The Dreaming Universe Quotes

“I am a product of my time, and it affects and conditions my thinking.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“In order for a reality to be created, a quantum wave had to travel out to the future, and a feedback from the hoped-for future event had to return in time to the present. This mixture of waves was responsible for the way things are now.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“It is for this reason that Jung may be right in assuming that energy is a universal concept applicable to psychic functioning as well as the physical universe. Jung then describes how energy has two attributes, intensity and extensity. Extensity of energy is not transferable from one structure to another without changing the structure; intensity of energy is. By extensity, Jung is referring to the quality of the energy. In other words, he is pointing out that there is "something" that travels from one place to another when an energy transformation occurs.

For example, a ball that is hit straight up carries with it energy continually undergoing transformation. It has kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy. The quantity of kinetic energy is continually transferring into potential energy as the ball rises. Thus at the top of its trajectory, the ball is momentarily at rest, i.e., with no kinetic energy, but with full potential energy. The evaluation of its quantities of energy is intensive but the qualities of kinetic and potential are extensive. The ball cannot transfer its kinetic quality into potential quality without changing its form by breaking up, for example, into parts.

Similarly there is a psychic extensive factor that is not transferable. Jung's concept of extensity and intensity are forerunners of David Bohm's concept of implicate and explicate order, about which I shall have more to say later. They are also forerunners of the conceptual division of the world into objects and actions of objects: subjects and verbs. They comprise a complementarity, a dual way of dealing with experience. They are hints of the division between mind and matter, physical and psychical, words and images.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“Now let me tell you why I have made this "energy" diversion. Briefly, energy is a fundamental or primitive concept. I would call it an archetype. Just like an archetype that appears in dreams, the picture of energy we have is quite different depending on how we in our societies have come to use it. I would also suggest that the concept of energy arises as part of the collective unconscious. It is universal and capable of taking many forms. The search for the energy of a system in the "out there" physical world is analogous to the search for the meaning of a dream in Jungian terms, in the "in here" of our dreaming world.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“Niels Bohr believed that the complementarity that existed between the wave and the particle aspects of nature were indications of a much deeper complementarity in which irreconcilable pairs of opposites need not be contradictory. As he once said, "the opposite of a small truth may be a lie, but the opposite of a great truth is also a great truth." Thus the ring i may be a symbol of the reconciliation of complementary parts of the whole.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“A Typical Description of an NDE (Near Death Experience)

I asked Ring to describe for me a typical NDE. He told me:

The first thing is a tremendous feeling of peace, like nothing else you have experienced. Most people say like never before and never again. People say [that it is] the peace that passes all understanding. Then there is the sense of bodily separation and sometimes the sense of actually being out of the body. There are studies that show that people can sometimes report veridically what is in their physical environment, e.g., the lint on the light fixtures above themselves. They could see in a three-hundred-sixty-degree panoramic vision. They had extraordinary acuity. Often when they went further into the experience, they went to a dark place that is sometimes described as a tunnel, but not always. They usually feel that there is a sense of motion; that they are moving through something that is vast almost beyond imagination. And yet they feel they don't have the freedom to go anywhere. They feel as if they were being propelled.

The extreme sense of motion often seems to be one of acceleration. Some describe that they have felt as if they were moving a the speed of light or faster. One NDEr described this as superluminal-moving beyond the speed of light with tremendous accelerated motion through a kind of cylindrical vortex, and then, in the distance, the person describes a dot of light that suddenly grows larger, more brilliant, and all encompassing.

Ring continued:

At this stage of the experience there is an encounter with light. It seems to be a living light exuding pure love, complete acceptance, and total understanding. The individual feels that he is made of that light, that he has always been there, and that he has stepped out of time and stepped into eternity. This feeling is accompanied by a sense of absolute perfection.

Being out of time introduces another aspect of the experience: a sense of destiny. Ring explained:

Then there is a panoramic light review in which you see everything that has ever happened to you in your life. Not [only] just what you have done but the effects of your actions on others, the effects of your thoughts on others. The whole thing is laid out for you without being judged but with a complete understanding of why things were the way they were in your life. The best metaphor I can suggest for this is: as if you were the character in someone else's novel. There would be one moment outside of time where you would have the perspective of the author of that novel, and you have a sense of omniscience about that character. Why he did the things that he did, why he had affected others, and so on. It is a profound moment outside of time when this realization occurs. You see the whole raison d'etre of your life. You may also see scenes or fragments of scenes of your life if you choose to go back to your body. In other words, it is not only that you have flashbacks but you also seem to have flash-forwards of events that will occur almost at though there is a kind of blueprint for your life. And it is up to you at that moment. You have free choice because it is often left to you whether to go back to your life or to leave it behind. The people we talk with of course always make the choice to go back or sometimes are sent back.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“Looking at what people with shamanic traditions say about dreams, one comes tot he realization that, experientially, for these people dream reality is a parallel continuum...I suggest [we] take seriously the idea of a parallel continuum, and say that the mind and the body are embedded in the dream and the dream is a higher-order spatial dimension. In sleep one is released into the real world of which the world of waking is only the surface in a very literal geometrical sense.....We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are, in fact, hyperspatial objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“I must learn to kill to be truly human. I must learn the sacred part of life that my Western culture has so well hidden from me: the meaning of death that is in life in food.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“Recent publications about Pauli, who died in 1958, indicate that he was working toward a theory of the overlap of quantum physics and psychology and that this overlap was revealed to him by dream images.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“But in the Persian dream Pauli realizes that this "second dimension" is not merely a theoretical physicist's attempt to add fuel to intellectual fires-to go beyond QM into a new, broader physics that includes the psyche-but is a hidden dimension that appears as a being. This being tells Pauli that he knows about the secret workings of nature, but he is unable to understand the difficult language of QM. He also tells Pauli that Pauli would not understand his language. But this "being" wants admittance to academia. He feels a need to enter into the dialogue of modern physics, perhaps to learn that language so that he can reveal his secrets to physicists. He pressures Pauli. This being is the spirit of matter and the hidden dimension that Pauli was seeking.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“The Buddhists tell us that all is impermanence and we, in our attempts to hold on to the illusion of a reality we create, grasp, in addiction, to whatever we can take hold of. But all becomes sand vanishing through our clenched fists. The dreamer goes on, and we being the dream of the dreamer have still another stone to quantum-leap toward. If we don't take the leap, the discontinuous nature of the dream will force us to anyway. Our future beckons to us. For what purpose, we can only surmise.

In the next chapter we shall see how the IR (Imaginal Realm) blew the mind of one of the world's greatest physicists and taught him that physics without spirit is as empty as a clenched fist of sand.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“For example, we may take as meaningful the idea that the universe is a great thought from a great mind. Or that the universe is a machine. Or perhaps we believe that the universe is consciousness or that space itself is conscious. Such statements appear to be meaningful, but they border on fantasy. By fantasy I mean that eventually the idea reaches into a realm of fuzzy definition, open to several, sometimes conflicting, visions. Indeed any idea about the universe borders on fantasy. Does this mean that we simply cannot talk about the universe meaningfully?

For example, take the idea that the universe is a great machine. Newton's laws and the observation that the planets follow these laws of motion would support the idea. But if it is a machine, then it would mean that life is a machine also. It would also mean that someone built the machine. And that the machine existed in space. But the universe encompasses all of space, so if it is a machine, it is a machine that built itself out of itself. What does that mean?

Take the idea that the universe is conscious. But if you ask where the consciousness resides, you have to say everywhere or nowhere because space-time location of consciousness is not measurable. For example, we cannot even find a seat of consciousness in our brains, no less in the whole universe. The mind does not fit into space-time, or it has no space-time coordinates, or it has them all. Is this meaningful?”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“But you cannot describe a quantum physical wave without representing it in terms of both of these kinds of numbers. And they don't mix. If you leave one of them out, you get the wrong answer. The fact that you need both real and imaginary numbers is a clue, maybe, to the "reality" of some psychoid level, a middle realm, a twilight zone. The fact that we use the term imaginary to represent these numbers is also significant and perhaps arises from some unconscious process pointing to the Imaginary Realm.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“I suggest that there is a rationale that applies to the materialization of events through dreams that I believe was hinted at by Werner Heisenberg in his book Physics and Beyond, as a middle realm between hard objectivity and soft subjectivity. Heisenberg wrote about the mystical and the scientific experience of the world as being joined in some way. He said that somewhere between the object and the subject is a middle realm, a concept that is receiving increasing interest among physicists today. It appears to me that this middle realm is Jung's psychoid realm, the tertium quid.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“The Pintupi believe that nothing was or is created by humans; it was all there from the beginning arising from the Dreaming. The conception and birth of an individual also arise from the Dreaming. Before conception, a person is said to be "sitting as a dreamtime being." This process is thought of as a transformation from the Dreaming into the actual.

Dreaming links everything together. Thus a person is linked to a place. The Dreaming provides an identity for the person, an identity that has existed before the person's birth and will exist after. Thus Pintupi come from the Pintupi land, which is their Dreaming.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“When man ceases to communicate with the dreamtime and to reenact his history, the world will disintegrate and life will wither and eventually disappear from the surface of the earth.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“The Aboriginal never hunts the animal for fun. It is unthinkable, a violation of the law. He hunts the wallaby for food. He hunts the land as the dream tells him. He dances the sacred dance of the animal he hunts.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet

“The fetal REM periods are something like "look here" messages given to the fetus, possibly resulting from these stimuli, thus training its brain for its opening appearance into the world of sights, sounds, and other sensations after birth.”
― Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet