Question: Hi, I'm from Oakland. I was wondering: Your thoughts on the significance, the benefits, and the implications of dreams and dreaming. And, as a related part of that question, the role of the subconscious in cognition and the development of ideas? Thanks.

LaRouche: Well, it's a complicated question, because, pathological dreaming as well as other kinds: How do you know the difference?

Those of us who have done creative work, probably have a somewhat better handle on this, than most people do. And I think the first thing, before trying to answer a question about dreaming, is you've got to give the discussion itself a mooring point. You can not talk about "dreaming," you have to have a mooring point. The mooring point: What defines sanity in dreaming? Hmm? Now, that can be approached.

Sanity in dreaming is very simple: Is that, if you are--. You know, I do a lot of work, which is long concentration. Sometimes I've been involved, sort of shut away from everything for several weeks at a time, working on one aspect of a problem. And dropping to sleep--not going to sleep, just dropping to sleep. This has obsessed me. I just shut out all kinds of things, and don't let them distract me, concentrate on this problem. So, in that state, sometimes you're successful and sometimes you're less successful.

So, now you can compare with the effect of this intensive intellectual work of that type, where you're bringing into a factor, where you say, "Am I dreaming, or not?" You become so tired, and you begin to fall asleep. You know, I used to do this kind of thing, I'd work for 48 hours without sleep and things like that. (I don't do that any more. I would like to, but I don't.) So, you get on the edge of sleep, and you would go into a state; you fall asleep, at the desk or something. Then, you would wake up, or the next day you would wake up, after sleeping, and you would have an experience in which, what you were trying to think through at the point you dropped, would suddenly come back at you, as if in a semi-polished form.

And therefore, you would be able, in that case, to determine whether the dreaming state, which you had experienced in that reflection, was rational or not. In other words, if you what you dreamed, as a new idea, was a product of your creative efforts beforehand, and it proves successful, that meant that the dream experience had been a productive process--not only it resuscitated you, but it had been productive in the sense of engendering that.

If you could do that--and I'm not suggesting that you all go off for 48 hours or 32 hours at time and so forth, without sleep, and concentrate on problems. But, I'm saying that the trick in this problem of dreaming is, is dreaming generally as a form of emotion; an emotional aspect. And what is the emotional driver of dreaming? If the emotional driver is not sane, then the dream is insane. It may reflect something, but it's not something you want to consider scientific or cognitive.

However, if you work hard, in creative work, you will find, that, often, on a problem which is very important to you, where you do a lot of intensive work, and you're getting close to defining a break-point, that you will often get suggestions, where you wake up, suddenly--you just dreamed something. You wake up suddenly. You have a sense of alarm; you've got to get that down. You suddenly realize you're dreaming, and before you wake up fully, you don't want to forget what you dreamed, so you put it down quickly. Then, you come back and look at it. And, that's the only way you can approach this.

I think most of the discussion of dreaming--. Well, see, what happens is this: It's understandable, to have this question of people who talk about dreams and immortality. People wish to say, "In my dream state, am I experiencing immortality?" Or, as Wordsworth wrote this famous poem, on the "Intimations of Immortality." Is it an intimation of immortality? People are trying to seek an individual immortality, in a way which is actually pathological. Who is immortal? Plato is immortal; Archimedes was immortal; Shakespeare's immortal: why? Because they had a dream state, which gave some kind of ontological experience of immortality? Or, are they immortal, because they developed discoveries of principle, which can be replicated by humanity, which become part of the essential culture of humanity, so that their life's work is efficient for humanity, after their death?

And this has other implications, which I won't go into here, because it involves the question of what do we mean by “time''? People think of time, in terms of lapsed time; they think in terms of clock time. And it's obvious, that clock time doesn't exist. Clocks exist; but clock time, as a principal ontological concept of time, is false. Because space and time are not things which are fixed; they are not fixed self-evidently and a priori. That, when you change the characteristic of a physical domain, the factor of time changes; the factor of space changes. When someone starts to say how old the universe is, I say, "You idiot, you don't know what you're talking about." When an astronomer says, "We have now calculated the universe and it's so many billions of years old, since the Big Bang!" What d'you mean? We had an LSD bash, or what?

We don't know: Space and time are physical magnitudes, and they are subject to change, based on the characteristics of the physical geometry of the space, and the space-time. And therefore, we don't really know much about time. We know what we don't know about time. Or, we know what ideas about time that we have, can be accounted for as idiotic; we know we work with a lapse of time; we deal with various ways, we measure the lapse of time. That is useful. But, when you start to talk about an absolute conception of time, we're in trouble.

For example, when we change the universe; when we make a physical discovery, which is valid in principle, we change the universe! Because we discover a principle which already existed--Ah! That's not exactly the change. What's the change? When we apply and make that discovery an instrument of willful human consciousness, we change the universe. So therefore, this "intimation of immortality" involves that area of discussion. Which is sometimes, among Thomas Aquinas and so forth, referred to as "simultaneity of eternity": That we live in a simultaneity of eternity. That history does not have a beginning and an end, but history is a process. We live in that process. Our mortal existence occurs in that process, but we are not simply a mortal, biological existence: We are a cognitive existence. And therefore, we're able to discover principles, and to apply them. We're able to transmit those discoveries to others, who then apply them.

We change the characteristics of the physical universe. As man becomes more knowledgeable and active, mankind will change the character of the physical universe. Because, by applying principles to the universe, which we have discovered from it, and making the use of those principles a willful application by man, we introduce those principles back into the universe in a new form.

We change the universe. Which will mean, that the rate of time, the sense of space will change--in a Riemannian way, a very simple, elementary Riemannian way.

So therefore, in this case, one recognizes that this dreaming state has become a source of speculation: Do dreams represent an ontological experience of immortality? I would suggest, not necessarily. They may, where they represent, as I said, in the case I described, in the experience of discovery, where you were able to capture something that came to you in a dream, as a result of something you were working on; and that proved to be successful, and you were able to change what you did, as a result of that, then that indicates that the mental state, which was a dream state, was being productive, and is valid.

But, I think, most of the time, what are called "dream states" are not valid. I think they rather suggest something else.

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