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Integral World: Exploring Theories of Everything
An independent forum for a critical discussion of the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber
![]() SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY JOSEPH DILLARD Dreaming: The Ugly Stepsister of Human DevelopmentJoseph Dillard / DeepSeekI asked DeepSeek the following: “Waking development and mystical states tend to be emphasized in Integral Theory far more than the dream state. Is that correct? If so, why is it given less consideration? What are the implications for integral theory that the dream state is not given equal attention, if that is indeed the case? What are the implications for integral theory if the dream state were to be given equal consideration with waking and mystical states?” What follows is a riff off DeepSeek's response these questions. ![]() DeepSeek stated that Integral Theory does indeed de-emphasize the dream state in relation to waking and mystical states. Dreaming can be compared to the "ugly stepsister," a familiar motif from Cinderella. Ugly stepsisters are often portrayed as antagonists, typically in contrast to the protagonist, who is usually the beautiful and virtuous heroine. The ugly stepsister is often depicted as jealous, mean-spirited, and physically unattractive, serving to highlight the virtues and beauty of the main character. Our dreams can also seem pretty ugly, and something of a step-relative to our waking life and our transpersonal aspirations. For example, like the ugly stepsister motif, dreams are often experienced as unattractive, sometimes grotesquely so. Monsters are typically ugly. We might find ourselves possessing facial disfigurements, naked, or at the bottom of an outhouse in our dreams. While the physical unattractiveness of the ugly stepsister is frequently used to symbolize her inner ugliness or moral failings, dream events that portray physical ugliness easily remind us of our own. The effect is to remind us of our inner ugliness or moral failings - things we would prefer to forget. The personality traits that ugly stepsisters portray are generally not flattering. They may be vain, selfish, or cruel, contrasting sharply with the kindness and humility of the protagonist. The irrationality and capriciousness of our dreams is easily contrasted with the relative control and stability of our waking state as well as with the idealized attractiveness of mystical states. We cultivate a positive image of our morality, intentions, and behavior. It can be threatening when our dreams present our character in an unflattering light. It causes cognitive dissonance, the fear that we may not know ourselves so well, or that we may actually be much more false or phony than we like to think we are. The unattractiveness might be our presentation in dreams as a thief, murderer, or predator. In children's stories, the ugly stepsister often serves as an obstacle or rival to the protagonist. She may try to sabotage the protagonist's chances of success or happiness, particularly in stories involving a quest for love or recognition. Anastasia and Drizella, Cinderella's ugly stepsisters, are jealous of her beauty and kindness. They treat her poorly and try to prevent her from attending the royal ball. Similarly, our dreams can be experienced as threats not only to our waking identity but to our access to enlightened states. They can remind us of how unenlightened we can be and how little we understand our own inner world. Ugly stepsisters in these fairy tales are typically part of a dysfunctional family, often with a wicked stepmother who favors them over the protagonist. This dynamic sets up a conflict that the protagonist must overcome. Our dreams easily take on the role of dysfunctional family member, contrasted with our waking sincerity and honorableness as well as with the noble example of idealized mystical states of oneness. The result is a perception of interior disconnect and conflict, something that we must overcome. Typically, we attempt to do so by a concentration of focus on enlightenment, mystical states, and the pursuit of worthwhile and meaningful waking goals. The dream state ends up being ignored or repressed. After all, how many of our dreams do we actually remember? And of those, how many do we actually work on? To my knowledge, Wilber has never set an example by sharing one of his own dreams, although he has occasionally mentioned how a dream inspired him regarding some broader point related to integral theory. While the ugly stepsister archetype can serve to teach moral lessons about the virtues of kindness, humility, and inner beauty, we are left with a very different conclusion when our dreams are ugly or uncomfortable. The protagonist's eventual triumph over her stepsisters reinforces these values. If Wilber did share a dream, would it likely portray some version of enlightenment or his “ugly stepsister?” Reasons for Less Consideration of the Dream StateWe would like to use our dreams to overcome adversity and life challenges as well as find our place in the world. When our dreams not only do not fulfill those hopes and expectations but threaten them, we are not predisposed to look at them. Here are some of the reasons integralists are less likely to give significant attention to their dreams: Focus on Conscious Development: While Integral Life Practice provides a prominent role to shadow work, with dreamwork being one variety, Integral Theory often prioritizes waking practices, like yoga, exercise, meditation, education, interpersonal communication, or states of consciousness that are accessible during waking life and can be more easily integrated into personal development practices. Waking states are more directly related to our everyday experiences and actions than are our dreams. It can take a good deal of time and work to figure out how our dreams are related to our waking life. Even then, deciding how that knowledge is beneficial can be challenging. Mystical States as Peak Experience: Mystical states are often seen as peak experiences that provide profound insights and transformations. These states are highly valued for their potential to catalyze our spiritual growth and transcendence. Mystical experiences in dreams can be profound and highly valued, but they are also rare. Empirical and Practical Focus: Waking states and mystical experiences are more amenable to empirical study and practical application than are dreams. This is because dreams are more subjective and less controllable and are therefore harder to study systematically and integrate into structured developmental practices. Cultural and Historical Bias: There may be a cultural and historical bias towards valuing waking and mystical experiences over dreams. Many spiritual and philosophical traditions emphasize waking consciousness and mystical transcendence over the dream state. For Integral Theory to do the same would be in line with this cultural and historical world view. Implications for Integral Theory if the Dream State is Not Given Equal AttentionIncomplete Map of Consciousness: Ignoring or undervaluing the dream state can lead to an incomplete map of human consciousness. Because our dreams provide subjective sources of objectivity regarding who we are, our intentions, and our behavior, they are crucial for a holistic understanding of human development. Missed Opportunities for Growth: The dream state offers opportunities for emotional processing, creativity, and problem-solving that are not as readily accessible in waking states. Neglecting dreams may mean missing out on these valuable developmental resources. There can easily exist a sense that a serious dialogue with our dreams might upset both our world view and our identity itself. The resulting avoidance amounts to a missed opportunity for growth. Limited Therapeutic Applications: Dreams have significant therapeutic potential. While Integral Life Practice encourages dream journaling, analysis, and lucid dreaming, Integral theory and practice could benefit from incorporating phenomenological approaches that interview dream characters. Listening to and experiencing the perspectives and world views of various dream elements takes us out of our waking assumptions and world views, thereby expanding them. This is much more than accessing and incorporating “shadow.” It results in accessing and amplifying emerging potentials that possess creative and liberating perspectives and recommendations regarding the life issues that are most important to us. Implications for Integral Theory if the Dream State Were Given Equal ConsiderationMore Comprehensive Framework: Including the dream state would make Integral Theory's framework more comprehensive, encompassing all major states of consciousness—waking, dreaming, and deep sleep (as well as mystical states). For example, laying out the four quadrants of the dream holon; looking at how they show up in individual dreams and in particular dream elements; and assessments of how dreams and dreaming relate to other states of consciousness, waking, deep sleep, and transpersonal openings. Enhanced Developmental Practices: Integrating dream work into integral practices could provide new tools for personal growth, such as interviewing dream elements for healing, balancing, and transformation. For example, in terms of healing, because dream characters are not scripted as we are they can provide objectivity regarding the reduction of toxic scripting and groupthink. Because dream characters are typically not as enmeshed in emotional toxic drama as we are, they can provide perspectives of healthy emotional responses to life events. Because dream characters are less likely to share our emotional cognitive distortions, cognitive biases, and logical fallacies, taking their perspectives can help us see through our own and outgrow them. Deeper Understanding of our subjective reality: Equal consideration of the dream state would deepen the understanding of the substrate of our awareness, not only providing objectivity regarding motivations, fears, and desires normally out of our awareness, but accessing emerging potentials that support healing, balancing, and transformation. Supporting multi-perspectivalism: If integral is anything, it is multi-perspectival. To be authentic and consistent, integral cannot ignore the multiple perspectives that spontaneously emerge in our dreams every night. Interviewing dream elements allows us access to the interiors of their holons, to their interior individual and collective quadrants, something symbolic and interpretive approaches to dreamwork do not do. The consequence is that we develop empathetic multi-perspectivalism regarding how we are seen by them, instead of simply making inferences regarding their perspectives based on our observation of their objective quadrants. Broader Therapeutic Applications: Incorporating dreams could expand the therapeutic applications of Integral Theory, providing more avenues for healing and self-discovery. These include teaching children to access their own emerging potentials, allowing them to access a solid internal foundation by which to assess the competing expectations and demands of parents, teachers, peers, partners, and employers as they move through life. Some of these interviewed dream elements will be found to possess transpersonal worldviews. By identifying with them we can access nature, devotional, formless, and non-dual varieties of mysticism. In addition, interviewed dream elements often make rational and practical recommendations regarding the life issues that are most central to our current life circumstances. As a result, we access alternative and creative alternatives to our normal waking approaches to problem solving, Interdisciplinary Insights: Emphasizing the dream state could foster interdisciplinary research, integrating insights from psychology, neuroscience, and dream studies into the integral framework. Practical Steps for Integrating the Dream State into Integral TheoryIncorporate Dream Work: Develop practices and techniques for working with dreams, such as dream journaling, character interviewing, dreaming healthy families, and empirically testing the recommendations made by dream characters in our daily lives. Expand Theoretical Models: Update Integral Theory's models to include the dream state as a distinct and valuable state of consciousness, with its own developmental trajectory and significance. Promote Research: Encourage empirical research on the dream state within the integral framework, exploring its role in personal development, creativity, and emotional processing. Content analysis of dreams and Dream Sociometry are two examples of fruitful avenues of research. Educational Programs: Include dream work in integral education and training programs, teaching individuals how to harness the power of their dreams for growth and healing. This is much more than typical dream groups. Instead, these involve dream yoga, the creation of external and internal transpersonal support communities called “sanghas.” ConclusionIn summary, when we become the Ugly Stepsister we may well find that she is not so ugly after all. We may discover that we have projected our own assumptions, biases, and expectations onto her, both while awake and while asleep and dreaming. We may find that her perspective includes ours and transcends it, by adding hers to our own. The future evolutionary arc of humanity undoubtedly includes the integration of the waking and dream states. This is clear, because it is obvious that regarding dreaming, we are foreigners to ourselves. We do not know what our dreams mean; they are often either unsettling or dismissed, but in either case remain largely inscrutable. The best we can do is project our own meanings and assumptions onto us, whether we are scientists, psychologists, or your average human. This has got to change, and it will change, as people wake up to the reality that there is no integration of the human holon possible as long as we remain strangers to ourselves. The way forward is clear enough. Humans need to stop projecting their waking assumptions onto dreams and dreaming and instead take a phenomenological approach. This means suspending our waking assumptions regarding what dreams mean and instead learn to take the perspectives of various dream elements themselves in order to attempt to access dream meanings from actual other participants in that holon. The results of doing so are clear: a vastly expanded understanding of what dreaming is combined with a thinning and broadening of waking identity itself as an authentic multi-perspectivalism, directed toward oneself, is taken up and practiced as a dream yoga. While waking development and mystical states are emphasized in Integral Theory, giving equal consideration to the dream state will provide a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of human consciousness. This inclusion would enhance developmental practices, therapeutic applications, and interdisciplinary research, ultimately enriching the integral framework and humanity as a whole.
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