International Mother Language Day -or- Chinese Mother Tongue

If we could collect dreams from people speaking all those living languages on the planet, we could listen and watch the fragments of multi-lingual transpersonal poetry of the planet's Finnegan's Wake displayed every night. Much as the dream below suggests, you can poetically travel to any local and use the universal poetic language of the dream to communicate with anyone on the globe. Umberto Eco Travels in Hyperreality provided the semiotic tools and point of departure for consciousness to "go native" in different cultures. The International Institute for Dream Research (IIDR) has had visitors from over 160 countries including your native China who have each contributed their dream fragments, allowing us to travel in the nightly global hyperreality of Dream Vision. Making the process of dreaming visible to all has been my aim since 11.11.1977.

Meeko, Chinese 25

I have some regular dreams like:

  1. If I fish beside a river, next day I'm sure will get some good news.

  2. If I fly round in the sky, next day I must go outside by bus or taxi, the story never change. I believe what I have done that I dreamed before. So, sometimes I'm afraid that I know the results when things begin. I can create dreams that some of them will come true. I believe that I can read the minds of some special people at the same time in my dream, feeling their happiness and dread. Sounds like I was there, communicated, in fact, I used their local language not my mother tongue.

Mr Hagen's Response; Chinese Mother Tongue -or- Finnigan's Wake

The origins of language are unknown. Most likely language 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. According to this story, humanity lost the spiritual translation matrix that had allowed it to commune with God, nature, and the cosmos. Each new generation on the planet dreams and creates new poetic languages, landscapes and paradigmatic models of culture and living. In Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, we find the 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 poetic mentations on the planet. If our dream thoughts seem strange, is because it is poetically unfamiliar to our waking awareness.

Wake's poetic stream of consciousness method informs the text and reader using the oral tradition and the literary storehouse of language, metaphor and puns, created out of the dream fragments of the thoughts and images of philosophy, theology, history, astrology, sociology and alchemy. In Finnegan's Wake, cultural poetic cycles of metaphors, allusions, idioms and puns are dramatic plot devices used to underscore the nature of cosmic jokes and facilitate laughter in the fish out of water plotline. Finnegan's Wake is the ritual comic side of the celebration of the whole of history of human consciousness as a dream in search of poetic redemption. Wake provides an endless generational poetic cycle of reading and dreaming, it is the stuff everyday Dream Vision on the planet is made of.

Umberto Eco The Search for the Perfect Language discusses Dante's dream of healing the wounds of Babel and a restoration of the natural Adamic paradisiacal perfect poetic language of Eden. In After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, George Steiner believes that each language maps the world onto the words it uses to locate and describe it. Said differently, the territory is not the cultural psychological map. For Steiner, communication = translation. Each mother tongue or first language shapes the sociolinguistic communication network of those taking part in a larger speech community individuals become imprinted to and belong to. The dream allows us to poetically enter the cultural communication idiom and social psychological network of all speech communities.

By some accounts there are over 6000 living languages on the planet. Your dream shows how cultural multi-lingual speech code switching and translation becomes a possibility. Walter Benjamin in his essay The Task of the Translator believed in the kinship of all languages and saw translation as a means of integrating many tongues into the one language that is at work. For Benjamin all languages were fragments of a vessel of a greater language. In this sense, in place of T.S. Eliot's "simultaneous order" of literary works, Northrop Frye proposed a total "order of words" in which literature "imitates the total dream of man," structured in archetypes.

As the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates already recognized, nature had installed the language of Dream Vision as a primal oracular language. The dream is the archetypal tongue that has been lost, and which we can all re-enter, it is the primal language that poetically connects all of humanity to its past and to its future. When talking to people about a dream, someone invariably asks, "What does it mean?" We no longer understand nature's poetic gift of dream language. Our cultural consciousness no longer communes or communicates with the primal poetic unconscious of nature. Yet truly it is not the dream that is confusing; the fact is that our conscious minds no longer have the tools to translate the universal language of the dream. UNESCO has created International Mother Language Day to promote awareness of cultural diversity and multilingualism on the planet. The IIDR has attempted to provide an outline the whole poetic process of this total multi-lingual transpersonal communication circulating in the Global Village. Dream Vision makes the ongoing historical cosmopoetic theatre of the Great Dream visible. 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."

All material Copyright 2006 International Institute for Dream Research. All rights reserved.