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Old 05-20-2004, 06:29 AM   #19 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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well---if many of us operate in equivalent cultural spaces, which involves the circulation of similar imagery/discourses--and if freud is right that much dream material is made up of (for example) material that you screen out in order to limit your perceptual field (as any functional subject has to in order to be functional--you cannot process all the visual material that barrages you in the course of moving though a given environment--if you did, then your sense of yourself as a coherent subject would collapse)--and if repression can be understood as the mechanism that does much of that limiting--then it would follow that you might well have dream that would involve similar images/discourses/modes of combination to those had by other people....this possiblility seems evident without going into the question of explanations at either the biological or metaphycial levels.

you certainly would not require jung to explain this kind of recurrance of imagery etc. the account above could be extended easily into one of a sense of history, patterns for deriving generalities from within that history, rules of combination, etc.

if you shift to a biological level to explain dreams, you run into problems that would be equivalent to trying to characterize the functioning of a given software package (what the package would present to you as a user sitting in front of your terminal) by detailing how the hardware operates--they are not unrelated, but it is really difficult to move from an account of the conditions of possiblilty for a platform to the modes that shape working within that platform.

as for the soul, well....i dunno. seems an outmoded terminology to me---if you work in a more or less religious framework, then the term soul can be functional, i guess-but i dont.

btw--my favorite bit about the transmigration of dreams comes from gravitys rainbow--pirate prentice---the guy who has other people's dreams--a cool character......
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