COMMENTARY ON THE DREAMS

This fourth collection of dreams, with its images and themes that are becoming increasingly familiar, suggests that we may now have available for our use a roughly outlined framework of dream symbols with which to characterize the symbolic meaning of our cooperative Journal venture. To recapitulate, first, in some of these common themes and images as they appear in this fourth collection, we note the frequent reference to dancing, ballrooms and music, to groups or crowds of people, to trees, plants and flowers, to night and sleeping people, and to a concern for children. These are all images that have occurred frequently in previous dreams. Several of the dreams also contain the familiar theme of a conflict between individuality and togetherness, between privacy and sharing, or between being alone and being crowded.

If we were to attempt to compose a composite dream that contained the most common elements from our collection of dreams, it would probably involve something like a group of people out in the country, dancing under the moonlight on a square parking lot. The dance would be in a circle around a tree containing some mysterious, rotating puzzle of colors. Each dancer would be concerned about either not being able to do the same dance as the others, or as well, or about not stepping on the children. The road leading to the dance would involve waking up a stranger asleep in bed. The road leading away from the dance would not exist, but would require each person finding his own path. Composing such a composite dream, involving a collage of symbols and themes from all the dreams, might be an interesting experiment to pursue in more depth.

Although there have been suggestions of it in earlier dreams, several of the recent dreams seem to allude to the possibility that participating subscribers may be somehow "meeting" in their dreams. Is it possible that in some other dimension, there may be a "psychic" interaction among the subscribers? We are referring to images such as "each link is so complex ... an impression of merging"; "a world-wide operation... an announcement on the radio"; "corridors... international affairs... people moving in and out of openings in the wall"; "Unity Church... Betty White (a clairvoyant)." Similar images may be found in previous dreams and would make an interesting study. What is your interpretation?