Why are you Looking at me that Way?
I have experienced some strange things during my nearly 58 years, and if I were to rank those experiences on some sort of Scale of the Bizarre, I would put Disjunctive Cognition near the top. There is a very good chance you have also experienced this phenomenon even if you have never heard that specific phrase.
In 2001, a psychoanalyst named Mark Blechner published The Dream Frontier. In this book, he documented case after case of people having two aspects of their cognition fail to match while they were dreaming. This happens even though the dreamer knows that there is something wrong. Try as they might, they can’t fix it. What exactly is Blechner talking about? I offer the following examples from my personal experience.
I have been posting chapters of the book I wrote about meeting Athena, the guitar player who made quite an impression on me. I have already published six chapters about her and the fallout from meeting her. I believe there are at least ten more to come. This post is about a dream I had about her a couple of years after we met, this post is about my first encounter with Disjunctive Cognition.
In my dream, I was sitting in a large chair. On my lap was an athletic African American woman with a fade haircut. I instantly knew this woman was Athena, who, in real life, is an ultra-thin Caucasian woman with blonde hair. Even though I knew it was Athena (I mean, I really knew it was her), I couldn’t change her appearance or get her to explain to me what was going on. It was very, very strange.
Blechner states that my experience is commonplace among human beings in a dream state. I certainly don’t remember ever experiencing anything like that before my dream about Athena. For obvious reasons, I woke up very confused. Since then, I have experienced Disjunctive Cognition in one other dream.
A few weeks ago, a young man appeared in one of my dreams. He did not look like himself, he showed up in the guise of Justin Roiland, one of the creators of Rick and Morty, a TV show that I absolutely adore. To complicate matters further, this young man took his own life in the recent past. Why would I have a dream about him, especially when he was “disguised” as another person? I have no idea. I am left with speculation and a sense of unease.
Disjunctive Cognition is something I could probably do without. Its strangeness is surpassed only by the disquiet I feel when experiencing it. I don’t know what to make of it, I will simply add it to the long list of odd things I have experienced and move on. As usual, the universe feels it is under no obligation to explain itself.
