The Dream Walker wrote:Most dream dictionaries are based on archetypal symbols that transcend culture, at least that's the idea. It's all from the Freudian era of psychology, and if you actually look into it, Freud's ideas, although groundbreaking, are absolutely ridiculous today.
So, I would not compare a DMT trip to a dream. Although DMT is supposedly excreted during REM sleep, I don't draw too many parallels between my dreams and my trips. As a long time oneironaut, I've had plenty of experience in describing and 'understanding' my dreams, and for the most part they are more linked to your brain's need to file away the information of the previous day to increase operational efficiency, move things from short-term memory to long-term, and things like that. DMT trips are nominally different in that it's a religious style experience, revealing great profundities of the universe, transcending consciousness, and traveling without moving. The symbols in a dream dictionary just wouldn't do it justice, and I doubt it would even be worthwhile to make one for DMT because symbols signify entirely different things for different people based on their culture and experience.
I have to correct a few things that seem to be misunderstood.
1. Archetypes are a main concept of Jungian psychology (analytical psychology), not Freudian psychology. Dreams are an important part of that Jungian psychology and considered something that the individual needs to be aware of but isn't yet. The collective subconscious is another concept of Carl Jung. Freud is the guy who based his psychology primarily on sexuality and whose personality design consists of just three instances, remember. To me Freud never made much sense because it lacked to include many phenomenoms. Freud simply was the more popular psychologist at that time, not necessarily the one with the better theories.
2. You do not only dream during REM sleep. I don't know when exactly endogenous DMT is released, but if that is only done during REM phase, then it can't be related to dreaming too strongly, because you dream just as much in every other sleep state. It's just more likely you awake during REM and remember what you dreamt then.
I think dreaming is determined by several factors. Brain chemistry is one of them, another is the dissociative state the mind is in during sleep.
3. That the brain does clean up and filing work during sleep is not proven. That is one of several theories that reflect the mechanistic worldview and it's rather unlikely, because only very very rarely we dream about events of the past day or waking reality at all. If we integrate things from our real lifes, it's mostly the last things we thought about before entering sleep and that we dream about only for a short time after falling asleep. That does somehow disprove the theory of reality processing work done during sleep. The actual state of knowledge about dreams still is: We have no idea what dreams are or what they might be good for. Well, we don't even know what waking reality is good for, though there are as many opinions as there are people.
4. Dreams can be "religious style experience(s)" as well. In fact before the mechanistic worldview became popular, dreams were considered visions from God (or the gods) and still are by various cultures and religions or religious subcultures. In the "western hemisphere", an increasing number of people practice out of body experience induction and what is reported can at least keep up with any entheogenic experience, "revealing great profundities of the universe, transcending consciousness, and traveling without moving." I had a few OBEs myself and can second that.
God is dreaming us.