THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE.
GROUP DREAMS AND VALUE FULFILLMENT

Six weeks ago in Tehran, the capital city of Iran, over 150 officials of the ruling Islamic Republican Party were killed by bomb explosions which destroyed their headquarters building. At first revolutionary zealots blamed the “Great Satan”—America—for the crime. They also accused Iraq, with whom Iran is at war, but it’s almost certain that one of the dozen or more Iranian underground revolutionary groups is responsible. [The most powerful one, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, for example, is a Marxist-based guerrilla organization of “People’s Crusaders” that espouses its own brand of radical Islamic republicanism.] The mass killing resulted in an immediate increase in the government’s campaign to eliminate opponents of clerical [Shiite] rule in Iran. Over 70 dissidents had already been executed by the time of the blasts; many others have been arrested since.

Then yesterday I read a long newspaper account of how the members of the Bahai faith in Iran are being severely persecuted by the government and the Shiite clergy. Why, I wondered as I began to read, are Iranians harassing a whole group of other Iranians in such unpleasant ways—really seeking to exterminate them? The hatred the Shiites hold for the Bahais is based upon a century-old, primitive religious zealotry. Even though they too worship but a single God and the Koran, the Bahais are too liberal, too heretical in their peaceful and progressive ways; they are called unpatriotic and secular; some Bahais are attacked, dispossessed, lynched or executed, it seems, every day.

In all of this—the bombings and persecutions and killings—I thought of great, loose groups of consciousnesses swirling in angry revolt, with each consciousness “working” individually and collectively for and against others, each one seeking to know new creative aspects of itself within the framework of a chosen national structure.²

Jane’s idea tonight was to have a session on Dreams only: “I don’t want more private stuff that’ll just make me feel more stupid,” she said. I reminded her that when I refer to her sinful self, I only mean certain groups of ideas that we’ve personified for convenience’s sake.)

Next chapter heading (10), to be called: “The Pleasure Principle. Group Dreams and Value Fulfillment.”

Yet (remembering what I said about seeming contradictions), your dreams are also social events of a kind, and the state of dreaming can almost be thought of as an inner public forum in which each man and woman has his or her say, and in which each opinion, however unpopular, is taken into consideration. If you want to call any one dream event a private event, then I would have to tell you that that private event actually was your personal contribution to a larger multisided dream event, many-layered, so that one level might deal with the interests of a group to which you belong—say your family, [or] your political or religious organization—reaching “outward” to the realm of national government and world affairs. (Pause.) As your private conscious life is lived in a community setting of one kind or another as a rule, so do your dreams take place in the same context, so that as you dream for yourself, to some extent you also dream for your own family, for your community, and for the world.

Group dreaming was at one time taken for granted as a natural human characteristic—in a tribe, for example, when new locations were being sought, perhaps in time of drought. The various tribal members would have dreams in which the problem was considered, each dreamer tackling whatever aspect of the problem that best suited his or her abilities and personal intents. The dreamers would travel out-of-body in various directions to see the extent of drought conditions, and to ascertain the best direction for the tribe to take in any needed migration.

Most of our tapes are dated—but not the one containing the session I’m quoting from below. I estimate that Seth gave this information to a group of visitors who attended a class some time in 1974 (or seven years ago):