MORE ON DREAMS:
FRAGMENTS FROM JACK TRUE
MARCH 3, 2011. These are remarks hypnotherapist Jack True made during a 1987 conversation we had. I present them as fragments from my notes.
“The overall situation a patient might find himself in, over a period of time…His emotions and thoughts are stymied. They’re frozen, in a way. He may be doing well or poorly in his life. It doesn’t matter. The situation is negative, in the sense that he doesn’t believe he can make progress in his own terms. He may not even know what his own terms are.”
“Despite his successes and victories, it all feels temporary, in retrospect. He keeps coming back to the situation. The unyielding rock. I’ve had patients, for example, who have been through many spiritual efforts to achieve greater consciousness—and they have had remarkable experiences…but then it all seems to fade away, and they’re back at the rock. As they get older, the situation hardens. A part of them is resigned. So the situation, the negative trend is very dense, you could say. It’s firm.”
“…A dream in which he becomes a master over space and time. Would inventing such a dream release energies which are bottled up? Would it make him feel better? …Then I have him invent other dreams—traveling to other dimensions, for instance. Dreams that get him past physical reality and its rules in other ways. An important part of what I do is decide what will work with different people. It’s not all the same for everyone. You have to understand that. “
“In myths, the gods can bring worlds into being, and they can take them out of being. They can rearrange reality. They can operate well beyond all the slaves who are trapped in a narrow context of reality. And these myths represent a human longing. It’s not just attributing certain qualities to gods. It’s wanting to be like gods. These are the terms of the myths. So you can simply dismiss all this as inconsequential fantasizing, or you can look further into it and see that these so-called godlike capacities are what humans think about subconsciously.”
“The subconscious is usually thought to contain repressed anti-social material. Well, if you adjust that notion a little bit, what’s more anti-social than being able to exceed the rules of time and space? You see? This carries us out far beyond traditional psychological concepts. This takes us into the underpinning of whole cultures. A culture is the reverse of what human beings really yearn for. It’s the dark side of the moon. A culture is an average. It’s the dream repressed. A culture is a thing people want to escape from. A culture, by its very nature, is defeatist. What’s in the subconscious is the desire to go past the rules of the continuum in which we live. To travel through time, for example. To go forward and back. Impossible, right? Well, that’s the sort of thing I find in the subconscious. So I have a choice. I can say it’s buried deep because it’s a fantasy of no importance that doesn’t belong in the world, or I can say it’s the key. I can say it represents the desire to climb to a higher level. And when I do that, and when I bolster it by having patients, in a light trance, invent dreams that support it, the patients get better. They experience well-being. They heal. They become more powerful in their lives. They become freer. And I DON’T mean they become healthier because they give up those dreams and fit in—I mean they step on to the path of magic.”
“A child grows up with a certain standard of beauty. It isn’t drilled into his head. He sees what’s around him and his feelings tell him what’s beautiful and what’s ugly. But then, at a certain age, there is a chance that he realizes something new. What he sees as beautiful isn’t really doing him any good. It’s becoming a little boring. But instead of exploring that idea, he shoves it under the rug because it feels too odd. He goes back to claiming what he felt was beautiful as a child is beautiful now. But he doesn’t quite feel the same way about it anymore. “Beautiful” is becoming a kind of category, to which he pays lip service. He is now beginning to perceive through a category. He’s sort of doing it by the numbers. He’s doing it by rote. Old categories of perception tend you hold you back. If you’re seeing based on what you’re supposed to see and feel, you’re cutting yourself off from energy, from creative power.”
JON RAPPOPORT