Dreaming Without Divinity
A Humanist Take on Nighttime Visions
The final module of Psycho Cinema Therapy will premiere on June 1st, 2025. I’ve been uploading one module every Sunday and, once it’s completed, Psycho Cinema Therapy will become a ‘movie review’ site. I have it in quotes because I won’t be doing a traditional thumbs up/thumbs down review. Instead, I’ll be analyzing what these movies are really telling us about our culture and ultimately ourselves.
Dream interpretation can be fun, but it can also be fraught with abuse. The more literal one takes their dreams the more abusive it can be. Very similar to people who take myths or bible stories literally. I don’t even take myself literally! You may hear me use phrases like, “your subconscious is trying to tell you”, but I don’t believe you literally have an inner self (let alone an ‘inner child’) trying to escape it’s manacles. Dreams, at their root, are most likely an involuntary filing system where the brain takes the memories, or images, of the day and files it away to make room for more memory.
We don’t actually begin to dream until we start to wake up. My current understanding is that most of our REM sleep is dreamless. As we awaken, we are witness to some of those images that our brain has concocted. You might say, our subconscious is our inner ‘ChatGPT’, just taking random thoughts, images, and words and compiling it into something that, once we are semi conscious, might strike us as frightening, humorous, intriguing, or humdrum.
I do mention Freud and Jung in the course, but most psychologists today will tell you that Freud and Jung have been discredited. Most psychology today apparently isn’t based on uncovering child hood trauma as much as it is unveiling our potential. Why can’t it be both? Childhood trauma is real! Just ask anyone who grew up in the strictness of fundamentalist Christianity! We are cable of amazing things, but it’s kind of difficult to be amazing and inspirational if you’re still cripped by wounds of the past.
It might be true that dreams might be the result of bad meals and stale pizza. That still doesn’t account for the disturbing nature that some of those images might inflict on the dreamer. Even if the dreams are randomly produced by the subconscious, the one who awakens might ask, “Why am I not dreaming of pleasant things? Why am I constantly having nightmares?”
A fundamentalist Christian trying to walk the straight and narrow may find himself sweating and praying, “Why do I keep having these sexual dreams? I’m spending all my hours working, reading scriptures, and helping out at the church!” This seems to me as striking evidence that dreams are truly about repression.
I have found the more I look at unpleasant truths when I am awake, the more pleasing my dreams become. Possibly because I’m repressing happy thoughts during the day? Either way, I am grateful to my subconscious for giving me pleasant images to get me started in the morning.
Dreams are fascinating, entertaining, scary, and sometimes sad. Humans have been interpreting dreams for centuries, mainly looking at them as omens of things to come. Even to this day! If you visit Facebook groups on dream interpretation, you'll find fearful people interpreting dreams like, "I was naked in a public place." as an omen that something shameful is about to happen to them. This is such a mistake!
Dreams and myths are more valuable when you put them in their proper historical or psychological context. Ignore the soothsayers and so-called prophets! We do not need tribal leaders using omens. Not anymore. We understand so much more through research and education.
Your dreams are not supernatural messages from beyond! I do not believe dreams are a sign from an alleged supernatural being, but, due to personal experience, I do not dismiss them out of hand. One of the most profound dreams I had occurred when I was a mere 6-year-old! I dreamed I saw a giant elf die in a city street. It was dark and there was a crowd surrounding the dying elf. You know who two of those people were? None other than Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert as Mr. and Mrs. Douglas from the vintage TV show, Green Acres!
This scared me as a kid and it wasn't until I was an adult when I realized that there were only a handful of dreams that have stuck with me through my entire life. I thought about that dream and remembered this dream occurred when we were about to move. Prior to the move, I read a lot of Golden Books with fairy tales and other children's stories. But during the move and after the move I started watching the television shows of the time. This was in the mid 60's, hence Green Acres. Those television programs dominated the little Golden Book children's stories.
There is no way my young mind would have been able to grasp the fact that things were changing for me. The fairy tales were dying and being replaced by mass media. Wow! This struck me as a pretty profound dream for a six-year-old. My subconscious was catching on, even though it would be years before my conscious mind would make sense of it all.
Dreams can be landmarks in our development. Some of the greatest changes in my life were marked by vivid dreams. These were not dreams of prophecy, I reject that notion. I respect my subconscious as sometimes being more advanced than my conscious mind. Why? Simply because my subconscious has no filter but my conscious mind is constantly looking for ways to compromise and navigate a difficulty.
Once the ten modules of Psycho Cinema Therapy are posted, the real fun will begin. I want to interview professors, therapists, and psychologists about this fascinating study for research, plus film directors, writers, actors, and other creatives about their work.
Consider supporting Psycho Cinema Therapy through this Patreon page. You will get shout outs, be mentioned in the credits, and all donations, $10.00 or more will get a free copy of my e-book, Deliver Him to Satan, which you cannot buy at Amazon or any other on-line retailer.
Deliver Him to Satan concerns a woman who learns the pastor of her megachurch has abused her daughter. This puts her on a disturbing odyssey where she realizes she can't trust anyone. Can't trust family! Can't trust church leaders! Can't trust her friends! Whom, or what, can she trust?
If you answered 'dreams', you're right on! This book demonstrates that even as her conscious self kept rationalizing evangelical poison, her dreams, however disturbing they might have been, never lied to her!
You can check out my ten-module course by visiting the Psycho Cinema Therapy page at YouTube.
Thank you for watching and consider donating to my patreon page and join me on what promises to be a most exciting and enlightening journey.
Module Five: The Psychology of ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Films is the most recent upload at Psycho Cinema Therapy: where film theory meets dream interpretation:
Start the whole course from the beginning by clicking the link below:
