As I ponder more and more on the relevance of dream interoperations I notice that it has tremendous cultural and political implications and I want to  bring out some aspects of it here. The West is addicted to waking consciousness and when they talk about the unconscious it is normally only within psychiatry and  hence as something associated with psychopathology of some kind or other.  It does not occur to them that a perfectly normal man has also an unconscious dimension to his existence and when well handled it can be of great benefit to the individual. Fortunately there are psychologists now particularly in USA who have begun to define psychology  as a discipline that studies the intricacies of the unconscious using the approaches of Hermeneutic Science.  Dream interpretation studies confirms such a few and along with it focuses upon the metaphorical functioning of the mind. The physical mind gets entrapped by the physical processes and the sensory stimulation and refuses to the metaphorical and archetypal determinants of it own behavior and because of which it fails to solve effectively the crises in life that it always faces unavoidably.  Dream interpretations in unearthing the metaphorical provides the necessary INSIGHTS that equip the individual to cope with such existential problems and come out from them unscathed.

For the dream states are intermediate in a graduated series of existential states that texts in Tantric Psychology such as that of Thirumular   list as sAkkiram, soppnam, suzuththi, thuriyam and thuriyAthItham. Here the existential state soppnam is what  we call the dream states  and it constitutes the beginning  of another range of deeper ways of Being that may not be our concern  here. The sAkkiram is wakeful consciousness  and which is not uniform as we think. The dream states and other deeper states of Being protrude themselves into it and thereby bring us home the fact  there is such a thing as unconscious in our normal functioning. A good example is the production of poetry which, though done while awake , what it succeeds in capturing  however is  the metaphysical, in the original meaning of being beyond the physical. Dream interpretation studies focus upon the metaphorical  and through that dimensions of mind beyond the perceptual and cognitive. Thus in submitting ourselves guided by dreams we are taken in the direction of solutions to our existential problems that throw us into depressions, melancholy, anxiety , neurosis and what not.   We can free ourselves from these gaining an understanding that CLARIFIES and make us comfortable, confident and enthusiastic. We manage to live as mentally healthy individuals quite sane and sanguine most of the times without swallowing dozens of pills and drinking pints of drugs which bring about only temporary relief if at all.

But of course this is not all to it. In taking the guidelines given by dreams seriously we UNDERMINE the various AUTHORITIES that seek to SHAPE our behavior in accordance with their own IDEALISTIC fabrications.  All institutions- political, economic, cultural, religious and what not - are coercive. They seek to mould an individual into a pattern that has coagulated as an institution of the above sorts and hence  has become the TRADITION  that demand submission  conformation and unquestioning obedience.  While institutions as such have the positive aspect of disallowing the slide into the primitive, they have negative aspect of arresting the individual evolution into the higher . Any individual who transgresses such institutionalized norms is threatened with excommunication and at times also punishment of various sorts. History is full of stories of such bold and rebellious individuals  thanks to whom we owe all the cultural advancements that we enjoy as a matter of fact to-day.

Dream interpretations and existing by them  breaks lose the hold institutions have on our aspirations and frees us to be guided by the primordial GROUND from which springs all the institutionalization. We are helped to become  AUTONOMOUS and through that AUTHENTIC, true to our essence. We do not try to conform to the numerous persona, the face masks the society throws for us to wear for its own comfort but rather wear NOTHING and learn to live without such persona, without hiding our true self  in socially comfortable and acceptable guises.

Here is the danger of such a pattern of life and because of which a dream sharing community is essential. The existence of such a community makes it social fact the determination of a substantial number of individual to live by the GUIDANCE given by the dreams the producer of which is non other than  Transcendental Collective Unconscious (TCU) which is deeper  than the Collective Unconscious of Jung and which the theologians are in the habit of calling the Deity, God and what not.  In living with the guidance provided by the Dreams, we are living as guided by the most powerful and enlightening  SPIRIT greater than which there is nothing in the world.  In attending to the dreams, taking them seriously , interpreting them, understanding them  and living in accordance  with the advise thus given we are in the hands of a POWER that seeks to enlighten us, free us and make us truly autonomous individuals. We become  more and more FREE  for the SPIRIT is freedom itself,  IT  does not seek to enslave anybody  for it is already fully saturated and integral , in want of Nothing.

Thus the dream sharing community secures for itself the most authentic and benign Leader or Guru  that is within each one of them  and thereby avoid the necessity of being subservient to any other earthly powers who only shine in the borrowed glory of the SPIRIT by appropriating as their own what are given as gifts by the SPIRIT to serve their own egoistic aspirations. Man wants to be God in his ignorance and manipulate the political, religious  and cultural for this end. The dream sharing community shatters the vainglorious dreams of such individuals , cuts them into size and makes them humble for their own good.

DrK.Loganathan