Dreams, Physics, and Butterflies

Dreams, Physics, and Butterflies

from Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms, by Richard Grossinger

When subjective cortical stimulation gives rise to credibly credulous narratives, the trances are called “dreams,” though sensory input, particularly audio, can influence a dream secondarily.

Dreams unfold in the brain like scotomas of migraine auras. In the latter, blind spots, pulsating zigzags, and “Alice in Wonderland” character and landscape distortions occur as bursts from mostly the brainstem bombard the optical cortex.

Dreams, likewise, synapse in sensorimotor zones of the cortex, not in the sense organs whose modalities they impersonate. The narratives of dreams are joint creations of conscious and unconscious elements of the mind, equally egoic and hermeneutic.

Nick Bottom’s “past the wit of man to say what dream it was” is acknowledged cross-culturally but, like consciousness itself, it is illusional and existential. No one has seen or felt another’s dream. Secondary artifacts alone testify, along with the oral and written literatures, of dreaming. Somnambulism and dream speech extend to other animals’ oneiric fugues, chirps, and barks. An electroencephalogram-trackable REM (rapid eye movement) is shared by birds and mammals.

Even cynics who consider dreams neural static of no consequence admit to their existence and to having them.

It is myopic to think of dreams as “just dreams.” They are realities, as vast and complete as any other. A dreamer is a traveler.

Insomnia is a psychospiritual crisis—a resistance to crossing bar[1]dos as well as a disease of biorhythms and mind. Pharmaceuticals are bardos too.

The problem with sleep hygiene and its sleep doctors, sleep labs, and sleep drugs is that they force-feed a bardo shift. Some bardos are crossed only by the neurotransmitters of relaxed intention, for their barriers are neither incidental nor pathological.

DREAM PHYSICS

Imagine a physicist dreaming that he is conducting an ultimate experiment on the nature of matter. This is the one that will nail the boson to the bottom of the Cask: the so-called God particle. He attunes his oneiric microscope much as he would one of metals and glass. “What’s the difference,” his dream self avers, “if it is all a dream?”

Now he is standing beside a cyclotron smashing particles. He awaits a rogue rune to break the plane of the dream.

From a Freudian view, he is fulfilling wishes and fears from his personal ego, pinging the façades of his profession onto the cerebral cortex’s xylophone where together they play a song of symbols.

No dream physics takes place or can take place.

If this is a lucid—self-aware—dream, then the physicist is exploring the epistemological basis of his empirical inquiry. Science is alchemical in both Paracelsian and Jungian senses, for the dreamer is excavating simultaneously: (1) matter; (2) The representations of matter in physics; (3) His own unconscious mercurial seeds; and (4) the paradoxical and transformative nature of all unconscious representations. The more primal and cardinal the representations, the more seminal their aliases. That’s the key to all transmutations—hermetic, shamanic, homeopathic, psychosymbolic, quantum-physical, proto-chemical, isotopic.

Perhaps the dreamer is an Astral traveler on a world that has not developed physics and built microscopes—a planet in this or another Milky Way. In its clair-oneiric dissemination across the universe, his dream turns into a technological act. He is using Bronze Age tools—only you wouldn’t call it “bronze” there—to dowse the basis of matter in a dream. Because he and the bronze are archetypal, their isotopes can be melded across the multiverse and periodic chart.

Now, remove the dreamer from his dream but not from the archetype. He is a smith conducting experiments with a forge and crucible. Eventually his civilization will discover lenses, and a descendant of his will work with mineral-based electron scopes and cyclotrons—my first dreamer returned.

I am leading us in a contrived circle because the attempt to source matter—to scoop its ontological basis—is a circle, and also is taking place in a dream: a waking dream, a phenomenology broadcast through microtubules.

Matter is physical, oneiric, alchemical, and epistemological: a cosmos, a dream, a thoughtform. Sentient beings are how matter thinks about matter—and there is no proof that it exists otherwise. And even if it does, there is no way for a dream of being a person, or a butterfly, to alight for certain on its own ontological plane.

BUTTERFLY DREAMING

At the butterfly house across the street from the Rosenberg castle in Copenhagen, so many winged caterpillars float that we visitors experience brief landings on our clothes, hair, hands. A sense of their world is conferred by touch. They say silently: “We alight, we like your colors too, we are not afraid of you. What do you think of us, big ones?”

Butterflies bring lightness, color, dance, surprise, but mostly lightness—large fluttering wings bearing illuminated wyrms.

According to a wall chart, about ten or so butterfly varieties dwell here, including the blue morpho, which is larger than the rest. On iridescent wings, its blueness glows. Wingspan gives these imagos a stabler gait in air than its mates, so morphos seem to glide, chasing in pairs and trios around us.

The chart attributes their iridescence to the fact that blue scares predators. A greater number of blue ones evaded bird meals.

A neo-Darwinian by upbringing, I accept this diagnosis but add a daub of “Paul Klee” blue: a Lemurian vibration. Blue is poison, but a fifth-chakra emission: clairvoyance. Its calibers of sunset—magenta, violet, mauve, indigo—transmit harmonies of psychic energy. Blue is yellow’s antipode, the light that is reflected when yellow is absorbed. A lake is actually yellow, the sun blue.

Four of the butterfly varieties are orange, identified on the chart as Julia, Postman, Tiger Wing, and East Mexican Banner. With the morphos, they glide in mute minuets of orange and blue. There are some flying yellows too, and others with transparent veined rings.

Take away a bit of white’s Etheric luminosity, and what remains is yellow—golden as a crown, buttercups in a field, marsh marigolds, a finch’s wing, tansy blossom, a plastic flute. The reasons that yellow exists are (1) white is too brilliant to be seen, so yellow is its filter and costume, revealing that first light has not only brightness but meaning and depth, and (2) yellow is what happens when a smaller, colder sphere intercepts the output of a star. Witness Gaian sunset, a fusion-clash of wavelengths at curvature’s edge.

I do not feel bad for the butterflies captive in Copenhagen, though I imagined I would. Their zoo was planted with their favorite flowers and, if that wasn’t sufficient, their hosts hung papyrus-thin strips of banana, orange, and watermelon from the ceiling. These surface-area wafers are centers of great clustering. Other delicacies are strewn in dirt around the plants. It is butterfly nirvana. And they are only dreaming of being butterflies, as we are only dreaming of being butterfly-keepers.

A Chinese Taoist parable from around 300 BCE sets the terms: Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither. To all intents and purposes a butterfly, I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.