"Whoever wants to be creative in good and evil, he must first be an annihilator and destroy values." Friedreich Nietzsche
For many of us, when Surrealism is mentioned, the image that generally come to mind is the liquid melting clocks of Salvador Dali. But In Europe, Surrealism was also a social, political, and poetic human liberation movement that championed the dream.
Like the Romantics before them, the Surrealists saw that the reasonable and rational held out a limited view for mankind, and that rationality, reality and religion had so choked our options for experience that all the marvels and significance of being were missed. Andre Breton, the father of Surrealism within the Modernist movement, drew together this Romantic spirit with the new leftist politics and the discoveries of psychoanalysis. "(Reality) revolves in a cage ."(Breton as quoted by Kelly, 1994)
The solution was the development of practices that challenged the old order and offered the new in the cast out forms of madness, social anarchy, disobedience, the shocking and the absurd. However, this anarchy was never anything more than a temporary technique for merging the social and the aesthetic, the dayworld and the nightworld; the sane with the insane. Waking and dreaming reality were to come together in Surreality. In Surreality, the role of dreams was to usher in the astonishing and open up to new possibilities. As Breton once said considering the amount of time we spend in dreams and waking life, "there is disproportionate attention to waking life." (Kelly, pg 37) The dream is seen as offering–a challenge in ushering in the marvelous. The search was to be a synthesis of dream and waking in Surreality, neither a compliance to conventional reality nor aretreatinto dreamland.
Sadly, Surrealism itself went the way of many Modernist movements; it became formalized and choked–in its own institutions. Breton’s contacts with Freud were not particularly productive and Breton’s analysis of his own dreams fail to bring to bear the wonderful spirit of reality offered in other realms. But the spirit of the movement has endured and has widely influenced not only postmodern philosophy and practice in Europe but offered itself as a kindred spirit ofthe human potential movements in the Americas in the 1960’s that also began to see the reality being served by the mainstream culture as limiting, repressive and dangerous.
How then can we approach the dream so as to liberate the marvelous on one hand without sinking into complete unreality on the other? Akhter Ahsen, a contemporary proponent of Surrealism, offers some modern perspectives andtechniques on dreams and imagery that may begin to give up a clue to theSurrealist Experiment.
From Ahsen in New Surrealism, The Liberation of Images In Consciousness: “One gets up in the morning and the eyes are still heavy with sleep. One opens up the eyes and the light comes in so strong that one dives back into sleep to avoid the traumatic impact o impassive reality."
The impassive reality can be so traumatic that the mind learns to withdraw from it. The passivity of an unmoving reality is anti-mind. When you look, the things stay there, nothing moves. But the mind wants to move. That is the contradiction. And if the mind has already been bombarded and constrained by replicas of immovable mental objects, dogmas and frozen belief systems, then where are the original movements of the mind manifested? Where is the original face of reality and its strength revealed?
Exercise: Let us see how some of Ahsen’s imagery exercises might be applied to dreams to bring us back into contact with surreality.
A. Look at something static in your room, a bookcase or door. Watch it for about a half a minute .. and return your attention to it if you drift. Note the dullness and" umovingness of this outer reality."
B. Now pick a dream.
1. Pick an image in a dream and : hold it in your mind. If you begin to wander, bring the image backagain and again for about a half a minute.
2. Locate the part of the image that pleases you the most and repeatedly bring this part of the image back into your mind.
3. Note the place of the image within your awareness, and how the image seems to be inside the mind.
4. Compare the image to the outerimage you had. Which is more pleasurable? The outside boring world or the new freshness of the inner image?
5. Which part of the dream image gives you a feeling of beauty?Explore for a moment the beautiful aspects of the image.
6. Which part ofthe image gives you a feeling of power? What is the source of this power and how does the dream image reflect this power? How might it be developed?
7. Now hold this dream image again in your mind a few seconds and then look at the outside world. Has the outside world now brightened up as a result? Note how attention on the inner imagination can make the outer world look more interesting
8. Experiment with bringing into your dream image various people in your waking life. Note how bringing them into the image, looking at them in detail and then viewing them again in the outer world changes the way we view
them.
Though Ahsen seems to miss the point that we are in the imagination as much as the imagination is in us, his delightful array of imagery techniques (this being but one of hundreds he offers) still work to bring out the idea that we can valorize dreamland imagery without getting lost it in, and that there is a place ofexchange between the waking and dreaming world that offers us tremendous sources o creativity and new possibilities in the creation of our own
Surreality.
Originally published in The Dream Tree News, Volume 2-1. © Richard Wilkerson.
Richard Wilkerson, Cyber-Pioneer and Dream Visionary, is an editor of Electric Dreams, an online magazine and dream sharing community, and the creative genius behind numerous
educational and interactive projects on the Internet, including DreamGate, Online Dream History Classes, Dream Art Galleries and much, much more. Visit him online at DreamGate
A Century of Dreaming with Freud
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010by Richard Wilkerson
Freud said that The Interpretation of Dreams was his favorite and most insightful book. He was very disappointed that the psychoanalytic movement did not advance the ideas set out in it and all but abandoned dreams to focus on something called transference. Transference is the transfer of a patient’s feelings for his/her parents to the therapist. This and other approaches quickly took over as a main focus of psychoanalysis. Dreams continued to be listened to, but fell away from what Freud called “The Royal road to the unconscious.”
Dreams as the Disguised Fulfillment of a Repressed Wish
As children we are taught to repress various thoughts, impulses, and actions. Eventually an inner censor takes over, and we begin to keep these things repressed without the help of mommy and daddy. During sleep we relax and these repressed feelings emerge. If they were to emerge fully, they would wake us up and disturb our sleep. So the censor hands them over to what Freud calls the dream-work. As dreams are the guardians of sleep, the repressed wish is cleverly disguised.
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