Fascinating stuff from the always excellent online magazine Psyche, with insights of value for both fiction writers (who often find their characters “coming to life” in strange ways) and psychonauts both natural and psychedelic (who often encounter autonomous-seeming intelligences and entities in inner space):
My fascination with dream characters began while I was in college. That’s when, in the midst of a dream in which I knew I was dreaming (a “lucid dream”), I had my first encounter with an older gentleman, who tried to convince me that, actually, my experience wasn’t a dream. Over the next two decades, this man appeared in several other of my lucid as well as non-lucid dreams. He always maintained he was real, one time going as far as to suggest that we were sharing a common dream or, even more unsettling, that I was a character in his dream. Setting aside the intriguing nature of these exchanges, several aspects of this enigmatic dream figure were particularly striking, including his clever discourse, the liveliness of his gaze (which gave me a genuine feeling of “being looked at” by another sentient being), and the fact that I never quite knew what he would do or say next.
Of course, characters in our dreams can appear one-dimensional or behave like mere “extras” in a play, but others, like the gentleman I came to know, evince an intriguing degree of psychological depth — saying and doing things as if acting upon their own thoughts or feelings. Moreover, much as in waking life, we sometimes encounter people in our dreams whose actions elicit a myriad of physical and emotional responses within ourselves. Through their choice of words, facial expressions, tone of voice and mannerisms, not only can dream characters pull us into all kinds of discussions and interactions but, more amazing still, they can display convincing behaviours and feelings in response to different events taking place within the dream world.
Even in lucid dreams then, it is your dreaming brain, and not your conscious self, that is the true director and producer. Herein lies one of the great and often underappreciated mysteries of dreams: your brain is responsible for creating both your sense of self in the dream (often as a first-person participant or observer) as well as the virtual world with which you interact — including the people, animals and sordid [sic] creatures you might encounter — but it keeps key aspects of this process outside of your awareness. Alongside innumerable details of the setting (such as whether the sky is clear or dotted with clouds), this almost always includes what dream characters opt to say and do in your dreams, whether you’re lucid in them or not. . . .
The fact that dream characters can exhibit remarkable cognitive abilities, from speaking fluently (sometimes even with a foreign accent) to engaging in complex social interactions, to displaying a range of situation-specific emotions, reveals something astonishing about the dreaming brain. Alongside the unfolding story and your own sense of self, it can create a host of dream characters who not only interact with you (or among themselves), but also appear to have private access to their own subjective perception of, and reaction to, the events unfolding within the dream.
Source: “What Dream Characters Reveal about the Astonishing Dreaming Brain”
Consider pairing all of this with my exploration of the daemonic muse experience in the context of the intertwined lives of Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson, published in Paranthropology and Daimonic Imagination: Uncanny Intelligence, and included in my forthcoming book What the Daemon Said: Essays on Horror Fiction, Film, and Philosophy. All three men questioned whether the independent-seeming entities or intelligences that “communicated with” them were truly separate/autonomous or instead represented a higher/deeper level of their personal psyches. The recognition that dream characters seem autonomous and even appear to possess rich inner lives of their own is worth contemplating in this same regard.
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