KEY:
AI = Adventure of Ideas
MT = Modes of Thought
PR = Process and Reality
PRr = Process and Reality, revised edition
SMW = Science and the Modern World
Glossary: Please use:
http://www.hyattcarter.com/glossary.htm
Dreams, Process Theory and Nonsensual Perception
As the title indicates, there are three items being brought together in this essay, which may be restated as how process theory, as it was developed by Alfred North Whitehead and his followers, might be applied to extrasensory perception and other psi phenomena, particularly in dreams.
Alfred North Whitehead [1861–1947], said very little about dreams and telepathy. He did belong to a society at Cambridge which kept votes on the topics of discussion, and according to his main biographer, Victor Lowe, Whitehead always voted yes on questions of psi phenomenon being possible. But no record from these meetings reveals any developed opinions. Still, his process theory, which attempts to encompasses science and non-science, provides a theoretical basis for nonsensual perception and action at a distance, which may be seen as the core elements of all psi phenomenon.
Whitehead developed his process theory at Harvard, after two other full and distinguished careers as a theoretical mathematician at Cambridge, and educational reformer and administrator at the University of London. Instead of retiring in 1924, he moved his whole family to America and became a philosopher at Harvard, where he developed his unique ideas that brought subjective experience back into science, a brought science into the new world of subatomic processes.
Core Theory
In Whitehead's process theory world, there is only one thing in the universe, Creativity. That is, the universe is a "creative advance into novelty." [PR 222]
Just to get a picture of this in our minds, think for a moment of all things being conscious, but only for a second, and without any memory. As we look around the room, everything we see is aware, but in the next moment, a new awareness arises as the previous one perishes.
The table is aware? Well, ok, no. Only individuals are aware, and the table is an aggregate of individuals. For now, think of the table as a swarm of processes, of individual atomic and subatomic processes, that can experience. However, their experience is very short, on the order of a millionth of a second. On the other hand, some things, like you and me, can remember our experiences. This allows us to build up contrasting views and options, to add more creativity to what we receive and what we pass on.
What's the Matter with Matter?
Whitehead was unhappy with the material stuff in science. He felt that the notion of matter was inherited from an ancient time when there had to be a container for the stuff of the world. The stuff might vary, green stuff, hard stuff, soft stuff, gold stuff, granite stuff, gaseous stuff, but it was all matter. Yet the very sciences that rely on this view are the ones that have dissolved this view. The more we poke into matter the more ghost-like the stuff becomes.
This is not news for 21st Century people. We have been comfortable with E=MC2 for generations and easily convert matter into energy in our theoretical minds. Yet the ancient concept of matter as a container linger on.
Everything (individual) has Experience.
However, Whitehead was also not happy that experience had been disconnected from energy, and that energy had, like matter, become a vacuous concept, devoid of experience and fully determined. For Whitehead, the energy units of the universe were instances of the creativity of the universe, and better characterized as feeling. Feeling captures for Whitehead the sense that the basic instances of the universe-as-creativity are both body and mind, both sensitive and sensor, influenced and influencing, experiencing, creative productions that take in the universe in its multiplicity and add to it their own view, so that there is always an all plus one. Feeling is a unification of the universe, plus this new addition. Its an actual process in transition that includes a self-evaluation as well as an evaluation of what it receives and what it passes on. For now, think of these feelings like as quantum energy units, with limited sentience.
Everything is in a Feeling.
"…apart from the experiences of subjects, there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness." [PRr 167.]
It is one of the tenets of Whitehead's theory that there is nothing beyond the experience of these feeling individuals. This experiential creativity is the final thing at the base of the universe, and there is nothing underneath this primitive feeling. All potentials, all sense and nonsense, all real and actual, unreal and partial, are "in" so to speak, some experience or another.
Yet note clearly that experience for Whitehead is not the same as consciousness. Object consciousness for Whitehead is a very highly evolved process synthesized from these more primitive experience/feelings, and consciousness is deeply swamped by sensual perceptions. I will separate these out more below as the difference is crucial for understanding nonsensual perception. For now, think about primitive experience more like "The Force" in Star Wars, as a direct connection of feeling to the whole universe. It connects to us by levels of intensity, depending on its relevance. At one moment, a blind Jedi feels more intensely the room around them and the swirl of her opponent's light saber. The next, she may be in closed-eye meditation and feel most intensely the torture of her friends a million light years away on the planet Harth-Vedra.
Prehension
At higher levels of synthesis where we are conscious of the world through our senses and reason, the word 'apprehend' is often used. We take the world in and understand it in some particular way or another. Since Whitehead attributes a kind of pre-conscious understanding to all individuals, from sub-atomic particles to humans to God, he uses the term 'prehend,' which might be initially characterized as apprehension without the ape, prior to sensual perception, prior to object consciousness, prior to human identity.
Primitive feelings, or prehensions, are then both subjects and objects. They are what feels and what is felt. As they are real, actualized processes or instantiations of creativity. Whitehead's technical terms for these primitive feeling/experiences are actual occasions, and actual entities. An actual occasion begins its creative process in feeling the past or prehending the past. An actual occasion feels the past from its own present. It feels the past as efficient causation, just as I feel the pressure of life pushing upon me. However, the cause is felt or prehended by an actual occasion as an aim from the past, and not just as an object of empty force. It is not fully determined by these past causes, but does directly feels them in its initial phase of becoming. Whitehead calls the process of actual occasions becoming, 'concrescence', meaning becoming actual or concrete, a growing together, coalescing. They are 'actual' because they are both real, and actualized.
The actual occasion in its initial physical phase receives the influences of the past, but then in a conceptual second phase begins forming a subject from these influences, and from the pure potentiality of the universe. Finally the occasion forms it's novel subjective aim, a primitive purpose one might say, from its unique view of the universe. As it passes out of the present, this subjective aim becomes an objective cause for actual occasions. Note the radical view of subject and object here. In the present, we are subject, but in the next moment we pass this present on as an objective datum that can be prehended by other present/future actual occasions.
Also note that the subjective aim includes an anticipation of future occasions. Peter Mutnik [2005] says this anticipation is what separates classical from quantum physics. This anticipation does not become a hard cause, but does align the occasion with larger sets or groups that can be quite distant, spatially and temporally. We will look at this in more detail later in the work of David Pleasant.
If we looked at the life of a single atom from a Whiteheadian view, say one in a wooden table, we would see the that this atom endures over time like a string of beads, with each present moment the atom coming into being and perishing into the past. This creates a kind of temporal society. This singular society will be part of other larger societies (molecules, macromolecules, organisms) and constrained to some degree by them.
So we might say that the actual entity is a microcosmic entity, while the macrocosmic entities of everyday experience—men, trees, houses—are groupings of entities termed nexu/s (plural of nexus has a line over the u, written here as nexu/s ), or societies. We have already said that tables and houses are not individual, but aggregates of individual societies. Yet there may be, as in a stone, properties objectively shared by the components of the aggregate. In this case, Whitehead will refer to the object as a non-indvidualized society. On the other hand, to the degree our body/mind or any individual responds to the world in a unified way, the society is said to be an individualized society. Non-individualized societies are swarming with experience, its just not unified.
Note that Archetypal Psychology has challenged the notion that objects cannot have soul. This might be seen as the first step in acknowledging this. However, in Archetypal Psychology, objects sometimes have soul and sometimes do not. The animist position that tribal peoples attribute a continued presence in a stone is incorrect. The stone is sometimes inhabited, and other times not. I will discuss the status of semi-autonomous entities in a later essay on Whitehead. For now, I simply want to note that 'objects', while not always conscious, always have primitive experience. In this way, the mind/body issue is not, as Griffin [1989] says, an ontological dualism, but simply an organizational duality. We put primitive experience together in one way and there is only unconscious micro-mind, we put it together in another way and we get consciousness awareness.
Consciousness, finally.
"Consciousness is how we feel the affirmation-negation contrast" [PR 372].
In general, more complex occasions will cycle within themselves between the physical and conceptual phases, and synthesize more complex subjective aims, and object consciousness. That is, more freedom, and consciousness. Not all actual occasions will vibrate in this way and so most will not reach consciousness.
For primitive experience to be synthesized into consciousness, a contrast or unity of incompatibles needs to occur. This will be the feeling of a set of feelings on one hand, and the feeling of a proposition about those feelings on the other. At the primary level of experience, there is only direct perception, and no issue of proposition truth or falseness. Just as an illustration, when we hit our foot with a hammer, there is no question in our mind whether we are feeling pain or not. We don't ask, "Hmm, I wonder if that hurts, or could I be wrong?" We might, however, be wrong about what hit us and why. This is just an illustrative analogy, not an example, since consciousness is involved in the sensory awareness of pain.
Contemporary Separation
Contemporary actual entities are actual entities that occur in causal independence of one another. "Actual entities are called contemporary when neither belongs to the 'given' actual world defined by the other" [PR 102].
Actual occasions cannot experience other actual occasions in its same present. Everything in the present, including your own subjectivity, is not available for another coalescing prehension. A microsecond after the subjective present perishes into the objective past, then all these occasions become available for experience. As an occasion perishes, it passes on its subjectivity as its subjective aim, felt as efficient causation in the present occasion.
As an analogy might be like the experience of your room, what you are experiencing in the room now, as being the product of experience that occurred a micro-moment ago.
Note that in Whitehead, some of this was your own personal experience, now objective (like your memory and visual field), and some is the experience of other actual occasions, which have now become relevant to you, but may not have been before. That is, I turn my head and now the relevancy of the table declines, and the bookcase increases.
The table and bookcase (its individual occasions that make them up, that is) are both in the present as a subject (which you can't see) and in the immediate past as an object which you can see. A better model of this is saying that as the moment passes, objects shift from a subjective phase to an objective phase. Once it has shifted, an occasion is objective or available for all to see.
Mutual Immanence
That one actual occasion, once it has perished, is available to all other actual occasions, has been implied in this essay, but not specifically stated. Once an actual occasion perished and becomes objective, it is theoretically available to all other new occasions in the universe. Due to their low intensity and relevance, distant occasions may not rise to awareness. Still, there is at the core of Whitehead's process philosophy this very key factor of each occasion adding its own uniqueness to the whole universe upon each concrescence, and this uniqueness being potentially available then to all other occasions. Time and space do not impose limits as the occasion, once available, is available to the whole extensive continuum. Just like a dream, where the occurrence of a seemingly distant event is available material for all other parts of the dream immediately, so to the extensive continuum is like the dreamer who dreams our dream and all parts are immediately influenced.
Occasions are not overwhelmed by this influx of all other occasions as each actual occasion acts as a filter as well as a reception to other occasions. Whitehead refers to this filtering as Negative Prehension, and this is generally a process available only to the second phase of conceptual prehension, where valuations are made. In other words, an occasion has influence on future occasions depending on its relevance to the subjective aim of the future forming occasion. Actual occasions on Alpha Centauri are as available as actual occasions in front of my nose, but their relevance and intensity are minimal.
Mutual immanence is not so bizarre if we return to the notion that life if basically strands of energy feelings. To the degree that these feelings are semi-sentient energy events in motion, then all types of events can arise through the transmutation of the energy inherent in actual occasions. Once actualized, that particular transformation is more likely to occur again. In this sense it is easy to see that all possible forms are in all other possible forms, and that those forms which are brought into actuality are more relevant to "the force" in general.
Sensory and Nonsensory Perception
Sensory perception for Whitehead is built up out of two more primary forms of perception, of time and of space. Perception in the mode of causal efficacy is a basic perception of time and perception in the mode of presentational immediacy is a basic perception of space.
However, we can't confuse this with Kant's notion of consciousness through the intuitive modes of time and space. For Whitehead, perception initially occurs pre-consciously as casual efficacy and presentational immediacy, which may or may not rise into the propositional symbolic relations of consciousness and conceptual understanding.
Causal efficacy is a direct, nonsensory perception of change. This is the Jedi "disturbance in the force." It is about positively prehending trajectories of the past and their future aims. In other words, it is a direct grasp of causes. Though experienced by an actual occasion, they are vague and initially unconscious. Causal efficacy "…produces the sense of derivation from an immediate past, and of passage to an immediate future…a sense of influx of influence from other vaguer presences in the past." [PR 178] Cobb refers to this as our "non-local, non-conscious interaction with the world as quantum organisms, a form of direct 'perception.'" [Cobb, 1993].
This mode of perception is core for Whitehead, and probably the most controversial. Whitehead felt that Hume and those who base their reasoning on conscious perception of the immediate objects of the environment, tend to end up not being able to find any evidence of causality in perception. Causality is relegated to being a constructed idea rather than a mode of perception. Whitehead's causal efficacy holds that causal influence permeates normal perception, and sees persisting entities with a past and an efficacy in the future. Perception is not limited to our typical spatialized present, but includes more fundamentally a temporal perception of the massive past.
Presentational immediacy is the perception of space in the sense of the relationships of space or the way space is structured in the present.
Both of these are perceptions of the extensive continuum. The extensive continuum is the way the many and the one can communicate with one another in the sense of general relationships before they acquire temporalization and spatialization. Its not what gets transmitted, but the conditions. An occasion may or may not conform to these conditions, but to be part of the continuum, they must conform. There may be other extensive continuums than the ones in which we participate, and participation is part of the definition of being part of that continuum. Some have attempted to define these conditions specifically and have succeeded and failed in various degrees. Note for example Kant's Categories, where the conditions for Understanding were attempted, (Quantity, Quality, Relation, Modality) and previous to Kant, the a-priori conditions, such as a=a and all bodies have extension. Whether or not these particular categorical truths hold is not the issue here. Rather, here we can just say that in particular Epochs, such as our own, particular laws (or persistent habits) hold sway over the way time and space unfold for experience.
As an actual occasion concrecses, it absorbs into its becoming the objective aim of the whole past and the past's space/time continuum. There is pressure to conform to the received continuum as well as pressure to unfold a novel continuum.
In presentational immediacy, there is just the presentation of a cross-section of the immediate present as a potential of extensive relations, without any causal concerns. As an illustration, we see a patch of color/space, and we don't know where it came from or where it is going. When combined with our senses, we can say this is about the geometry of life, how its all divisible, (how we can chop up perception into spatial segments).
Presentational immediacy is the perceptive mode "in which there is clear, distinct consciousness of the 'extensive' relations of the world. . . . In this 'mode' the contemporary world is consciously prehended as a continuum of extensive relations" [PR 95].
When combined with sensory data, presentational immediacy sharpens causal efficacy.
"But we all know that the mere sight involved, in the perception of the grey stone, is the sight of a grey shape contemporaneous with the percipient, and with certain spatial relations to the percipient, more or less vaguely defined. Thus the mere sight is confined to the illustration of the geometrical perspective relatedness, of a certain contemporary spatial region, to the percipient, the illustration being effected by the mediation of 'grey.' The sensum 'grey' rescues that region from its vague confusion with other regions" [PR 185].
Given that the primary mode of perception is the direct prehension of one or more actual occasions by another actual occasion, sensory perception finds itself as a later synthesis of experience. Sensory perception is called symbolic reference, and is derivative from two earlier modes of experience, causal efficacy and presentational immediacy.
The mixed mode of symbolic reference is only found in conscious perception, and perceives objects both as located in specific regions of space, and as a persisting entity with a past and the power to act in the future.
These modes of perception present no inherent theoretical problems with psi and its acquisition of information at a distance. The main problem will be how distant events can rise to consciousness, as consciousness tends to be overwhelmed by the senses and their impact on what is relevant. So before discussing the various ways in which process philosophy might handle psi, we need to make a side trip into the how dreams may provide the very conditions and prove a good model of the type of state that will be most conducive to psi phenomena.
Dreams and Psi
"While awake, our view of ourselves is one in which we see and stress our autonomy, our individuality, our discreetness. We define our own boundaries and we try to work with them. What I'm suggesting, and which is not at all novel, is that our dreaming self is organized along a different principle. Our dreaming self is more concerned with our connection with all others." [Ullman 1989, 217]
It shouldn't really be a surprise that dream states are more conducive to psi phenomena. Written records of dream prophecy and strange phenomena occurring during dreams go back to the beginning of writing itself, in early cuneiform and Egyptian texts. And who hasn't heard of someone in the family predicting the future in dreams? Still, it was sometime before these claims were carefully studied. In the 1960's dream psi research began at the Maimodides Medical Center in Brooklyn, which produced more than fifty articles, summarized both in a technical monograph [Ullman and Krippner, 1970] as well as two editions of the popular book Dream Telepathy with Ullman, Krippner and Vaughn, [1973, 1989].
Ullman was the chair of the Psych Department at the Center and after some preliminary studies with Parapsychological Foundation in 1960, the lab was established [1962]. The basic procedure was to have the participant hooked up to an EEG and sleep in a soundproof room. After going to sleep, the target picture was revealed, usually an art piece selected by random and given to an agent 32 to 98 feet away (sometimes longer). When REM began, the agent began "sending" the picture, and after 10-20 minutes the sleeper was awakened and the dream recorded. The next morning the sleeper was shown 8-12 pictures and asked to rank them in terms of how closely they matched the emotions of the dreams. many variations and subject combinations were used. Some experiments were as exotic as having the 2,000 dead heads from a Grateful Dead concert see and send the picture 45 miles away to Malcolm Bessent in the lab.
It became very clear, that while the replication of these experiments would prove challenging, the dream state seemed particularly favorable to psi. The dream state may also be seen conductive to the construction of types of consciousness from experiences of feelings whose relevancy is typically overwhelmed by waking consciousness.
Dream Psi and Whitehead
It is almost a definition of psi to say that it is nonsensory influence at a distance. And the primary question is how non-contingent force, information, and pattern are transferred and received? How is a mind in New York able to read a mind in London?
The primary core of prehension, is exactly this, the nonsensory reception and transmission of influence. As mentioned before, an occasion receives at beginning of its formation the whole of the past, and adds to this whole past selections from the realm of pure possibilities. "From Whitehead's point of view," states David Ray Griffin, "the only thing extraordinary about extrasensory perception…is that the information in question has risen to consciousness." [Griffin 1989, p.29] Process philosophy, at its core, is all about nonsensory perception. However, the datum from a prehension in London finding its way to consciousness in a mind in New York City will require some explaining. In theory, there is no barrier to this occurring.
The first item to note is that the nonsensory perception of actual occasions means that causality is retained, but separated from both the rule that the events must be contiguous and that causality implies full determination. There can be causal influence at a distance, and that influence needn't be fully determined as each occasion has a chance to alter its own course. Thanks to quantum physics, this is now not as much a stretch of the imagination as it once was. [Pleasants, 2003].
Given this paradigm, we are getting psi information all the time in the background of our perceptual flow. In fact, given this paradigm, we are getting more psi information than any other kind of information, as we are immediately prehending the past of all other occasions in any extensive continuum we might share with them.
There are some problems. Perception in process theory is guided by relevancy as much as anything else, and sensory data tends to force its relevancy upon consciousness. Given that sensory perception overwhelms our more basic sense of "The Force," sensory reduction is needed. This is why psi experiments need for people to block out extraneous stimuli through meditation, concentration and dreaming. Dreaming has an added advantage of providing a reduction in sensory input by raising the threshold which allows or block out a lot of sensory information to our senses.
The next problem is that one of the ways an occasion restricts the relevancy of new possibilities is through negative prehension. In negative prehension, pure potentiality is excluded from entering into the synthesis of the uniqueness and definiteness of the forming occasion. However, the exclusion is itself a relational tie to that which has been excluded. Even negative prehensions maintain a thread of connection to that which they have rejected. Altering the filters of negative prehension is a way to change the relevancy of how a moment is formed. Speaking of how this might be done at the level of human consciousness, we might consider developing types of meditation that relax the typical filters and level them all out, as in vipassana. Of course, being open to what is, may not favor one's experiment any longer. Alternatives would be meditative stances that allow us to hold intensions in mind while generally remaining open to wider and wider influences.
Finally, there is the issue that the targets and re-construction of the targets in psi experiments and actions, to make any sense to us, need to be reconstructed in consciousness. This is going to involve the senses at several levels. If Charles sees a red apple on his table in London, and has asked me to guess what he is looking at, I will have to make a guess about a target that is essentially a sensory construction and symbolic reference. The target may be, like an apple or table, an aggregate object that doesn't even exist as unified object of any relevancy at the level of an full actual entity or the sets it participates in. The target might be just an abstraction in Charles conscious mind. Charles and I do share a similar culture and both have apples and tables as shared signifieds or concepts. At the level of prehension, what is going to be immediately grasped, will have to be the extensive relations behind these abstract concepts. In Whiteheadian terminology, the nexus of societies is what will be passed in nonsensory perception, not a picture of an apple or table, if the focus is on the thing on the table. What might increase relevancy is to focus on the object in Charles mind, not what he might be seeing as some object separate from his thoughts. A 2002 paper by E. W. Kellogg discusses this issue of reconstruction in some detail, where a psi target appearing like a cornucopia ends up in his dream as a helicopter.
Besides the perception of distant minds and objects, (which we have explained as being the nonsensory perception of actual occasions) there is also psychokinesis, or changing things at a distance through non-contiguous means.
In Whitehead's process theory, the other side of nonsensory prehension is causal influence, which then also acts at a distance, as well as upon contiguous events. Griffin [1997] feels that just as perceptual data overwhelms our consciousness of nonsensory perception, contiguous causality overwhelms our perception of influence at a distance. But from the viewpoint of the object influenced, this is just another case of nonsensory perception. We will the spoon to bend, but the spoon (the society of occasions making up the spoon) prehends the intensions of past occasions and change accordingly (or not). The physical and the mental just two poles of the same occasion, and so psychokinesis can be seen more as a communication than the will as brute force. Taken as such, a common form of psychokinesis is the impact of the mind on the body. Griffin [1989] feels that just as sensory perception presupposes a more primitive nonsensory perception, so bodily actions presuppose a more primitive psychokinesis. The real question in this system is not whether or not it can be theorized, but whether or not it can be brought up from inconspicuous to be conspicuous.
I would speculate that for psychokinesis to work more effectively, the shift from willing to communicating is going raise the relevancy of the suggested change to target. However, it is difficult to know just what it means to communicate going down the ladder of synthesis instead of up. That is, we are talking about wanting a highly constructed intention, such as wanting the spoon to bend, and hoping this conscious intention can be broken down into a coherent message at the level of causal efficiency or subjective aim in an actual occasion. However, if one could succeed in such an endeavor, then this would make the effort much easier.
Kellogg [2004] has suggested a work-around by drawing upon the minds and the abilities (psi or otherwise) of one's alternate selves in alternate universes. In Whiteheadian terms, we could say that when something actualizes itself, it is now objectively available to everyone, and therefore more likely to occur again. So why try to invent the wheel again? Just tune into those that have already been able to make psychokinetic contact.
Prophecy and precognition are initially difficult for process theory to address, as mutual immanence reveals to the present occasion all of the past, not the future. Griffin notes that there are many kinds of seeing into the future. If the Titanic springs a leak in the basement, that information is now "present" temporally to all, and so those on the top deck might get it, even if not sensed. Or one might intuit consciously or unconsciously the trajectory that is most likely through the accumulation of subjective aims. But the first is distant seeing, not seeing into the future, and the second is simply making a good guess. Griffin's other alternative is that visions, particularly dream visions, may CREATE the upcoming event. This too may be, but is not seeing the future.
Dave Pleasants [2000, 2003] has suggested a different solution by reading Whitehead via quantum physics. Pleasants has been fascinated by the Radin/Bierman effect [1998]. They were studying responses of subjects to various pictures and found that subjects bodily responses to evocative pictures occurred several seconds before the pictures were presented. How to explain this?
Condensing his quantum theory explanation here beyond what is fair, a series of alternative universes spread out before us in all directions of time and space. Once we experience them, they become fixed, for us. But for some theorists these paths are all valid and real alternative universes, not just potentials that become actual. The parallel lines are fixed, but the path any individual takes between them is not fixed. One may see an event that looks like a fixed future event, as it is in one universe, but choose not to take that path.
Pleasants feels that by combining Whitehead's feeling processes with parallel universe theories, we can come to the view that "future events are not only real and capable of interacting with each other, but are also conscious of themselves and their interrelations with other events on a very basic level" [Pleasants, 2003].
Whether or not these parallel universes are part of the mutual immanence of this particular extensive continuum is problematic. But perhaps its better to proceed with the theory that they are, and the key (to seeing the future) is to focus on what might make these alternative universes more relevant.
Whitehead's process theory seems well suited to the theoretical discussion of many aspect of psi. The issues of cause at a distance, mind and body, distant knowledge and transmissions exceeding the speed of light in temporal and spatial directions are all easily handled. What seems just as promising, is that Whitehead's insistence on the creative and subjective pole of all events, which brings into play the issue of relevancy. Relevancy is important in developing psi theory, but also in developing psi pragmatics. With relevancy as the main filter and amplifier, it may be that the desire to use psi to further control and manipulate the world will have to give way to psi as a way to communicate with the world, and the world with us. In particular, a way of communicating below the level of conscious abstractions and with the thing itself. For Whitehead, this thing itself is the creative universe.
And it appears that dreams are going to be one of the best laboratories for this experiment. This is true not only because of sensory reduction, but because dreams unfold the truths of subjective creativity. Each dream is its own space-time continuum, both developing new alternative multiplicities while synthesizing distributed unity. As Ernest Hartmann [1998] has said, dreams contextualize emotion. They are already clearly an intelligent feeling, a creative advance into novelty.
REFERENCES
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