I am working on clarifying the importance of the first step of the FiveStar Process. In past years, I described the first step of the FSM as exploring feelings and establishing a sense of community by sharing feelings among the dreamwork participants. But I've come to realize in the last couple of years that the first step should be an assessment of the initial dissonance that the dreamer feels, and can be felt in the retelling of the dream. Ullman was perhaps the first allude to this initial state that precedes the arousal of dreaming--a state of felt tension in sleep between the dreaming self and the emergent emotional content that announces the presence of something foreign or "other," or not yet incorporated into oneself. On this basis, I recently wrote, as a prelude to a paper I'm going to be working on:
One might ask, what is the first cause of dreaming? What gives rise to the experience of imagery during sleep? While one cannot easily access the very beginning of the first impulse that gives rise to the phenomenon of dream imagery, we can imagine that there is some sense of tension that arises that makes necessary the consideration of a felt situation that faces us. It has been said that polarity underlies the foundation of consciousness, and that a dialectical process always precedes the arousal of self-reflection and consciousness. Jung referred to it as a "tension of opposites" that comes about through the awareness of the unintegrated, repressed, or emergent aspects of the personal or collective unconscious. That is, the tension can be seen as a product of encountering something that has not been integrated from one's past, in line with Freud's notion of resolving repressed early conflict as encompassing the course of development that awaits us. Or, from Jung’s point of view, it may arise out of the tension between the ego and the emergent archetypes, which offer an enhanced energy and consciousness as a part of the an integrated, yet to be actualized dimensions of the Self. In both cases, however the common element is a sense of otherness and strangeness and intrusiveness. Jung describe the process of incipient self-awareness as the presence of a dark messenger, which mythologically is represented by Hermes, who arises out of the depths of the unconscious with a thrust that is unwelcome but necessary for the conscious self to evolve further, either by repairing its brokenness from past shearing between persona and shadow, or by wrestling with the angels of our unheralded greatness that offers to expand the ego, at some risk of destabilization.
