The Prophet -or- Dream Vision and the Human Condition: Part 1

For J

Meaning of Life and the Human Condition -or- Depth Psychological Intentions

Recently a young psychologist commented on "Field Notes of a Dream Researcher", there is alot of stuff to read. The message I received was that there was not enough communicative structure (at least for her) to bind, to bridge all the "work" together. My response to her and to you the reader...this is my intention. In literature, as in life, there is more than one way, more than one method, to find linguistic meaning in a work of art.

Freud understood that the creative hermeneutic dream work process is "overdetermined". The prosaic and poetic reader-response structure of meaning is something that you the reader need to find, ultimately you the reader subjectively structure and create meaning in your life, even as we speak. Finding your own oral and visual communication style, your own vision and voice in life is what creative dream work is all about.

As an adolescent, stories such as JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings", Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" and Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet" framed and fueled my "depth psychological" imagination, my vision, my voice and existential meaning of life. "The Prophet" discusses a variety of topics about the "human condition", this is what this "Field Notes of a Dream Researcher" is all about. It is about "The Raw and the Cooked" menu of life and living. Much like in psychotherapy, there is a diverse menu of topics found in "The Prophet", talk of love, marriage, children, giving, eating and work, are but a few.

This Field Note will connect the chapters found in "The Prophet" with a variety of Field Notes that discuss the same menu of human condition topics. In part two of "Dream Vision and the Human Condition", I will contrast Gibran's more poetic vision of the human condition with Hannah Arendt's more prosaic philosophical views found in her book "The Human Condition". In part three, I will provide my own synoptic "1001 Nights" global cultural dream vision theatre to illustrate the transpersonal psychodynamics of the human condition.

The Land of Collective Memory -or- The Dream Vision Gates of Your Heart

After twelve years living in the city of Orphalaese, Almustafa is returning home by ship. The Prophet uses prose poetry asking us; "And is it not a dream which none of you remember having dreamt, that builded your city and fashioned all there is in it?" Dreams provide access, a gate, to individual and collective dream vision patterns as they relate to the human condition, read the dream interpretation "Dreams and the Human Condition". Again from "The Prophet"; "If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song. And if our hands should meet in another dream we shall build another tower in the sky."

"How often have you sailed in my dreams. And now you come in my awakening, which is my deeper dream." Here then, are "The Prophet's" chapter headings and the IIDR dream interpretations that are associated to them. 

 

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