“I was just wondering to what extent if you control one, you can control the other.”
Hmm…there is a certain distaste that arises with the word ‘control’ but it might be close to what I’d want to say. I think ‘coping’, which may have elements of control but seems to be wider in scope, is a better word. It seems to me that prating mantis’ comments about his sister working in her dreams reflects part of the function of dreaming. Personally, I think in some ways all our dreams are, in a sense, “regurgitating,” but this doesn’t give any license to merely dismiss the important role that dreams play in our lives. It seems to me that dreams are constructed out of experiences in waking life—this is the sense in which dreams are “regurgitative.” However, the constructions of dreams are at least as complex as the structures we encounter in our waking experience, and as such, there is as much “quantitative” potential work to be accomplished in dreams as there is potential to work during our daily life. This is where the coping comes in.
In dreams we can wrestle with the issues that are stagnating in our waking life or become more aware of these issues because the dreaming mind is not as censored as our typical day-to-day awake life. It’s funny this way, because we might almost want to say, with respect to some dreaming experiences, that we are more “awake” in our dreams than we are in are so-called “conscious life.” Anyway, it seems that through these two avenues of dreaming, we are coping with what is not being worked through or even recognized in our daily waking life.
When I was going through a depression earlier this year, and after I had started to cultivate helpful resources towards remedy, I was reading J. Krishnamurti’s The Awakening of Intelligence, and in some parts of the book he talks about dreaming and work. It’s his position, it seems to me, that since we actually have such a limited and selective attention in our daily conscious life, that we dream in order to sort out all the things that were present to us in the complexity of our experiences in the world, but to which we were only partially or entirely inattentive. Part of Krishnamurti’s approach to living (again, on my interpretation) is to, in some sense, pay more attention to, and become aware of in a broader way, our experience of life. Now, I’m painting with broad strokes here with respect to his larger picture and approach, but he suggests that at the “height” (so to speak) of such an awareness we would cease to dream and the mind would be fresh and new in its readiness for each waking day. He stresses that to reach such a state it takes much work and energy—things that are barely present to those struggling through depression. However, I think this might be where we can turn to some of the “control” aspects of coping.
In my own experience, part of my road to recovery/discovery has been trying—and it only takes a little here and there, best to start small and let the momentum build—to become more aware of what I am doing (here ‘doing’ includes thinking, feeling, reacting, acting, choosing, etc.) at such and such a moment, and pay if only a little more attention to what is occurring in the context that the particular experience is embedded within. Here what we seem to be doing is changing the momentum of the negative feedback loop into a feedforward loop; that is, we can work towards changing the polarity, so to speak, of the loop. We can work towards this via our waking life or our dreaming life: the work that we can accomplish in either of these states of experiencing is going to be a function of the approach that we take towards our experience. If we are dismissive of dreams and neglecting our waking experience, then little is going to get done. If we take some small initial steps with some sense of strategies for coping, then we can begin to accomplish work in either state. At least, that’s how it’s been in my experience. Of course, this is a part of renewal, and not the whole of it; i.e., we often need to establish other resources for coping than only our own isolated workings—perhaps counseling of some sort, exercise, medication, better diet, etc. However, our approach to our experience—dreaming or waking—seems to play an important aspect with regards to how we will acquire and make use of these other resources.
To comment on your hypothesis, Harmony:
First, it’s always good to keep some kind of skepticism towards any model, no matter how good it seems to work. Models, after all, appear to be devices for coping with experience, and we can always, it seems to me, be working towards improving how we cope with life, i.e., how we live through each day. Every model is, in some sense, a simplification derived out of attention to a limited set of factors; however, it seems to me, we cannot really make an intelligible or effective model out of the whole of the complexity of life because it is simply to rich and varied for us to wrap our heads around. We our prone to deal with our experiences wrapped up in boxes and packages.
Anyway, I’d say that depression has at least the two parts that you mention: i) the emotional distress, and ii) the lack of energy and motivation required to cope with the emotional distress. I feel that i) certainly is a catalyst for depression, but I doubt that it is the only cause, and certainly ‘emotional distress’ is a generalization that ranges over a wide variety of experience that can place an individual into a state of depression; i) is also likely a factor in dreaming—our mind will try to cope with emotional distress while we are asleep, thus also giving rise to ii). And here is where the “strange attractor” will start to build between i) and ii): emotional distress means that we are in a position where we have to work towards coping with our experience. We can try to accomplish this in either waking or dreaming life, or both, but this takes energy and motivation. As we expend what little energy we might have in dreaming and waking experience, this can in turn cause more emotional distress. More of that can lead to even less energy and motivation; thus, yet more dreaming and more emotional distress. Vicious, really.
When you say, “without any rest, the brain cannot repair itself or do the kind of mental admin that you get in deep sleep,” I think this is very close to the opinions of Krishnamurti, and, I would think, other people who speak on or investigate sleep and dreaming. Unfortunately, I think that most of us humans, if not all of us humans, are “…people without a fully functional brain.” What I mean about a “fully functioning brain” is along the lines of what Krishnamurti seems to saying about intelligence. I have a feeling that some of those who are in a state of depression are actually in a place where they are being faced with the opportunity to make progress towards intelligence. As opposed to some other people who are not depressed but are not moving towards intelligence either. It’s very much involved, it seems to me, with our approach to life, with our habits of coping. |
