In part two of this sleep and dream series in "6 Degrees of Cats," your favorite cat-themed history, culture, and science, let’s find out what your dreams (and your cat’s) mean…if anything!
Returning to the podcast are Jungian analyst Mary Bowen, the senior most Pilates practitioner to have studied under Joseph Pilates who explains Jung’s deepest mission for us in the unconscious and relates it to her own journey. We’ll also excavate the profound collective consciousness of The Dreamspace with The Nap Ministry founder and Bishop Tricia Hersey, M.Div., author of New York Times bestseller “Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto” (Little, Brown Spark) whose follow up, “We Will Rest! The Art of Escape” (Hachette), helps us navigate a path to true liberation and connection to self and others.
And cats, of course.
After this episode, take note of your dreams and discuss them with your cat. Or with your fellow 6 Degrees of Cats listeners on The Captain’s Log!
Support the podcast at https://ko-fi.com/6degreesofcats for as little as $1 / month for stickers, early access to new episodes and behind the scenes audio. View the show notes and more on The Captain’s Log, the companion podcast newsletter here: linktr.ee/6degreesofcats.
And check out these supplementary episodes:
- Catnaps! On Pilates and Rest with pilates practitioner Mary Bowen (Lifelong Pilates Plus Psyche with Mary Bowen) and author and activist Tricia Hersey, M.Div (The Nap Ministry)
- Felines & Fatherhood: Exploring Masculinity, Father’s Day, and the Unique Bond Between Men and Cats
About the experts:
- Mary Bowen is the most senior Pilates elder still teaching who knew and studied with Joseph and Clara Pilates. To study with Mary please visit https://pilates-marybowen.com.
- Tricia Hersey, M.Div, is the Atlanta, Georgia-based founder of The Nap Ministry, an organization that examines the liberating power of naps and author of “Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto” (Little, Brown Spark) and “We Will Rest! The Art of Escape” (Hachette), both available at major and independent book retailers. You can follow Bishop Hersey’s work on Instagram, Facebook, Threads and X via @thenapministry and learn more about her work and how to participate in a Collective Rest Experience by visiting her website at thenapministry.wordpress.com.
Producer, writer, editor, sound designer, host, basically everything*
- Captain Kitty (Amanda B.)
* with co-executive producers Binky & Snuggles and associate producer Peanut
Animal voices include:
- Binky, Snuggles and Peanut _^..^_
Music:
- Leathered: "Look Alive" © 2025
- Additional sound effects from Pixabay.com
Logo design:
- Edward Anthony © 2025 (Instagram: itsmyunzii)
Research used:
- Bartels, M. (2024, March 2). What do dogs and cats dream about?. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-dogs-and-cats-dream-about/
- Bautze-Picr
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome back to 6 Degrees of Cats, the world's number one and only.
(00:27):
That themed culture, history, and science podcast in which I, Captain Kitty, aka Amanda B,
and my feline co-executive producers Binky, Snuggles, and Peanut, navigate the weird
wild world from the past to the present, with the help of an exceptional array of guest
experts.
All aboard!
Sorry about that, folks.
(00:55):
My dreams are bizarre.
How about yours?
Apparently, the average human has multiple dreams at night, though based on a few studies
only a quarter of us or so can actually recall them, so who knows.
As for my dreams, obviously some of them do, indeed, have cats, sometimes my cats, and
sometimes cats I've never even met, at least in this life.
(01:18):
I wonder if it's the same for the rest of the team?
And seems like in the house Binky is the biggest dreamer based on the many times he's
either licked his chops mid slumber or startled himself awake.
Surely disappointed to see that, yes, Peanut is still here and no, there's not a large
roasted chicken in front of him.
(01:40):
Since we already established that cats are the champions of napping and rest, in this episode
of 6 Degrees of Cats, let's follow that dream cat into the realm of the unconscious.
I mean, hopefully you'll remain conscious during this episode.
The team and I do our best to keep things entertaining.
(02:10):
It would take someone far more educated and erudite to break down what consciousness is.
In fact, there's a entire industry of people trying to do just that in the fields of machine
learning and artificial intelligence or whatever.
But you know what, it's my podcast.
Let me take a stab at it.
(02:33):
I think it's safe to say that if you're able to process information from your five senses
and respond to your cats increasingly urgent paw punches for roasted chicken, you're conscious.
When the regions of the brain that coordinate things that we do from say, planning your
(02:55):
cat's birthday party to figuring out how to get your cat to the vet and pay off to $5,000
vet bill that turns out to be in digestion.
(Snuggles)
Those regions of the brain are offline because you're, you know, sleeping or in a coma
worst case scenario.
In that instance, you're unconscious.
(03:19):
And if none of the brain regions are active, then you're clinically dead.
Sleep researchers have captured activity during our unconscious state on brain imaging
scans such as MRIs and PET scans.
But beyond that, we're still figuring out what exactly is going on up there.
And why stuff is still going on even when we're sleeping.
(03:42):
The stuff I'm talking about, at least for this episode, dreams.
In our contemporary industrialized culture, one of the first more widespread theories on
dreams can be traced back to one orally-fixated Viennese mental health practitioner, Mr. Sigmund
(04:08):
Freud.
Mr. Freud or Dr. Freud's most famous theory explained the dynamics of the human mind with
his iceberg theory.
At the tip of the iceberg is the conscious.
Here, thoughts and perceptions can be observed and reported.
(04:31):
At this level, someone, not you or me, of course, let's call him Brutus, doesn't like cats.
Why?
"They're a*****s, man!"
But it's not just about cats, according to Freud.
(04:51):
Below the surface, there's the pre-conscious, which I guess is where our memories live.
So maybe Brutus got off the wrong foot with cats when he pulled Frisky's tail and got scratched.
According to Freud, deep below the surface, underneath that pre-conscious, there is the
(05:12):
sub-conscious, the primary instincts and drivers of our emotions.
Freud might say for Brutus, cats represent his childhood feelings of rejection by his mother,
who didn't hug him during the times he was hurt or scared.
So the next time someone says they don't like cats, you truly can
(05:35):
ask, "Who hurt you?"
Now that we've kind of explained the sub-conscious, let's talk about dreams.
Because according to Freud, dreams are the window into the sub-conscious.
Dreaming about a tree?
(05:56):
That's a penis.
Dreaming about showing up naked to deliver a final presentation for a class you didn't
even know you were in?
That's also a penis.
And if you want to murder your father and marry your mother...
I'm just kidding, I'm really not.
In all seriousness, you can check out the show notes for more context and accurate facts
on these nerdy jokes about Freud.
(06:22):
I'm probably undermining Freud's impact a little bit.
His reach extends beyond daddy issues, penis envy, diagnosing your ex as an egomaniac, blaming
his cold mother for his narcissism and the existence of the cigar industry.
Freud's therapeutic approach did set up a model of treatment that's now a mainstream therapeutic
(06:44):
intervention, you know, for someone lying on a couch talking about their feelings.
Try it sometime, it sometimes works.
Anyway, his work and theories inspired future generations of mental health workers, including
one of his most famous pupils.
Carl Jung
(07:05):
We happen to have a Jungian expert in the house who will provide a much better synopsis of
his impact on psychology.
What Jung gave us was the structure of the psyche and he called that spirit that we have in
our unconscious huge, huge archetype.
He called it an "animus."
(07:26):
("-us" is male) what the mother's influence for the male is he called "anima."
There are two parts of us that are in unconscious.
If you recognize that voice, you're right.
I'm so glad to have returning expert Pilates Elder Mary Bowen.
(07:47):
I was somebody else with the first husband and then with the second husband, his name is
Alex Martin and I would have been Mary Martin.
Well, I don't know if you know how famous a musical star she was.
I was also a musical comedy and I thought, no, I would have to sing instead of speak.
(08:07):
So I went back to my own name.
So I'm Mary Bowen forever.
Mary in addition to her title as the most senior active Pilates teacher to have studied
directly under Joe and Clara Pilates is also an established Jungian analyst.
(08:30):
The reason I started with a Jungian psychoanalyst, my friends from Yale, we'd been in the Yale
drama school together and we'd been doing shows together, and they were all kind of,
who am I?
And they had found this wonderful Dutchman who would come and was married to an American
woman and they went to him for a dream work.
(08:53):
At that point, I was funny all the time.
I could be funny about anything.
You didn't need a script for me.
And I also was a singer and I could do lots of things for theater and my friends and everybody
knew me said, you can have the big time.
(09:17):
I went to meet him.
I sat in that chair opposite the dignified older man.
I don't know if I ever asked the question.
After an hour with this man, I was home.
I was where I needed to be.
I was meant to take the journey in her, not out.
(09:38):
I would just give in my life to everybody that made them laugh, but I would never become
Mary.
So that's how I started.
I went to all the teachers.
You know, I never thought I'd teach.
Never thought I'd be a dream analyst.
(10:03):
And then my dreams began to show that people were coming soon.
And they were all the way around the city block, one stack in the New York City.
I said to my analyst, what do you think that is?
And he said, "we'll just have to see?"
Or by the end of that next year, I had 23 weekly clients.
(10:29):
It was being hatched and I was being grown from the inside out.
Now that's so wonderful because your ego is not invested.
Your spirit is being receptive.
And it's such a beautiful way to be able to live from the inside out.
The bigger work is finding where you are and how you are in your unconscious and working
(10:56):
with it.
Young diverged from his mentor in his conceptualization of the unconscious and relative disregard
of the subconscious.
His research went beyond the borders of Western Europe.
It led him to observe motif, themes and stories that he felt indicated an ancient, collective
(11:20):
unconscious.
The shared themes of flood stories, resurrection myths, and other recurring cultural narratives
and symbols, he called archetypes.
And it's his theories on dreams that bring us to cats and the unconscious.
(11:43):
In the unconscious, you were able to give us these structures of the psyche for the first
time so that all of us can really know why we are the way we are understand better.
The dream tells you what it wants you to know.
Every dream tells you what you don't know or it wouldn't bother.
(12:07):
And if it repeats and repeats and repeats, then you are really stuck in the mud because you
are not getting it.
So if you see a cat in your dreams, the cat, if you dream about it, you are dreaming about
the feminine.
(12:27):
And people who hate cats are something, they are having trouble with the feminine, you know,
and it's very deep.
Fascinating, if not surprising.
This reinforces some of the historic cultural motifs associated with fearless catas relating
to women and cats that we've touched on a bit in the past few seasons and episodes.
(12:54):
The cat puts itself totally first.
You cannot train it, you accept it, you meet it on its own terms.
This is the cat.
Each one is their own special cells and they never fake, they never deceive you, totally honest
(13:18):
and they say beautiful their whole lives.
These are your things we need to dare to be like.
Can understanding our dreams help us in our waking state?
(13:42):
Our dreams solely in the domain of the unconscious?
Let's continue serving the landscape of the dream space.
The lay back, pet your cat if they're nearby and we'll get right into it after the break.
(14:17):
Before the break, we touched on dreams from the psychodynamic theory of human behavior and
motivations, courtesy doctors Freud and Jung.
If you're a question through your dreams, you can converse with that part of you and you
get it born your whole life.
One part is going to be at the bottom of the unconscious itself, not even born.
(14:42):
So your life is getting that born more and more.
(15:11):
I'm now learning because I'm also a very much a science nerd that neuroscience, what
the dreamy it is and what happens in the brain when we're sleeping is that our brain is
taking a moment to be able to process all the things.
I'm so glad to reintroduce the Bishop of The Nap Ministry, Tricia Hersey.
(15:37):
In our last episode on rest, we shared the transformative impact of rest on the system.
And Tricia was just getting into what she called the dream space.
(15:59):
I love the dream space.
So I grew up in the Black church with my dad being a preacher.
I'm a lover in Martin Luther King, Jr., who's one of my favorite theologians and activists.
I went to school just being like, I'm an artist.
I want to study theology, not even really having much of background, anything except for
(16:19):
being raised in the church, church in the religious identity that I had became more of
like my cultural North Star, but I just dug into it really coming from an artist's list
and coming from an activist's list.
So I never thought I would be creating an organization around rest.
(16:42):
I just knew that I was exhausted.
When I began resting for myself, I was getting so many downloads and dreams and my body and
spirit, I was giving these ideas for this entire ministry.
I was making all these deep connections between what I was studying in school and what
my life was.
(17:06):
I called it a dream space immediately because I was getting ideas and dreams with my ancestors.
My grandmother was popping up and we were resting together in our dreams and the ideas of so
many things came together.
(17:26):
Tricia's experiences are not only profoundly spiritual, they're also backed by some of
the latest neurobiological research.
I feel like the dream space is also a place of deep healing.
I was at a science conference, one of the scientists said that dreaming is the poor man's
(17:47):
therapy.
We're able to work things out in our dreams so the brain can be getting to process things
that have happened in our life.
Our brain is healing from trauma, there's a chemical in the brain when you sleep.
The scientist Trisha referenced, Dr. Robert Stickgold of Harvard University, is a leading researcher
(18:07):
in sleep and dreams.
His field has established a strong positive relationship between our mental health and the
biomechanisms of dreaming.
And mammals, most dreams, take place during a critical phase of sleep, demarcated by rapid
(18:29):
eye movement, dream sleep.
Without going into too much detail about the various regions of the brain and their features,
there's evidence that dreaming itself has a specific role in helping us make sense
of the information we absorbed in our waking hours.
Moving away from Freud's theory of the origins of dreams and the subconscious, they have
(18:52):
emerged two dominant theories on dreams and the brain.
The first, from 1977, by a Hobson and McCarley, is called the activation synthesis hypothesis.
A lot of the more sophisticated understanding of the activated regions of the brain during
a non-ream dreaming build off of this theory and it kind of bypasses.
(19:25):
The other is theory.
This threat simulation theory posits that dreams are a feature from our earlier days, fending
(19:47):
off saber-toothed tigers and trying not to die.
According to this theory, dreaming allows our brains to synthesize stressful or ambiguous
experiences during our waking hours and that enables us to more effectively process
that scary scenario again in our next waking experience or something like that.
It's like we're rehearsing in our brains.
(20:10):
Some experiments on lab rats, by which I mean undergraduate students at liberal arts colleges,
have shown that this may apply to cats.
Yes, the dream state of cats has sort of been observed.
When your kitty twitches or moves or even verbalizes mid-cat nap, it's likely the case that
(20:35):
she's often some dreamscape.
She finally catching that pigeon or managing to break into the 40 pound bag of friskeys.
But then again, do cats dreams even resemble ours?
(20:58):
Philosopher David Pena Guzman wrote a book on the dreams of animals, mostly mammals, due
to our similar neurological structures relative to reptiles or mollusks.
Dr. Pena Guzman points out that an animal's dreams are likely to involve the primary sensory
data that they evolved to prioritize.
(21:21):
As a human, or at least as far as I know, when I dream about a cat, I see a kitty.
But since for cats, smell is as informative as sight, perhaps if Binky's dreaming of me,
he doesn't see me, he's smelling me.
(21:41):
For the record, I smell like marshmallows and cotton candy, okay?
For now, this remains speculative because, you know, I can't interview Binky.
He doesn't have a dream diary or anything.
And I haven't found a study that monitors cats during REM sleep and notices if the regions
(22:02):
related to scent processing are activated.
Which would be my next step if cats were to consent to this kind of study, of course, it's
all about informed consent.
This is all compelling evidence that dreams are a feature, not a bug of evolution in mammal
brains.
(22:25):
Young was definitely on to something with dream work, mostly thanks to pointers from the
civilizations and cultures he studied to come to his unique and specific worldview.
Which might have included the five dreams of the Bodhisattva, which revealed the past
to enlightenment and his role in this process.
Maybe the Ojibwe tribe, whose dream catchers, reflect the importance of dreams in their
(22:49):
culture.
Certainly, the temples of Greco-Roman god Serapis, the god of dreams, and the ancient dream
incubation ritual to clarify and invoke the meanings and messaging of dreams.
(23:12):
Almost every known civilization wondered about the meaning of dreams.
It's impossible to really quantify and measure this.
Now we say metaphysical understanding of dreams.
We're still not sure what to make of them.
We in the industrialized world now have more structured, some may say sophisticated ways
(23:35):
to describe our physical world and some of its machinations.
You know, the earth rotates around the sun.
If you plan to see it in the right conditions, it'll grow, cats always land on their feet,
electricity, stuff.
Life has become, for many, slightly more manageable, but unfortunately, looking around in the
(23:57):
year and now, it's still a volatile, unpredictable world.
We're actually still feeling the same feelings that our ancestors felt.
And that's why it's just really amazing and restorative to talk about the dream space.
Take it away, Tricia.
(24:18):
I say the more you sleep, the more you go into a dream space, the more you wake up to see
what is really happening.
In my book, I talk about what it means to be an escape artist from the systems.
It's called "We Will Rest (24:31):
The Art of Escape".
And it talks about how to build these escape plans.
Perhaps in parallel with Jung's collective unconscious, we can cultivate this collective
consciousness within the dream space.
(24:52):
We have to build together.
It has to be in a community.
Community can look like 20 people.
We can look like 30 people.
We can look like two people.
My dad was a community organizer in activists.
He was a union organizer.
With the union, he was part of the international brothers of electrical workers.
They would be striking and they would come together and I would secretly be in the house
(25:15):
and be fighting them in the front room, fighting and scheming about the next strike that was
going to happen.
My mother's in the back cooking, feeding them, and they worked together to support each other
when they were on strike.
By understanding the brilliance and radical nature of community and how it will save us.
(25:36):
On August 23, 1968, one of the most famous dreamers in the United States stood on the steps
of the Lincoln Memorial and said, "I have a dream."
Dr. King's beautiful dream of unity, connection, and radical transformation to combat, anti-Blackness
(26:01):
and all forms of oppression.
It's an ancient one.
And I think it's why his message continues to resonate across time, cultures and communities,
all working in synchrony to wake us up from the relentless systems that separate us from
ourselves and others.
(26:24):
I'm going to shout out folks like Bell Hooks, Audre Lorde, Malcolm X, Grace Lee Boggs,
and of course Bishop Tricia Hersey.
Just like these and you and people you know who continue the work.
We aren't alone.
We're a chorus, raising our voices collectively to sustain this ancient melody together.
(26:45):
And in order to do so.
Go back and get into the dream space and tap into these beautiful ideas.
And may your kiddies be your mascot.
You know cats don't try to learn anything, they're just being who they are.
(27:06):
If you let that happen, you have a happier life.
You're not pushing, you're so driven.
Folks, I know we're all out here trying real hard.
(27:28):
We're all out here.
To keep a roof over our heads. To keep up with the Joneses.
To stay a step ahead of the widening gap between getting by and struggling.
And I hope in our own ways, we dismantle this machine.
It won’t be overnight. It might take a lifetime, or more.
But take it from any cat you come across,
(27:50):
sunbathing and resting,
living moment to moment.
If they can dream, we can too.
I'd like to thank my wonderful experts, Mary Bullet, Trisha Horsey.
While the opinions are my own, the research and work is theirs.
(28:12):
If you'd like to learn more about them, please check out our show notes,
which also include the references and research that went into this episode.
And if you loved it, please do keep sharing our podcast
and give us a five-star rating wherever you listen and write us a glowing review.
To support the podcast, definitely check out our show notes
or head to any of our accounts to click on the appropriate links to donate.
(28:34):
For as little as a dollar a month, you can help keep us in ship shape
and in the collective, unconscious, and the dream space.
Remember, everything is connected.
6 degrees of cats is produced, written, edited, and hosted by yours truly, Captain Kitty, aka Amanda B.
(28:56):
Please subscribe to our mailing list by going to l-i-n-k-t-r.e/6 degrees of cats
or look us up on all those social media platforms.
You'll be first in line for the extra audio and more treats if you connect with us there.
All episodes are dedicated to the misunderstood, the marginalized, the resilient, and the weird.
(29:19):
And of course, all the cats we've loved and lost.
I have known you one cat, now, Amanda, you would not believe this.
I've had cats we've had such love affairs and they've been so psychic and we've had every kind of thing.
(29:43):
This cat could care less.
This is a big, four-geneer-old, long-haired, golden, born in the wild.
He's just simply called Jack.
He's not affectionate.
He did kiss me once in the last few months, which was the first time ever in 12 years.
I mean, something I'm doing right, but he's not there for me.
(30:06):
He's there for himself.
I honor him as if he is the king, as if he's God Almighty.
He's with him, what he needs is he needs that, I give it to him.
And I think this is my last cat of my life, baby.
Welcome back to 6 Degrees of Cats, the world's number one and only.
(00:27):
That themed culture, history, and science podcast in which I, Captain Kitty, aka Amanda B,
and my feline co-executive producers Binky, Snuggles, and Peanut, navigate the weird
wild world from the past to the present, with the help of an exceptional array of guest
experts.
All aboard!
Sorry about that, folks.
(00:55):
My dreams are bizarre.
How about yours?
Apparently, the average human has multiple dreams at night, though based on a few studies
only a quarter of us or so can actually recall them, so who knows.
As for my dreams, obviously some of them do, indeed, have cats, sometimes my cats, and
sometimes cats I've never even met, at least in this life.
(01:18):
I wonder if it's the same for the rest of the team?
And seems like in the house Binky is the biggest dreamer based on the many times he's
either licked his chops mid slumber or startled himself awake.
Surely disappointed to see that, yes, Peanut is still here and no, there's not a large
roasted chicken in front of him.
(01:40):
Since we already established that cats are the champions of napping and rest, in this episode
of 6 Degrees of Cats, let's follow that dream cat into the realm of the unconscious.
I mean, hopefully you'll remain conscious during this episode.
The team and I do our best to keep things entertaining.
(02:10):
It would take someone far more educated and erudite to break down what consciousness is.
In fact, there's a entire industry of people trying to do just that in the fields of machine
learning and artificial intelligence or whatever.
But you know what, it's my podcast.
Let me take a stab at it.
(02:33):
I think it's safe to say that if you're able to process information from your five senses
and respond to your cats increasingly urgent paw punches for roasted chicken, you're conscious.
When the regions of the brain that coordinate things that we do from say, planning your
(02:55):
cat's birthday party to figuring out how to get your cat to the vet and pay off to $5,000
vet bill that turns out to be in digestion.
(Snuggles)
Those regions of the brain are offline because you're, you know, sleeping or in a coma
worst case scenario.
In that instance, you're unconscious.
(03:19):
And if none of the brain regions are active, then you're clinically dead.
Sleep researchers have captured activity during our unconscious state on brain imaging
scans such as MRIs and PET scans.
But beyond that, we're still figuring out what exactly is going on up there.
And why stuff is still going on even when we're sleeping.
(03:42):
The stuff I'm talking about, at least for this episode, dreams.
In our contemporary industrialized culture, one of the first more widespread theories on
dreams can be traced back to one orally-fixated Viennese mental health practitioner, Mr. Sigmund
(04:08):
Freud.
Mr. Freud or Dr. Freud's most famous theory explained the dynamics of the human mind with
his iceberg theory.
At the tip of the iceberg is the conscious.
Here, thoughts and perceptions can be observed and reported.
(04:31):
At this level, someone, not you or me, of course, let's call him Brutus, doesn't like cats.
Why?
"They're a*****s, man!"
But it's not just about cats, according to Freud.
(04:51):
Below the surface, there's the pre-conscious, which I guess is where our memories live.
So maybe Brutus got off the wrong foot with cats when he pulled Frisky's tail and got scratched.
According to Freud, deep below the surface, underneath that pre-conscious, there is the
(05:12):
sub-conscious, the primary instincts and drivers of our emotions.
Freud might say for Brutus, cats represent his childhood feelings of rejection by his mother,
who didn't hug him during the times he was hurt or scared.
So the next time someone says they don't like cats, you truly can
(05:35):
ask, "Who hurt you?"
Now that we've kind of explained the sub-conscious, let's talk about dreams.
Because according to Freud, dreams are the window into the sub-conscious.
Dreaming about a tree?
(05:56):
That's a penis.
Dreaming about showing up naked to deliver a final presentation for a class you didn't
even know you were in?
That's also a penis.
And if you want to murder your father and marry your mother...
I'm just kidding, I'm really not.
In all seriousness, you can check out the show notes for more context and accurate facts
on these nerdy jokes about Freud.
(06:22):
I'm probably undermining Freud's impact a little bit.
His reach extends beyond daddy issues, penis envy, diagnosing your ex as an egomaniac, blaming
his cold mother for his narcissism and the existence of the cigar industry.
Freud's therapeutic approach did set up a model of treatment that's now a mainstream therapeutic
(06:44):
intervention, you know, for someone lying on a couch talking about their feelings.
Try it sometime, it sometimes works.
Anyway, his work and theories inspired future generations of mental health workers, including
one of his most famous pupils.
Carl Jung
(07:05):
We happen to have a Jungian expert in the house who will provide a much better synopsis of
his impact on psychology.
What Jung gave us was the structure of the psyche and he called that spirit that we have in
our unconscious huge, huge archetype.
He called it an "animus."
(07:26):
("-us" is male) what the mother's influence for the male is he called "anima."
There are two parts of us that are in unconscious.
If you recognize that voice, you're right.
I'm so glad to have returning expert Pilates Elder Mary Bowen.
(07:47):
I was somebody else with the first husband and then with the second husband, his name is
Alex Martin and I would have been Mary Martin.
Well, I don't know if you know how famous a musical star she was.
I was also a musical comedy and I thought, no, I would have to sing instead of speak.
(08:07):
So I went back to my own name.
So I'm Mary Bowen forever.
Mary in addition to her title as the most senior active Pilates teacher to have studied
directly under Joe and Clara Pilates is also an established Jungian analyst.
(08:30):
The reason I started with a Jungian psychoanalyst, my friends from Yale, we'd been in the Yale
drama school together and we'd been doing shows together, and they were all kind of,
who am I?
And they had found this wonderful Dutchman who would come and was married to an American
woman and they went to him for a dream work.
(08:53):
At that point, I was funny all the time.
I could be funny about anything.
You didn't need a script for me.
And I also was a singer and I could do lots of things for theater and my friends and everybody
knew me said, you can have the big time.
(09:17):
I went to meet him.
I sat in that chair opposite the dignified older man.
I don't know if I ever asked the question.
After an hour with this man, I was home.
I was where I needed to be.
I was meant to take the journey in her, not out.
(09:38):
I would just give in my life to everybody that made them laugh, but I would never become
Mary.
So that's how I started.
I went to all the teachers.
You know, I never thought I'd teach.
Never thought I'd be a dream analyst.
(10:03):
And then my dreams began to show that people were coming soon.
And they were all the way around the city block, one stack in the New York City.
I said to my analyst, what do you think that is?
And he said, "we'll just have to see?"
Or by the end of that next year, I had 23 weekly clients.
(10:29):
It was being hatched and I was being grown from the inside out.
Now that's so wonderful because your ego is not invested.
Your spirit is being receptive.
And it's such a beautiful way to be able to live from the inside out.
The bigger work is finding where you are and how you are in your unconscious and working
(10:56):
with it.
Young diverged from his mentor in his conceptualization of the unconscious and relative disregard
of the subconscious.
His research went beyond the borders of Western Europe.
It led him to observe motif, themes and stories that he felt indicated an ancient, collective
(11:20):
unconscious.
The shared themes of flood stories, resurrection myths, and other recurring cultural narratives
and symbols, he called archetypes.
And it's his theories on dreams that bring us to cats and the unconscious.
(11:43):
In the unconscious, you were able to give us these structures of the psyche for the first
time so that all of us can really know why we are the way we are understand better.
The dream tells you what it wants you to know.
Every dream tells you what you don't know or it wouldn't bother.
(12:07):
And if it repeats and repeats and repeats, then you are really stuck in the mud because you
are not getting it.
So if you see a cat in your dreams, the cat, if you dream about it, you are dreaming about
the feminine.
(12:27):
And people who hate cats are something, they are having trouble with the feminine, you know,
and it's very deep.
Fascinating, if not surprising.
This reinforces some of the historic cultural motifs associated with fearless catas relating
to women and cats that we've touched on a bit in the past few seasons and episodes.
(12:54):
The cat puts itself totally first.
You cannot train it, you accept it, you meet it on its own terms.
This is the cat.
Each one is their own special cells and they never fake, they never deceive you, totally honest
(13:18):
and they say beautiful their whole lives.
These are your things we need to dare to be like.
Can understanding our dreams help us in our waking state?
(13:42):
Our dreams solely in the domain of the unconscious?
Let's continue serving the landscape of the dream space.
The lay back, pet your cat if they're nearby and we'll get right into it after the break.
(14:17):
Before the break, we touched on dreams from the psychodynamic theory of human behavior and
motivations, courtesy doctors Freud and Jung.
If you're a question through your dreams, you can converse with that part of you and you
get it born your whole life.
One part is going to be at the bottom of the unconscious itself, not even born.
(14:42):
So your life is getting that born more and more.
(15:11):
I'm now learning because I'm also a very much a science nerd that neuroscience, what
the dreamy it is and what happens in the brain when we're sleeping is that our brain is
taking a moment to be able to process all the things.
I'm so glad to reintroduce the Bishop of The Nap Ministry, Tricia Hersey.
(15:37):
In our last episode on rest, we shared the transformative impact of rest on the system.
And Tricia was just getting into what she called the dream space.
(15:59):
I love the dream space.
So I grew up in the Black church with my dad being a preacher.
I'm a lover in Martin Luther King, Jr., who's one of my favorite theologians and activists.
I went to school just being like, I'm an artist.
I want to study theology, not even really having much of background, anything except for
(16:19):
being raised in the church, church in the religious identity that I had became more of
like my cultural North Star, but I just dug into it really coming from an artist's list
and coming from an activist's list.
So I never thought I would be creating an organization around rest.
(16:42):
I just knew that I was exhausted.
When I began resting for myself, I was getting so many downloads and dreams and my body and
spirit, I was giving these ideas for this entire ministry.
I was making all these deep connections between what I was studying in school and what
my life was.
(17:06):
I called it a dream space immediately because I was getting ideas and dreams with my ancestors.
My grandmother was popping up and we were resting together in our dreams and the ideas of so
many things came together.
(17:26):
Tricia's experiences are not only profoundly spiritual, they're also backed by some of
the latest neurobiological research.
I feel like the dream space is also a place of deep healing.
I was at a science conference, one of the scientists said that dreaming is the poor man's
(17:47):
therapy.
We're able to work things out in our dreams so the brain can be getting to process things
that have happened in our life.
Our brain is healing from trauma, there's a chemical in the brain when you sleep.
The scientist Trisha referenced, Dr. Robert Stickgold of Harvard University, is a leading researcher
(18:07):
in sleep and dreams.
His field has established a strong positive relationship between our mental health and the
biomechanisms of dreaming.
And mammals, most dreams, take place during a critical phase of sleep, demarcated by rapid
(18:29):
eye movement, dream sleep.
Without going into too much detail about the various regions of the brain and their features,
there's evidence that dreaming itself has a specific role in helping us make sense
of the information we absorbed in our waking hours.
Moving away from Freud's theory of the origins of dreams and the subconscious, they have
(18:52):
emerged two dominant theories on dreams and the brain.
The first, from 1977, by a Hobson and McCarley, is called the activation synthesis hypothesis.
A lot of the more sophisticated understanding of the activated regions of the brain during
a non-ream dreaming build off of this theory and it kind of bypasses.
(19:25):
The other is theory.
This threat simulation theory posits that dreams are a feature from our earlier days, fending
(19:47):
off saber-toothed tigers and trying not to die.
According to this theory, dreaming allows our brains to synthesize stressful or ambiguous
experiences during our waking hours and that enables us to more effectively process
that scary scenario again in our next waking experience or something like that.
It's like we're rehearsing in our brains.
(20:10):
Some experiments on lab rats, by which I mean undergraduate students at liberal arts colleges,
have shown that this may apply to cats.
Yes, the dream state of cats has sort of been observed.
When your kitty twitches or moves or even verbalizes mid-cat nap, it's likely the case that
(20:35):
she's often some dreamscape.
She finally catching that pigeon or managing to break into the 40 pound bag of friskeys.
But then again, do cats dreams even resemble ours?
(20:58):
Philosopher David Pena Guzman wrote a book on the dreams of animals, mostly mammals, due
to our similar neurological structures relative to reptiles or mollusks.
Dr. Pena Guzman points out that an animal's dreams are likely to involve the primary sensory
data that they evolved to prioritize.
(21:21):
As a human, or at least as far as I know, when I dream about a cat, I see a kitty.
But since for cats, smell is as informative as sight, perhaps if Binky's dreaming of me,
he doesn't see me, he's smelling me.
(21:41):
For the record, I smell like marshmallows and cotton candy, okay?
For now, this remains speculative because, you know, I can't interview Binky.
He doesn't have a dream diary or anything.
And I haven't found a study that monitors cats during REM sleep and notices if the regions
(22:02):
related to scent processing are activated.
Which would be my next step if cats were to consent to this kind of study, of course, it's
all about informed consent.
This is all compelling evidence that dreams are a feature, not a bug of evolution in mammal
brains.
(22:25):
Young was definitely on to something with dream work, mostly thanks to pointers from the
civilizations and cultures he studied to come to his unique and specific worldview.
Which might have included the five dreams of the Bodhisattva, which revealed the past
to enlightenment and his role in this process.
Maybe the Ojibwe tribe, whose dream catchers, reflect the importance of dreams in their
(22:49):
culture.
Certainly, the temples of Greco-Roman god Serapis, the god of dreams, and the ancient dream
incubation ritual to clarify and invoke the meanings and messaging of dreams.
(23:12):
Almost every known civilization wondered about the meaning of dreams.
It's impossible to really quantify and measure this.
Now we say metaphysical understanding of dreams.
We're still not sure what to make of them.
We in the industrialized world now have more structured, some may say sophisticated ways
(23:35):
to describe our physical world and some of its machinations.
You know, the earth rotates around the sun.
If you plan to see it in the right conditions, it'll grow, cats always land on their feet,
electricity, stuff.
Life has become, for many, slightly more manageable, but unfortunately, looking around in the
(23:57):
year and now, it's still a volatile, unpredictable world.
We're actually still feeling the same feelings that our ancestors felt.
And that's why it's just really amazing and restorative to talk about the dream space.
Take it away, Tricia.
(24:18):
I say the more you sleep, the more you go into a dream space, the more you wake up to see
what is really happening.
In my book, I talk about what it means to be an escape artist from the systems.
It's called "We Will Rest (24:31):
The Art of Escape".
And it talks about how to build these escape plans.
Perhaps in parallel with Jung's collective unconscious, we can cultivate this collective
consciousness within the dream space.
(24:52):
We have to build together.
It has to be in a community.
Community can look like 20 people.
We can look like 30 people.
We can look like two people.
My dad was a community organizer in activists.
He was a union organizer.
With the union, he was part of the international brothers of electrical workers.
They would be striking and they would come together and I would secretly be in the house
(25:15):
and be fighting them in the front room, fighting and scheming about the next strike that was
going to happen.
My mother's in the back cooking, feeding them, and they worked together to support each other
when they were on strike.
By understanding the brilliance and radical nature of community and how it will save us.
(25:36):
On August 23, 1968, one of the most famous dreamers in the United States stood on the steps
of the Lincoln Memorial and said, "I have a dream."
Dr. King's beautiful dream of unity, connection, and radical transformation to combat, anti-Blackness
(26:01):
and all forms of oppression.
It's an ancient one.
And I think it's why his message continues to resonate across time, cultures and communities,
all working in synchrony to wake us up from the relentless systems that separate us from
ourselves and others.
(26:24):
I'm going to shout out folks like Bell Hooks, Audre Lorde, Malcolm X, Grace Lee Boggs,
and of course Bishop Tricia Hersey.
Just like these and you and people you know who continue the work.
We aren't alone.
We're a chorus, raising our voices collectively to sustain this ancient melody together.
(26:45):
And in order to do so.
Go back and get into the dream space and tap into these beautiful ideas.
And may your kiddies be your mascot.
You know cats don't try to learn anything, they're just being who they are.
(27:06):
If you let that happen, you have a happier life.
You're not pushing, you're so driven.
Folks, I know we're all out here trying real hard.
(27:28):
We're all out here.
To keep a roof over our heads. To keep up with the Joneses.
To stay a step ahead of the widening gap between getting by and struggling.
And I hope in our own ways, we dismantle this machine.
It won’t be overnight. It might take a lifetime, or more.
But take it from any cat you come across,
(27:50):
sunbathing and resting,
living moment to moment.
If they can dream, we can too.
I'd like to thank my wonderful experts, Mary Bullet, Trisha Horsey.
While the opinions are my own, the research and work is theirs.
(28:12):
If you'd like to learn more about them, please check out our show notes,
which also include the references and research that went into this episode.
And if you loved it, please do keep sharing our podcast
and give us a five-star rating wherever you listen and write us a glowing review.
To support the podcast, definitely check out our show notes
or head to any of our accounts to click on the appropriate links to donate.
(28:34):
For as little as a dollar a month, you can help keep us in ship shape
and in the collective, unconscious, and the dream space.
Remember, everything is connected.
6 degrees of cats is produced, written, edited, and hosted by yours truly, Captain Kitty, aka Amanda B.
(28:56):
Please subscribe to our mailing list by going to l-i-n-k-t-r.e/6 degrees of cats
or look us up on all those social media platforms.
You'll be first in line for the extra audio and more treats if you connect with us there.
All episodes are dedicated to the misunderstood, the marginalized, the resilient, and the weird.
(29:19):
And of course, all the cats we've loved and lost.
I have known you one cat, now, Amanda, you would not believe this.
I've had cats we've had such love affairs and they've been so psychic and we've had every kind of thing.
(29:43):
This cat could care less.
This is a big, four-geneer-old, long-haired, golden, born in the wild.
He's just simply called Jack.
He's not affectionate.
He did kiss me once in the last few months, which was the first time ever in 12 years.
I mean, something I'm doing right, but he's not there for me.
(30:06):
He's there for himself.
I honor him as if he is the king, as if he's God Almighty.
He's with him, what he needs is he needs that, I give it to him.
And I think this is my last cat of my life, baby.
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