A Dreamer's Notes: Under the Threshold

Less can be more. I am going to start sharing brief notes from my commonplace book (aka my journal) on this blog, ranging from current movie reviews to snippets of ancient philosophy.

 Soul in Slumberland 

The movie Slumberland, available on Netflix, is getting rave reviews and deserves them. It's deeply moving and visually stunning, sad and scary at times but relieved by flashes of wild humor and with a deeply satisfying ending. We travel through many dream doors and learn how it might be possible to enter the dreams of others. We see that loving contact with the departed is possible in dreams. We learn what can be gained when we brave up to nightmare fears. We are drawn to think about whether there are dream producers and dream regulators who try to give us the dreams they think we need and apply certain rules.

Most exciting, for me, is the vivid depiction of what can happen if we lose a vital part of ourselves - the beautiful bright dreamer - through soul loss and it goes off to live in another world, leaving us bereft of dreams and their magic in regular life. And what it means to get that dreaming self back in the body.

Beneath the Threshold

"Out of slumber proceeds each fresh arousal and initiation of waking activities....To some extent at least the abeyance of the supraliminal must be the liberation of the subliminal. To some extent the obscuration of the noonday glare of man's waking consciousness must reveal the far-reaching faint corona of his unexpected and impalpable powers."

- Frederic W.H. Myers, in his masterwork Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. Myers, a classical scholar and poet as well as one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, is using language he invented. In the Glossary at the start of Human Personality, he defines "subliminal" as follows: "Of thoughts, feelings, &c,, lying beneath the ordinary threshold (limen) of consciousness, as opposed to supraliminal, lying above the threshold...The threshold (Schwelle) must be regarded as a level above which waves may rise - like a slab washed by the sea - rather than as the entrance to a chamber."

“She walks into a dream like you walk into another room."

A few lines from a fantasy novel by a popular author who understands dream travel:

“They go journeying by dream all the time. She can't understand why I make such a fuss about it."

"So you dream of your woman?"

"She is not my woman. Never talk about a woman [of her people] that way. And I don't dream about her. She comes into my dreams."

"What's the difference?"

"In the world you and I grew up in, nothing at all. In her world, she walks into a dream like you walk into another room."

- This passage is from Forest Mage, the second novel in Robin Hobb's Soldier Son trilogy. She gives us clear, simple insight into the nature of dream travel, as experienced by ancient and indigenous shamans and Active Dreamers today: the essential dimension missing from any number of psychology and sleep research books.

Stoic Divination through Sympathy and Soul Travel 

The Stoics had an optimistic belief in divine pronoia: that the gods sent forewarning to humans out of benevolence. They defined divination as “the foreknowledge and foretelling of things that happen fortuitously” (Cicero De Divinatione2.13). The future that cane be foreseen for them is not predetermined.

Two modes of divination described by the far-traveled philosopher Posidonius are observation of the "affinity of al things" and the close study of dreams. He spent time with druids in Gaul and wrote five books on divination, of which only fragments survive, mostly in the pages of De Divinatione, a philosophical dialogue by Cicero. The concept of sympatheia - the  "affinity of all things” (συμπάθεια τον όλον) – presents the world, including the gods, as a unified organism with mutually interrelated parts that turn on each other. Everything is part of a cosmic body. Just as your whole body may respond to the lightest touch on your little toe, what happens to any part of the cosmos may resonate with the whole and generate an event far away. 

Posidonius taught that the soul travels free from the body during sleep. “Divination finds a positive support in nature, which teaches us how great is the power of the soul when it is divorced from the bodily senses as it is especially in sleep and in times of frenzy or inspiration: (Cicero de div 1.129). The Stoics held that dream divination is open to all, a view resoundingly espoused by Synesius of Cyrene in his wonderful little book On Dreams around the year 404.

Image: "Subliminal" by RM with AI assistance