bloch in The Principle of Hope, the work of the utopian imagination is propelled by the polarities of light and darkness, of hope and despair, of dream and nightmare. Dream Vision provides the mind with a light meter for hope. If light is a metaphor for hope, and if science fiction is the genre that speculates about the future, is the Earth metamorphosing into a Kafkaesque place of darkness and despair, such as that mindscape of the neo-noir cyberpunk SF film classic Blade Runner (based on Phillip K. Dick's Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep?)? 

Dystopias belong to the theatre of grotesque. Such examples of dystopias as Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon express the fear of totalitarian dictatorship, visions of societies in the throes of a collective nightmare. Underworld, the dystopian postmodern novel by Don DeLillo, presents a world of international capital, transnational media, hostile takeovers and electronic sex. Individuals and communities are unprotected amidst a high-tech bombardment more sinister than the nuclear threat. Skin and mind have become flayed, exposing the insides to penetrating and manipulating electronic signals leaving the individual feeling excoriated, invaded and violated.   

Dreams received at the IIDR speak of a multitude of such dystopian landscapes, a recent film Children of Men (view video) warns us as most dystopias do, of the dream of life turning into a nightmare. 

Cultural Imperialism: Mind Control and the Politics of Fear 

Aldous Huxley had already warned us of the political use of mind control techniques. Hypnopaedia, sleep learning, was a device that, for Huxley in his dystopian novel Brave New World, represented the ultimate form of mind control. In the book, infant hypnopaedia is used to condition consciousness and ensure the compliance with the ideological order. Throughout the novel, characters spout what they were made to believe through hypnopaedia. Even those who are conscious of such mind control cannot fully escape its power. 

Mind Control (see video) and psychological warfare (view video) was investigated by the CIA . The 2004 film The Manchurian Candidate (see film trailer) based on the novel by Richard Condon, features a brainwashed American soldier whose dreams hold the keys to the truth of a political conspiracy.

In The Crisis of the Self in the Age of Information: Computers, Dolfins and Dreams, Raymond Barglow argues that computers and information technologies have colonized the mind. Informed by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Barglow believes that, instead of the old organic metaphor of the body, a new technological equation has gained ascendancy: mind = machine, undermining and rewriting the sense of an autonomous self. Barglow sees a crisis of individualism. Is he telling us that we are in danger of becoming the mythological techno-character of the Star Trek series known as The Borg (see video)? Will resistance in this tribal hive mind become futile?

Although the computer is the ruling metaphor of our age, Barglow does not take account of one of its practical effects. Dreams received at the IIDR bear out U.S. cultural dominance in the Global Village, influencing the planet to accept its rituals. Of special concern is the U.S. military's and the CIA's neo-colonial surveillance of national theatres. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,  Walter Benjamin, anticipates the means by which the United States has politicized communication with a mass-produced art, mind, consciousness and economic message system.

Cultural imperialism (see video) has been critiqued by the likes of Edward Said and Noam Chomsky (view video). The German band Rammstein Amerika (watch music video) has graphically parodied the perceived American cultural imperialism. The most radical form of this trend of cultural imperialism is the threat of American militarism. In President Eisenhauer's farewell address to the nation, he warned of the influences of the Military Industrial Complex (see video), while President Reagan Star Wars (view video) vision fueled it and the Cold War film Dr Strangelove (see film trailer)parodied it. 

Fear and Loathing in the Global Village 

To clearly understand such social evils as mind control, war, violence, rape, abuse, hate crimes, prejudice, and censorship we must restore the dreams communal communication frame by re-embodying visions and voices that have been suppressed and relegated to the unconscious. The communication problem, however, looms large, since most people remain fixated on their personal problems without realizing that their victimization or alienation is linked to negative communal or global factors. Nor are most of those who shatter others' dreams aware of how much harm they inflict. Most likely they wouldn't care, unless they resembled Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, whose Dream Visions transformed him. The wars, genocides, and crimes against humanity in the 20th century alone echo as nightmares, and resonate among those who survived. Even more horrific is the thought of the voices and visions that were muted or erased from history by death squads, in gulags and in killing fields or other even more recent horrors, such as the Rwandan genocide or the Iraq War. 

           These You Tube video documentaries provide visions of a planet in faced with a variety of perils. 

Global Dream Research: Dreamtime and the Global Consciousness Project  

The origins of language are unknown. Most likely human communication began sometime in the darkness of proto-history. According to the monogenetic hypothesis of language acquisition, all languages have descended from one form of speech. The Bible tells us that this Adamic language was lost when humans attempted to build the Tower of Babel. Humanity lost the translation matrix that had allowed it to commune with God, nature, and the cosmos. The catastrophe of confusion told in Genesis 11:1-9 involves the Tower of Babel. For George Steiner in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Part 1 Part 2 (see videos) restoring a unitary language, a new myth, a "new key" for humanity is possible, a forum in which our minds can join a dialogue about private and public problems. In The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges imagines a library that encompasses the metaphors of all minds, people, languages, places, and times in which a guide to its labyrinth seems to be nearly impossible. Yet Borges insists that such a guide and map exists. The guide and the map are of course what this story has been about. Dream Vision is the guide, and it provides a map for the mind to follow. It is a program that envisions the minds ability to move among the world's dreamers, and also connects us to the dreamers in the past and future. 

Steiner believes that each language (cognitively) maps the world onto the words it uses to locate and describe it. For Steiner, communication = translation. Each generation creates new topologies and landscapes of culture. Steiner tells us that a day will come when "translation will no longer be necessary. All mother tongues will have re-entered the translucent immediacy of that primal, lost tongue and speech shared by God and Adam." Dream Vision is that primal oracular language, the primal tongue that has been lost, and which we can all re-enter. It is the language that connects humanity to its past and to its future. The dream washed over the planet before humans acquired the tools of language. When talking to people about a dream, someone invariably asks, "What does it mean?" We no longer understand dream language. The conscious mind no longer communicates with the unconscious. Yet truly it is not the dream that is confusing; the fact is that our conscious minds has difficulty or cannot translate the universal mythological language of the dreaming mind. 

Stuart Moulthrop has designed a hypertextual program called Dreamtime that creates a kind of virtual cybermontage of dreams and memories. It suggests that dreams are what connect us on a higher level of consciousness and reality, much like the  Australian aboriginal Dreamtime (see video) which provides one vision of how this consciousness operates. Although such programs as the Global Consciousness Project attempts to understand the dynamic effects of global consciousness as it relates to such  events as 9/11, the death of Princess Diana, or World Cup soccer, they do not provide sufficient answers as to how this process operates. As we know, Bin Laden and his cohorts literally dreamt of carrying out the 9/11 attack. In the aftermath of the attack, many people suffered traumatic nightmares. Princess Diana has influenced many people's dreams, one of the reasons that the Queen as portrayed in the film The Queen could not understand the British public's overwhelming grief at Diana's death. Rita Francis has compiled and edited the dreams of men and women in Dreaming of Diana: The Dreams Diana, Princess of Wales, Inspired. 

What can a dream research program on a global scale do? 

I believe that a baseline of social indicators of Dream Vision on the planet will be revealed. I believe that research will show the underlying processes and architecture of the mind, and provide a new philosophy of mind and nature. Dream Vision can provide a peaceful stage for global citizens, and a mental health movement that aims for a peaceful world. Acting as feedback, the research results can affect how we look at all the areas of life touched by the arts, sciences, and humanities. I believe it will expose a noir genealogy of mind control, oppression, censorship, corruption, prejudice, abuse, schadenfreude, and hatred. It will provide a guide for seeking material wealth, ideal romantic adventures and, for those with a theological bent, the Kingdom of Heaven.  

Dream research can provide a sociological baseline and literary thread for understanding dreaming. All aspects of the philosophy of mind and nature can be quantitatively and qualitatively revealed and evaluated. Most important, research can ask: What is the future of Dream Vision? As an oracle, the dream can help us understand how to achieve a better brighter future. The temples at Delphi and Jerusalem have fallen into disrepair. An instauration of the dream is necessary to restore the utopian foundations of Western civilization, and reach a rapprochement with dreams and oracles found in Eastern traditions like those of the I Ching and Feng Shui.  

The dreams of the public, find little or no expression in almanacs or newspapers or newscasts, yet they play an extraordinary role in everyday life. In the future, we will need to examine large samples of dreams, not for the purpose of political-economic surveillance - instead, the opposite can be true - as a biopsy to detect the abuses of our rights and freedoms, to promote growth and maturation, and to help guide us towards a peaceful and loving orientation free of pathological deceptions, bullshit, hatreds, and destructiveness. As the philosopher Harry Frankfurt On Bullshit Part 1 Part 2 (view videos) has shown us that there is a great deal of bullshit (about dreams) is circulating in the public's consciousness (Global Village). It is imperative to inform an ill-informed public about the nature of dreams and dreaming, so they can plug into the nightly mentations of humanity and understand and contribute to making the world, this spaceship Earth a better place. 

I hope that you will listen to the Inner Tube dream conversation of the 6.6-billion inhabitants living in the Global Village, dance to the tribal drum, hear the calls of laughter and joy of elation and the weeping and sorrow of misery and suffering. These calls are calls to action. The IIDR advocates an end to nightmares, Weltschmerz, the Tragedy of the Commons. The business of restoring our collective public memory and Dream Vision to health is paramount in creating a Global Village that is free, peaceful, and loving. I echo what Martin Luther King Jr. had in mind when voicing the words: "I Have A Dream!" (see video). We all have the right to dream, it is an inalienable human right which embodies and encompasses the values of freedom, peace and justice.

 

 

   

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