Dreams occur at so many levels of reality that it is quite impossible to describe their true scope. For one thing, that scope includes levels that are consciously unknown to us. Dreams serve as backup systems also, for example, in the important communications between various peoples or nations — and, particularly when physical communication is cut off between such groups, dreams provide the continuation of information’s flow from one part of the species to another.
There are dreams of different import, some triggered genetically, that serve as sparks for particular kinds of behavior — dreams, in other words, that literally span the centuries in that regard, coiled latently in the very chromosomes; and no level of consciousness is without some kind of participation in dream states. In that regard even electrons, for example, dream. Dreaming touches upon both microscopic and macroscopic events, or realities, and is not simply a human characteristic, appropriately appearing within our own range or within our own species. It is instead one area of subjective experience that is everywhere prevailing within the universe.
As I have mentioned many times, animals then dream, as do plants, insects, and all form of life. All molecular constructions exhibit that certain kind of introspective activity, as if the inner working of some giant computer was intimately in touch not only with its own programming and the probabilities connected with it, but with a deep psychological awareness of the activities of the electrons and various visible and invisible particles that form its own physical construction.
We are bound to have, then, many larger dream formations that can only be called group dreams — subjective events in which our own dreams happen, and in which our own dreams take part. We expect all of the elements of the physical world, however, diverse, to fit together and for a certain kind of permanency and order. It should be no surprise, then, that this same kind of “fitting together” includes subjective life also — or that, say, our private dreams are also fragments in a vaster dream reality. They are as important to the operation of that reality as electrons are to our physical one, providing inner pathways for the accumulation of wisdom and pleasure.
There are certain kinds of dreams in which the various species then communicate, and in which the energies of the environment and its inhabitants merge. These include a kind of horizontal psychological extension, the translation of one kind of dream into another kind — the transference of information from one system to another, in which the symbols themselves come alive.
I can only hope to evoke some feeling within you that is reminiscent of our own actual behavior at those hidden levels of dreaming activity, but they have remained highly pertinent in the development of all species with their environments, keeping the intents and purposes of one alive in the other. I have told in previous blogs, that in actuality, now, no genetic knowledge is gone from the earth. It does not vanish. It is retained in latent form within a kind of backup system, so that in terms of probabilities each species carries within its own genetic patterns the blueprints and specializations of each other’s genetic sequence.
Those sequences follow the pursuits of value fulfillment so smoothly that they can be reactivated whenever the conditions are fortunate — for even the animals are not concerned with simple survival alone, not the plants, but with what I can only call emotional qualities: qualities that seek a full appreciation and creative extension of those conditions of consciousness that stamp each species as itself and yet join it with all others.
In a fashion our own dreams operate or appear as electrons in other realities. That is, they change their form, their subjective force or direction, and become part of the working mechanics of the universe. The same applies to our own thoughts. They are not “wasted” after we have thought them, or simply discarded. They do not become extinct either, but go on to serve other functions in the universe than those which we are presently aware.
This all involves a lush multitudinous creativity. The pleasure principle can probably be likened most to the latent appreciation of beauty that is everywhere apparent if we look for it: the ecstasy of each form of life for the wonders of its own existence, in which love’s values go beyond themselves, and yet a condition in which each species or life form “realizes” that its own fulfillment adds immeasurably to the existence of all other forms.
We did manage at least to hint of some material that almost exists on the edge — the very edge — of any rational understanding.