Deleuze dreams on...

Hi Mark,

 I really enjoyed your post. May I reprint this on Electric Dreams?  drop
me a line at rcwilk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Some notes

>>>>>>>>>>>>
I'm not talking about dream interpretation according
to any mythical archetypes or structuralist
psychoanalytic symbolism; but rather, paying
attention and noticing scenes, characters and
situations that reoccur and might provide amusing
asides on current waking-life events. This, I think,
is what Richard C Wilkerson, in his online
"Postmodern Dreaming" essay, calls
"post-representational presentation in which meaning
is generated in the freeplay of being, becoming and
re-becoming".
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<,

  Yes, however, I want to be a partial apologist for the archetypalists....

  I wanted to add that some Jungians, (C. G. Jung and James Hillman) try to
get at much of this you mentioned in their work, though one might not
recognize it in the watered down versions for popular culture.   Symbols
for Jung were not reflections or representations in the sense we are used
to talking about them, but dynamic engines of production, producing
monstrosties that our individual consciousness' flee from in most situations.

True, Jung was steeped in Hegelianism and saw symbols as binary binding
forces that held together opposites in an attempt to synthesize more Self.
 But note, 

1. The opposites that were bound together were productions, desiring
machines breaking into the flow of the standard-quo, forces that human's
see as in-reconcillable, totally not going together ever and in terms of
*representations* only interfaced with our consciousness in strange and
novel imagery, often found in dreams where the ego is not as easily able to
deny them. 

2. Archetypes are not Stereotypes. One of the problems when Frye translated
Archetypal psychology to literary forms and Joseph Campbell into Mythic
literature was the loss of the core of the archetype.  Encounters with
archetypes are always a defeat for ego.  At best, the ego, me, gets
radically relativized and minimalized in the grand scheme of forces.  At
worst, it becomes possessed and identified with the archetype and inflated
beyond belief. (at least beyond the belief of others, the I,me,ego blinds
does not recognize its own capture for some time).   
       Of course, Jung's "Self" archetype is problematic in that it sits at
the center of everything, centering everything, binding everything to
itself and projecting out its little warrior, hero ego.  James Hillman
offers a corrective to this by keeping the Archetypes but removing the Self
from the center and setting alongside the other archetypes. Its still does
its centering and balancing, but as a equal player with other archetypes.
Also, Hillman always using the word archetype as an adjective. Archetypal
encounters are not  just stereotypical, but tornado like events that create
cracks and fissures and sometimes total breakdowns in the flow.

>>>>>
but rather, paying
attention and noticing scenes, characters and
situations that reoccur and might provide amusing
asides on current waking-life events. 
>>>>>>>>>>

  Yes, I would suggest taking this even further.  I would suggest that
moving in and with dream imagery as you suggest will bring these entitites
into waking life, and perhaps begin to deconstruct the boundry between
waking and sleeping life where one is real and the other merely a
representation of the real.  Individuation might be seen as the
actualization of the dream figures rather than the ego.

Castaneda has a highly conscious-focused relationship with dreaming. When
he says "dreaming"  I feel I must always translate this to "Castaneda's
sub-form of lucid dreaming with neo-shamanistic goals".  Characters slip in
and out of lucidity, but basically it is lucid dreaming with motive. The
inorganics correspond to what Jung refers to as the Animus/Anima archetype,
(though they parade around as more) which Jung felt was special in that it
was partially full of collective unconscious stuff (things we have never
experienced) as well as personal unconscious (things we are but reject) and
therefore serves as a guide into the Other.  I like Castaneda, but this
material has so much trickster in it that it can't really come out and play
with other systems.  

  Postmodern dreaming turns fractically rather than practically, twisting
out of having a dream and being had by a dream. When I am awake I had the
dream, when I am asleep the dream has me. When I am liberated we have one
another.  



 - Richard  Wilkerson