Nightmare in the dark issues
Dreaming in the lotus: Buddhist dream narrative, imagery and practice. Dreaming yourself awake: Lucid dreaming and Tibetan dream yoga for insight and transformation. On the one hand, dreams are considered to be unreal and deceptive, yet they are also a magical art to be mastered by the seeker, and their meanings are deemed of highest importance (Wallace, 2012 Wallace, B. In this philosophical system, the world of dream occupies an interesting paradox. Nevertheless, although all phenomena are empty of inherent existence, they are, at the same time, pure manifestations of Buddha mind. Whereas Jungian psychology is rooted, albeit loosely, in the philosophies of empiricism that presuppose a subject–object duality, Tibetan Buddhist philosophy emphasizes the empty and illusory nature of the separate self, whether in waking life or nightly dreams. (Original work published 1935, revised 1953) ). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C.G. Psychological commentary on “the Tibetan book of the dead.” In H. Notably, Tibetan Buddhist cosmology strongly influenced his thought (Jung, 1935/1989a Jung, C. Jung’s psychological theories drew on a vast number of sources, including shamanism, art, religion, alchemy, parapsychology, and Eastern philosophy.
Because dreams contain images that are not created with conscious intent, they provide self-portraits of the psychic life process and can be utilized for their objective insights into the psyche’s teleological directedness. For Jung, both myths and what Jung termed “big dreams” are expressions of psychic content emerging from the collective unconscious, which includes the entire spiritual inheritance of humankind’s evolution.
Jung turned to the stories and images of religion and mythology to explore psychic life, in general, and the religious function of the psyche, in particular. Utilizing the interpretive frameworks of Jungian-oriented depth psychology and Tibetan Buddhist psychology, this universally experienced nightmare of terror can also be undergone as a dream of transformation with potential for psychological and spiritual growth. With a Jungian perspective directed at artwork created by a person who has experienced sleep paralysis, archetypal imagery emerges and reveals elements missing from conscious view. This article considers the nightmare of sleep paralysis to be an archetypal psychic process akin to Jung’s night sea journey and having correspondence to the wrathful deities presented in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Known in the neurocognitive literature as “isolated sleep paralysis” or “sleep paralysis with hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations,” the phenomenon is fascinating to researchers across disciplines because it occurs when we are both asleep and awake, presenting fundamental questions on the subject of conscious experiences in sleep. The majority report the episodes as terrifying, mysterious, and uncanny.
Many people who experience nocturnal assaults by dark entities, demons, hags, or incubi during sleep paralysis ascribe them to evil spirits with varying degrees of malevolence. The sleep paralysis nightmare has been reported from antiquity to modernity across manifold cultures.