The Life of Dreams.
Living life includes dreams. But, dreams enact communication by a different process than our regular waking way of making sense of things.
the Two Routes
There are two kinds of ways to process information and within our experience, this is the same as having two languages. But usually we have access to only one.
The language of the day-time processing is one kind, of fixed terms and definitions, direct push-pull, back-to-front, past-to-future processing to address specific tasks for a particular and defined purpose. We might see how this kind of thinking could contribute to a person’s feel of a lack of purpose in life. People most often are taught to orient their activity and their minds on the concern for completing a certain task properly. This usual, general task is called ‘life’, but it has certain protocols attached to it along with certain ethical rules.
The implicit protocols are to make money and support yourself, perhaps raise a family, and contribute to society. This protocol is supposed to link with a person’s purpose, and indeed many people will report that supporting their family and contributing to society give them purpose.
Nothing wrong with that.
However, mental health issues can arise around the ethical imperatives that are linked to that sensibility. The imperative often times is that to think about or ponder things which do not conform and confirm the importance of self-sustenance activities are extraneous, pointless, and in a certain light, even dangerous.
The Other’s Way
The experience of dreams often enough call into question this ‘real-life’ protocol by their very nature, by the very presence of their appearance. This is why many people just laugh off some the ridiculousness that the odd, strange, alarming, and silly images and scenes that the dreams show us. As well, this explains why we only try to interpret dream to what they mean, since the meaning are comparing them to in order to find their meaning is the meaning that is the general imperative of waking life, which is: only consider information so much as it is relevant to the purpose of self-sustenance, supporting oneself and one’s family, and by extension contributing to society. The purpose of one’s life, according to the waking manner of processing information, is to align one’s purpose to this ethical protocol of human purpose.
The mistake, though, with the experience of dreams is that the insistence of orienting oneself upon the waking manner of processing information excludes the potential for more information about what is happening. As I have said, the person is not only using less information than is actually available and indeed is only using one kind of processing of that information. This is a recipe for anxiety, depression, sometimes drastic emotional and mental gestures such as lability and hallucination
— basically, all the various mental disorders that we come across in the world are a failure of communication within one’s Self.
From: The Communication of Dreams coming in 2026.