This is a follow-up on my last post ("Master of my fate - another AI dream)
"Another" AI dream? I can't come up with the other one right now, but AI has cropped up in my dreams more than a few times, but when it does it is never AI exactly but a subversive non-human super-intelligence that is out to control humanity, and in each of these dreams, I start out helpless but I gain personal power and integrity in the course of the dream. The reason I am writing this reflection is to make the case that dreams are trying to help us, not just survive, but thrive in the world we inhabit by pitting us against forces or entities that resemble or approximate the entities that we must contend with in our waking life, such as AI!
Please listen to what I am saying. When we go to sleep, the psyche (the intelligence of the ages that is behind our dreaming, which is informed by archetypes) is converting our waking experience into stories in which we are the protagonists, that dramatize the essence of the issues of our lives. As playwright and director, the psyche is brilliant in how it co-mingles elements of the "real world" with themes and situations that reveal our complexes or blind spots. Dreams, in other words, are a blend of the quintessentially personal and the archetypal foundation of what is most human in us, and it (the psyche) is always working for us, the way a benevolent or compassionate god would favor us, by sowing our path with synchronicities as we go.
Almost everyone these days knows, or has heard of, synchronicities, commonly understood as meaningful coincidences. In life, we might experience a synchronicity every day, and maybe not notice it, but synchronicities are simply the result of inner and outer realties syncing up. But in dreams, everything that happens is a synchronicity within the context of the dream! If I do something in a dream, the (acausal) intelligence of the dream responds by altering what happens next accordingly. The point is, the story is not planned out ahead of time. We are relatively free agents in our dreams, but our freedom is somewhat limited by the archetypes that drive the overarching theme of a given dream in which we find ourselves.
So, if you apply what I just explained to the dream that I shared above, I am being vetted by a super-intelligence that is similar to AI, that wants to find a place for me in the artificial world that it is creating, but my psychic imprint doesn't fit any of its templates. (That could be the dream of many of us who do not feel at home in mainstream culture.) So, the way it deals with me is to issue a high clearance pass with the counsel that if I accept this clearance I will be lonely (without friends or partner).
This is where the dream might end, because there doesn't seem to be any wiggle room. This AI-like super-intelligence is calling the shots. But the intelligence of the psyche that is spinning the dream is leaving my options open. In the dream, believe it or not, I am flattered to have been granted this high clearance that allows me to navigate several realities. That would be like someone high up in a global-corporation, who is too creative for his job description, who is contemplating quitting, receiving an offer (from a mysterious source) of a promotion that grants him total autonomy to come and go as he pleases, with unlimited access to passwords and top-level meetings, as long as he agrees not to quit, but stay with the corporation while pursuing whatever else he wants to pursue. In other words, he has to agree to stay in the Matrix!
In my dream I decline the offer of the highest level clearance because I realize that I am dreaming and that the AI-like intelligence, that is all-powerful in the dream, has no power over me outside of the dream.
It is this last -minute transcendent awareness that is the real top-clearance, and I would urge any creative person who is worried about having their creativity co-opted by AI to follow my example of taking their power.
What power? The power that comes with lucid dreaming.
To repeat, there were several places where this dream might have ended badly for me, but I was able to retain my free agency by not accepting my fate. When the AI-like intelligence asked me "Who are you?", my answer was (quite possibly) the one answer that guaranteed that it wouldn't be able to to pigeonhole me -- "I am a person who doesn't project". Of course, I do project, but, because I am a veteran dream-worker, and a veteran dreamer, it is part of my daily practice to own my projections and withdraw them before they muddy my sense of reality. That is my process.
This dream is a beautiful illustration of how that works, and it can also work for you.
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I want to address a common misconception about what Jung meant by "collective consciousness", which is the consciousness of the collective. That would be the consciousness that is willing to live in an artificial world. Jung also referred to the "collective psyche". That is not the same as collective consciousness, because the psyche is is not just personal. It is like the ocean, but not the unfathomable body of water that tankers sail across. It is more like the ocean that is home to dolphins, giant squid and fantastic creatures who exist outside of our purview. The psyche is like a vast watery world that is much larger than the land masses of the planet, full of mystery. When we dream, we are in the psyche but the psyche is not in our heads, it is a dimension that transcends our brains, which (our brains) are like the operating system that allows us to access the psyche and the psyche to access us.
Much of the world we live in is artificial and there are forces in the world that take advantage of our psychological / emotional vulnerability. AI is a perfect example, but it's not the only artificial intelligence out there that is out to exploit and control us. There is the media, with its invasive advertising of products that we buy but that we need like we need a hole in the head. You might think that capitalism is behind advertising but it is more sinister than that. It is a zeitgeist that serves the entrenched self-centeredness of Western civilization.
When I dream I see what is after me or what is threatening to swallow my autonomy or undermine my integrity. I get a story that helps me find myself in the great scheme of things. But the genius of the psyche is, that it personalizes my struggles in finding myself in the great scheme of things. What makes it possible for the psyche to do that is, the intelligence of the psyche is inwardly objective. Does that sound paradoxical? Darn right it does.
We were taught to think that only the outside world, what is outside of us, is objective (that is, that has has a reality that exists independent of our body and mind), but the intelligence of dreams (within the context of a given dream) is objective, because archetypes, the engines of our dreams, are independent of our egos. Archetypes, once constellated, have a life of their own. That is why Jung called the psyche that informs our conscious self, the "objective psyche". He said that it constitutes an Archimedean point -- a hypothetical, objective viewpoint. or reliable starting point (like a "God's-eye view") from which one can observe, understand, or act upon the world from a position outside of it, without personal bias, inspired by Archimedes' claim, "Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the Earth."
You may not have much of a dream life. Not many folks do any more. (i.e., What I often hear is: "I must dream but I don't remember them.") But if you exercise that muscle (the muscle of dream recall), you might be surprised how easily it will come back to you. We were all great dreamers when we were young after-all. Losing the ability to remember our dreams is unnatural and had to be conditioned, because, as I like to say, we are a species of dreamers! We had to be taught to deny this birthright.
If that conditioning were irreversible I would say we are doomed. But it is reversible, so we aren't doomed, and we do have control over our fates. And that is very good news for the New Year.
(Article changed on Dec 28, 2025 at 1:00 PM EST)
