Chica Dreams

From Wikipedia:
The subconscious mind is halfway between the conscious thinking mind and the unconscious mind or collective unconscious. The thinking mind would be the consciousness and is able to reason and make meaning of things. The subconscious mind is the recording mechanism that records information based on how it was perceived by the judging thinking mind. The unconscious mind is a record of things how they innately are without judgement and is thought to be outside of time and space so therefore is a record of everything in the past, present and future.

A few years ago, while exploring dream interpretation, I poured through different types of psychological texts and dream books. The problem I had with dream interpretation, was that there were particular symbols listed that represented different aspects of dream content. Within this context, every dreamer would have to be of the same culture, have the same upbringing and problems.  It just didn’t seem to fit and Jung archetypal system didn’t help matters. In fact, Jung’s system made things worse.

So I began thinking about how the subconscious works. Someone has to know how it works, right? Attempting research I found almost nothing. There are some general hypothesis out there of lay people who really aren’t sure and there are a few models people have come up with, but have technical difficulties that haven’t been worked out.

In addition, professionals in the field of psychology can’t agree on whether there is such a thing as a subconscious.

Freud had his models of personality and psychosexual development and there have been others since. There are personality theories, but it seems everyone in the business of psychology is hesitant to take on the topic of the subconscious.

Most likely because it could be a bad career move.

Academia doesn’t often accept new or really good ideas unless something has been proven conclusively.

Okay, so here is what we have to work with (facts only):
We know there is an organ contained within the cranium we term the brain. It’s a bunch of gray matter that works kind of mysteriously, but recent research has found the brain repairs itself by creating new neural connectors after it’s gone through massive trauma. It may take a long time for this to happen, but the brain actively works toward self-preservation.

The brain also runs on tiny electric impulses in constant movement from one area to another that send signals to the areas we use to get things done.

Sidebar:
While attempting to understand the concept of a subconscious and filled with the thoughts of Native American mythology, I was outside on the porch one night watching a spider work. She was building a web. Every once in a while I would run across a documentary about spiders, but I’ve never taken the time to really watch. This night and over the next couple of days I observed this spider build her web and whenever wind came up tearing a filament, she would repair it immediately.

If you watch a spider in her web, you’ll notice that when an insect or debris is caught in a web, the movement effects the whole of the web. That is, if a gnat is caught, every single filament vibrates with the notion of that gnat.

This is how I began thinking about the subconscious as a web. Like the Araneidae web, our gray matter is connected by filaments, nerves, neural receptors and chemisty. Each area is connected to every other area in some way. Hence, you have a web of a sort. And like the spider web, our thought process (subconscious, unconscious, whatever you wanna call it) is effected by everything coming into it.

I could see this. The subconscious as the term used to describe the understanding of connection within the brain.

We are sensory beings and constantly bombarded with information around us.  Everything that comes in changes us in some way. Though they may be incremental changes, they are nevertheless changes; and they may be for the better or the worse.

So it’s not as romantic as Jung’s collective unconscious. Nor is it dramatic. It’s just a good a hypothesis as any other about the subconscious and I haven’t seen many of those lately.