Different memories of the same events tell different stories, leading to associations offering different levels of insight.

“I never read. It prevents me from thinking.”
— Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac, physicist

Dreams exemplify what I’m calling first and second order associations.

Dream #1

I’m touring a factory-like facility with my son and ex-wife, but it’s the first ex-wife and the son of the second ex-wife. With us is the ex-partner in my original software business. The son is 15, my separation from my first ex happened 25 years ago, and my first software business concluded 40 years ago.

While these are distant memories—with the exception of my son who still lives with me—they left questions that have not been answered. As with most dreams, the plot was allegorical.

The factory involved assemblies of some sort. It was disorganized and maze-like, and the overall structure or purpose was unclear. It was as if all questions had been resolved—though I don’t know what the questions were—and the dream was all about keeping the group together.

My son was running around erratically. I had to follow his many detours to make sure I didn’t lose him. At first he was a child, but then he became a small toy, then a small fly, and then he disappeared entirely. I searched through cluttered halls calling his name. After passing through half a dozen strange environments I realized I’d have to go home and wait for him to be found.

Once I got home—and this was the home of the first ex where I’d lived while I was managing the business with my ex-business partner—it dawned on me that the my son’s disappearance might have been part of a scheme by the ex-business partner, and the business partner was going to extort money from me for his safe return.

I thought I should hire a private investigator to help find my son. I recall looking through the Yellow Pages under “P” but could not seem to find the right section. “Perhaps ‘detective’ would be the right category,” I thought. I found the “D” section but found no listings for “detective.”

This was unusual in another regard. Usually, I cannot manage anything having to do with alphabets or ordering in my dreams, but I distinctly remember opening the phone book to the “D” section and not finding anything under “detective.” However, I have no visual image of the actual pages, only a few flashes of letters and the knowledge that I was in the “D” section.

At that point, I ran out of ideas and the dream ended. I awoke with the dawning knowledge that I should wait for more information.

Dream #2

I’m taking photographs in a Caribbean fishing village like the one I spent time in when I was growing up. I’m viewing local people milling about in friendly groups. I watch more formal conversations between White Christian clergymen, the memory of whom I’ve invented because there were no such people in my past.

The previous night, in real life, I’d seen the movie “Some Brilliant Creatures,” a romantic family comedy about a mother, son, and an octopus. In my dream I was taking pictures by the sea and heard a voice, or I thought to myself, “Wait until the surge comes in.” Then a surge came in and I was in water up to my knees.

The dream then shifted to my scuba diving, and I was instructing a group of kids on safe procedures. I was emphasizing the difficulty of knowing your location because you don’t have shadows to help you maintain direction, and you can’t see landmarks because the visibility and your field of vision is too limited.

I remember surfacing and orienting myself. I reminded everyone that they need to pay attention to their location when they surface because the currents can move you farther than you’re expecting.

As I awoke, I was repeating these instructions to myself. I noticed my cat sleeping on the bed and heard my son speaking to his mother, who is my second ex-partner, outside his window. I had a familiar alienated feeling as I heard her footsteps crossing the deck.

First Order Associations

I’ve described these dreams, but not the meanings of them. If you were to make up stories, these narratives are weirdly possible, but the messages of these dreams are different from what first appears. The messages have little to do with the primary plot lines. Their meanings lie with the events and associations attached to the characters.

The primary plot line of the first dream follows from its “first order associations,” as I’d like to call them. These are the objective associations we draw from the setting and actions. In the first dream these were the factory, the maze, the disorder, the aimlessness, and the conflict. In the second dream these were the local familiars, the unfamiliar clergy, the sea, the children, navigation, instruction, and being under water.

These elements provide a series of stage sets, or containers. These do not carry the deeper meanings any more than stage sets reveal a plot. The real meaning, or message, relates to what these characters and situations mean to me, not the general associations we ascribe to them.

I’m calling these deeper meanings “second order associations” because their meanings depend on each other rather than any common, social, or generally understood reference. Second order associations are deeper constructions that are weakly connected to and poorly understood in the social context.

Second Order Associations

Traditional, casual dreamwork concerns itself with first order associations. In this regard, authors offer dream dictionaries and dreamers ask strangers for interpretations. This creates ideas and suggests relationships, but it lacks personal depth. As such, it’s next to useless in uncovering the deeper meanings that come from second associations.

Real dreamwork starts with second order associations. Despite being more remote and less obvious, these are the associations that have greater meaning. It’s simple: what comes first to mind in any situation relates to your immediate concerns, but what affects you most deeply are your longer lasting, underlying issues.

These deeper issues don’t manifest as clearly or quickly because,

1. they’re uncertain,
2. they’re uncomfortable,
3. they’re confusing,
4. you would like to avoid them,
5. they make you lose your direction and,
6. they can trigger trauma, fear, paranoia, despair, and anger.

The deeper concerns are far more important than your more obvious associations. Almost by definition, your ability to navigate, address, and resolve these issues has been unsuccessful.

Take the example of learning to ride a bicycle. On the surface, this is just a skill that’s useful for getting around. But at a more fundamental level, riding a bicycle involves learning, balance, and attention. It can also involve motivation, self-worth, fearlessness, and liberation.

You can intellectually address the problem of using a bicycle to get around. You can find other solutions and justify your desire to learn or avoid learning. But to address the more fundamental issues you have to physically and psychically engage the problem. As a result you might prevail.

As you know, learning to ride a bike comes suddenly as your nervous system adapts to the situation. But you also should expect a certain amount of failure, and that failure can be both traumatizing and painful, making success all the more liberating.

Confronted with learning to ride a bike, intellectualizing is your first order response. It’s safer but it will not achieve the same neural skill. Should you address the issue at a deeper level and succeed, then you will achieve more than riding a bike, you’ll also improve your situational awareness, self-confidence, balance, and neural connectivity.

Fear

Pain is a perception; fear is a conception. The two are partners though one can learn to endure pain with minimal fear. It’s also true that what we fear will be painful is not the pain we expect. When it comes to psychological pain, both the pain and the fear are in your mind. That does not mean that they’re unreal, it means that you can control them.

The expression “follow the pain” suggests that you should look at the most acute aspect of a problem in order to find a solution. Obviously, if you have a pain in your foot, then you’re most likely to solve the problem by examining your foot. But if your pain is the result of something that you’re doing, then bringing it into greater focus by doing more of it would, most likely, cause a greater problem.

For instance, if you’ve strained a muscle, straining it more will do no good. If the pain is grief or heartbreak, then immersing yourself in the grieving or heartbroken mindset will certainly make the problem more acute, but it probably won’t reveal a solution. Following the fear, on the other hand, can provide another perspective.

What is it that you fear will happen next? How have you constructed that future path, or how are you being led along it? You can answer these questions intellectually, emotionally, or neurologically, which is to say with regard to what’s triggering or compelling you.

My greatest fears pertain to heartbreak as that is where I’m most needy and vulnerable. As a mountaineer, I’ve been in many dangerous and painful situations, but it’s heartbreak that has caused the most pain and generates the most fear. And heartbreak is something we have some control over.

Grief

Today I finished the book Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow, by Maria Coffey (2003), that explored the heartbreak of the survivors of mountaineering accidents. Part of her focus was on the attitudes and actions of the mountaineers who got themselves killed, but most of her focus was on how their deaths affected their parents, spouses, and children.

I found this both sad and enlightening because I’m not sure my parents or spouses would have been nearly as devastated by my death as most of the parents and spouses interviewed in the book.

By following the pain, I mean exploring what you think and feel are your most vulnerable aspects. I encourage you to look beyond the pain you expect, in order to identify the secondary and tertiary effects of it. With effort, you can overcome your pain and your fear. In contrast, you cannot overcome the pain and fear you may cause others.

These are secondary associations. They are not the first things that come to mind, and they don’t involve your immediate actions. You may dream of being lost in a small boat in the sea, and your dream dictionary will tell you that means that you feel unsafe with your current or future situation. But at a deeper level, it may relate to the context of your life and have deeper meanings in regard to the other elements of your dream. It may mean that you have lost direction and are unsure of your identity.

Interpretation

Dreams don’t always tell a story or have a destination. They’re more like warning signs on a path to an uncertain location. My first dream was about family, both the lack of it and the risks to it. The kidnapping of my son reflected both my anxiety about my son’s future and my memories of my stupid business partner.

Sometimes these symbols are plainly obvious, but even when they are, they’re painted with many layers of meaning. My anxiety regarding my son encapsulated my anxiety with regard to other family members: his older brother, my older brother, and my emotional foundations built in my childhood.

My business partner represents how badly I have overestimated people. This has been reflected in both my marriage partners, my business, and my physics colleagues, all of whom I trusted too much. As I moved beyond physics into psychotherapy I carried greater suspicions about the competence of my fellow psychotherapists. I feared they were lacking, and I acted on this fear as I trained as a therapist.

Actions

I now understand that my physics teachers fundamentally misunderstood those aspects of the subject on which I focused. This led me to test those who were teaching me psychotherapy and to determine, in real time, that these teachers were similarly pretentious.

My fear of being exploited was well founded but, this time, I was prepared. I was not fooled by precedent and protocol and was able to see how and where most psychotherapists and psychotherapy programs fail. They do not have the insight that an involved and insightful person can achieve simply by paying careful attention.

That is not to say that everyone should do better—far be it for me to know what others should do—but rather that they could. This applies to education generally, and my dream was making indirect reference to it. Recognizing this established a greater connection between my intellectual discernment and my emotional misgivings about accepted levels of professional competence and, in that way, this strengthened my certainty in both regards.

The second dream was more about control. It was the dream equivalent of a counseling session. The dream was not about the ocean, but it presented itself in that context. In fact, the day after tomorrow I’m getting back into the ocean for a guided snorkeling weekend (https://oliviasreefdiving.com/). This will be my first serious reentry into the cold waters of the Pacific in four years. It is a serious investment with high expectations and I am anxious about it.

The second dream’s first associations related to going back into the ocean, and the dialog in the dream was quite literal and direct. But this dream’s second associations had more to do with why I plan to go back to the ocean, what I hope to find there, and how much confidence I have in the outcome.

One consequence of this dream was my going to the local, public pool to test my swimming stamina. It’s good I did because I have very little and I need to be aware of this.

Another aspect of this dream was to remind me of what I’ve been doing with my life and whether I should lower my standards regarding the people I’m willing to speak with, and how I might invest my time so that I feel rewarded without expecting anyone to meet my now high standards.

Be Skeptical

Emotionally and intellectually I enforce a high bar on conversation and ideas but, in terms of authentic listening and interest, I’m open to any curious, honest, and introspective person. Taken together, these dreams involved children, partners, professionals in my field, and people in general. The secondary associations were about how these things have, could, or might work out.

Where first order associations have focus and definition, second order associations are like a collision of thought bubbles. They are inherently permeable, uncertain, and chaotic. This is why we generally overlook them. There can be no “dream dictionary” for second order associations. If there were, it would read something like Tarot cards: full of double meanings and ambiguity, as this is exactly where fear leads.

Recognizing and understanding second order associations takes attention and patience. It takes attention because you must remember a number of undecipherable episodes and indications. Given that you probably don’t remember what you had for lunch yesterday, this will take some practice.

Once you’ve committed your most recent associations to memory, you then need to let them ferment. That means, you need to give yourself time to freely associate connections in a kind of ecological manner. Rather than thinking like a person looking for theories and conclusions, think like a plant that’s looking for a trend or reward.

Plants move toward air, water, and light and they do this by sensing a gradient. You are looking for a gradient too, a slope of many dimensions that leads upward. And as you travel up you, like a plant, are looking for novelty and opportunity, and when you sense these you branch out. Don’t think too much. It’s associations that you’re after, not conclusions.

Where it was sufficient to interpret first order associations and reach conclusions, you grow into second order associations and uncover questions. There you find perspectives, not directions. You find feelings and possibilities, not interpretations and conclusions. This is what you want.

True Ignorance is More Powerful Than False Knowledge

Interpretations and conclusions simply reflect what you already think. They are a consequence of what you already know. In contrast, feelings and possibilities reflect what you don’t know. That’s the gradient you want to sense and follow: the gradient toward greater fear and ignorance. That’s what you want to sense and follow if you want to find curiosity, courage, and insight.

I’m now an expert in quantum physics not because I know so much, but because I know how much is unknown. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t need to read most of the new work because I can see the authors don’t understand the questions. Stop looking for conclusions and success; learn to keep your direction while walking with ignorance and uncertainty.

References

Coffey, M. (2003). Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow: The Personal Costs of Climbing. St. Martin’s Press.