I once dreamed that I conducted the premiere of my first symphony to a packed Carnegie Hall, and that it was a triumph. As the performance unfolded and the music reached the ear of my dreaming mind in that strange compressed but complete (we might almost say encoded) language that dreams employ, I heard every note played by every instrument of the orchestra, and indeed, saw them on the printed page of the score, and they were good. I have, of course, no way of knowing whether those notes, if realized in an actual performance, would bring a 21st century audience to its feet, but I know that for me, that dream symphony was the actualization of all my musical ambitions. I also knew, the moment I woke up, that I would not remember a single note. Not consciously anyway.
I am a musician and something of a composer, but I’ve never written a symphony, and in my waking mind, would not consider myself sufficiently trained in symphonic form to do so. But over the course of my life, I’ve listened to and studied symphonies for many hours, and I know what they’re supposed to do, in the same way that any educated human being knows, without being an engineer, what a bridge is supposed to do, or without being a designer of haute couture, how a good suit should be stitched together. It seems entirely possible I could dream of building a bridge or making a suit and that they might be just as perfect as my symphony was. The question is this: if these dreams could be replayed, frame by frame, like a video, would we see the ‘granular’ construction of the symphony, the bridge, the suit, or just a wash of impression, a second order cypher based on what I think these things should sound, look or feel like? Are they delusions of grandeur or visions of what we could do if we allowed our minds full rein? I don’t believe that neurology or psychology can answer these questions yet, because we’ve not yet been able to record or replay a dream. But that day may be coming, and if it’s revealed that the bridges and cathedrals we build in our dreams have structural integrity, it will be the most revolutionary development in human capability since the invention of language. It will mean that subconsciously, we’re able to access a kind of God-knowledge of how things are put together.
Or we could learn that it’s all castles-in-the-air. That our minds do indeed play tricks on us. That my dream symphony was just an artful pastiche of favorite bits from Beethoven, Shostakovich, Stravinsky heard over the years. Our futuristic dream cities are just cobbled together from images we’ve picked up from movies and picture books. Dreams represent notions of what beauty, terror, ecstasy, humiliation are as forms in the original Platonic sense. Because I have an idea of what perfection of form looks like and sounds like, I can dream it. The imagination waxes in the divine solitude of sleep. But there is something missing in that reduction, and I think it has to do with our misunderstanding of exactly what imagination is, and how much power it has. When I hear a symphony, if I am actively listening and have a musical vocabulary, its “code” pours into my brain and is in some sense processed. When I cross a bridge, if I am paying attention and have ever built a bridge of Legos, I absorb the way in which it is supported and its weight distributed. I can both see and feel these things and relate them to my own experience. It’s not really so grandiose to think that with the right understanding of Newtonian physics, I could be a bridge builder. And if I were to build a bridge, or a cathedral, it would begin with an act of imagination, not unlike the way entire cities emerge from dream life in Christopher Nolan’s film Inception.
Everything begins with imagination. Some theologians and philosophers, both ancient and contemporary, would argue that the cosmos came into being because some inchoate proto-field which we can call God if we wish asked the question: what if we do this thing? And if this field remains immanent in each one of us, which is certainly what modern physics would contend (we are made of the stuff of the universe or, to quote master physicist John Wheeler, who coined the term black hole, we are ‘its from bits’), then there’s nothing to prevent any of us from asking: what if I do this thing?
The evidence that we can, if we wish, create marvelous things well beyond our technical training or experience lies in what we do when we are in a state of what Aldous Huxley and so many others before and after him call active relaxation. This is the state that, for example, an Olympic pole vaulter needs to be in before they take their run at the bar, that allows athletes, year after year, to surpass records with almost superhuman prowess. It’s also the state that pervades our happiest experiences. Even the more clumsy among us can bust an impressive dance move when we are in an AR state. Even the most test-averse of us can, given sufficient intelligence, score high on an SAT if we can achieve this somewhat paradoxical state of float and focus. When we approach the object of our desire in this state, she or he is most likely to say, “You had me at hello.” It’s a state characterized not so much by a surplus as an absence: the absence of anxiety, which then leads to a sense of being absolutely ‘in the moment.’ And this is where we are in the dreams that we remember the most fondly, and in which we accomplish the most stunning things. How to bring this into waking life is the question I’m posing here.
My conjecture, which some may dismiss as ‘woo,’ but which has a pretty sound basis in both neurology and theology, not to say idealistic philosophy, is that when we are in this AR state, we are more able to access what we might call the AI state — not as in ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ but as in active imagination. Active Imagination re-entered modern thinking largely by way of the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung as a form of dream therapy, but the concept goes at least as far back as Avicenna, and especially to the 12th century Sufi mystic ibn ‘Arabi, whose notion of Alam al-Mithal — the imaginal realm — is the subject of a number of mind-bending books and essays by the French philosopher Henry Corbin, not to mention the theosophy of Dune. For neither ibn ‘Arabi nor Jung is the imaginal realm a place of fantasy. Nothing there is ‘imaginary.’ It is an intermediate plane, between ordinary physical existence and the divine order (if the word divine makes you twitch, you can substitute something like physicist David Bohm’s implicate order, or even the quantum vacuum field, from which all things come and to which all things return). But it’s a realm that very few of us ever visit outside of dreams. The perceptual tools we’d need to get there have atrophied over the long course of modern history. These tools have to be re-acquired, and that is a painful and (as Jung testified) often terrifying learning curve. Just ask any shaman. The idea is that if we cultivate the ability to perceive the imaginal realm, we can step into it, and there we can see and comprehend the world of forms, and watch those forms as they morph into things apprehensible to consciousness — like cathedrals, bridges, and symphonies. Best of all, we can, on occasion, bring things back with us.
To push this further, when we enter the imaginal realm, we perceive things not as ordinary mortals, through the highly selective sieve of consciousness, but as gods, or at least angels — whatever you take them to be (personally, I take them to be us, but in that intermediate realm and blessed with the powers of perception required to enter it). We can see the bridge before it becomes a bridge, and hear the symphony before it is written. All things exist in form before they exist in material substance. There are rules for how to make a symphony that were developed over the two-hundred odd years between Haydn and Mahler, but these rules did not come out of nowhere. They came from the realm of the active imagination, from people who were, at least momentarily, able to go there. Of this I am fairly certain. There is really no other way to understand great art. It is neither an accident not some sidecar of Darwinian natural selection: a better way to get laid and thus pass on progeny.
To develop the skill of active relaxation, restraining consciousness so that we can more easily enter the world of active imagination, and to return to mortal life with the gifts of that world. That would seem to be the Grail. Forget about the metaverse. It is an artificial construct in the most basic sense, a geek’s fever dream, and it will not get you there. I may not get there either, despite my best efforts. Like Moses, age may stop me short of the Promised Land. But I am confident that if I could enter that realm, I would find my symphony there. And glorious cities, not yet beyond the stage of a computer animation wizard’s draft, and yet complete in every important detail. Magnificent cathedrals and mosques and temples that vault arch by arch into the supernal. All there for the taking, and the making. I suppose I can hold out hope that this is the world I’ll know when I leave the body…or will my visitor’s pass to the imaginal realm expire with brain-death? Doesn’t matter. I know it’s real.
