“I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?”
— Zhuangzi (4th century BCE)
What Do You Think?
Our brains think in ways we’re unaware of. What we think of as thinking is the end result of much mental digestion. We have little evidence to support this except our own general blindness to the processes that underlie our thoughts.
Whales are thought to have long, non-repetitive “conversations” that look like language, but we cannot identify any words. Dolphins may use a language embedded in 3-dimensional sonar images. Dogs are thought to “think” using a process similar to what we experience when we are dreaming.
We have philosophical, linguistic, cognitive, and meta-linguistic traditions that examine our thoughts. We translate human thoughts from one language to another. We have created abbreviated languages and studied the languages mentally disabled people use. But we have never created an inclusive picture of the world in a wholly nonhuman language, and it’s unclear if we could understand any language that was nonhuman.
When the issues of animal communication come up, it’s common to hear the question, “what might we ask?” This question, offered with such naïve assurance, assumes there would be some common ground on which to say anything, or even think anything that was meaningful to us in a language that was not human.
How Do You Think?
A thought is a story we narrate. It’s rare that we have a thought to which we don’t add words. Our complete thoughts are composed of what we say, sense, envision, associate in the present, remember from the past, and project into the future. The words play a supporting role.
Words reduce, clarify, codify, record, and enable communication. Without words, our thoughts would be larger, involve a larger awareness, be less amenable to summary and labeling, and lack a compact means of recording. Communication would be difficult, as wordless thoughts are difficult to remember.
Despite this, we’re told that 95% of our communication is nonverbal. This does not mean language is unnecessary; it is a deceptive statement. If you watch a movie with the sound turned off, you will not follow 95% of the plot or appreciate 95% of anything.
Nonverbal communication is not not verbal, it is a verbal complement. The way a couple looks at each other can reveal entirely different meanings to the statement, “I love you.” Body language is another layer of communication that does not replace the words. It may change the meaning of the words, but it still requires them.
Before there was sound in movies, looks and actions communicated meaning. But these were exaggerated ploys. They were cultural stereotypes that you would never see in real interactions. We see the body language of our pets and we “read” their messages, but no one would be so naïve as to think we really understand them.
Certainly, the thought of a rose or a shot on the arm could be communicated using a picture or a punch, but these would not convey the meaning. The meaning would differ for each of us. We use words to explain our associations, but in using words we collapse our thoughts to crude constructions.
Thoughts start without words, and words are added to them, but they are not the thought, and whatever the thought might have been is knocked off the assembly line by the words. When we use words, we lose much of the nuance in our thoughts.
The human brain has five layers, of which the outermost, the neocortex, handles thought. The neocortex is our most recently evolved structure and comprises only a thin surface of our brain. The thing that is our thought, if it’s even fair to call it a thing and not a process, has origins that are both structurally and conceptually deeper.
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In the Nursery of Ideas
The thoughts that we consider are ideas that have already been assembled. When we see sense in them, it’s not the sense from which they grew but which grew on them. As our brain tissue grows from childhood, through a process of trimming away unnecessary neural connections, so our thoughts grow through a process of trimming away unnecessary memories and associations. The original form of a thought is not a hierarchy of insight built on a solid foundation, it is a swamp of molecular confusion that has accreted into a prunable form.
Yesterday, I listened to an interview with Eric Weinstein (2024) in which he talked about the state of theoretical physics over the last 40 years. As a physicist of his generation, I am familiar with this topic, history, and the characters he referred to. He mostly complained about the unfairness of academia, the misuse of power, and the pervasive lack of insight and honesty. It sounded like sour grapes to me, like someone complaining about their parents.
A Dream of Irrelevance
That night I had a complicated dream in which I wandered shirtless through a college campus. I met a group of three coeds, one of whom spoke like Sabine Hossenfelder (2018), a current YouTube educator, author, and critic of academic physics, and a scientist herself. The term “coed” is derogatory, and Hossenfelder is being denigrated in academe.
I was racing through the building, a kind of academic prison-maze, gathering information. Despite my being shirtless, I was not impeded. I learned of a potentially interesting colloquium soon to begin. The women were interested, and I led the group in that direction.
I bounded up several long stairways. I replayed this image several times in the dream. I brought us to a conference room in which a large audience had loosely arranged themselves at tables, on chairs, and on pillows. The topic and participants were unclear.
I was initially self conscious in my shirtlessness, but I felt my presence was justified. The group was large and informal. With a growing feeling of being both entitled and inconspicuous, I found myself wearing a shirt.
First, one professor appeared, and then another. They seemed disorganized and unfocused. I expected this was a presentation, but it was more likely a discussion.
The Dream’s Role in Forming Thought
This dream was a construction of evolving relationships. Everyone had analogues to characters in my past, people mentioned in Weinstein’s dialog, my relationship to the field, and my future expectations. It felt like a series of decoupage images cut from scrapbook memories and self-reflections. The dream wordlessly recapitulated my feelings, combining past and present thoughts.
I only heard words in my overture to the coeds, the recognition of Hossenfelder’s response, and the droning of the presenters. Words spoken or heard in other contexts were just a blur.
The presentation was of no importance, and it was dawning on me that this was going to be a waste of time. The conference was an effete presentation given by men who presumed their authority. I am certain of this now, though I was uncertain of it in the dream.
After 40 years of consideration, I conclude the main issues in my area of physics have been overlooked, misunderstood, misrepresented, and falsely addressed. Weinstein and Hossenfelder claim a conspiracy of power and ignorance, but not an incompetence in the details. There has been a pursuit of fame and money at the expense of science and understanding. These issues could have been raised 80 years ago.
A Clarifying Second Dream
I’m now writing in the middle of the next night, having woken up from what was a kind of nightmare. This second dream was about bowling and the theft and murder involved in the acquisition of a smaller bowling syndicate by a larger one. In a backroom deal, a terrified, middle-aged man was being coerced into selling something. I knew he should not do it and could not see why he was cooperating.
He was then murdered by a hunting knife plunged in his chest. He was then finished off by a second knife plunged into the front of his throat. I, along with another witness, blithely escaped the scene and began a long, circuitous journey away from the carnage through a kind of forest wilderness. We were not being pursued, but it was unclear where we were going or when we would get there.
As with most nightmares, mine and others, one awakes agitated and uncertain. I took the advice I give others; I got a cup of tea and began writing about the dream. The conclusions are less important than the associations I unearthed.
None of the characters in this dream looked familiar, but they had a familiar feel. Familiar enough that I knew their intent. I harkened back to the dream of the previous day, which seemed to have nothing in common with this dream, in order to come up with these connections.
In my 11-year career in physics, I met what would turn out to be people of the lowest spiritual and moral qualities. I had limited experience in psychology and no experience in business, so I accepted that these people, who were students, researchers, and professors, were normal for the field.
Some of these people had high political connections. They reflected a perverted normalcy. Were it not for the rigid structure of academe, these people would be judged mentally unstable. I have since encountered no group as cruel and venal, despite my subsequent decades of experience in business.
On reflection, I recognize the murderers and victims in my dream as characters from my physics experience in the 1970s and 80s. Some of these being the same people who Weinstein and Hassenfelder refer to as predatory and corrupt.
I have not re-encountered these people or their professional environment. I have recently returned to pursue the unfinished work I was doing then. This has led me to more firmly recognize the scientific environment as morally and scientifically polluted.
Not Just a Few Bad Apples
Academic psychology and the fields of psychotherapy are also compromised, but these fields do not display the moral decay and corrupt interests that have rotted physics. In the 1990s, I used my better judgment to escape academia. I began a software business, leaving my judgments about physics unresolved. I worked in a dozen different industries as a software consultant. There, I met a few incompetent and dishonest people, but nothing as thoroughly perverse as I experienced in academia.
I now recognize this decay in science in the accusations raised by Weinstein and Hassenfelder, and the naïve and psychological ignorance of my better physics teachers. This is the lesson I draw from my recent nightmare.
I should not call it a message because it was not a communication. It was the conclusion of long-standing uncertainties. The dream was not telling me; it was forming me. I remembered this dream, but I did not have to. Most dreams are not remembered, and I would have gained my new resolve whether or not I remembered this dream. New feelings will be triggered by these new, albeit distant, associations.
The dreams established an emotional reflex that will shape my attitudes toward the field, the victims and perpetrators, and situations that remind me of them. These reflex attitudes will shape my future thoughts, even though they are not verbal.
Dreams reflect formative aspects of thought, but they are not thoughts in the normal sense. They might constitute thoughts in the minds of other species, but they are further developed in humans.
It’s clear that our thoughts are incomplete. We see this in the continued slaughter, unspeakable horror, and species-level exploitation that has dominated human history. Another level of thought is needed, and this may require further development of our brains.
Better Thoughts Through Daydreams
In a series of articles following the work of Kieran Fox and others (Fox et al. 2013; Domhoff et al. 2015; Christoff et al. 2016; Fox et al. 2019), the authors describe the role of daydreaming in creative thought.
“Isolated reports have long suggested a similarity in content and thought processes across mind wandering during waking, and dream mentation during sleep. This overlap has encouraged speculation that both ‘daydreaming’ and dreaming may engage similar brain mechanisms.”
— Kieran Fox, et al. 2013
The authors offer two dualities that may be useful in understanding daydreams. The first is the distinction between ideas built from seemingly irrelevant associations, and the ideas built around a practical goal. I understand this as the distinction between spontaneous and intentional recall. You don’t know where the spontaneous ideas come from, while you think you are the agent responsible for the intentional ideas. This is a weak distinction.
The second duality is the distinction between creative thinking and rational thinking. Creative thoughts are said to be more spontaneous and less relevant, while rational thoughts are connected through some mechanism. This feels similar to the first duality of you call creative thoughts unjustified, and rational thoughts practical. I will discard the first duality in favor of the second.
In this context, day and night dreams are different. Daydreams may start with a creative idea, but once your attention is drawn to the idea, your rational mind intellectualizes. In contrast, in nighttime dreams, the creative thoughts only exist to provide description, and rarely demonstrate reasonable connections. Reasons may exist, but they’re not obvious, logical, or familiar.
We can make daydreams more like night dreams by halting our critical mind and disconnecting our thoughts. The result is more useful daydreams. Dreams that evoke ideas with connections that go beyond the practical.
I do this with my clients using light hypnotic trance; I lead my clients into daydreams and conjure issues that are poking into their consciousness. I will either guide a visualization through a conceptually disconnected territory, or ask them to imagine conversations between opposing characters.
Dreams Are a Digestive Process
To understand dreams, understand that your rational mind is not in control of your thoughts. Yes, you use words, but you don’t know what you’re saying until your words are spoken. Words are like roads, they are pathways. The territory of your mind, the geography of your thoughts, is not determined by the roads you have built. These roads may determine where you can travel most easily, but not all that can be seen, and certainly not what’s most important.
Rain runs down valleys creating rivers and streams, but if you’ve ever traveled on rivers and streams, then you’ll be aware of just how little you see of the landscape. Being on the surface of the water puts you at a lowest point. You’re always looking up and can rarely see over the bank.
This is similar to words and thoughts. Words give you a means of progress, not an understanding of the terrain. The full terrain is river-less, as your deeper feelings are wordless. To get to your true feelings, you must pour the water of your awareness outside the normal channels. You must gain a larger awareness.
This is what dreams do. When you dream, your mind is like a myopic giant carrying buckets of water from the reservoirs of your memory and pouring them over the wider landscape of the past, present, and future. Most of us have regions we don’t visit either intentionally or because we’re repelled by unnamable discomfort. These become our blind spots, which determine our character and habits.
What I do in almost all therapy is map larger, unexplored emotional landscapes. I don’t have to analyze, advise, or critique, I simply want to learn what’s there. I might draw from the waters of memory, but my clients are the ones with the eyes to see what’s there.
Dream therapy, the tentative title of one of my next books, is about how to do this. It can be done through lucid dreaming, dream recollection, guided imagery, suggestive hypnosis, or creative daydreaming. The dream you remember is just the beginning, and as you become more adept at inviting night dreams to consciousness, and more committed to remembering and exploring the emotions they suggest, the more new territory you’ll explore.
Oneirology Recapitulates The Evolution of Mind
I suspect unconstrained creative thinking, the evocation of associations without analysis, is how we thought before we had a neocortex. We think in non-neocortical ways too, but our rational mind is layered on top of this.
This would mean that animals without a neocortex either don’t think rationally, or have developed an alternative to rational thinking. It suggests that there are higher forms of thinking that we don’t possess and cannot conceive.
We think in layers that recapitulate how our minds have evolved. We block out the dreaming mind because it thinks in different ways and comes to different conclusions. Thought at lower layers are largely invisible to upper layers in order not to interfere with them.
It is not a question of emotion versus intellect, two aspects of thought designed to work together, although they often don’t. I feel this is further evidence of our unfinished evolution.
The nonrational associative mind underlies the intellect, and this mental substrate builds its foundations through our dreams. The waking mind, rather dismissively, presumes it needs no foundation. These presumptions, when misapplied or misunderstood, lead to fractured thought and unsupportable thinking.
We no more need to “understand” dreams to understand our thoughts than we need to understand a foundation in order to live in a house. On the other hand, from our dreams we can learn how our thoughts are built and what they’re capable of. Therapeutic dreaming is not a process of finding answers, it’s an exploration of our territory. It’s a process of engaging a more fundamental picture of reality.
References
Christoff, Kalina, Zachary C. Irving, Kieran C. R. Fox, R. Nathan Spreng, and Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna. 2016. “Mind-Wandering as Spontaneous Thought: a Dynamic Framework." Nature Reviews Neuroscience 17: 718–31. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.113
Domhoff, G. William, Kieran C.R. Fox. 2015. “Dreaming and the Default Network: A Review, Synthesis, and Counterintuitive Research Proposal.” Consciousness and Cognition 33 (2015) 342–53. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810015000264
Fox, Kieran C. R., Savannah Nijeboer, Elizaveta Solomonova, G. William Domhoff, and Kalina Christoff. 2013. “Dreaming as Mind Wandering: Evidence from Functional Neuroimaging and First-Person Content Reports.” Frontiers of Human Neuroscience 7: 412. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3726865/
Fox, Kieran C. R., Roger E. Beaty. 2019. “Mind-Wandering as Creative Thinking: Neural, Psychological, and Theoretical Considerations.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 27:123–30. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328380292_Mind-wandering_as_creative_thinking_Neural_psychological_and_theoretical_considerations
Hossenfelder, Sabine, 2018. Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. Basic Books.
Weinstein, Eric. 2024. “#833, Are We On The Brink Of A Revolution?” Modern Wisdom Podcast. https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/G454/prfx.byspotify.com/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/SIXMSB8586352492.mp3
Why Your Dreams Are So Crazy (podcast)