We are used to a certain kind of before-and-after order. When we build physical structures we pile brick upon brick. It may seem that psychological events have the same kind of structure, since after all we do perceive them in time.
When we ask: “How are events formed?” We more or less expect an answer couched in those terms. The answer is not that simple. The origin of events lies in that creative, subjective realm of being with which we are usually least concerned. This state of dreaming provides an inner network of communication, that is its way far surpasses our technological communications. The inner network deals with another kind of perceptual organization entirely. A rose is a rose is a rose. In the dream state, however, a rose can be an orange, a song, a grave, or a child as well, and be ach equally.
In dreams we deal with symbols of course. Yet symbols are simply examples of other kinds of quite “Objective” events. They are events that are what they seem to be, and they are equally events that do not “immediately” show themselves. One so-called event, therefore, may be a container of many others, while we only perceive its exterior face — and we call that face a symbol.
The other events within the symbol are as legitimate as the one event we perceive.
Basically, events are not built one upon the other. They grow out of each other in a kind of spontaneous expansion, a profusion of creativity, while the conscious mind chooses which aspects to experience — and those aspects then become what we call an objective event.
Events obviously are not formed by our species alone, there is a level of the dream state in which all earth-tuned consciousnesses of all species and degrees come together. From our standpoint this represents a deep state of unconscious creativity — at the cellular levels particularly — by which all cellular life communicates and forms a vital biological network that provides the very basis for any “higher” experience at all.
What we call dreaming is obviously dependent upon this cellular communication, which distributes the life force throughout the planet. This formation of any psychological event therefore depends upon this inter-species relationship.
The psychological symbols with which we are familiar in natural terms rise up like smoke, inherent in cellular structure itself. In deepest terms animals and plants also possess symbols and react to them.
Symbols can be called psychic codes that are interpreted in infinite fashion according to the circumstances in which consciousness finds itself. Dream events “come together” in the same way that the universe does. Events, therefore, cannot be precisely defined. We can explore our own experience of an event, and that exploration itself alters the nature of the seemingly separate event that we began to investigate. We share, then, a mass dream experience as we share a mass waking world. Our daily experience is private and uniquely ours, yet it happens within the context of a shared environment. The same applies to the dream state.
Our dreams are also uniquely ours, yet they happen within a shared context, and environment in which the dreams of the world occur. In that context our own existence is “forever” assured. We are the physical event of oneself put into a given space and time, and because of the conditions of that framework, within it we automatically exclude other experience of our own selfhood. The greater event of oneself exists in a context that is beyond our usual perception of events. That greater portion of ourselves, however, forms the self that we know.
In dream state we step into a larger context to some extent. For that reason we also lose the special kind of precise orientation with which we are familiar. Yet we begin to sense, sometimes, the larger shape of events and the timeless nature of our own existence.
Individually and en mass in the dream state we change the orientation of our consciousness, and deal with the birth of events which are only later-structured or physically experienced.