Category: Society and Politics

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Basketball Dream Diaries #2: The First Two Games

The day before the opening game of the Trailblazers’ 2021-2022 season, I was bothered by something I read online about Damien Lillard, Portland’s best player. The article ranked him lower among the league’s top players than I think he deserves; it dinged him for his defense, and emphasized the catastrophe that would befall the Blazers should he ever leave. The tone of the article reflected the very low expectations people seem to have for Portland’s performance this season. The Blazers hired a new head coach, Chauncey Billups, who has never held that role before, but whose previous assistant coaching focused on defense, and that’s where the Blazers most needed to improve (tied for 3rd best team in the league in offensive efficiency last year, but 19th in the league in defensive efficiency). Otherwise, Portland made no big roster moves during the off-season. They let Carmelo Anthony go, which I thought was too bad, he had a great run with the Blazers the past couple years. They re-signed their big mid-season acquisition from last year, shooting guard Norman Powell, which is certainly good. They added several new players to the bench, including two big guys who play great defense, Cody Zeller and Larry Nance, Jr.

What’s not to like? The fear is that it doesn’t add up to enough in an NBA that gets faster and more skilled every year. Yes, Damien and C.J. McCollum will score points. But will the rest of the team be able to perform at championship-levels of competition? Nothing that happens in the preseason should cause too much anxiety, but losing all four games didn’t help in calming the worrisome vibes as the first game approached.

The Sacramento Kings were the visiting team. Led by veteran Harrison Barnes, they have lots of quick, young, talented players who clearly want to change their reputation as one of the league’s weakest teams. They certainly succeeded in gaining new respect from the Blazers, who lost in a very dispiriting fashion, 124-121. Portland played terribly for the first three quarters, made a comeback in the fourth, then fell short as Damien missed a last-second 3-point shot. For the game, Damien missed all nine of his 3-point attempts. Ouch. The team had no chemistry, and looked slow and out of tempo. The defense was awful.

Prospects of a truly disastrous season suddenly loomed. What if the Blazers had suddenly dropped into the lower ranks of the league? What would that mean for Damien and C.J., who have been the subject of trade talk throughout the off-season? Watching a franchise go through a sudden decline is a very, very painful experience for a fan…

That night after the game, I had this dream:

Will Damien Be Distracted?

Damien Lillard goes onto the basketball court with a gift someone gave him, a white rectangular box with a few things in it….He is happy, but I am confused….Won’t this distract him from the game?….

(10/21/21)

The dream made me think back to the opening ceremony before the game started, when Damien stepped to center court and spoke to the crowd. He welcomed everyone back to live action (yay!), and promised the team would try hard, even if the initial results might not be pretty to watch (hmm).  The announcer thanked him as “Dame D.O.L.L.A.,” his musical pseudonym (double hmm). Now that I thought about it in light of the dream, it struck me at the time as a strange moment, breaking the fourth wall to reach out and lower our expectations, while gesturing towards his career beyond basketball. Damien is the not just the leader of the Blazers, but also the unquestioned athletic Alpha of the city, so it felt jarring somehow to hear him talk like this.

In the dream, I don’t know what’s in the box. It seems like a gift box for nice candles, or small jars of preserves, or little containers of grooming products. Whatever it is, it makes Damien happy. For nine seasons, a happy and confident Damien has led to a lot of Blazers success. What makes me worried about him now? His gifts. Literally and metaphorically, Damien Lillard is amazingly gifted. And that’s exactly what worries me. He has so many talents and future potentials, what if he isn’t totally committed to the Blazers anymore? What if he could do better as a musician than as a basketball player for Portland? It feels disrespectful to Damien even to think such a thought—so it comes out in a dream.

But one game does not a season make. No matter what’s going on with Damien, he’s not going to miss every 3-pointer he shoots. We could certainly hope for a better showing in the second game, even though it would be against a much better team, the Phoenix Suns. Led by rising star Devin Booker and all-time great Chris Paul, the Suns went all the way to the NBA Finals last year. If the Blazers were ever going to show a new level of defensive competence, now was the time to do so.

And lo and behold, an entirely different team showed up. The real team? Maybe. The Blazers overwhelmed the Suns, 134-105, and it could have been much worse. Booker did what he does, and scored 21. But the Blazers out-shot, out-rebounded, and out-hustled the Suns on both ends of the court. C.J. McCollum was hot and scored 28, while Damien had 19 points to go with 8 assists. Lots of bench guys got to play, and they looked great, too. Nassir Little and Anfernee Simons brought high energy and confident shooting, and Dennis Smith, Jr., had 5 assists in just 15 minutes of play. Ahh. What a wonderful exhale of a game.

That night after the game, I had this dream:

A Knife’s Edge

I am paying attention to a guy, his story, like in a book….A knife’s edge is threatening something of his….A round dark piece of fruit?….He is doing ok, though, overall….A couple, a man and woman, are sitting next to me on my right….But they just see the pages in the book, the images; they do not hear the story, and so they have no real idea what is going on….But I do….The guy in the story just has to keep moving forwards, that is all….

(10/23/21)

In the dream, the people to my right reminded me of the young couple sitting next to me at the game. They were in a happy party mood, friendly and chatty, shouting at the players by name, and getting high fives when they could. And yet… For most of the game they were fiddling with their phones, taking pictures, making videos, instagramming, etc., completely oblivious to the actual game in front of them.

To be clear, I have no problem with a fun date at the basketball game. Courtship at the court is an awesome thing and should be encouraged whenever possible. The dream doesn’t really seem to be about this couple or my feelings towards them. To be honest, the obnoxious man sitting to my left was much more annoying, so if this was a crowd-focused dream, I’d expect something from that direction. Instead, the dream revolves around the guy, his story, and the image of the knife and the round dark fruit. When I think of the dream in the light of the previous night’s game, the fruit immediately reminds me of an ad (for whiskey?) I saw on TV recently in which an artist spins an art-work basketball made of black shiny ceramic. That struck me as really cool and creative. And the guy in the dream with his story makes me think of each individual Blazers player, and what a big win like that means to them, how it opens up a new vista of confidence, reassurance, and possibility.

All of these basketball-related associations hover around the dream. Yet they shouldn’t distract from what Ernest Hartmann called the central image of a dream, in this case the piece of fruit and the knife. Sports aside, what other symbolic and metaphorical meanings can be connected to this specific, vivid image? Hmm. It could be seen as a vision of perilous sexuality, with the knife a phallic danger. It could be seen simply as part of preparing a piece of fruit to eat, and thus an image of impending nutrition. A knife and piece of fruit are common elements in classic paintings of “still life” scenes. Hmm.

The biological purpose of fruit is to bear seeds into a favorable growing environment, carrying the potential vitality of the plant into the future. Aha, there’s something that strikes a chord. The seed idea feels connected to the preseason-as-fertilizer metaphor from BDD #1, like an extension of nature-language to make sense of the basketball experience. In the dream, it felt like the fruit-like object needed to go forward with him, that’s the desired flowing growth of the story. But the knife is a threat; it could stop the flow (a player could be cut from the team?), and so it requires great caution in moving forwards (the Blazers’ weakest position?). The fruit is right next to the knife, right by its edge…

That seems to be the metaphor of the dream, or at least one of its metaphors: Playing on the knife’s edge. That’s what all the guys were doing last night. The story of the Blazers’ new season, the stories emerging for each player, the fate of their deepest seeds of potential, all entered last night’s game in a perilous and uncertain condition. Who is this team? How well can they perform?  Do they have a future? By meeting this challenge with such a powerful and thoroughly entertaining performance, they put those questions to rest, at least for a night.

The couple in the seats next to me did not seem to share any of my concerns, but that’s fine, they clearly had a great time at the game, too. To be honest, they reminded me of Ronnie and Amber LaFontaine from “Modern Family.” I tried to be a really, really good neighbor.

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The Nightmares of Halloween

It’s more than a metaphor to say that Halloween is a time when our nightmares go on parade. The scary images, decorations, and costumes that take over the month of October have a direct psychological connection to the actual themes and patterns of people’s nightmares. If we look at current research on nightmares—who has them, what they’re about, what causes them—we can gain new insight into the unconscious creativity of our Halloween festivities.

Who has nightmares? Numerous studies have reached the same conclusion: children are especially prone to nightmares, and so are women. Let’s start with age. The younger you are, the more likely you experience nightmares. Ernest Hartmann’s 1984 book The Nightmare notes the frequency of nightmares in children between the ages of 3 and 6, and he suggests that bad dreams may begin even earlier than this: “It is quite likely that nightmares can occur as early as dreams can occur; that is, probably late in the first year of life.”

The age factor shows up clearly in the nightmare patterns of adults. In a 2010 survey (available in the Sleep and Dream Database) in which 2,993 American adults answered a series of questions about sleep and dreams, the following are the percentages of people in different age groups who answered “Yes” to the question, “Have you ever had a dream of being chased or attacked?”

Chasing/Attack dreams, by age:

18-24: 71%

25-34: 65%

35-54: 59%

55-69: 48%

70+:  40%

Now for gender. Women tend to have more nightmares than men do, although how much more seems to vary during the life cycle. A meta-analysis by Michael Schredl and Iris Reinhard in 2011 found a striking pattern: similar frequencies of nightmares for males and females in childhood and old age, but a significantly higher frequency of nightmares for females during adolescence and adulthood. There seems to be a “nightmare bump” during women’s lives that elevates their frequency of bad dreams consistently higher than men’s. Is this nature or nurture? Probably both. A similar pattern appears in the 2010 SDDb survey cited above, when analyzed in terms of gender.

Chasing/Attack dreams for men, by age:

18-24: 68%

25-34: 63%

35-54: 56%

55-69: 47%

70+:  37%

Chasing/Attack dreams for women, by age:

18-24: 82%

25-34: 71%

35-54: 65%

55-69: 50%

70+: 46%

No matter how we explain these differences—more on that below—the basic pattern seems clear. Nightmares are especially frequent early in life, and especially for women during adolescence and young adulthood.

What do we have nightmares about? The most common content is fear, of course. And yet, what terrifies one person may have no emotional impact on someone else, so it’s difficult to generalize about the contents of nightmares. Still, it is possible to identify a few typical elements. In the SDDb, I selected four types of dream text (“bad dream,” “nightmare,” “nightmares,” “worst nightmare”), of 25+ words in length, which yielded a set of 423 dreams. I analyzed these 423 dreams using a word-search method with a template of 40 categories of content. I then compared the nightmare results to the results for the SDDb Baselines, a collection of more than 5,000 dreams representing ordinary patterns of dream content.

The dreams in the Baselines average about 100 words per report, while the 423 nightmares have an average length of only 65 words per report. This means the Baselines will tend to have higher frequencies on all categories. That’s actually helpful for our purposes, because it makes it easy to spot the categories that are unusually high in the nightmares (Baselines included in parentheses):

Fire: 4.7% (4.3%)

Air:  6.4% (4.4%)

Falling: 10.9% (8.3%)

Death: 18.4% (8%)

Fantastic beings: 10.4% (2.1%)

Physical aggression: 42.1% (17.6%)

Religion: 7.1% (6.7%)

Weapons: 9.9% (3.9%)

These are the categories of content that seem to be over-represented in nightmares, appearing more often in bad dreams than in ordinary dreams. They are also the themes that characterize pretty much every horror movie ever made, and countless video games, and, of course, many of the costumes and decorations of Halloween.

Why do we have nightmares? Psychologists have offered several theories about this. For Sigmund Freud, a nightmare is a failure of the sleeping mind to contain the instinctual desires aroused in dreaming. Similarly, the neurocognitive theory of Ross Levin and Tore Nielsen explains nightmares as a failure of emotional regulation during sleep. Carl Jung viewed nightmares as reflections of inner conflict, and thus potential revelations of insight and guidance. Antti Revonsuo’s “threat simulation theory” focuses on chasing nightmares and their potentially beneficial role in preparing the individual for similar threats in waking life.

The simple fact that nightmares are so common seems to be evidence against a theory of dreaming as a form of play (such as I propose). How can a frightening experience be playful? Actually, a theory of dreaming as play has a good explanation for the prevalence of nightmares. Research on play in animals and humans has found that play-fighting is one of the most common forms of play among social species like ours. Although it’s not “real” fighting, play-fighting does involve real aggression, threats, and negative emotions, and it seems to have a valuable rehearsal/preparatory function similar to other forms of play. Paradoxically, play-fighting can also promote social bonding by creating a safe arena to work through interpersonal tensions.

This brings us back to the connection between nightmares and Halloween. Seen in this light, the many little rituals of Halloween are ways of playing with our nightmares, welcoming them into waking awareness, sharing them with others, and celebrating their wild creative energies. Once each year, we invite these energies into the community as a way of enlivening and strengthening our collective bonds, at a time when daylight is waning and the nights are growing colder. This is the psychological wisdom of Halloween, infusing us with a playful burst of unconscious vitality just as we’re preparing to survive through the coming darkness.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today on October 21, 2021.

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The Basketball Dream Diaries #1: Preseason

Earlier this week I attended the preseason basketball game between the Portland Trailblazers and the Sacramento Kings. Although the Blazers played with lots of energy, the Kings beat them handily, 107-93. That night (it was a Monday), I had the following dream:

Fertilizing the Basketball Court

Lots of people are engaged in some activity, trying to set up a sports game, on a basketball court…. They are sweeping and spreading lots of soil onto the court…. To fertilize it?…. I am confused, but I go along with it, curious to see where it leads….

(October 11, 2021)

This is the first basketball dream of the 2021-2022 season, and it offers a simple and actually quite beautiful metaphor for the meaning of the preseason. Of course, it might seem at first glance like nothing more than typical dream nonsense, the random combination of two incidents from my previous day—watching the basketball game, and spreading compost in my yard, which I did in fact do earlier that morning. The dream puts these two bits of “day residue” together in a way that makes no logical sense. Spreading dirt on a basketball court in the way it was spread in my yard would prevent a game from going forward, not help it along. But this is a case where we need to put aside a literal reading of dreams and think of them in metaphorical terms. As a metaphor, the soil may express something else, a meaning related to its literal qualities but connecting those qualities to a non-literal situation.

That sounds abstract, I know, so here’s a practical way to bring out the metaphorical dimensions of a dream. I call it asking questions of specification. Why soil? Of all the things my dream could have portrayed as being spread across the basketball court, why this and not something else? It could have been sand, or pennies, or ping pong balls—but it wasn’t any of those, it was specifically soil. What are the qualities of soil, of composting earth, that might metaphorically relate to a preseason basketball game?

Just as my dream might seem trivial and insignificant, the game that night could be considered trivial and insignificant, too. Only one of the Blazers’ regular starters (Jusuf Nurkic) even played, while Damien Lillard, C.J. McCollum, Norman Powell, and Robert Covington, Jr., sat out the whole contest. The Kings pretty much dominated at both ends of the court, with the Blazers making 27 turnovers and shooting only 21% from 3-point land. Not a pretty game. But was it meaningless? Not to the bench guys who did play, and played hard, every one of them striving to use his minutes on the court to learn, grow, and demonstrate to the coaches how he can contribute to the team. They were playing as energetically as they could, flashing their best moves and testing their newest skills. Pre-season games are vital for these players’ developmental progress, and beneficial for the whole team’s long-term success.

This suggests one aspect of the dream’s metaphor: Pre-season games are like composting a garden. And, composting a garden is like getting a sports team ready for a new season. They’re both about nourishing, preparing, getting ready for big moves and expansive growth. Fertilizing the future, empowering the fullest expression of latent potentials, fueling the competitive fires that animate all forms of life.

The concept of a season is another metaphorical link. Both gardens and basketball teams follow a regular annual cycle of activity and rest, with transitional states between. With gardens and Nature in general, the coming of winter brings a lessening of external activity and an inward focus on survival through the dark and cold, and preparing for new growth when light and warmth return. Basketball runs on an opposite (complementary?) cycle, with activities turning indoors and revving up just as the days shorten and chill of winter approaches. To understand the rhythms of a season for a garden or a basketball team is to understand the distinct and essential value of each stage in the cycle, and how that specific stage adds to the ultimate health, strength, and dynamism of the overall process.

And, as a further metaphorical extension, compost doesn’t smell great. But the stinky smell is actually a good thing! The strong, earthy odors of a well-fertilized garden—and the turnovers and missed-3s in a hard-fought preseason game—are all part of a deeper, long-term growth process. In basketball, it’s part of the magical transformation of a disparate group of individual players into a cohesive, high-performing, championship-level team.

And how good it will smell when the garden blooms again and the regular season begins…

 

About the Basketball Dream Diaries: Dreams about sports have been a recurrent theme in my life since childhood. Since moving to Portland, Oregon in 2010, I have become a big fan of the city’s NBA basketball team, the Trailblazers, and my dreams have reflected that interest with several references to the team, the players, and their interactions with the rest of the NBA. I’ve attended several games at Moda Center, and had a lot of fun each time. I have also noticed how the intense stimulation of the games, starting at 7 pm in the evening and going till 9:30 or 10, has a direct impact on my sleep and dreaming later that night.

This year, I’m unbelievably fortunate to have season tickets to the Trailblazers home games. In anticipation of possible basketball dreams to come, I’m starting this chronicle to track the influence of the Blazers’ season on my dreams, and to see how my dreaming imagination evaluates and interprets the Blazers’ performance this year. It’s going to be color commentary from the unconscious. A surrealist angle on the NBA. A self-experiment in sports-mediated dream incubation. And an open door and welcome mat for the metaphor-generating wizard of my sleeping mind.

 

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What Are the Ethics of Dreaming?

When people think about ethics, they usually focus on the evaluation of good or bad behaviors in the waking state. But what about the ethical status of the one-third of our lives that we spend in sleep? Do we have any ethical duties or obligations relating to sleep? Do dreamers have any basic rights or responsibilities?

Many people treat dreaming as a kind of ethical “free-fire zone,” where moral boundaries don’t apply and anything goes. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato said that when we sleep the “rational, gentle, and dominant” part of the mind retires, unleashing the “beastly and savage” parts, leading to the outrageous immorality of dreaming: “there is nothing it will not venture to undertake as being released from all sense of shame and all reason.” (The Republic, book IX) More recently, some enthusiasts of lucid dreaming have encouraged using conscious dream control as a tool to enjoy consequence-free fantasies of sex and power. Dreaming in this view is reduced to the ethical status of a video game, where nothing is “real” and the players can behave however they wish.

In both of these cases, dreaming is cast outside the sphere of normal ethics. Sleep and dreaming are treated as sub-human realms where ordinary moral rules do not apply.

Several problems follow from this view, to be explored in future posts. Here, we’ll consider one particularly urgent problem. Think of it like this: In regular waking life, if someone tricked you into do something you didn’t want to do, we would call that other person’s action unethical. But does that judgment change if it happens in your dreams? If the person tricks you into having a dream of something you otherwise would not dream about, can we still call their action unethical? It seems not, according to the prior view that nothing that happens in dreaming really matters. Where’s the harm? Where’s the negative impact? They might have forced you to have a dream, but all dreams are unreal, so what exactly did they force you to do? When we start with the assumption that dreaming is a moral wasteland and ontological void, it becomes more difficult to draw appropriate ethical lines around waking behaviors that have effects on people’s capacity for dreaming.

This is not a theoretical concern. Thanks to new technologies in data science and brain imaging, researchers are now able to identify meaningful patterns in dream content with unprecedented speed and accuracy. That’s not a problem—new knowledge is a good thing! The problem comes with the unethical use of that knowledge to manipulate other people’s dreams without their awareness or full understanding. The increasing availability of these technologies makes it easier to attempt such manipulations for political, commercial, or criminal purposes.

It may seem paradoxical, but support for a higher ethical status for dreaming comes from current scientific research on dreams. Findings in neuroscience and cognitive psychology show that the brain processes our experiences in dreams very much like it processes our experiences in waking life. The vivid realism of dreaming is deeply rooted in the regular workings of the neural networks of our brains, with potentially strong and long-lasting effects on the waking mind in the form of “big dreams,” which have been reported throughout history and across all cultures. Modern dream researchers are helping us understand more clearly than ever before that 1) the dreaming mind is closer to the waking mind than Plato’s “wild beast” model suggests, and 2) dream experiences are more neurologically real and personally impactful than the “video game” model suggests.

Of course, Buddhists have long taught that karmic traces can accumulate in sleep, so you shouldn’t think you can break the precepts while dreaming and get away with it. Christian theologians like Augustine and Aquinas have argued that if people consent to immoral behavior in their dreams, their souls are indeed responsible for those sins. Modern researchers are simply adding empirical evidence and a neuro-cognitive framework to confirm this perennial insight about the ethics of dreaming.

 

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today, February 3, 2021.

 

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Jung, Flying Saucers, and the Anxieties of Our Time

How archetypal dreams, visions, and art respond to a collective crisis.

One of the last books he ever wrote, C.G. Jung’s Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1957) shows how psychology can shed new light on social anxieties and cultural conflicts. This slender text offers Jung’s perspective on the controversial phenomenon of “unidentified flying objects” (UFOs). Writing at a time when UFO sightings were a public craze, Jung saw an opportunity for psychology to make a valuable contribution to collective understanding and self-reflection.  The resulting book remains an excellent model for the psychological interpretation of culture, with potentially helpful implications for our troubled times today.

Jung examined several kinds of texts with the UFO theme: dreams, art from both old and new sources, waking visions, and science fiction, along with media stories and governmental reports. This itself is interesting, as it shows how Jung treated all these different kinds of texts as arenas in which symbols from the collective unconscious (“archetypes”) can emerge. When treating an individual patient, Jung looked for the emergence of special symbols or archetypes that respond directly to the patient’s waking life problems. With the UFO phenomenon, he expanded this approach to the whole of Western society. Why are so many people dreaming, thinking, and envisioning UFOs at this particular moment? What is happening in society right now that elicits this kind of collective visionary experience?

Here as in many of his later writings, Jung highlighted the psychological strains of living during the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The division of the world into two hostile, nuclear-armed camps, separated by an “Iron Curtain,” suggested that global humanity was in a gravely unhealthy condition. Jung also emphasized here as elsewhere how the modern world can threaten individuality with mass movements, both politically (communism) and economically (consumer capitalism). People everywhere were in danger of being subsumed into mindless, undifferentiated groups where true psychological development was impossible.

The sudden surge of UFO sightings at this specific moment in history made sense, Jung said, as a response to these acute social anxieties. With the conscious mind in such an embattled condition, the collective unconscious provided what Jung called a compensatory or balancing archetypal symbol: the mandala, an image of wholeness and integration. Mandala symbols are best known from Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Asian religions, but in their archetypal essence they appear in all cultures, usually as round figures with a variety of geometric, chromatic, and symbolic complexities. Jung said that UFOs, whatever their reality as visitors from alien planets, have the psychological meaning of mandalas, projected into the sky above us, giving us a vision of transcendent union and wholeness. The integration we have failed to achieve in this world is reflected back to us as a living potential arriving from the greater realm of the cosmos (itself a symbol of the collective unconscious). Because people of our time are struggling in this essential psychological task of becoming an integrated, fully actualized individual (the process of “individuation”), the archetype of wholeness cannot be directly recognized in its traditional forms. Thus, it

“is forced to manifest itself indirectly in the form of spontaneous projections. The projected image then appears as an ostensibly physical fact independent of the individual psyche and its nature. In other words, the rounded wholeness of the mandala becomes a space ship controlled by an intelligent being.”

Thinking of Jung’s book and its methods as applied to our world today, we can ask the following questions: What is the great anxiety of our age? What is the greatest threat to collective health and well-being? What are the compensating dreams and visions pointing us beyond our current problems?

Since Jung’s time, the Cold War has ended, and Westerners have little to fear from global communism. The threat of civilization-ending nuclear war remains, but it no longer worries people the way it did some decades ago. Instead, a multitude of other apocalyptic scenarios haunt people’s waking hours. These include environmental catastrophe, civil war, economic collapse, pharmacological mind-control, robotic takeover, and political tyranny under an evil dictatorship (e.g. by fascists, socialists, racists, theocrats, and/or neoliberals), not to mention a global pandemic. We have reached Boschian extremes in our capacity to conjure vividly variegated scenarios of doom and ruin.

Following the logic of Jung’s method, and given our present context, perhaps we should be on the lookout for dreams, visions, and works of art that provide a creative response from the unconscious depths to these overwhelming apocalyptic horrors

For instance, we might expect the compensatory emergence of archetypal symbols of renewal and rebirth, of growth and revitalization, of a future collective renaissance.

We might expect to see more dreams of empathetic reconnection with others, stimulating greater awareness of multiple perspectives on the world, breaking free from the solipsism of the digitized self to reconnect with other people, with nature, and with one’s own body.

We might expect to see more expressions of the archetype of the trickster, the playful agent of chaos and disorder who disrupts established traditions and yet also inspires new creativity and cultural dynamism.

We might see more forceful and perhaps even threatening appearances of the anima archetype, challenging narrowly androcentric thinking and stubbornly enduring patriarchal biases in all aspects of personal and collective life.

It seems a near-certainty that the apocalyptic anxieties of the present age are already calling forth unconscious responses of archetypal energy and symbolism in all of our lives. The big question is whether our conscious minds can recognize these archetypal expressions when they do occur, and integrate them into a broader, more balanced sense of self—a stronger self that can act more effectively in the world, fueled by the energy of psychological wholeness.

Note: This post first appeared in Psychology Today, 12/7/20.

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Dreams of Wildfire

The West Coast has a long history of wildfires, and dreaming about wildfires. A study from the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm has important lessons for those of us currently being threatened and harmed by the blazes in California, Oregon, Washington, and elsewhere.

On October 20, 1991, almost exactly two years after the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the Bay Area, a brush fire in the eastern hills of Oakland, California exploded into a racing wall of flame that consumed several residential neighborhoods with shocking speed. Twenty-five people died, hundreds were injured or suffered from smoke inhalation, and more than 3,000 homes and apartments were reduced to ashes.

Two weeks after the fire was finally extinguished, Dr. Alan Siegel, a clinical psychologist from Berkeley, and his colleagues Barbara Baer and Karen Muller initiated a very timely and illuminating study. They recruited three groups of people: 28 who lost their homes, the Fire Survivors; 14 who lived in burn zone but homes were not destroyed, the Fire Evacuees; and 18 people living outside the evacuation zone, the Control Group. All the participants provided an interview, responses to several questionnaires (e.g., the Beck Depression Inventory), and a two-week dream journal. Siegel and his colleagues carefully analyzed all this information, focusing special attention on patterns in their dreams. Their work appeared as a chapter in Deirdre Barrett’s excellent edited work Trauma and Dreams (1996).

Two of Siegel’s findings stand out as potentially helpful for people currently in the West Coast wildfire danger zone.

The first came as a surprise to the researchers:

“An unexpected finding of our study is the profound and largely unacknowledged reactions of the Fire Evacuees—people who lived in the burn zone but whose homes were spared. Their unremitting survivor guilt, depression, intrusive thoughts, and nightmares were more distressing than that of the Fire Survivors.” (161)

Siegel emphasizes the therapeutic significance of this finding. In addition to those who have been directly impacted by a disaster, the “lucky survivors” can suffer terribly, too, in ways they may try to hide or minimize as part of their survivor guilt.

The second important finding is that “post-fire dreams reawakened preoccupations with grief from earlier epochs” (167). The experience of a new trauma has the potential to reactivate memories, feelings, and physiological reactions from previous traumas. This is especially important to recognize when trying to help people find their path towards recovery and healing:

“Of all the factors shaping coping and recovery, one invisible dimension of the Survivors’ and Evacuees’ experience was dominant—the lingering emotional impact of earlier losses, traumas, and deprivations… Those with more profound backgrounds of trauma were more severely affected and slower to recover. Their dreams after the fire and around the anniversary of the fire frequently used the metaphor of their earlier traumas to depict reactions to the Firestorm and its aftermath.” (174)

Siegel’s work highlights a vital insight in caregiving work in the wake of a disaster: the people most vulnerable to psychological suffering from the present event are likely to be those who are carrying unhealed wounds from the past.

There is no getting around the long-term impact of such experiences on everyone involved, and Siegel’s observation about anniversaries is worth underlining. He says “firestorm survivors suffered profound reactions to the impending first anniversary of the fire” (173). This should be kept in mind when planning public memorials and commemorations of a disaster, which different people may experience in very different ways.

Still, there is reason to hope that with time and effective caregiving, recurrent post-traumatic nightmares can gradually change and transform in more positive directions, becoming less fixated on the specific triggering event, more varied and imaginative in form, and generally dreamier in mood and feel. This was a key finding of Ernest Hartmann in his 1984 work Nightmares, to which Siegel refers in his conclusion:

“A series of dreams often shows a progression toward mastery as a trauma is resolved. Nightmares that are like graphic memories of the trauma gradually fade, giving way to dreams less focused on the trauma and more mixed with other concerns.” (176)

This important study by Siegel and his colleagues adds further evidence in support of the idea that greater familiarity with dreaming can have subtle but significant public health benefits. Dreaming is a vital part of our innate crisis-response system, hard-wired into our brains over millions of years of evolution (and presumably many, many wildfires). Promoting more knowledge about dreaming and dream-sharing offers a simple and effective way of strengthening our collective resilience whenever disaster strikes.

 

Reference:

Alan Siegel, “Dreams of Firestorm Survivors,” in Trauma and Dreams, ed. Deirdre Barrett (Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 159-176.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today, September 13, 2020.