Lately I find that I really enjoy fossicking through the nytimes...and came across an interesting article on dreams.
Of course, most articles and writings about dreams interest me on one level or another...but this particular piece by
John Tierney appealed to me because it served as a reminder of the basic paradox inherent in many dreams, most intuitive work...and many, many fairy tales.
He reminds us of the difficulty involved in deciding whether or not to take our dreams (or any one particular dream) seriously.
A peculiar difficulty often encountered by the casual observer of dreams who wakes up one morning to find himself confronted with the unsettling memory of one helluva seriously disturbing dream.
Tierney cites Penelope's perfectly imperfect answer to this from the Odyssey...
which is to say...some dreams count and others don't.
The ones that do come through some mythological Gate made of Horn...(meaning that these are transparent)....
while the one's that don't come through an opposite Gate made of Ivory...(meaning clouded and obtuse...i.e
opaque ).
Of course in my mind...all dreams come through that damned Ivory Gate...and then tease the hell out of us if we decide to pay any attention at all to them.
And we either persevere until they actually led us right up to and through that elusive Gate of Horn...or we forget them.
But of course...the nytimes is concerned with those among us who have no time or inclination to spend with dreams...but who simply can't escape the occasional distress of a sometimes thorny / sometimes horny bit of dream ivory that refuses to fade away quietly.
Long story short...he announces newer scientific research which aims to help make that distinction for us...which is therefore logic / thought and sensation (as in the use of the thinking function and the sensate function) aiming to bypass the feeling and / intuition / intuitive functions.
In
Myers-Briggs typology-speak this is ESTj science trying to capture, measure, dissect, categorize, classify, and otherwise pin down INFp woowoo. Which is pretty much just butterfly collecting...but in some silly (and nasty) way is nearly the equivalent of trying to clone a dead human being.
It will probably be done, eventually...but it's not gonna be precisely what science is (apparently) looking for.
In case you’re interested in the comments I couldn’t help making...
both of which include some nifty dream interpretations...
kristo
