Day Residue In Dreams

Original video by Stephen Berlin. Official website of Stephen Berlin's Lucid Dreaming Discourses: here, YouTube account here. The following text in this entry is a transcript.



Hello, everyone. (00:00:07) Stephen Berlin. I’m going to now be moving beyond my dreams of transcendence, moving in to aspects of the dream state, which should have more widespread appeal for dreamers in general, and it doesn’t matter what you use your dreams for, dream interpretation, lucid dreaming, creative purposes, metaphysical reasons, a playground for your appetites—whatever! It’s all good. Exploration of your unconscious mind. it’s all good.

Anyway, I want to bring these next three aspects of dreams up for one critical reason. Researchers are aware of these, and people that have kept dream journals for quite a period of time are usually aware of these, but the reason I consider them so important is one particular thing: (with sudden emphasis) You’re swimming in this stuff in your dreams! These three things I’m going to talk about are so prevalent in your dreams, your dreams are saturated, and saturation is the slyest of disguises! And, you know, we human beings are oblivious to the obvious. That’s why it needs to be pointed out. And these three things are… (glances aside) drumroll… (counts on his fingers) day residue, faulty logic, false remembrance.

That’s kind of disappointing, isn’t it? Residue, faulty, and false? Sounds pretty disparaging. Here I gave this big buildup, and now I got these kind of, you know, terms that kind of seem to diminish the dream state! Well, that’s purely because of the prejudice of our waking world, which thinks it’s vastly superior to our dreaming world. They’re just different states. Okay, we have residue in our dreams of the “real” persons, places, and things in the waking world. And our logic in our dreams may be faulty in dereference to the “superior” logic in the waking world, which is important to our survival. And our memories in dreams cannot necessarily be proven to be true or not, but in the waking state, we can go back, there’s usually some records kept, you know, we’re great at documentation in the waking world—so—so, this is all semantics, don’t let the kind of negative connotations of the words throw you.

Now, so let’s start with the first one. Day residue. Now, day residue is term coined by Freud, and Freud also coined a term for our dreams, the “via regia” the royal road to the unconscious, and boy, he was right on it with that. Now, normally when we talk about day residue, among dreamers, you and me, we’re usually referring to something that happened in the last day or so, you know, the very recent past—you know, today, yesterday, maybe the day before—that was pretty inconsequential during the day, and then it made this huge exaggerated cameo appearance in our dream that night!

Best thing to do is start off with an example. When I went to Standford University, when Stephen LaBerge had his annual dream retreats there, (00:03:10) his assistant at lunchtime gave me a chocolate candy wrapped in foil. And I probably, being moronic like I am, I didn’t want to have, you know, chocolate on my teeth—so, I didn’t eat it, I shoved it in my pocket. Well, then, later that afternoon, I’m reaching in my pocket to get my keys or something, I pull out my hand and…had a mess! So, I had to go wash my hand, clean my pocket…

Anyway, cut the chase, that night, I had a lucid dream, and I was flying in the lucid dream, and there was a road—a dirt road, it appeared to be—in a field. Well, for some reason, I decided to land, and I landed in the road, when I got to the road, it was mud. It was like wet mud. And then, I became like a kid, I sat down in the mud and I began to put my hands in it, squeezing it, and oozing it out through my fingers, and just playing in this mud having a grand old time, and marveling, like I always do, at the reality of it, being lucid. And I didn’t think about it when I was in the dream but when I woke up, I knew instantly (snaps fingers) that was from that chocolate melted on my hand yesterday!

So, that is classic day reside. Day residue is usually something that’s a little bit out of your habitual routine, something that doesn’t happen every day, something that’s a little bit uncommon, or if it is a common occurrence on a particular day, it got presented in some kind of an unusual or uncommon manner, and these uncommon things that are relatively insignificant—I mean, the chocolate on my hand didn’t seem insignificant to me, but, generally speaking, isn’t that critical—and it turned from this little melted chocolate into this big pit of mud. Now, you know, it could have turned into a latrine, you know, and then it could have been a much less pleasant dream.

(pause)

Although, in a dream like that, I would have been able to test the sense of smell in a dream. So, you see, I always get something good out of a dream, which I’ve actually done before and with that particular substance, and I got to tell you, the sense of aroma does work in a dream. It was (00:05:15 and invidious fragrant of fruit) it was how I wrote it down. (laughs) I even made up words for it, it was so…aromatic.

Okay, I’m getting off the subject, here. All right, so! Now, also day residue can be things of almost briefly, even hardly-hit our consciousness. You overhear a word at a table next to you at a restaurant, somebody mentions some city, and that night you dream about a city. Things that hardly make it into our awareness, our dreams really throw at us. Now, whereas day residue typically refers to the very recent past, I would have to say that, realistically speaking, our dreams are made up entirely of day residue from a lifetime of days, in our journey from the cradle to the grave, our dreams consist entirely of day residue. We’re sensory input mechanisms, and everything we bring in ends up in our dreams and process through our dreams somehow. And that’s not just persons, places, and things, that’s also storylines and fears and anxieties and emotions and love and all this stuff—it’s all in our dreams, and it all—we’d have to acknowledge, comes form our waking world.

Now, let’s use the example of a tree. Now, a tree usually isn’t considered day residue in a dream, but it was day residue as a child when you perhaps first saw a tree. But now that you’ve seen a million trees, well, you wouldn’t really call it day residue when a tree appears in your dream, you’re not likely to recognize a tree as anything significant because of that.

Another example of things being day residue: would you dream of laptop computers, for instance, if computers didn’t exist in the real world? Probably not. But this opens another question for dreamers to discuss, and that is, can you dream things that never really happened? Or, can you dream of stuff that doesn’t really exist in the waking world? Now, this is another fascinating subject and because of my dreams of transcendence and some of your own dreams, this is—you could see where we can get into a whole new realm here. So, just keep an open mind about all this stuff, that’s all I can say. That’s all we all should do.

Okay, so I think that does it for day residue, and I want you to know that ultimately I’m going to open up—when I finish these discourses, I am going to open them up to comments. But if I open them up to comments at any point in time, these wouldn’t get done. I’d get too distracted, and I’d get annoyed with people, and I’d be feeling a need to justify some comment or have to answer some criticism, and you know—(scoffs) don’t need that! So, anyway, but I will eventually, so bear with me—I want to thank you, as I always do, for being here, I’m moving on next with faulty logic, and then on to false remembrance, both interesting topics… This has been discourse number seven, so, I hope you’re becoming familiar enough with me now that maybe there’ll be a synchronicity or two in your life that will remind you of these. I hope so.