From: miket@hermes.tcs.com (Michael Turner nmscore Assoc.)
Subject: Re: MPD characters versus Unconscious.
Organization: Teknekron Communications Inc.
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 20:01:18 GMT

In article <gj156879.721676979@cunews> gj156879@alfred.carleton.ca ( gj student 156879) writes:
>Someone suggested that the characters getting annoyed could be that
>you subconsciously make them respond in such a way.  This is true, but
>it could be that your subconscious is your MPD section of your
>brain...  How can I say this clearly?  I don't think the two things
>are that different.  Your subconscious is everything not in your
>conscious.  MPD characters are not in your conscious.  THEREFORE,
>they're subconscious?
> 
>                                                            Nik


James Hillman suggests a substitute term for "subconscious" -- "imagination".
Your imagination turns up things you don't expect, and is sub-conscious in
the sense that you aren't consciously aware of any internal process that yields
up those things.

While I find my dreams (and anyone else's) imaginative, I don't find that I
am terribly imaginative in them.  If anything, I am usually trying hard to
do or think the "normal" thing when all these odd things are going on.  Maybe
that's why lucid dreaming can be so difficult to achieve -- it takes some
imagination for the ego-consciousness to even hypothesize that it is dreaming,
and your imagination is, in dreams, off doing its own thing.

I think I am arguing for a process split in dreaming -- that a lot of your
imagination is running around rampant, while your ego-consciousness is put
in a kind of spectator position, unable to access imagination for the most
part.  Your imagination is incapable of such autonomy in a waking state, and
probably (if it has preferences at all) likes the feeling of freedom and power
it gets in dreams.  I think these feelings of freedom and power can get
transfered to the ego-consciousness in "Real Life"--certainly some of my
most liberating and powerful dreams have not been lucid dreams where I had
a fair amount of control.

Is it your imagination (singular) that is expressed through a variety
of characters in your dreams? Or is each character a separate (or
separable) entity?

Does your imagination even know what it is to have a separate, stable,
individual thread of consciousness?  Such a thread is, after all, only
a useful thing when one has a real-world body to look after, anchored
by its single, real-world source of sense-impressions, and depending on
accurate interpretation of these for its survival.  The imagination has no
such responsibilities.  It has little or no autobiographical structure for
the memories it accesses, seeing these as raw, unserialized data, and isn't
ego-bound to the survival of any single dream character.

To say to a dream-character "You are only in my dreams," is perhaps
somewhat like telling an employee "You only work in my company".  It's
true AND false.  It's true in oppressive ways, and false in that there 
would be no company without employees.  Still, from a dream-character's
point of view, there is much to be resented.  The dream-character is,
in some sense, a representative of the imagination, and to say "You
are only in my imagination" is denigrating to the imagination, and thus 
to a mysterious but productive part of oneself.

So: do I "subconsciously make my dream-characters act annoyed" when I
tell them they are only in my dreams?  Or is there a temporarily
autonomous entity inside myself that is expressing the annoyance?

Break a hologram into two pieces, and you get two fuzzy, but still
complete, images of the original.  Break these, and the images get
fuzzier still, but you never break the image itself.  Some theories
of the brain suggest that human consciousness and memory are like this.
Maybe part of dreaming is this kind of fragmentation.  When the
fragments rejoin, a statement like "I subconsciously made my dream
characters do thus-and-such" becomes more intuitive and plausible
than "In my dream, my subconscious went off and did what it wanted
to, and I couldn't do anything about it."  Until we have a more
precise idea of what "subconscious" means, and in particular, whether
the "subconscious" can have its own volition, we can't really say
that one of these statements is true, and the other is false.
---
Michael Turner
miket@tcs.com
Newsgroups: alt.dreams