Enter the Gutenberg Galaxy-or-World Literature and Dream Vision
Philosophy of the Mind -or- Life, Literature and Literary Method
In the "Gutenberg Galaxy" Marshall McLuhan invites us to enter the social world created by books and mass media. Helen Keller who was deaf and blind, entered the English universe of "words" and language of the Gutenberg Galaxy, when she finally grasped the psychological idea that all the objects in the world have a "name". Keller as the rest of us, have followed in "mythological" footsteps of the "primal poet" Adam.
Dreams can show how to create a unified a model of mind, body and of natural history. The philosophy of the dream is the philosophy of the mind. Entering the artistic gestalt of dream vision provides primal poetic access to a philosophically transformative and sublime experience.
The dream allows you the reader to plug into the daily planetary poetic rituals of light and darkness. Thanks to dream vision, you may enter the literary labyrinth for how the mind organizes our "literacy" of life, death, philosophy, art, music, literature, religion, politics, economics, science, medical humanities, nations, cities, civic rituals, environmental forces, consciousness, thought, feelings, time, space, people and relationships.
Enter the cybernetic and cinematic Hollywood dream factory. Enter the primal voice of the ritual drum of life writing. Enter the temple of Apollo and hear the Delphic oracle, enter the reel playing in Plato's Cave. Hear the voices of Joseph, Christ, and Mohammed. Enter Alice's rabbit hole, fly away with Peter Pan, enter a virtual factory of the archetypal cultural imagination, enter the literary time machine.
In entering this poetic and prosaic world of words, one can also enter the "oral tradition", and oral history of dream vision. Collecting the dreams of those from around the planet, allows us to understand what the German poet Goethe called "world literature".
This world literature of "dream vision" is circulating on the planet every night. This "people's history" of dreams and dreaming is going on now, as we speak. See the visions and hear the voices of billions of dreamers, and the nightly pulse of the poetic ocean of their dreams. To quote William Blake; "To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour."
In his essay "The Task of the Translator" Walter Benjamin believed that there was a kinship between languages and mother tongues, and that by integrating many tongues, the fragments of a greater language could be recognized. The "Indo-European" is a language family of mother tongues that fits Benjamin's kinship description of the "Dead Poets Society" (read dream interpretation). Within this family of languages lies a deep dream vision sedimentation of individual and collective history.
Often with so many languages and cultural idioms, we become lost in the translation. The dream however has always provided the symbolic frame work for the linguistic integration of all tongues, as evidenced in the dream interpretation, "International Mother Language Day". The dream allows us to poetically enter the cultural communication network of all speech communities. The primal archetypal language of dream vision is innate and universal. We can all cultivate and choose from the "Menu of Dream Vision" (read list of life writing genres found in dreams).
In After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, George Steiner believes that each language maps the world onto the words it uses to locate and describe it (the world). For Steiner, communication = translation. Each generation creates new literary topologies, maps and landscapes of culture. Steiner tells us that a day will come when; "translation will no longer be necessary. All mother tongues will have re-entered the translucent immediacy of that primal, lost tongue and speech shared by God and Adam."
Dream vision is that primal poetic language, the tongue that has been lost, and which we can all re-enter. It is the language that connects humanity to its past and to its future. When talking to people about a dream, someone invariably asks, "What does it mean?"
We no longer understand or commune with our nightly dream language. The conscious mind no longer comprehends the psychodynamics of the communal unconscious. Yet truly it is not the dream that is confusing; the fact is that our conscious minds have forgotten the translation code key to the universal language of the dream. The dream vision "frame story" of "1001 Nights in the Global Village" (read article), when completed hopes to unify all the mother tongues and all the people living in the global village.
Further Reading:
- Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language