Kim Birdsong Interviews Robert Bosnak at the Embodied Dream Imagery Conference sponsored by Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, California, January 30, 2005
Kim Birdsong: Robert, could I begin by asking you to explain your theory of embodiment. It might be a bit different from what many of us assume as simply feeling sensations and being in our skin.
Robert Bosnak: I'm not just talking about embodiment, I'm talking about embodied imagery. So maybe I should begin with what I understand an image to be: I take an image to be a quasi-physical environment in which we find ourselves. Quasi-physical because it presents itself as physical. It is completely ambient. It is completely around us. It is also a place where events take place and one has the knowledge that one is awake. So it is not that we feel or think that we're awake, but that we know we're awake in the same way that we know we're awake when we read this article.
In this quasi-physical environment, a lot of sensations take place in the body... affects take place and affects always have a bodily aspect. Affects, as we know from neuroscience, are physically based-or at least provoke-physical responses. We also know from neuroscience that dreaming is organized around affect. Since affect always has a bodily aspect, what is important in working with dreams-because a dream is an environment-is that we somehow get back into the environment and that we begin to sense the emotions and the affects that take place in that environment.
What I call an embodied image, or embodiment as I use it, is the way that affect is carried in the body, the way that feelings are carried in the body. When one begins to focus on those feelings, metaphors begin to arise. It's a coincidence of a sense of place, emotions, affects and then metaphor. That all comes together, and that is what I call embodiment. It is an embodied state. It carries metaphor as body. At that place, there is no difference between psyche and body. That is what the phenomenologists would call the body/subject. We are frequently thinking of the body as an object, the body/object, which is the body that can be operated on the operating table... but the body/subject that I am talking about is this sense of embodiment where metaphor, body, affect, emotion and cognition… all of that is coalesced in one single state.
KB: How did you develop the process that you are demonstrating during this workshop?
RB: My interest in dreams began with my own analysis, and I started into analysis because I had been severely physically ill. It was during my analysis that this illness finally cleared up, so I've always been interested in the relationship between body and dreaming. I began to read up on it, and in my training at the Jung Institute, I became even more interested in dreaming. I learned that the whole tradition of western medicine is based on the clinae that they had at the Aesklepion Temples of ~200 B.C., where people would make a pilgrimage to dream, and had dreams where the god would appear to prescribe the healing process or prescription. There, the physical body and dreaming were always seen as belonging together. This whole notion that we have that dreaming is about psyche only is very recent.
KB: When I took the tour of that site in Turkey, the guide said that part of the healing process was to come to the forum afterward and to discuss the images that had appeared.
RB: Yes, I think that was what they would do there. We don't know much about what those discussions were like. I personally think that it was the presence of the god that did the healing. What you would discuss with the priests was not so much what the god meant, but how the god was present and how s/he affected you. From that information, the priests would devise all sorts of medicine. But I think it was the presence of the god that really mattered.
KB: How do you work with your own dreams? Do you use the Embodied Imagery process?
RB: Yes, I work with my own dreams with someone else. I have a dream buddy. We swap dreams. One week I work on her dream, and the next, she works on mine. I have never been extremely successful with working my own dreams over long periods of time, except for working on dream series. I describe that process in Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreams. You can work on a whole series of dreams and then find an infrastructure in it, and I do that when I go through periods of great transition. But on the individual dreams on a daily basis, I find I'm already very happy when I can get back into the dream, back into the hypnogogic state, and through the hypnogogic state enter into the dream and experience and feel it a bit. If I'm lucky, I can get into one other character and experience the dream from the point of view of a non-ego perspective. Then I'm already very happy. But I cannot get as far alone as I can when somebody helps me.
KB: So much of our personal work in this culture seems to be privatized. It's nice to have the support.
RB: It's also I think that dreaming that dreamwork-has always been seen as a social thing. In many traditional cultures, you tell one another your dreams in the morning. It's a social event; it's not so much a private thing. It is something that is relational. It's something that you bring into a relationship. Families talk about their dreams together. The talking, hearing the others' perspective, having another ear listen is a very important thing. There are stories that Jung would tell his dreams to his gardener. I don't know if it's true.
KB: One portion of the practice of DreamTending that Stephen Aizenstat presents suggests an offering to the image, a sort of ritual honoring of the image. Is that a part of the Embodied Dream Imagery process, or is it anything that you practice personally?
RB: Not so much. What I believe is that the offering is the time that you spend and the change in consciousness that you allow the dream images. When something remarkable comes from a dream or when a gift comes in a dream, then I think it is a very good idea to make some kind of offering, but I don't do it as a matter of principle in every piece of work that I'm doing.
KB: Could you say a bit about alchemy and its influence on your work?
RB: I have found alchemy to be the best metaphor system to give a background to my work. The advantage of alchemy is that when you describe something in alchemical terms, you know that you're not describing something literally. You're always aware of metaphor. With other metaphor systems-developmental psychology, for instance-you could actually believe that what you're talking about is literal, that it is literally because of things that happened to you when you were three years old. We are led to believe, then, that there is a direct causal connection, and of course there is no causal connection. It is a pseudo-causality because we cannot follow causal connections over long chains. We cannot pretend that we know what the casual connection is between something that happened when we were three and something that is happening right now. The danger of developmental imagery as a background to psychology is that you can take those images literally. You certainly cannot do that with alchemy.
Alchemy is very interesting to me because it takes psychological processes or embodiment processes as substances that get mixed and get refined. Alchemy is a study of the refining and the "essentializing" of embodied states. I interpret the metals that they're talking about in alchemy as embodied states, because what they were saying was that the metals had a body, soul and spirit. They were embodiments.
I find it very useful to look at what is happening right now, what is happening right here with the substances that are being brought in, like for instance, a dream. If we take the dream as the material, then working on the material, there are certain laws that govern working on that material.
In the material you'll find contrasts. When you work the material for a while, it will start heating up. When you work the material for a while longer, the pressure rises. All these alchemical terms are useful to us. The alchemists had respect for the material, but not for the outer form of the material. So they would start grinding the material until it revealed its prima material. The prima materia is the spark that is contained in matter.
When we work on a dream and we really focus, concentrate on the dream, we heat up the substance. As it heats up, we come closer and closer to the spark. The spark that reveals itself at that moment can start a transformation process. So all these notions are good metaphors to use when we are working practically on a dream, because when we work on a dream, we are frequently completely in a state of chaos, not knowing what to do and not knowing where we are. Therefore a metaphor system like this, like alchemy, is very helpful to stabilize us a bit.
KB: That lack of respect for the outer form also seems to allow for the narrative of the dream to fall away.
RB: Yes, I'm very interested in that part. I think this comes from the notion that we have two kinds of memory. We have a narrative memory and then we have a flashback memory. We have a memory that is purely states: one state after the other. You know how memory is state specific. Something that you don't remember now, but when you're in the same situation again, you remember it perfectly. So memory is state specific. Then there is a memory that is about an ongoing narrative. I'm very interested in the memory that is about states.
What I'm trying to do is: I'm working on the dream, and I'm getting into as many states as possible: states that are experienced by the ego in the dream, but also states that are experienced by other presences in the dream. I have developed a method in which you can then plant these states in different places in the body as a sense memory. I got that from Stanislovsky and from acting.
By the end of a dream one could experience maybe three or four different states, and in the end you take all these states together by feeling them simultaneously in your body. You do that by focusing on the location where you deposited them.
The body becomes a memory theater, and as you experience all these states at the same time, then something very strange begins to happen. New states begin to emerge. A network of states comes into being that is able to have a variety of states present at the same time, and that has a transformational quality. That has a very creative element to it because it is a completely new network of states. It has a healing element to it, because it creates a new sense of body. I find it the most productive state that I have found.
KB: It sounds very much as if you're creating a new capacity.
RB: I think that's actually what happens. That's why, at the end of the work, you get into this network of states and we work together to devise a practice that person can do for a period of time to feel this network of states and to get it more robustly into the body. In that way it becomes an actual, new way of being in the body. This new way of being in the body creates a lot of new potential.
KB: It was intriguing to me in listening to the demonstrations in your workshop that it was actually rather difficult for participants to phrase questions to the dreamer that could elicit a sensate response. It was also difficult, in some cases, for the dreamer to state specifically whether he or she was hot or cold, tingling or tense. We go into metaphor so easily. It's hard to stay in our skins.
RB: Absolutely. I think that's a matter of training. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. What I want people to notice first is sensations. When you notice a sensation, it is very difficult to immediately start interpreting it. I want people to stay as far away from interpretation as possible. I'd like to do those things that use the mood in a more global sense - like interpretation - after the work on the embodiment is done. After that is finished, one can go into all kinds of insights. As the work is happening, I want to stay away from interpretation as much as possible, because interpretation frequently halts the process.
Interpretation is useful, sometimes, during the process, but it is very specific. Interpretation can be useful when a person is becoming too moist to speak in alchemical terms, so that the feelings are running over each other. There's just all emotion; for instance, the person is sobbing wildly. In that case, interpretation can be very useful because it has an astringent quality. It can dry the matter for a moment. Then you let that interpretation go.
KB: Could you also speak to the notion of "updraft?" I think there can be a general tendency to want a kind of cosmic union in dreamwork. It's as though we have got some goal up there and out there, away from our bodies, or that we're trying to transcend or elevate ourselves in some way with our work.
RB: The outcome of that kind of work is that everybody feels great, and nothing happens. The alchemical model goes from the notion that it is from the poisons the remedy is made. If you have several body states in which there are some that feel better than others, and you feel that the person starts to tend towards the ones that feel better... that is what I call an updraft. The ones that feel worse begin to drop away, and then you can feel this urge in the whole group to make that updraft continue and feel better and better and better. At that moment you lose the poison. At that moment you know that you are moving away from any potential of remedying. We have to reconnect the poisonous substance to the sense of well being, because if the poison is not part of the network, you will never, ever make the remedy. This work is not about feeling good. Feeling good is not necessarily good. Feeling good is just feeling good; one feeling among many. And it's a feeling we love, but it is not a goal.
KB: Speaking of goals, a lot of dreamwork-especially some of the more basic texts-seems to have as the goal to try to come to a moment of "Aha!", a feeling that, "I've got it now;" very goal specific. I see your work as more of an opening, more of an open-ended process.
RB: I see there is a moment that is similar to this "aha," but very different. The problem of "aha" is that it is a moment of capturing. In an "aha," the moment gets captured in an understanding. Understanding is frequently a closed system. Something that was open and chaotic before now becomes a closed system in the "aha." I'm not after the "aha" at all because I want at all times chaos to be part of the system. Because my notion of working is complexity theory, I want to stay between order and chaos and I never want to move too closely to order because the process starts to ossify and quiet down. The creative process is when order and chaos are very closely together. I think "aha" is anti-chaos.
KB: You've mentioned that this is very different from having a foot in this world and a foot in the other world.
RB: I think that is a misunderstanding of dual consciousness. Dual consciousness is actually something that William James brought up in the 1880 's -1890 's. He was talking about how there are two states of consciousness that are there in parallel, that are there simultaneously. You are fully in the image. The image is surrounding you completely. You are engrossed in the image and at the same time, you are sitting in a chair being engrossed by an image. That is dual consciousness. The observed and the observer. So there are two states that are fully present at the same time, and that is very different from a single state in which you have one foot in and one foot out. Actually, it's two feet in and two feet out.
KB: Do your personal dreams differ from location to location? You work all over the world. Do you feel the landscape is dreaming?
RB: Yes. It does, but less so than I have experienced with other people. There are people who are much more sensitive to place than I am. I did notice when we were working last summer near the volcano in Hawaii, I did have a disproportional amount of dreams that had heat and anger and rage in them than I have had in other places. When we were in the paleolithic caves, I had more of a sense of the ancient. So aspects of place do influence me. There are people who are enormously influenced by place, but I am not one of them.
KB: You also mentioned that the dreams that come in the night, while we are asleep, seem to come from a different source, or have a different sense to them than perhaps something that we conjure in a waking, imaginal state.
RB: This is a belief that I have. I believe dreaming is further removed from habitual consciousness than is, for instance, active imagination or meditation. A few weeks ago, we worked on a meditation with someone where an image that presented itself was actually called up. The person then began to have a whole unfolding of that place, so we decided to work on that. It didn't give half as much information as a dream. I think that dreams are the most alien psychological material we have, if we want to call it that. You can work with a dream. The sheer alien nature of dreaming is what is important.
KB: Yet as humans, we seem to want something familiar and comfortable.
RB: The familiar is what keeps us bound to the ego. The familiar is what expands the ego. The familiar cannot get us out of ego traps, it just expands them. The ego by its nature has a colonialist attitude, and an imperial attitude, which is best expressed in Freud's saying, "Where id was, shall ego be." It is the desire of ego to possess. So my work is the opposite of "becoming possessed by ego." It is becoming possessed by the images while we are fully aware that we are becoming possessed by them that is important.
KB: Is there anything else you'd like to share?
RB: One of the things that is very important for us is realizing that we can work on our own dreams, but we can't get as far working alone.
Because dreamers are scattered all over the globe and all over the map, we started www.cyberdreamwork.com and found that you can actually do this work very well through a voice and video program on the internet. You can communicate in real time with people from different locations. The interesting thing we found through working on the internet is that we can get into very deeply embodied states... so the notion that the internet is disembodied is not true. It's what you do with it. The relationships in these cyber-dreamgroups can be very intimate. That way of forming a group is a very useful way for people to work on their dreams with others because frequently people don't always have others with whom to share their dreams in their direct environment.
