Dreaming

Out on the Shimmering Edges of Self

Jürgen Werner Kremer

The whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it. (Bateson, 1972, p. 462)

The horrors of the crises we are living with call upon us to stubbornly insist on the affirmation and remembrance of what it means to be an aware, entangled participant in livable, sustainable communities that celebrate the intra-active balancing of all beings that are part of our complex ecological weavings. Such participation requires a sense of self or mind that sees itself as part of a process embedded in larger sets of minds and their mattering processes. It requires the awareness and remembrance of relationality and interdependence in the most profound Indigenous sense as it is lived to this day by aboriginal peoples all over this world. For those of us who have lost this quality of attention and presence, its remembrance calls for the assertion and embodiment—the enactment—of visionary sovereignty.

Freud hailed dreams as the golden road to our personal unconscious. But does our dreaming also have the capacity to open up remembrances and visions that can help us navigate our present social dilemmas? Can it help us to attend to the ways in which the past and the future are enfolded in the present? May it help us revise our sense of self so as to foster ecological intimacy and visionary sovereignty? To begin answering these questions we have to look critically at the individualistic framework that has gripped Western psychology, a sense of self that by all appearances is an obstacle to acting and imagining ourselves as part of a network of ecological intimacy. Who is the self remembering dreams? This then leads us into an exploration of the potentials of dreaming and an appreciation of the inspirational and visionary import of dreams.

This essay proposes a framework for re-thinking the understanding of the self (individuality or identity) as it is commonly conceptualized in Western mainstream psychology. The individualistic self with its dissociative process is revealed as one of the central ingredients in the manifestation of our current monstrous crises, discriminations, and persecutions. Dream tending then is part of a counter move in the establishment and affirmation of de/colonial islands and resurgences, a move important for people of all ancestries and ethnicities.

Dreams Intrude on the Western Self

The fact that we are dreaming every night poses a daily challenge to central assumptions of the Western sense of self, namely its sense of mastery by way of conscious purpose and rationality. These nocturnal events are generally outside the reach of rational control and often resist easy comprehension. Their dismissal as irrational and incidental by waking minds is a typical response. Yet, intrusions from what appears to be separate and outside the realm of the Western self, continue to disturb its sense of assuredness.

At a time when our frontal cortex is mostly offline and left hemispheric brain process are generally not in control, the nocturnal arrival of dreams on our self screen then disrupts the received view of science’s assumptions about what reality is: ultimately, we either have to dismiss dreams as irrelevant or fantastical and irrational—or we need to question the prevailing Western assumptions about reality so that we can bridge to a different understanding of the world and ourselves.

Part I

Science On the Edge of Remembrance

Where have the Western sciences taken us with their increasingly sophisticated measuring instruments and methodologies? What are the implications for our understanding of self and identity?

The short answer is: the scientific developments of “the West” have brought forth results during recent decades which, if taken seriously, question historical assumptions of the dominant scientific paradigm of modernity, i.e., the epistemology that guides research (and with that fundamental assumptions in the field of psychology are also questioned). Quantum theories in particular have undermined the possibility of defining any observer as separate from the object of observation. Instead of facts, quantum theory suggests that observers create the phenomena of reality. Depending on our perceptual procedures, different phenomena show up, i.e., different realities or worlds are created.

Based on recent cognitive research, the interface theory of perception suggests that the self is usefully regarded as a screen on which internal and external reality shows up encoded and these coded versions may not look anything like what is being coded (what is “out there”). The central challenge is not whether perceptions accurately depict reality, but whether what is depicted on the self screen serves survival fitness. The self is a story composed of these perceptual memories.

At the center of our current debacles sits a sense of self that tells stories in an individualistic framework as part of the overall story of modernity/coloniality. This sense of self has developed over time as it has disassociated itself from entanglements not easily controlled by rationality and conscious purpose. The result is a self with strong boundaries together with a sense of mastery that misleads humanity into seeing itself as exceptional.

During the process of the emergence of this normative Western quality of self, ritual practices related to dreams, visions, and other ways of attending to the world—hallmarks of an entangled sense of self with porous boundaries—have been eclipsed.

The modern sense of self and the rise of modernity/coloniality (aka the rise of “the West”) are two sides of the same complex process, one is conditioned on the other. The psychological process of emergent normative dissociation (the splitting from self entanglements and attention to them) and the socio-cultural and economic story since the Renaissance are two aspects of one process.

The individualistic sense of self is now at odds with what science tells us.

Everything Manifests in Relationship

Rovelli (2021b), theorist of quantum gravity, regards current physics as “a—very mild form of panpsychism … It is about how entities manifest themselves to one another. It is about relations … how a system affects another system” (p. 32). This means we should not look at distinct entities with individual properties. Entities cannot be described independently from anything else—observations (perceptions) are always contextual (the horse evolves with the grass, i.e., the ecosystem it is a part of; depression is a complex process involving biochemistry, interpersonal relations, intra-personal communication, etc.). The description of “entities” needs to be relational.

Observations and perceptions arise as two systems intra-act, i.e., as our specific inquiring perceptual activity manifests phenomena during its intra-active activities.

The implications of these interpretations of the most advanced research in physics are dramatic: The mirror of truth and reality, as posited in the received view of science, i.e., the left-hemispheric and frontal cortex focused construction of reality in representationalism, has been shattered by the latter day revelations of Western science. Truth has become relational, it emerges in relationship.

Quantum mechanics has shown that reality only emerges in the intra-actions of observers initiating the collapse of quantum superpositions; current theories assert that quantum principles pertain at all levels of reality (e.g., Barad, 2007, p. 109f.; Rovelli, 2021a). This means that, “the world exists only as a cloud of simultaneous, overlapping possibilities—technically called ‘superpositions’—until an observation brings one of these possibilities into focus in the form of definite objects and events” (Kastrup, 2021, p. 121). Reality is not out there to be grasped or mirrored; particle and wave don’t exist independent of the observer. “Quantum physics demonstrates that the interaction is an inseparable part of phenomena” (Bohr, 1998, p. 11). What the embodied self has at its disposal are not facts, but phenomena that have been created through intra-active re/actions to inner and outer worlds. These observations or perceptions are at the foundation of what humans define as reality.

Phenomena

Phenomena exist in context and in context only. That is, “phenomena are ontological entanglements” (Barad, 2007, p. 333; italics in original).

The process of human presencing in reality, i.e., in the world of phenomena, is a process in which “observer” and “observed” are ontoepistemologically and ethically inseparable and entangled, as quantum theories show us. The world of representationalism has banked on the notion of singular truths and restricted its attention accordingly. Quantum theories remind us that, as a matter of phenomena, we are creating worlds. And we need to be accountable to the worlds we create through our intra-active activities.

Self as Interface

Science has disclosed the workings of human perception: external and internal sensations become perceptions which are interpreted both consciously and unconsciously, and subsequently become stories of the self that remembers these intra-actions. What appears on our self screen are phenomena that emerge from our intra-actions within the world (or within ourselves), our perceptual activities (whether unassisted or as research activity utilizing measurement technologies). Perceptions are assembled during complex unconscious and conscious processes. Narrative schemas help store these intra-actions in memory (Berns, 2022).

Quantum theories and recent cognitive psychological theories assert this: The self is a collection of perceptions and experiences that are combined into stories as they are remembered (Hoffman, 2019; Kastrup, 2021); the self is not a thing, but an ongoing performative process that relies on memory in the construction of experiences of self. This self can usefully be considered an interface (analogous to a computer interface, a “screen”) that allows us to show survivable realities, created within the constraints of our embodiment and its material intra-actions; the self interface (as process, not thing, as locus where phenomena appear in code) has developed in service of our survival.

Hoffman’s (2019) interface theory of perception assumes that perceptions are the result of material intra-actions which I can only trace as perceptions, as descriptions, as experiences on my self interface.

If there is no inherent requirement that what appears on my self screen, our perceptions, actually looks like anything in the external world, then this does not mean that there is no objective reality. “Something is there in objective reality, and we humans experience its import for our fitness in terms of DNA, RNA, chromosomes, organisms, and resources … There is good reason to believe that the things that we perceive … don’t exist independent of our minds. The reason is that the structures of fitness payoffs, which shape what we perceive, differ from the structures of objective reality with high probability” (Hoffman, 2019, p. 63). What matters is survival or fitness. The organism stays alive as it maintains its structural integrity through its intra-active cycles of perceptions and actions.

The Western research and theories just summarized mean that the story of “the West” has undercut itself and revealed its ideological nature by means of its own powerful research. The story of inevitable progress appears now as a particular imagination, a particular cultural story, a Western local realism—naïve, as it were—that has claimed supremacy and universality.

Survival Fitness

One of the central assumptions in current evolutionary thinking is that natural selection does not favor truth, it favors fitness (or fitness of perception). Fitness has been established as indubitable pivot in evolutionary thinking, yet it is surrounded by questions (questions that have been apparent to Indigenous minds ever since the appearance on their lands of coloniality together with its linear evolutionary stories). However, science in the tradition of modernity/coloniality generally continues to assume that our perceptions are literally true or are literal mirrors of reality.

Given that modernity/coloniality is fast approaching the limits of its survival fitness in the face of ecological and other self-created threats, an urgent need emerges to review critically prevailing assumptions about survival and to remember and develop alternate paradigms of survival fitness. So, how are we to understand the term ‘survival fitness’?

Hoffman (2019) offers the following definition of fitness: “Fitness is no mirror of the world. Instead, fitness depends in complex ways on the state of the world, the state of the organism, and the frequencies of strategies” (p. 58). In this definition the words “fitness depends in complex ways on the state of the world” seem pivotal for understanding our current debacles, both in terms of past and future evolutionary fitness. Yet, the story of “the West”, of “civilization”, of “progress,” has been shoehorned into a linear story that only remains persuasive if the storyteller is an addict of mono-causal linearity and if they have superior dissociative capacities.

The limitations in notions of universal Darwinism (a term initiated by Dawkins, 1983; see Kelley, 2020) come into focus when we leave the strictures of the addictive Western story behind and confront survival or fitness solutions outside of the paradigm that implicitly and explicitly justifies current structures of dominance and exploitation. The anthropological literature offers a wealth of data that arguably suggest solutions to the crises and challenges of “the West” that are part of very different paradigms and that offer a diversity of possible solutions (see Graeber & Wengrow, 2021). Notably, Indigenous stories define survival differently, understanding it in terms of their entangled sense of self, of the complexities of multiple generations, of finding balance, or, to use the Diné (Navajo) term, as hózhó, meaning beauty or balance or harmony. The well-known Native American exhortation to consider one’s actions in the context of seven generations backward and seven generations forward is pertinent here.

Modernity/coloniality has dismissed these Indigenous philosophies wholesale as outdated and non-scientific, incapable of recognizing any long-term evolutionary benefits in these stories, which are placed at the beginning of the linear evolutionary ascent of “the West” and “civilization”, the “rise” from hunter-gatherers to so-called civilized states of modernity. Part of this rise is an increasing emphasis on linearity, mono-causal explanations, and conscious purpose at the center of social changes; this is an insistence on the self as dis-entangled. Yet, “the idea of conscious purpose is a sort of a fake, an artifact or epiphenomenon, a byproduct of a disastrous process in the history of occidental thought” (Bateson, 1991, p. 228). This “byproduct” clearly has become central as the power of linear, purposive rationality, technological developments, and data processing hold our attention in its grip while overriding (i.e., neglecting and discriminating against) entangled processes of thinking and processing (what Bateson calls “corrective processes”). Conscious purpose, central to left hemispheric processes, is anchored in language, while corrective processes call upon holistic and image-based processes (the arts, dreams, poetry, etc.), which are central to meaning-making (and centrally revolving around right hemispheric processes).

Gregory Bateson, in his seminal Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), outlines distinct notions of evolution, adaptation, and survival. He argues that evolution is a shared process: “The unit of survival is not the breeding organism, or the family line, or the society … The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment” (p. 451). “Adaptation is the adaptation of all the relations between all his characteristics and all the other characteristics” (1991, p. 278). Bateson’s statements suggest an understanding of evolution that is more akin to Indigenous being/thinking, to a process of knowing that is systemic and entangled in nature which ultimately also opens the space to include the knowing of non-human beings, thus overcoming human exceptionalism.

Universal Darwinism (Dawkins, 1983) de-emphasizes systemic aspects: in the selection of preferred states, evolutionary fitness is defined as “both by [the state’s] ability to survive intact in spite of the immersion in the environment … but also by its propensity to create offspring” (Kelley, 2020, p. 125; italics JWK). What is emphasized in this definition is the importance of boundaries over the immersion of the boundaried state in its environment; the phenomenon of the unit of survival is created through a different quality of cut: the perception of the unit of survival cuts out the context it is a part of; it creates the perception of a separate entity with its properties. The alternative is to describe a process between all the relations and between all their characteristics and all other characteristics. By contrast, universal Darwinism generally assembles perceptions that are focused on the isolation of facts and their properties as inherent, with the resulting descriptions of strongly boundaried units cut from the processes that are integral to their creation.

The perspective of universal Darwinism is consistent with the linear evolutionary story of modernity/coloniality and with the psychology and onto-epistemology of the well-boundaried masterful self fostered in “the West”. The attention to the strength of the self boundary is tantamount to the denial of the self’s entanglements, the porousness of the self. Indeed, we could say that the masterful, well-boundaried self of the Western, dis/associated from the world it is an intimate part of, survives in spite of its immersion in the world, despite its catastrophic impact on the world.

Other cultural stories explaining the survival of humans and evolution might say: evolutionary fitness is the ability to survive intact facilitated by and because of their immersion in the environment—a nurturing, systemic, intimate, and balancing conversation or mutual nurturance that includes human and other-than-human participants. And part of this story is an entangled sense of self which survives as it defines itself through its intra-active immersion in the environment. The survival of humans is a story of all the relations between all their characteristics and all the other characteristics, as Bateson would have it. What has been called totemic thinking in the anthropological literature can be understood as a qualitatively different cognitive process trying to capture the mutuality of the processes the self is a part of.

By contrast, the Western notion of self and progress is focused on its own survival, i.e., the survival of the well-boundaried, masterful self (as it were, despite its entanglements in the environment). Our present crises and calamities can thus also be framed as the evolutionary challenge of “the West”, a challenge that in other places and times has found qualitatively different answers—or led to extinction. An integral part of this challenge is to reframe intra-actions that historically have led to dissociative concepts and to use narrative understandings that reflect Indigenous perceptions as well as quantum theoretical understandings of our intra-active embeddedness in the world.

The Pivot of Culture

Clearly humans have lived successfully in dramatically different perceptual worlds showing that the action-perception loop is complex as performative practice, allowing for the assembly of a multiplicity of perceptual worlds that all potentially serve survival fitness.

History shows that the action-perception loop can lead to a multitude of different solutions to the challenge of survival. These can be meaningfully grouped as at least two qualitatively quite different solutions, both assuring a certain level of fitness: 1) The story of modernity/coloniality has at its center a Cartesian, dissociative move, a cut, as it were, in which the self becomes reified and self and other become separated by a strong perceptual boundary creating the assumption of universality of its knowledge. This story of the self corresponds with assumptions of representationalism and the way it defines objectivity and truth. This story has shown a certain degree of survival fitness over recent centuries, but is now encountering serious limitations and obstacles in our current crises. 2) Indigenous stories have at the center a narrative sense of self that is fundamentally entangled with the world in participatory intra-actions as well as a conscious awareness of these entanglements that gets actualized in ritual performances; Indigenous peoples have survived well until the onslaught of colonialism in its various forms and their violent dismissal as “primitives”.

“The West”, modernity/coloniality, has shown both a remarkable disinterest and disregard as well as extraordinary levels of misunderstanding of Indigenous paradigms. Its self-interest is anchored in objectifying concepts (representationalism) that ultimately serve the dominant parts of Western humanity (their interests in profit, wealth, and control)—and the story of civilization and progress generally has served these elite interests quite well up to the beginning of our current crises.

The focus of the Western assembly of perceptions is on internal and external cut-out entities with distinct, self-contained properties. The story of evolution and universal progress that has served the elites of the West so well excludes significant aspects of our ethno- and biosphere in service of a linear evolutionary story that justifies its dominant exploitative socio-cultural status.

Material intra-actions (perceptions) leading to experiences on the self interface are constrained by way of socialization into a particular quality of the action-perception loop, excluding perceptions that are deviant from the universal story of progress. Foucault (1971) perceptively noted this for “the West”: “In order to know other cultures—non-western cultures, so-called primitive cultures—in order to know these cultures, we must no doubt have had not only to marginalize them, not only to look down upon them, but also to exploit them, to conquer them and in some way through violence to keep them silent. … So, if you will, my hypothesis is this: the universality of our knowledge has been acquired at the cost of exclusions, bans, denials, rejections, at the price of a kind of cruelty with regard to reality” (italics JWK).

Arguably, what has been excluded (banned, denied, rejected) from the observations and stories resulting from the action-perception loop are exactly where to find potential remedies for our current crises. And it is these remedies that Indigenous peoples the world over have retained in their perceptual worlds and cultural practices (with so many of their lands being hot spots of biodiversity).

The central point established above is that the supremacist assertion of the Western worldview and scientific practices is fallacious, as shown by Western science itself. And with it, inevitably, the process of the Western self now also appears to be fallacious in its narration of reality. Indeed, the constraints of human embodiment allow for a diversity of solutions for survival, as is apparent in the richness of our planet’s ethnosphere and its intricate histories and traditions (Davis, 2014).

Part II

Attending to Half the Self

At the center of our contemporary debacles—the climate catastrophe with its rising carbon emissions, the ongoing genocidal war on Indigenous peoples, toxified landscapes, species extinctions, inequality, racism, gender discrimination, pervasive surveillance, etc.—sits the human sense of self that emerged during modernity/coloniality. Psychologists have studied the human self and its cognitive, conative, affective, and physiological dimensions since the inception of the discipline. There is little or no controversy about this unique figure that is the central actor in these crises fueled by the continuation of colonialism, rapacious racialized capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and other destructive forces of neoliberalism that constitute what Moore (2015) has called the “capitalocene” era. The interior depths of self are now no longer embedded in and attended to as part of the nurturing intricacies and intimacies of community and nature, entangled stories of the self. It is this change in self process that is usually not accounted for and for which “the West” has yet to be accountable. The Western self is not a by-product of modernity/coloniality, it is one of the main characters center stage of the developing catastrophic plot.

“The self”, which is always implicitly the modern Western self as it has emerged conceptually from its ancient Indo-European background, has a prestigious heritage of givenness in the history of the modernity/coloniality, i.e., it is seen as ‘natural’.

Western socio-cultural practices firmly assume a self at the center. Yet in a profound sense, it has become more and more difficult to insist on a story that neatly delimits the human person from the environment and the turbulent tangle and mangle of bodies it contains.

Critical observers lingering at the boundaries of the Western self and at the periphery of Western cultures are learning to discern the workings of mind in nature, and the workings of nature in mind, of mind mattering or matter minding, an awareness and story altogether distinct from the story of the masterful, thickly-boundaried Cartesian self of “the West”. This then is not a mere reversal of inside and outside, but a story of attention to the complex osmotic pulsing between mind and nature that results in fresh perceptions, experiences, and remembrances. It is the recognition that the lines once thought hard and thick are actually blurry and porous—the ‘outside’ now seems to be leaking in (as opposed to the inside seeming to attain a superlative and one-directional measure of control over the outside). This is also the recognition that all selves, of whichever cultural provenance, are stories created in the performance of intra-active entanglements.

In all honesty, this rise in awareness can only be described as circuitous process of remembrance and recovery of what has been excluded from storied awareness during the historical developments of the Western self. The once seemingly secure self approaching the ‘outside’ with the attitudes of a master, now is in peril and arguably delusional as Western science has begun to acknowledge different levels and qualities of entanglements, undermining its inflated claims to a thickly boundaried self.

The Self Is a Story

Internal and external perceptions get stored as memories using narrative templates that facilitate the memory process. Loy (2010) notes that the self and its worlds are made of stories. Stories are told and retold and, importantly, they can be changed; they live in communal interactions, they grow, they deteriorate, they change direction.

The self sits on top of complex processes that undergird and provide critical support for our conscious endeavors; these are significant neuropsychological intra-actions that create our self/perceptions. For a long time now psychology has understood how perception is a constructive process of the brain based on sensory and other input. Recent research shows how much of this ongoing constructive process is unthought (Hayles, 2017). Our intra-actions leading to perceptions are largely unconscious. The self sits on top of these unthought processes; you might call it a story or a metaphor or a simulation—or even a delusion.

Pollan (2018) describes a visceral experience under the influence of 5-MeO-DMT (“the toad”) during which his “I” was extinguished and he was plunged into the unending depths of epistemic uncertainty. Afterwards he wondered whether this was the mysterium tremendum mystics encounter and explore. We could say that he moved to the far end of the shimmering edges or the deepest depths of the self, the intra-active seed levels of perception, to encounter the primordial ground of being that is the foundation of philosophers such as Parmenides and Empedocles.

This particular shift in the assemblage of perception, i.e., this particular quality of human consciousness-matter intra-action discussed by Pollan, leads to experiences and insights that gave rise to early Greek philosophy, as it did to Indigenous shamanic cosmologies and practices the world over. It is a realm of knowing dismissed in the West at least beginning with the Renaissance. What Pollan experienced in extremis, and what for millennia has been appreciated as the knowledge of mystics, shamans, prophets, saints, seers, and visionaries (and what in Indigenous worlds was and is a critical part of human balancing and well-being in the world), has been relegated to the shadows of our contemporary Western world, attended to only by a minority of visionary practitioners, thinkers, and activists.

Normative Dissociation

In order to understand the role of dreams in the deconstruction of the self of modernity/coloniality, and their potential for re-indigenization, we need to re/member the history of self as it impacts how dreams are dis/regarded. Such remembrance is a process of cultural healing. The stories of self reflect cultural stories and normative practices of socialization and it is to these stories that “the West” needs to be accountable, i.e., for the realities the stories of “the West” have created.

The road “the West” has taken in the ongoing rejection and denial of its own indigenous roots can be described as dissociative process during which the self became increasingly split from sources that naturally fed its well-being and facilitated a process of balancing—it has been a road away from experiences (i.e., perceptions) of shimmering and ek/static entanglements with nature, away from holistic and integrative perceptions, away from gender and sexual diversity and fluidity, away from engaging in personal and cultural remembrances—away from intra-active qualities reaching from the analytical to the imaginal, away from a fluid process of mind/spirit mattering.

The change in story creates and reflects a change in the way the boundaries of self are drawn in embodied performance; it has transformed from a un/consciously entangled to an dissociative process that establishes a new norm of what the “good”, acceptable, and expected self should look like. The rejection of entanglements through in/attention is reflected in the self/destruction of ritual processes that facilitate encounters with the shimmering of the mysterium tremendum. The Western self now sits on top of it in its own dissociative world. Dreams and visionary comprehension are among the slain along this road. What was once respectfully related to as ‘thou’ now becomes ‘it’. The deletion of initiatory ritual transitions during socialization insures the separation from intimate entanglements in the world. The addictive empowerment of normative dissociation, together with the investiture of a particular form of linear rationality as reigning monarch, has created practices which are crippling the self, its stories, templates, and its capacities to attend to its entangling edges and the world. Instead of a pulsing process of osmotic nurturing exchanges, perceptions become ossified into categorical caskets. This is a narcissistic hall of mirrors where knowledge seeking is limited to a narrow range of attention. The concomitant evolutionary story has at its center an atrophied sense of what survival can mean, the focus shifting increasingly to short-term payoffs and benefits, to the reduction of the intricacies of survival to quantitative values (these days primarily defined in terms of short-term profit). Quantitative measures of survival have become central to Western science.

Normative dissociation results in a practice of self in which the cultural norm initiates or socializes the members of a social group into a disentangled sense of self, taken out of relationality, i.e., out of the perception of relationality. The emphasis is on conscious purpose, and corrective processes (to use Batesonian terminology) are mostly disregarded and neglected. The result of this process is a sense of masterful self with strong boundaries (Cushman, 1995) that has taken itself out of the context it is an inevitable part of, thus developing a sense of supremacy and focus on control of context. Normative dissociation creates a particular quality of self-interface.

The history of normative dissociation traces the origins of a collective pathology which has qualities that we find in individual dissociative processes as described in “abnormal psychology”: a failure of integration of perceptions and experiences, lacunae in remembering, and unbidden intrusions into consciousness (e.g., through dreams); these are ‘symptoms’ commonly considered diagnostic of dissociative pathologies. Normative dissociation refers to the psychological process resulting from a socialization which models and educates in a particular use of the human brain, a narrow band of attention, and the creation of particular stories, emphasizing left-brain frontal cortex functions over other brain functions and over connections with our somatic presence and material engagement in the world. This is a narrowing of the bandwidth of intra-actions that create the phenomena on our self screen. Dreams, holistic intuitions and comprehensions, somatic experiences, visions, and similar experiences get shunned and are not remembered in perceptual processes; they are not allowed to be an integral part of the self process.

Normative dissociation is a particular process of attention, a particular performance of embodiment representing a historical shift in self narration. The severance of the aware intimacy of intra-actions results in an awareness of interaction where the perception of separations dominates (of separate entities with their distinct properties) and, conversely, contrasting signs of aware entanglements are commonly pathologized.

Normative Self

The process of normative dissociation leads to what is generally understood and asserted as the standard or normative self in the West: traditionally (historically) “white”, male, with hetero proclivities, etc. This heteropatriarchal self, as commonly universalized by mainstream psychology, discriminates against other self presentations and processes that do not fit this template. The normative self heavily favors and prioritizes left hemispheric brain processes, while typically devaluing right hemispheric processes, somatic knowing, dreams and visions, narrative knowing, mythic stories, hi/stories outside the historical canon, etc. (whether the experiences of people of color, Indigenous people, members of non-commercial arts and crafts communities, members of LGBTQ+ communities, et al.). Individuals on or outside the border of the normative dissociative Western self represent, broadly speaking, those aspects which have been excommunicated and which are un/consciously persecuted through psychological, legal, political, and other actions that are ultimately violent. Thus the internal aspect of these dissociative processes is self-colonization, which is then unconsciously projected outward onto peoples who express identities falling outside the style and categories of the preferred and rewarded Western self. Violent cuts that sever awareness of entanglements are necessary to maintain the normative Western self. The presence of other identities and self processes threatens social norms and triggers fear and anxiety in the social body of normative selves, all too often manifesting in violent action.

The historical development of the contemporary Western self as intra-active phenomenon can be tracked in different dimensions, whether in the rise of monotheism in religious studies or the rise of particular forms of education or changes in neuropsychological processes or definitions of acceptable evidence. Hunt (1989) has tracked how the valuation of dreams has shifted from archetypal dreams to personal dreams when comparing Indigenous societies and modernity/coloniality. Iain McGilchrist’s (2009, 2019, 2021) groundbreaking work documents the changes in how left and right brain hemispheres are used. Socio-cultural changes in “the West” are mirrored in changes in neuropsychology; and habitual changes in neuropsychological processes are mirrored in the socio-cultural world. These are significant changes in the use of the human brain, not significant changes in brain structure.

The bottomline of this dissociative process is a perceptual disentanglement that creates a cut (and with it a story) that separates the self from the awareness and perception of the intra-action of mind and matter, i.e., of an entangled self process. It creates a particular knowing and thus a particular world. This severance from the intricacies of mindmattering processes is guided by the power of conscious purposes; it relies on left hemispheric frontal cortex attentional functions to create the presumed mirror of reality and holder of truth. This cut, this perceptual disentanglement, is entirely normalized and universalized within modern traditions, while from the perspective of Indigenous traditions it is a violent move of separation. It is violence against relations: the community of human, other-than-human, and more-than-human beings that are part of the shimmering. It is the rejection of entangled intimacy, a subtle yet powerful, violent, and ultimately deadly move. It is violence against the visionary practice of livable communities based in place.

It is this violence that is at the core of modernity/coloniality. The violent cut in attention from what naturally nurtures the self allows individuals to stand outside of an entangled world, enabling a move to power-over and control (of the environment, of ‘primitive’ peoples, resources, etc.).

The initial violence is against the self. McGilchrist (2009), based on an extensive review of the extant research, describes the shift as the original master (the right hemisphere) getting usurped by its emissary (the left hemisphere) which established itself over the centuries as master. The attentional power of conscious purpose colonizes the integrative attention of corrective processes. This is a process of self-colonization, i.e., the left hemisphere seizes colonial power over the rich spectrum of knowing processes that were cherished when the right hemisphere was the master. Arguably the attentions right hemispheric processes afford are integral to an Indigenous way of being in the world (see Littlebear, 2016, in conversation with McGilchrist). The usurpation, while undoubtedly historically gradual, is ultimately violent in the denial of the richness of perception and beingkowing humans are endowed with.

It is this violence that subsequently gets externalized, most recently in the history of colonialism in its various incarnations. It is a shift from pluriversal entanglements in livable communities engaged in nurturing conversations with all relations, to a universe where insistence on singular truth reigns. In the pluriverse of Indigenous civilizations humans are not exceptional and are seen as carrying particular obligations within the web of life that are commensurate with the unique characteristics and capabilities of human animals.

The historical process of the development of the self story of modernity/coloniality and its normative dissociation is one that culminated over time: each rejection of attention to an entanglement, each small act of violence constitutes a loss, a continuously self-inflicted wound leading over time to the strongly boundaried and masterful self idealized in the contemporary West. It is a history of seemingly progressive dissociations that in actuality constitute losses—losses that have built to a largely unconscious trauma (i.e., the forgotten rejection of intimacy with the world) which structures the attentional process of the (post)modern self; these are losses in self narration the West needs to be accountable for. We literally are now the frog in the frying pan who fails to react to the rising heat with a life-saving leap (not to Mars or the world of cryogenics, but a life saving shift in attending to the world). Each movement forward in the history of the West—at each moment—seemed meaningful, constructive, and progressive—while failing to notice how literally turning up the heat in consequence is destroying life on our planet. The end result of the psychological process is a certain stasis in self process, a reification.

The dissociative erasure of our entanglements in attention, awareness, and story today is not just the foundation of individual suffering, but also of social anomies. This becomes all too obvious when colonial moves enforce Western notions of self on Indigenous peoples, a violent gesture for sure, as the internalization of colonial self structures is relentlessly imposed. The most appropriate Indigenous intervention is the use of cultural ceremonies that re/affirm an Indigenous self process, i.e., a process of cultural assertion of the de/colonial practice of Indigenous presence and a celebration of entangled selves in ritual and story. For societies functioning within the paradigm of modernity/coloniality this would mean the attention to, and thus the recovery of the self as richly entangled process.

The Normative Self Is WEIRD

The emergence of the Western story of the well-boundaried masterful self, the self marked by normative dissociation, represents a qualitative shift in consciousness. In the scheme of cultural diversity this is extraordinary. Clifford Geertz has noted how unusual, even peculiar, the Western notion of individualism is: “The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures” (1984, p. 126). This constellation of self has been labeled WEIRD by Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan (2010), their pointed acronym for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic individualities.

The WEIRD self process of modernity/coloniality impacts the importance dreams are accorded. Tedlock (1992, p. 2) notes that “a majority of the world’s peoples have not focused their thinking around oppositional dualism, and thus have not isolated dreaming with the unreal realm of ‘spirit.’” This Cartesian dualism, as discussed above, has been deconstructed during the last hundred years by Western science itself in notions of quantum field theories and other advances, but these breakthrough insights have yet to impact (post)modern cultural practices—and mainstream psychology in particular-—in any deeper way.

Self as Data

In the present historical moment the (post)modern Western self is increasingly shaped by computer algorithms and ever multiplying means of surveillance catalyzing changes in the quality of the mind-matter intra-actions creating the story of self. While this change carries numerous benefits, these changes reinforce the severance of the intimacies of participatory intra-actions and straightjacket the multi-dimensional and multi-causal entanglements of the self into a singular quantitative dimension focused on information.

Byung-Chul Han’s (2017) incisive analysis tracks how our digital culture has impacted our sense of self. “It means turning everything inside out by force and transforming it into information. … Information represents a positive value; inasmuch as it lacks interiority, it can circulate independently, free from any and all context. … This also means stripping people of interiority, which blocks and slows down communication. … The negativity of otherness or foreignness is de-interiorized and transformed into the positivity of communicable and consumable difference: ‘diversity’” (p.9, italics in original). Data are not a story, information becomes devoid of narration.

Han highlights how the (post)modern self has become flattened into a set of data that is measurable and can easily be manipulated for profit by “Digital Big Brother” (also see his recent Infocracy, 2022). Data can be calculated, the entangled self resists quantification. Self-exposure becomes data that are assessed, consumed, and sold on social media, leading Lanier (2018) to argue for the necessity to get off social media. Alternate minority uses of social media notwithstanding, Han’s analysis summarizes a significant trend in the change of the (post)modern self that imperils freedom, truthfulness, and spaces for reflective inquiry and depth—an imperial and colonial move.

Uneasy Dreaming

The people of “the West”, and maybe in particular of the Eurocentric parts of the North American continent, predominantly have a relationship with dreams where they “publicly confess the cultural belief, or stereotype, that dreams are meaningless fantasies or confused mental imaginings with no true or lasting reality dimensions” (Tedlock, 1992, p. 8). Jung noted that “it is only in modern times that the dream, this fleeting and insignificant-looking product of the psyche, has met with such profound contempt” (1917/1926, §21). This dismissal of dreaming has a long history reaching back at least to the European renaissance. Corbin calls this shift in the relationship to the world of dreams a “metaphysical tragedy” (1969, pp. 13-14) during which an entire world of substantive images disappeared; active imagination provided access to this knowledge.

Bosnak (2007, p. 11) locates this shift in “the West” around the thirteenth century when the imaginal world, this “real world between matter and spirit, between body and mind, a real world of creative imagination” began to disappear at the beginning of a long march to define reality in opposition to imagination, relegating the latter to the realm of fantasy. He stresses that the imaginal world is an embodied world. “Some selves are physical, such as the population of our waking worlds; other selves, like the figures we meet in dreams, appear physical, but are fundamentally unknown. The latter exist in a world where imagination takes on body” (p. 1, italics JWK). “Embodiment is the fundamental archaic way of knowing” (p. 71). Quantum field theories suggest to conceptualize or narrate these as different qualities of mind-matter intra-action which represent different attentions assembling different perceptual worlds and consequently different selves and embodied performances.

“Where imagination takes on body” is a particular quality or process of mind-matter intra-action, of mind-mattering, the intricate complementarity of consciousness and somatic processes. During the centuries and millennia before the shift in relationship to imagination, in Old Europe, the Western world acknowledged and was engaged in imaginal realities of its own indigenous provenance. These indigenous worlds in the ancient West practiced and embodied imagination as a way of perceiving, knowing and critical thinking; they validated the importance of what appeared in dreams and visions, whether such knowing emerged during our regular nocturnal dream cycles or was catalyzed in ceremonial proceedings leading to visionary experiences or in profound imaginal moves of the mind resulting in philosophical and scientific re/visions.

Indigenous peoples generally don’t seem to make strict distinctions between dreams and visions, instead they regard these experiences of alterations in attention as of the same kin; all of them may lead to imaginal knowing (including philosophical, scientific, and other insights). The embodiment of these experiences is considered critical: “In tribal cultures, ecstatic, mystical states don’t so much convert into emotive personal experience as into physical experience or experience with direct effect in the physical (that is, as a consequence of entering an ecstatic state, a practitioner can do something actual)” (Allen, 1998, p. 47). They become part of the flow of communal practices that maintain ongoing awareness of, and embodied performative engagement with, an entangled sense of presence. Irwin (1994) similarly discusses the translation of dreams into effective actions that serve the community in Plains Indian traditions. This relationship to dreams is quite different from narrow appropriative, rational interpretations of dreams (see Lippmann 2003).

Eclipse

What perceptual worlds have been lost during the long march from embodied reason and imagination to the practice of a one-dimensional rationality? What particular quality of attending to the world, of embodied intra-action? Corbin (1969, p. 47) describes it as “the world intermediate between the corporeal and the spiritual state and whose organ of perception is the active Imagination.” He further notes, quoting Koyré, that “the notion of the imagination, magical intermediary between thought and being, incarnation of thought in image and presence of the image in being, is a conception of utmost importance” (1969, p. 179). Corbin describes imagination as creative action and emphasizes that “Imaginatio must not be confused with fantasy” (ibidem). He insists that imagination has a noetic value and is an organ of knowledge that “creates” being. Imaginatio refers to a spectrum of perceiving and thinking that ranges from the ek/static in ritual to the visionary thought process of philosophers and scientists.

Corbin’s descriptions can be translated into the language used in this essay, i.e., they can be understood as referring to a particular quality of mind-mattering or mind-matter intra-action facilitating a particular perceptual process: visionary cognition. Imaginal knowing then can be conceptualized using the theoretical concepts provided by Friston (Friston, Sengupta, & Auletta, 2014) and Hoffman (2019): it is a quality of cognitive action that facilitates insight and critical thinking by way of a different quality of mind-matter intra-action (an alteration in mind or consciousness, as it were), creating a specific sense of presence, attention, and perception.

On one end of the spectrum we have practices facilitating imaginal perceptions (Indigenous rituals, meditative practices, etc.) and on the other end of the spectrum we have visionary cognition that may result in philosophical systems and scientific advances. Parmenides’ philosophy is based in a visionary journey. Jung’s mature psychology emerged from imaginal encounters, recorded in the Red Book (2009). Kekulé’s dream triggered his understanding of the benzene ring. Barad’s work, tightly argued on the basis of scientific evidence, also displays the fruits of visionary cognitive activities. The Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, according to his own descriptions, developed his novel insights based on visionary experiences thanks to the inspiration from his ancestral family goddess Namagiri Thayar: complex mathematical formulae would scroll down in front of his eyes. Ramanujan had no training in pure mathematics, yet he provided solutions to problems considered unsolvable at the time (as documented in his notebooks). It appears that his cognitive process involved imagination and intuition together with the more common approaches of argumentation and induction.

The Yukaghir regard “the world of dreams and waking life [as] two sides of the same reality, which together constitute one world, and neither is therefore amenable to prioritization” (Willerslev, 2007, p. 176). Imaginal realities as specific mind-matter intra-actions cannot be dismissed, as such practices impact the world we live in, whether during a Yukaghir hunt or while theorizing or while resolving social issues or while sharing dreams. Imaginal practices are part of the creation of the world we perceive and live in. It is one world, which modernity/coloniality has split and fragmented into attentional incoherence, thus creating the unreality of imaginal worlds, dismissing them as mere phantasy. Arguably, this fundamental perceptual bias is at the root of our current malaise. What appears as extraordinary and unbelievable in the Western mind is a human potential Indigenous shamans and their communities have practiced since time immemorial to build sustainable and livable communities fit for survival. Similarly, genius scientists and philosophers have used this potential to advance our knowledge. In the face of humanity’s precarious survival situation it becomes increasingly obvious that the fragmentation of our world has produced Western selves, and concurrent social realities, that are unfit for survival.

Part III

Dreaming Ourselves into the Shimmering

As Davis (2014) reminds us: our planetary ethnosphere contains a wealth of stories reflecting different senses of self and different cultural perceptions of the world. The majority of these stories contrast with standard notions of the modern Western self. Understanding these foundational differences in self process is critical for understanding the role of dreaming and dreams. Appreciating the self process of Indigenous traditions in particular can help to illuminate what has been dismissed and denied in service of the story of “the West”. This, in essence, is a story away from indigenous practices of what Gimbutas (1974, 1989, 1991) calls ‘Old Europe’.

Yet, Indigenous cultures to this day perform, embody, and balance self entanglements on all levels in culturally diverse ways that have proven useful in their place, time, and ecology as they assert their traditions. These cultural practices reach from the imaginal realm of dreams and visions to detailed astronomical, botanical, and other observations, as recorded in abstract conceptions, mythic stories, and art (see e.g., Lévi-Strauss, 2021). And notably: so many of these practices occur in areas of significant biodiversity, which we can take as an appropriate indicator for fitness for survival (“The home ranges of Indigenous peoples currently shelter 80% of Earth’s remaining biodiversity.” Editors, Scientific American, 2021). This suggests that Indigenous knowledge and practices are critical not just for their own survival, but for the survival of our species and planet.

Call to Remembering

Let me give two examples of performative practices of attentional self entanglement, one from an Australian Aboriginal tradition (the Yolngu culture) and one from the European continent. These examples illustrate my understanding of the ‘shimmering’, the various qualities, experiences, and practices of cultural self creation beyond the bounds of what modernity/coloniality asserts as the normative self of the West.

In Australian Aboriginal Yolngu traditional painting, bir’yun is the name for the effect of intricate crosshatched patterns creating a sensation of shimmering movement over the painting’s surface. This is not merely an artistic style, but a reflection of Yolngu philosophy and ritual embodiment, a manifestation of ancestral forces and lingering presences. It is a pulsing movement that is evoked in the philosophical depths of Aboriginal stories and ritual practices.

The bir’yun of the Australian Yolngu culture (Morphy, 1991) is not so much about concepts or abstractions, as it is a practice of being, action, and intra-active presence which also manifests in a particular style of painting. Wangarr, commonly translated as Dreamtime, is a term for their culturally specific ritual connection with, and embodiment of, imaginal realities anchored in place. Knowledge as mindmattering is the enacting of Wangarr, making imaginal realms present and making oneself present to the reality of imaginal realms. It is a practice of embodiment in which the boundaries of the self shimmer as its stories emerge from material intra-actions. It is a way of making the past present and giving meaning to the present through song, dance, and other ritual proceedings. It is the presence of ancestral stories. The boundaries between Wangarr and secular, everyday reality are porous; knowing and transformations occur across realms as the Dreamtime is opening up possibility and ancestral beings may be perceived. Silence is an important prerequisite for revelations. Knowledge is embodied knowledge. Bir’yun cannot be reduced to an artistic technique or the psychological concept of a self with porous boundaries, rather: it is cultural practice of presencing that arises from ancestral obligations in the present; it is a material practice all around in which the self is entangled with and nurtured by the environment it is a part of.

We find similar performances in the understanding of world and self in the older layers of European cultures, before the emergence of modernity/coloniality. Among the Old Norse we see examples of profound engagements with the shimmering, of the performative embodiment of an entangled sense that is actively inclusive of dreams and visions, a process of inquiry and knowing that includes imaginal realms. Here we find a sense of self that connects the self beyond itself (Bjarnadóttir & Kremer, 2000): ó∂r is that aspect of the self that can be called “ecstatic faculty”, the human capacity to reach beyond the limits of the individual self through its attentional practice, ek/stasis, standing outside of itself; ó∂r references an ancient indigenous European self and awareness process reaching into the roots and branches of entangled being.

On a neuropsychological level, we access this quality of intra-active attention when we balance ourselves, i.e., when we synchronize our two hemispheres and the older and younger parts of our brains in ritual presence (Winkelman, 2010). The Old Norse understanding of the self included hamr (the power of imagination), önd (the divine spark), fylgja (the fetch, the familiars, protective spirit), and other aspects which reflect an enlarged sense of self (in parts akin to Jung’s understanding of personality). These terms map various aspects of the shimmering and were accessed ritually.

Practices like the Old Norse seiður and the Yolngu bir’yun aesthetic, are catalysts to re-think the individualistic self in the present fascinating and disturbing period in our shared histories. The story of the classical Western human form and the long-held assumptions about what it means to be a person are crumbling under the crushing weight of entanglements.

I use the term ‘shimmering’ to refer to mind-matter intra-actions that breach the boundaries of Western notions of self in gentle or intense ways and represent an entangled sense of self. These ‘breaches’ include: visionary and dream states of all sorts; trances and other ritual practices or spontaneous events that create an expanded sense of presence; they include experiences of what is often called the imaginal realm, visions facilitated by dancing and fasting, insights that arrive in dreams or through visualization or visionary cognitions. The term also refers to the fluidity of these states. ‘Shimmering’ seems a perfect metaphor to point to the enlarged self processes emerging.

Remembrance on the Shimmering Edges

Indigenous traditions the world over have always valued dreams in their own culturally specific ways, something that holds true to this day; here dreams are generally considered of both individual and collective significance (see for example Degarrod, 2004; Grimm, 1883/1966; Irwin, 1994; Tedlock, 1992). By all accounts, this held similarly true for the world of Old Europe. The historical shift in “the West” began at least 800 years ago (but can arguably be traced back to its representationalist roots in Plato’s cave) and is reflected in the emphatic shift of the use of human brain capacities from right to left brain hemispheric dominance, resulting in cultural dismissals of dreams and the totality of mind-matter intra-actions creating experiences of an imaginal realm. Neither dreams nor the variety of visionary cognitions fit any longer into the world created by the dominance of left cortical hemispheric processes.

In the European traditions, at the beginning of the 20^th century, Freud re-opened the doors to the world of dreams within an individualistic framework, while simultaneously marking the powers of the unconscious as dangerous and in need of civilizing. Taking a notably more positive approach to the unconscious—by appreciating its compensatory functions—Jung put depth psychological understandings into a paradigm on the threshold to a new and expanding self narrative.

Jung sits on the threshold of European indigenous presence (which he struggled to recover, primarily through his studies of alchemical texts) and our (post)modern world at peril; Jung has been of tremendous service in opening the portal. His quality of imaginal inquiry and knowing remains urgent for healing the dissociated self and nurturing numinous experiences of the shimmering self. He offers psychological ways to take responsibility for what normative dissociation has wrought, and continues to inflict, on the world. While Jung ultimately remains within a Western individualistic paradigm, he is among the pioneers opening the Cartesian self to indigenous presence and practices of assembling perceptions differently.

While Corbin’s writings may seem esoteric, what he refers to is a quality of cognitive inquiry that shamans and other visionaries have practiced for millennia. In the field of psychology, Jung is pre-eminent for his fight on behalf of the imagination and the value of the knowledge it creates. Jung’s inquiries on the outer edges of the shimmering (or into its depths), which he referred to as “the numinous,” led to profound knowledge that significantly impacted the subsequent development of his understanding of individuation and the self. Yet, psychologists have frequently tried to dismiss his visions and dreams as psychotic (Kingsley, 2018). Indeed, Jung had significant visions concerning the state of the world with its “rationalistic and political psychosis that is the affliction of our day” (Jung, 1951/1959, p. 84, §140). Shamdasani (2009, p. 29), for example, lists twelve experiences which Jung regarded as precognitive of the First World War (called ‘fantasies’ by Shamdasani). His perceptual processes were attuned not just to his personal process, but the collective catastrophe ahead.

One of the central qualities of such narrative emergence from the unconscious is multiplicity: “the words composing a dream-narrative have not just one meaning, but many meanings” (Jung, 1945/1948, §539). In this extraordinary move, dismissing the hold left brain processes have on what counts as reality, Jung undercuts the increasingly shallow self construction of modernity/coloniality and talks about “the 2,000,000-year-old [person] that is in all of us. In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where do we make contact with this old [person] in us? In our dreams” (1936, p. 89). Jung puts his finger on the dissociative wound of “the West” by both valuing evolutionary and indigenous origins as well as the multiplicity and indeterminacy we all carry. Sabini (2008) explores the question whether the psyche is capable of remembering its ancestral and phylogenetic origins and cites dreams containing evolutionary content; she asserts the potential importance of such content for healing the limitations of the modern self. Indeed, to my mind this suggests that dreams may help us re/member and re/engage with the shimmering of self, its interweaving and entanglements and overcome the habits that have created the dark side of human exceptionalism.

Hillman saw Jung’s notion of self as monotheistic and considered this an “overvaluation of a singular patterning force” (Bosnak, 2007, p. 15). Hillman developed a polytheistic perspective highlighting the multiplicity of patterns carried in images in the self. “The West” continues to be addictively invested in an evolutionary model of self and society that constructs a line of progress, emphasizing singular ‘Truth’, with the metropolitan West as the exemplar of where things are and should be headed. In this scheme animism and polytheism are considered primitive and dismissed as childish (see also Butler, 2014; Miller, 1981).

Images are, in a central and foundational sense, the language of dreams, in contrast to the verbal language we use to navigate everyday consensual reality dominated by left hemispheric processes. Images are multiplicity, opening the portal to creativity. “The closer we get to an image-presence, the more it becomes an environment in which we find ourselves. We are pulled into the presence and participate in its medium. This is the literal meaning of the word ekstasis, a movement outside of our selves, changing our state of being” (Bosnak, 2007, p. 20). Ek/stasis brings us to presence on the shimmering edges of the self and it may plunge us into the depths of the imaginal realms—experiences that may be enlightening or confront us with darkness.

Bogzaran uses the term epistemic uncertainty as “a way of knowing about not knowing”, “epistemic uncertainty encourages the dreamer to examine core assumptions and beliefs that often breed a sense of certainty” (Bogzaran & Deslaurier, 2012, p. 204). Taking a journey to places where we don’t know (an underworld journey or immersion in the shimmering edges) forces us to surrender our habitual assumptions and to engage with uncertainty, with the multiplicity of images, and even to confront the death of the self.

All true initiatory journeys have an uncertain outcome. Upon our return we may realize that the core of what we held true about our selves and about the world has become uncertain, even how we know has become uncertain. As our habitual self has thus been deconstructed, renewed processes of knowing can emerge that include intercourse with imaginal worlds.

Meaning-making, imaginal knowing, then becomes a gradual pulsing process, an iterative mindmattering (Barad, 2007) deconstructing and constructing—entering epistemic uncertainty and returning, challenging and affirming—as the movement toward and from the shimmering edges of our selves continues. This includes space for uncertainty, ambiguity, and critical self/reflection.

No Trespassing!

Some years ago a dream visited me that catalyzed a radical shift in my self process. It is an example of a dream piercing the presumed security and mastery of the well-boundaried Western self, the self I had been socialized in. The dream visitation was an invitation to engage with the shimmering edges of my self and to plunge into the depths of ancestral ceremonial buildings and memories. It is from these depths that ó∂r arises, the voice of imaginal inquiries, visionary cognitions, and comprehensions, the ritual embodiment of ancestral forces that have the capacity to queer the Western self. It is from the deepest roots of the shimmering that the self comes to presence with its entanglements.

While I had previously intentionally worked to overcome the constraints of the self husk I had been socialized into, this dream came unbidden and thus felt more powerful than any of my reading or critical reflections. It profoundly disturbed my conformity with the self-mold that had stamped me.

The story of the dream begins by bringing the geologic history of my birth place into my presence: during ice age times the area of my birth place very much looked like today’s tundra where the Sámi people of the European arctic north live and where one of my ancestral lines seems to be leading as indicated by a family photo.

I am in Hamburg, the Northern German town where I was born. Here I grew up. I am sitting on the threshold in the doorway of an old brick house, one in a row of houses that are considerably older than the First World War. Beside me is a woman. She shares my vista. I overlook the river Elbe from on high. My threshold perch is atop the ancient ice age rim of the river, once the border of a flow miles wide. Tens of thousands of years ago reindeer herds roamed the tundra of these latitudes. The southernmost border of the thick ice sheet covering much of northern Europe was encroaching then, bringing along boulders and rocks from the north. The reindeer now live much farther north and the river moves in a much narrower bed. It still spreads to considerable widths three hundred or so feet below. Ferries crisscross its course and ocean liners enter and leave the harbor.

Sitting atop this ancient riverbed I am very close to where I went to kindergarten shortly after the Second World War. I enter through the heavy wooden doors that are high and painted an almost black, dark green, Hooker’s green. Inside, a large playroom is warmed by a comforting, white tile stove; its enormous size reaches toward the ceiling. It is the center of this space accommodating a small crowd of children. The room is lambent with light reflected from the wide river. It enters through large windows that allow for a grand vista. Behind the house is a garden with plants and trees inviting a child’s playful imaginations. From here the river can be admired as it stretches below in all its grandeur.

I notice an archaeological excavation in progress behind my old kindergarten. The area is cordoned off with yellow plastic strips, glittering as they twist in the wind. Signs are put up all around: No trespassing! Stay out! Not to be deterred, my dream allows me to leave the body, my dreambody, at the moment of seeing these signs. There is no pause, no struggle with the prohibitions right in front of me. Assuming a form that permits me to proceed is the natural and immediate dream solution. Invisible now, I enter the forbidden grounds.

I hover over the ancient ruins that are clearly visible thanks to the work of the archaeological team. To the right a round, tower-like structure emerges from the underground depths. It appears to extend a good ways into the earth. I recognize it as an ancestral ceremonial structure. Similar ones are right next to it. The name of the place where this dig into ancient cultural history occurs is Altona, meaning “all-too-near.”

One legend has it that an orphan was blindfolded when the burghers of Hamburg wanted to expand their overpopulated city beyond the constricting medieval city walls. The idea was to place the new town where the orphan would trip and meet the ground. But what happened was unexpected. The boy had barely left the city gates, when he stumbled and fell. The attendant burghers exclaimed in surprise that this was all too near, in the local vernacular: “All to nah!”—thence the name for this part of the city—Altona. This is the story I learned in school.

The dream begins with a dramatic primordial setting, the ancient riverbed that connects to the paleolithic historical layers of the place of my upbringing. Not far away the ancients of that time made offerings to three female spirits or goddesses, as marked by the archaeological find of three tall and clearly gendered staffs. Here they made offerings and presumably entered the depths of their shimmering, the entangled presence of self. The dream opens me to this broad panorama of the most ancient roots of my birth place where self was rooted in place and entwined with the community not only of humans, but also animals, plants, natural features and more-than-humans.

The broad river valley borders on the place where my dream helps me gain access to the layers below the contemporary city of Hamburg, an ancestral place that is all too close, as the dream spells out. Right there with my childhood. Fenced in by signs forbidding entry. Right there beyond my normative practice of self.

Central to the dream is the prohibition to step outside of established boundaries of self and to engage with the shimmering and the voice that emerges from ek/stasis (or in my own tradition, the voice of ó∂r arising from ancestral and deeply rooted entanglements). The existence of this taboo affirms that ek/static explorations of the shimmering are always possible—otherwise: why have a taboo? When we transgress we engage with stories that arise from outside the normative self, that emanate from the shimmering that enters through the fractures and cracks of the self husk and connects us with a larger sense of presence, with imaginal knowing. In consequence, habitual patterns of self/perception are disrupted and perceptions are now assembled to create different experiences and stories.

I remembered this dream with the vibrant luminosity that seems common to dreams drawing attention to their meaning. It needed little interpretation. It was all spelled out for me at the end. Lest I deny what I had been shown. And midwifing this process was a woman next to me, an anima figure, the feminine gaze, catalyzing this process of integration, of balancing left and right hemispheres, younger and older layers of who I am in my self awareness and in my brain processes.

The entry place of the dream, the prelude to the central revelation, is a place of comfort situated in a primordial setting: The kindergarten is a place of play, filled with the warmth of light and heat. Ontogeny and phylogeny are invoked as the place of early childhood sits atop ancient geological layers, earth memory visible in the course of the river. The kindergarten is guarded by a heavy wooden door, its shade of green signaling the depth of the dream space as well as renewal from the depths.

Beyond the kindergarten building, what was hidden in the earth is something not only rooted in the depths of place, but something that reaches from deep down skyward: a tower—a protector, guardian, or observatory. The memories hidden in earth are shown as the strength of the tower, a structure for elevated vigilance all around. What becomes visible from the viewpoint of the tower are the layers of memory un/earthed. But in order for the strength of these memories to become visible, two things needed to happen: a transgression (taboo violation) and a shift in attention or consciousness (leaving the body, changing from visibility to invisibility).

I am compelled to pay heed and to take the dream as injunction to trespass across the lines that separate me not just from childhood memories, but also the root memories of my ancestral cultures and their presence. Since this dream visited me I have struggled to remember beyond the bounds of my habitual self, a struggle not only to recover details of historical indigenous presence in Northern Europe, but, maybe more importantly, to remember a process of critical imaginal inquiry and presence, a sense of indigenous presence, as it were, an altogether different sense of self.

At its most generic level I take this dream to be an injunction to honor my ó∂r, the shimmering entanglements of my self. The taboo violation meant entering a qualitatively different onto-epistemological and ethical process by honoring ancestral roots, their process of presence and knowing. The past becomes present in the now and the dream’s injunction gestures toward the future. The dream flashed a memory for the future so that I would work to actualize what it could have been in the past and can be in the future. The movement of history as I was taught, the evolutionary story that was instilled in me, dissolved as the dream flashed remembrance as potential for the future, i.e., the injunction to actualize what could have been. Instead of the linearity of progress and the notion of mono-causality central to the story of “the West”, I began to find a different relationship between past, present, and future, and different notions of causality.

This dream flashes up a meaningful constellation in the now for the sake of our future. It creates the potential of wholeness and the possibility of a world in which present and past are related in a different way. The remembrance the dream brings engages me with the denied parts of history, it brings into the present a story that has been relegated to the primitive layers of pre/history. What flashes up in the now are ceremonial places, the remembered presence of balancing and nurturing conversations. The now reveals its multiple layers. This represents the possibility of a different quality of consciousness to remedy the largely left-hemisphere based hall of mirrors “the West” has produced: “We have strayed from our phylogenetic foundation and run into an impasse, because we have been using only our limited conscious mind to deal with survival matters. The dreaming mind opens into a broader bandwidth” (Sabini, 2008). Dreams bring images from our entanglements, from beyond what our conventional self is able to envision. They have the capacity to break the mold and create deep remembrance and deep attention.

Dreaming the Deep Structures of Our Times

The Western self story maintains the delusion of enforcing and mastering strict boundaries—while even its own standard research by now contains many examples that undermine central assumptions of this particular quality of self narrative. The terminus of this essay is how dreams, when taken with their full import, reveal not only the Western self’s deceptions, but also help us recover what has been lost. Challenges to the self of modernity/coloniality are evident, for example, in lucid dreaming and dream telepathy. Convergent patterns among dreamers, an emergent cultural imaginary, come into focus in times of crisis, such as the covid-19 pandemic. Innovative practices of collective or culture dreaming invite revising the boundaries of the Western self. I will discuss these four types of evidence and practice as examples that challenge Western notions of self.

Lucid Dreaming

The term lucid dreaming was first introduced by Frederik van Eeden in 1913; it is a well-documented process in which we as dreamers “are explicitly aware that we are dreaming”, a process of “clear insight and correct orientation to reality in opposition to” ordinary or nonlucid dreaming (LaBerge & Gackenbach, 2000, p. 152). Lucid dreaming represents a qualitative shift from dreaming as a remembered event to present awareness of a sequence of events during which dreamers are able to act and interact while dreaming. Lucid dreaming is not a memory of dreaming but an experience of dreaming as it is happening. It is a particular process of assembling perceptions, distinct from other forms of dreaming.

It has been discovered that lucid dreamers are able to communicate with people (aka experimenters) who are in everyday consensual reality. Dreamers can count and signal through eye-movements (LaBerge, 2000). Communication between lucid dreamers and individuals functioning in ordinary reality challenges notions of strong self-boundaries, suggesting models of entanglement (see Radin 2006). The examples documented in experimental research as well as anthropological observation necessitate rethinking both self boundaries and self process.

Dream Telepathy

Dream telepathy, the capacity to communicate telepathically with someone who is dreaming, is distinct from lucid dreaming. The most significant experimental research on dream telepathy was conducted at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY, beginning in 1966, by Ullman, Krippner, & Vaughan (1973). The most recent meta-analysis by Storm et al. (2017) concludes that “dream ESP is (i) a demonstrable effect; (ii) not governed by experimenter, or laboratory, or historical context” (p. 134). Thus research in dream telepathy has shown significant results again and again as it has been replicated.

In dream telepathy dreamers are generally not lucid, yet while in the shimmering they receive imagery from the waking world. Boundaries between consensual reality as configured in the West and the shimmering apparently may be crossed more easily than prior conventional assumptions recognized. This research helps us rethink self boundaries as osmotic and fluid.

Dream Inquiries into the Cultural Imaginary

This and the subsequent two sections discuss examples of communal dream sharing to focus on what dreams tell us about culture (as opposed the individual). Hillman (2001, p. 237) suggests that dreams “be welcomed for [their] information regarding the state of the soul of the world”. Needed now is an equivalent understanding of dreams that concern the societal bodies to which we belong, locally and globally. Sabini (2014, p. 37) describes culture dreams as having few associations for the dreamer and being rather plain and factual rather than elaborately symbolized: “Dreams like these are like weather reports on the psyche of a culture or social body” and she quotes (ibidem) Montague Ullman’s belief that dreams don’t primarily have to do with the individual, “I think it is the manifestation of phylogenetic adaptive mechanisms that have to do with the survival of the species”.

Concerned with the malaise of modernity/coloniality, Jung identified dreams for their collective implications and stated that “collective dreams have a character which forces people instinctively to tell them … such dreams do not belong to the individual; they have a collective meaning … they are true for people in certain circumstances” (1933/1964, § 323). Such dreams provide an opening for potential cultural healing.

When looking at the cultural imaginary an obvious place to start may be the impact of major historical events on our dreams. How do dramatic events impact our dreaming? Recently, social media have been used to survey dreaming during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic (early examples from the beginning of the pandemic are Barrett, 2020 and Nielsen, 2020). Nielsen noted a ‘dream surge’, an increase in dreams concerned with the coronavirus and social distancing.

The individual self is responsive to historical moments while struggling to maintain their own psychological balance. Initial research on the pandemic (Nielsen, 2020) has shown, for example, that nurses in Wuhan, China, had a significantly higher rate of nightmares than usual; about one third of U.S. citizens recalled more dreams than usual and more than one third had pandemic dreams during the initial phase of the pandemic. Beyond their individual significance, dreams can guide us toward collective experiences and memories.

Sliwinsky (2017, p. vii) regards “dreaming [as] a distinct species of thinking that can represent, contain, and transfigure the most profound of human conflicts. A dream becomes a particular kind of communication, a gossamer transport for the expression of difficult desires, ideas, and conflicts.” This “distinct species of thinking” refers to imaginal experiences, dream inquiries, and the interpretation and critical reflection on dreams. Dreaming has powers as collective change agent. “Dreams are vehicles for otherwise unthinkable thoughts and a species of psychological work that can fold and transfigure the force of a harsh reality” (p. ix). Dreams tap into something outside of the masterful self, they enter the shimmering edges of the self and connect with collective processing, questioning, knowing, and remembering.

Communal Practice of Deep Dreaming

The practice of regular dream sharing has been documented for many cultures. Indigenous practices of dream sharing, such as seen among the Amazonian Achuar and Huarorani Natives, illustrate an older understanding of dreams and their entanglement with the world, as important information about self and world. Nwoye (2015, p. 1), in his discussion of African dream theory, notes that there are dreams that “originate from another source to give messages to the individual for the benefit of others”. The two approaches discussed here share two qualities: a focus on cultural interpretations and an emergent practice of communal dream tending, in which becoming present to the shimmering edges of our selves is central. These are embodiments of a self process that reaches outside of the normative self of modernity/coloniality.

Deep Dreaming, developed by Richard Russo and Meredith Sabini at The Dream Institute of Northern California, is a communal practice that provides a bridge to what Joseph Henderson identified as the “cultural unconscious” (Henderson, 1984). The session commonly begins in the silence of a meditative trance.

In the induction, Spirit is asked if it would bring forth from participants’ whole lifetime of dreaming ones that need to be heard for their relevance to this period in history. Slowly, dreams come forth, told in the present tense. After about half an hour, this first phase of communal meditation is brought to a close. The dreams are then retold in sequence by the facilitator, thus becoming a shared dream. After listening to the entire narrative, participants begin offering comments and reflections on the actions and images in the larger dream, elucidating various themes and linking them to issues in the world at large. The focus is thus not on the personal meaning for the dreamer but the meaning for the larger whole. Deep Dreaming is emergence theory in action, creatively applied to the collective or cultural unconscious. The Deep Dreaming process harkens back to Indigenous ways of relating to dreams and is in stark contrast to dream practices that focus on individual significance. “It gives us the rare chance to glimpse and briefly touch the source of cultural creativity, the aqua vitae, that is accessible to everyone” (Sabini, 2007, p. 38).

Chartres Communal Indigenous Dream Process

The Chartres dream work (Colorado, Duncan, & Hurd, 2021) emerged from within a context of the affirmation of Indigenous practices and the recovery of indigenous mind work, meaning: a process acknowledging that all people have indigenous roots that are relevant for our contemporary survival. The cathedral hill of Chartres has roots that reach back to the Indigenous layers of the place, the Celtic and Gaul peoples. The cathedral’s famous labyrinth facilitates not only personal embodied journeys into self as it is walked, but is connected with ancient mythic layers, specifically the combat between Theseus and the minotaur that was originally represented on the central plaque; the labyrinthian journey into the unknown depths of self can connect us with the deepest layers of the psyche and phylogeny.

The Chartres dream process is place-based and attends to echoes and synchronicites in the dreams shared. Relationships, landscapes, and mythic stories receive particular attention. This process has evolved over more than fifteen years of annual conferences where participants share their dreams every morning: At the beginning sacred chant calls everybody to presence and shifts the attentional process; then dreams are shared, whether from last night or older dream memories that have become present that morning. The dreams are digitally recorded. Once the dream sharing has concluded, a team of experienced dreamers looks at the gathering of dreams for emergent themes with the help of notes, transcriptions, and glyphs. The themes of each day are reviewed and parsed for commonalities and synchronicities. This elaborate and careful process culminates in a final visual and storied presentation of the emergent dream story at the end of the conference week. The stunning visual images combined with evocative chanting and narration make the group dream present to all participants.

“Dreams look backwards to our Ancestors, situate us in the present moment, and speak of possible futures” (Colorado, Duncan, & Hurd, 2021, p. 16). This dreamwork explicitly sees itself as part of de/colonial practices that validate dreams as unmediated ancestral communications and remembrances of interconnectedness. The focus is on “how the dreams work on multiple levels to impart critical, life sustaining messages and understandings for today, and simultaneously reconstitute holism at this critical time in human history” (p. 15).

Deep dreaming and the Chartres Indigenous dream process are examples of re/emergent cultural practices of dream sharing that assert the importance of dreams as a form of knowing, as imaginal inquiry.

Dreams Have the Last Word

This essay reconfigures the Cartesian understanding of self as intra-active participatory process in which experiences and narratives emerge through the material, somatic presence of persons embedded in their environment. Dreams have a valued place in this process. Ever since the emergence of the self of modernity/coloniality, dreams have challenged the boundaries, mastery, and exceptionalism of human personhood that is so central to the self understanding of the contemporary Western mind.

The (post)modern self, as part of an evolutionary story that claimed a certain self-satisfied inevitability, never quite was what it claimed to be; its story was never as watertight as dreams and artistic creations have consistently shown, and as scientific advances produced within the received view of science increasingly show. At the same time, the Western self is increasingly becoming a set of data subject to algorithmic manipulation for money and power, rather than a communally connected self with introspective depth and multiple layers of reflexivity enabling an informed participatory citizenry. Even research conducted within the received view of science (representationalism) has shown that the claim to a lack of shimmering—the assertion of strong boundaries, control, and mastery—is self/deceptive. The shimmering is always there, whether individuals and cultures are aware of it or not. The modern self likes to trade in epistemic certainty, only to have its own investigations into the truths of the matter, as it were, undermine such assertions and catalyze epistemic uncertainty and multiplicity.

Research evidence has shown the importance of REM sleep for the consolidation and sorting of emotional memories. We can consider its role in Batesonian terminology as our nocturnal corrective processes.

Jung (1933/1964, p. 50), consistent with current research, saw the general function of dreams as the restoration of psychic balance. His concern notably was not just with individual well-being, but also with that of cultures. His focus and revolutionary contribution, in the face of what he saw as the catastrophes of “the West”, was to conceive of the connections between the individual and collective unconscious in a way that is potentially generative of cultural healing. This was a move to reconfigure the socio-cultural imaginary of the West and to reconnect personhood with the numinous shimmering and deeper roots of the self . While his theory ultimately remains tied to an individualistic paradigm, his inquiries were groundbreaking in their connections with collective concerns and the consideration of alchemical and Indigenous traditions. These traditions have historically maintained a different sense of self through ritual and mythic inquiries, i.e., processes of aware entanglements.. Dreams that come to visit us are part of the shimmering edges of the self, the place from which ek/static connections and entanglements may reveal themselves to show the limitations of the notion of self as well-boundaried and masterful entity. Dreams are one of the important avenues to establish de/colonial islands in the minds of “the West.” They may bring gifts to help us out in remembering who we are in our shimmering, entangled self. Out of our dreaming a new paradigm may emerge that is grounded in the remembrance of our ancestral selves, the renewal of our ancient, indigenous capacities for today.

Dr. Sabini recently shared with me a dream of hers from 1996 that was simply the statement: “No longer anima mundi but asiste vida is the new myth.” She commented that, in Spanish, asiste is the imperative form of asistir, which means to serve, wait on, care for, assist. Joseph Henderson, a senior Jungian analyst who was her consultant at the time, said he thought the dream was correct—because anima mundi pertained to an earlier historic era when spirit was considered to be behind the world. A decade and a half earlier, Sabini received a related dream message, also in words: “During this period of history/time, the task is that spirit re-enter matter.” Both dreams call for a change in worldview, presenting the challenge to develop a different quality of human presence—a different attention to and engagement with the world. Dreams are thus talking to us about an outmoded paradigm. This theme appears in Barad’s writings (see especially 2017) where she analyzes the intra-action of mind and matter (which many would call the intra-action of consciousness or spirit and matter), the inseparability of mind-mattering. Also, Gazzaniga (2018) discusses the complementarity of mind and matter to understand consciousness. Goff (2022) asserts panpsychism as the simplest and most elegant paradigm to resolve the ontoepistemological issues that have beset consciousness studies ever since Galileo outlined the scientific understanding central to modernity/coloniality.

Dreams call for an intra-active embodied presence, an entangled way of being, the practice of a new ontoepistemology and ethics, woven through not only human communities, but communities that are more and other than human. This is an imperative for the change in the imaginary of “the West,” for the remembrance of indigenous ancestral roots for the sake of our future, the cultural healing of the deceptions and crises normative dissociation has created. Dreams are one of the important avenues to establish de/colonial islands in the minds of “the West” and in the embodied practices of “the West.”

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Endnotes

¹ This paper has benefitted from exchanges with Bayo Akomolafe, Timoti Bramley, Apela Colorado, Karen Jaenke, Stanely Krippner, Meredith Sabini, and Elenita Strobel. Part of the origin story of this piece was a plan to co-author a book with Bayo and it was he who brought in the notion and initial language of bir’yun, the shimmering. (A few sentences and sentence fragments from the original beginnings persisted into this essay.) I am grateful for the inspirations and clarifications these conversations provided and, as always, I am solely responsible for the conceptualizations in this essay. Throughout Bogzaran & Deslauriers (2012) provided essential context for my discussion of dreaming.

² De/colonial: The forward slash indicates how coloniality and decolonicality are diffracted (rather than a binary); it disrupts the unilinear temporality implied in decolonization or decoloniality. The slash cuts together apart (Barad, 2010, p. 245), it acknowledges an entanglement rather than creating a dichotomy.

³ Bateson contrasts conscious purpose and linearity with corrective processes (the arts, dreams, love, etc.). He notes the habit of Western man(!) of “changing his environment rather than changing himself … The power ratio between purposive consciousness and the environment has changed rapidly in the last one hundred years and the rate of change in this ratio is rapidly increasing with technological advances. Conscious man, as a changer of his environment, is now fully able to wreck himself and that environment—with the very best of conscious intentions” (1972, p. 445/6).

⁴ Benally (1987, p. 139) explains the term hózhó as follows: “The ultimate goals of Navajo life are: First, to seek and establish the state of hózhó; and secondly, to learn behavior appropriate to that state of hózhó. Hózhó appears to be a life where peaceful words (hózhóóji saad) are spoken, peaceful thought (hózhóogo ntsáhákees) exists and tranquil society (hózhóogo da’iiná) exists.”

⁵ Compare this with research discussed by Nisbett (2003): when shown objects (fish) with background, Japanese participants were more likely to begin with descriptions of the background, while U.S. participants tended to begin by discussing the “focal fish”.

⁶ Western science, of course, has created an impressive array of theoretical and practical knowledge. The recognition that truth is intra-active and socially constructed does not mean that truth is an arbitrary event. Far from it (it honors the scientific process). However, the implication is, as should become apparent in this essay, that the Western paradigm, because of foundational fallacious assumptions, limits which phenomena can be generated (socially constructed) and will be accepted as fact. Adequately assessing the achievements of Western science requires the application of the various paradigmatic critiques that originate outside of its supposedly universal paradigm.

⁷ I am using the terms West, “the West”, and modernity/coloniality interchangeably; Mignolo’s term modernity/coloniality points to the entwinement of our current state of affairs with colonial history and is my preferred terminology; however, in places “the West” eases the weight of sentences (see e.g., Mignolo & Walsh, 2018).

⁸ Mindmattering refers to the processual fact that concepts are physical arrangements, meaning making is material, matter and meaning, concepts and materiality are in intimate relationality (see Barad, 2007, e.g., p. 14).

⁹ “In the [world] of the right hemisphere, we experience the live, complex, embodied world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world in which we are deeply connected. In the other [world], that of the left hemisphere, we “experience” our experience in a special way: a “re-presented” version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes on which predictions can be based. … These are not different ways of thinking about the world: they are different ways of being in the world” (McGilchrist, 2019, pp. 22 & 23).

¹⁰ When referring specifically to the Aboriginal Yolngu or other Indigenous traditions I will use the pertinent culturally defined term, such as bir’yun.

¹¹ For a more extensive discussion of Benjamin’s “flashing up” and Barad’s and Butler’s interpretations of Benjamin, see my Coming-to-Presence at My Place of Hope (2021).

¹² My appreciation goes to Meredith Sabini, Apela Colorado, and Stanley Krippner for our dream discussions and the various resources they shared with me.

¹³ While dream telepathy may involve the dreamers’ lucidity, lucidity is not part of the definition of dream telepathy.

¹⁴ My appreciation goes to Meredith Sabini, PhD, for sharing these dreams as well as helpful sources used in this article. She has been a depth psychologist in the field since 1972 and is the founder and director of The Dream Institute of Northern California. She has a special interest in collective dreams and has published guidelines on how to recognize them. Her publications and other information can be found at: www.dream-institute.org

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