The Long Dream

May 31st, 2006 Fred McVittie

We are in a dream in which we are wandering through a strange land. It is beautiful and monstrous together, as if our eyes don’t speak the language. The laws are confusing here and we make stupid mistakes all the time. Everyone is a stranger. Everyone. We may think we see a familiar face and we want to run to that person, run as fast as we can, but we don’t seem to be able to get anywhere. Our legs are heavy and fastened to the ground by forces we can’t begin to understand. We are lost, abandoned, and alone.

This is the dream we have been dreaming, you and I, for the last 400 years. The good news is, it’s time to wake up.

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A Dream about Mixed Metaphors

September 11th, 2006 Fred McVittie

I had a dream last night about a world without any objects. Everything was unstable, in flux, but not chaotic or confusing. What would happen is that I would look at something, and that looking would be accompanied by a thought, and then as my stream of consciousness proceeded then as my thoughts changed this would physically change the thing I was looking at. It was as if I was watching the motion of my own thinking. I can only assume the dream was a reflection of the material on metaphor I have been hearing about; that as the metaphors which comprise my conceptualisation of experience shift, then the experience itself shifts. This kind of shifting presumably happens all the time in non-conscious cognition; I am thinking about something, love for example, and (usually unconsciously) understanding it as a PATH, and then my metaphorical understanding of that shifts so that I (again usually unconsciously) start to understand it as a CONTAINER. This suggests that however stable and consistent the external world may be, the internal, symbolically (metaphorically) structured, world must be much more motile. Many of the elements of the external world which we regard as object-like, particularly abstract concepts like love, justice, truth, etc. must exist in our minds as variable, transformable entities; PATHS can turn into CONTAINERS and then into BATTLES, and then into a DANCE. The symbolic universe of the unconscious must undergo these kind of transformations all the time, and these transformations should be surreal but not arbitrary; they should follow the logic of cognitive linguistics. I think it must be a vision of that universe that I dreamed about.

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Dreams and Metaphors

October 31st, 2006 Fred McVittie

We tend to assume that dreams are only the workings of our minds at night, possibly the random firings of sets of neurons, or maybe the sign of some cognitive filing process, or maybe even signs of psychic distress or disorder. These dreams only come out at night, and they live inside our heads; private, unseen, and personal. We also have public dreams however, and a naive reading of any newspaper reveals these dreams to us. Hiding within the bald and apparently transparent language of even the most formal and rational texts; of science, art, business or politics, is another language of metaphors and symbols. The embodied metaphors we use to articulate and conceive of such abstract concepts as ‘love’, ‘justice’, and even ‘conceive’, are routinely invisible to us as metaphors; habitual use has led us to ignore their metaphorical status and accept them as somehow ‘real’. On some level we must know the truth however, that when we talk and think about ‘justice’ an image of a set of scales, or of a profit and loss account, is forming in the recesses of our minds. When we talk about ‘love’ half hidden thoughts of journeys is structuring that thought. These metaphors which constantly pace our wide awake existence together comprise the constant dreams we all have. Dreams of bodies in spaces.

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Embodied Dreaming

May 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The conscious thoughts and experiences we have when waking are always accompanied by rich layers of non-concious cognitive activity. This ranges from simple monitoring and maintenance activities: keeping the heart pumping, regulating body temperature etc, to complex pre-conscious and unconscious mentation(in the psycho-analytic sense. These more complex layers of cognitive activity underpin the fully conscious and occasionally rational thoughts we equate with ‘awareness’ or ‘consciousness’, and without these supporting processes consciousness and awareness would not be possible. Normally these processes are not accessible to us, much as the beating of our heart is not normally something we can be aware of, however, there are times when the noises of the body and the world are muted or stilled, and the sound of our heart erupts into our consciousness; when we are afraid, or in love, or running. Similarly, there are times when the blaring of consciousness is turned off and the quiet running of the subterranean rivers of non-conscious cognition becomes audible. One of these times is in the dead of night and the stillness of REM sleep. When we dream we have direct access to the conceptual layer of our cognition. And what we find is that the language of this layer is not abstract, symbolic, and computational, but concrete, embodied, and metaphorical. Our dreams show us the mechanisms of our thoughts.

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