I might like to consider myself to be “naturally introspective” –at least in my role as an author. However, I suspect that the real issue is my strong desire to find the bridge—to push awareness further into waking life. I love what I have been generating in my dreams and am all too anxious to move these dream-based ideas and images into written form when I am awake. Perhaps I push too hard and too fast. This might be a form of writer’s exhaustion for me.
Fortunately, there is another journey that resembles, but is not a false awakening. I would suggest that false awakening dreams are often actually the strange occurrences of the hypnopompic state. This is the state that exists when we are not quite awake and are still witnessing the swirling remnants of dreams that have not quite closed down. While the false awakening dream that occurs during the middle of the night can be disconcerting, the swirling hypnopompic images can be quite entertaining, and the ideas that swirl around with the images might actually be of great value in terms of their “out-of-the-box” insights and creativity. I will have more to say about this when considering supportive dreams.
Savoring: There is one final ego function that is often overlooked. This is where our ego dips into a bit of our Id to produce a deep, rich appreciation for the arts, good food, good viewing, and good friendships. We savor the beauty and joy that life can bring us. This is the aforementioned state of Awe that is featured by Dacher Keltner. He offers the following example of awe and wonder (Keltner, 2023, p. 39:
“. . . a mental state of openness, questioning, curiosity, and embracing mystery, arises out of experiences of awe. In our studies, people who find more everyday awe show evidence of living with wonder. They are more open to new ideas. What is unknown. To what language can’t describe. To the absurd. To seeking new knowledge. To experience itself, for example, of sound, or color, or bodily sensation, or the directions thought might take during dreams or meditation. To the strengths, and virtues of other people. It should not surprise that people who feel even five minutes a day of everyday awe are more curious about art, music, poetry, new scientific discoveries, philosophy, and questions about life and death. They feel more comfortable with mysteries, with that which cannot be explained.”
The state described by Keltner contains not only Awe and Wonder. It also contains Flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). While Awe tends to be a passive experience with powerful forces being observed and absorbed in a psychic storm, Flow tends to be an active experience with the power being found in one’s engagement of activities that exist in the threshold between boredom and anxiety. When Flow and Awe join forces, one may find the kind of openness, questioning, curiosity, and mystery that Keltner has described. And can this state of Awe and Flow exist in a dream? At least to some extent, it can. The theme of food and eating in dreams expands our awareness regarding the benefits associated with the consumption of food. In food dreams, we might see where our Ego not only portrays the nutritional function served by a good meal, it also brings in something of Freud’s powerful and highly emotional Id—we lick our lips and savor the feast that is placed before us!
