"How didst thou make division of Thyself?"—William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
One of the things that fascinates me about dreaming in general is the apparent mental autonomy that dream characters have. Yes under scrutiny they sometimes spout nonsense, but nevertheless they do seem to operate quite independently of even the most lucid of dreamers.
DC's are part of you, part of your mind/ego but yet they can seemingly have quite distinct self-contained personalities that are sometimes quite complex.
Are DC's representations of parts of your subconscious/personality which diverged from your current ego at some point in your past and are now self-contained personalities within your mind? or are they are simply an elaborate illusion that your subconscious creates to give the dreamer an animate object to interact with to create a close representation of the outside world.
The latter would be the easy/obvious conclusion, but I'm not entirely convinced.
An interesting read along similar lines is: The Dream Character as Prototype for the Multiple Personality Disorder Alter by Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., assistant professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School.
Would be interested to hear peoples' thoughts. (forgive the pun!)
That Shakespeare quote is often used in psychoanalytic theory, particularly the idea "splitting" within the Object Relations school.
I guess it can be applied to DCs. As MB says, though, DCs tend not to repeat themselves, so there must be many splits or many permutations of parts of different splits going into each
DC.
I prefer to think of DCs as clusters of constructs. If we think of a construct as a building block of any thought, idea, decision etc then we can make DCs from any combination of constructs in our minds. In fact in my dreams, DCs are often not very stable and can change as the dream goes on. Like I'm constructing them all the time. The more common clusters of constructs become our archetypes. For example I often dream of family, nice girls, powerful women, men that chase me, killing machines, formless DCs in the background, and people from school and uni long ago. They may be different each time, but they all seem to represent the same sorts of things to me.
This is an excellent thread. Very interesting.
My gut feeling on this one tells me that what DC's mean to you, will be completely dependent on what you believe them to be. I just don't believe there is going to be a one size fits all explaination.
I'm slowly coming to that conclusion too. However, I suspect the similarities between us outweigh the differences.
