"The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable."
-Italo Calvino
-Italo Calvino
This post is not about anything particularly philosophical. In fact, it is about something that millions of people experience all the time. Science has not spent a lot of time trying to understand it, or even proving or disproving its existence, although it is a common phenomenon.
After dinner on Monday night, I had a chore I had to finish that night, but I was extremely tired. Much too tired to do it. So I went to bed to take a nap, and as I often do, I mentally set a time for me to wake up. In this case, I was planning to nap for one hour, then get up and do my chore. I didn't set an alarm clock, I just depended on my mind to wake me up at the correct time.
I learned to do this decades ago, and at first I would mentally repeat the time I needed to wake up over and over again. Nowadays I just tell my mind a couple times, and in the majority of cases that is enough. This was not the particularly interesting bit, I do that all the time.
What was interesting was what happened when I did in fact wake up. I had been so tired when I went to bed, that I fell asleep more or less instantaneously. When I woke up, I was still asleep. My conscious mind did not have a clue in this world why it had woken up. All it knew is that one minute it was having lunch with Abraham Lincoln and a pair of talking zebras, the next minute it was staring into the dark, not sure where or even who it was. For at least a couple minutes, I was still dreaming - even though I was sitting up with my eyes open. I didn't even know at first why I was awake. All I knew is that some force, a force that was very much in control at that moment, had compelled me to be awake and was giving me an imperative command to get on my feet.
Some part of my mind, some part of me, was ticking off the minutes all that time. While myself as I know me was off sipping consomme with Abe and the talking zebras, myself as I don't know me was waiting, awake, on guard. Ready for the clock to run out, so it can take over my body, sit me up and get me conscious enough to function.
I think if you had asked me while I was dreaming whether I wanted to get up and do the dishes, I think the answer would be an emphatic no. "No thank you, I am chillin with my homeboy Abe and the zebras. Go away." But I, the playing, dreaming, conscious self, was not in control. I, the bearer of my pre-sleep instructions, was. I say that the conscious mind was dreaming, I think that when we dream our conscious minds are not so much absent as unfocused. It no longer has to engage reality, it is free-associating. Playing, in other words. That also explains the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, when we are aware of dreaming while we are dreaming. It is the conscious mind that dreams, IMO. When I woke up, I was conscious but still dreaming, and it was that mind that was so confused by what was going on. My unconscious mind was the one that had it all under control. My dreaming conscious mind on the other hand, never got the memo that said we were supposed to be waking up now. It was surprised to be waking up.
The unconscious mind, according to Freud, was the playground of the Id, the primitive unrestrained drives and impulses. The Id has no sense of responsibility at all. If that is true, my unconscious mind is seriously messed up or something. In this case, it was my unconscious mind, not my conscious mind, that was being responsible. My conscious mind was off playing games.
In the classic 1956 movie Forbidden Planet, alien technology allows an isolated scientist to unleash all the monsters of the Id, the hidden demons of the unconscious, in material form. His unconscious mind creates real physical monsters that kill. I guess my unconscious mind then would be puttering around like a housewife, waking everyone up and reminding them to floss between teeth. ;)
Carl Jung thought that underneath the normal unconscious mind was the collective unconscious of all living things. I don't have any reason to believe that this is true, but if it were, it would not surprise me either. My unconscious mind acted like a good conscientious guardian while my conscious mind was off partying brains with dead Presidents. I guess what I take away from this is, we are more than the mind we think we are. And that our unconscious mind is no more the primitive unthinking ape than our conscious minds are. Sometimes less so.
