The Rhetoric of Inner Space

By R.J.R. Rockwood

The Rhetoric of Inner Space: Student Writing Based on Dreams is a remarkable collection of dream descriptions by students in Dr. R. J. R. Rockwood’s Composition classes at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The dream essays are presented in three categories. The first includes straight descriptions of student dreams. The second consists of essays in which students analyze their dreams. The third are stories that students based on their dreams. In addition, there is a section containing student course critiques.
An Index to the dream material is included.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796050646

R.J.R. Rockwood

Dr. Robert John Remington Rockwood has a B.A. in English and German and an M.A. In English and Russian from the University of Miami; a Ph.D. in English and Linguistics from the University of Florida; and he has done advanced study in historical linguistics at the University of North Carolina. For the year 1973-1974 he was a Fellow of the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University. Dr. Rockwood has served on the full-time faculty at Florida Southern College, Florida Keys Community College, Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Florida. From 1978 through 2001 he worked as an industrial technical writer, editor, and web designer at such companies as Lockheed Martin, Unisys, NCR, and Talus. Starting in 2002 he taught online courses for the University of Phoenix. The Body Dies but the Spirit Lives, 2nd Edition, Revised and Expanded (2020) is his twelfth book published by Xlibris. The others are: • Leopardo da Gotcha (2002) • The Passing of Merlin Zauber (2005) • The Last Ant (2007) • Dillon's Rocking Bear Invisibility Chair (2013) • I Don't Talk to Earthlings (2016) • Owen Often Beside Himself (2016) • The Primrose Path (2016) • The Spirit of Alchemy (2017) • The Eternal Life Ministry of Teenage Michael Maier (2018) • The Rhetoric of Inner Space: Student Writing Based on Dreams (2019) • The Body Dies but the Spirit Lives On (2019) Dr. Rockwood lives in Roswell, Georgia, a northern suburb of Atlanta. His e-mail address is [e-mail].

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Copyright © 2019 by R. J. R. Rockwood.

ISBN:                Softcover                        978-1-7960-5065-3

                         eBook                            978-1-7960-5064-6

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Rev. date: 08/02/2019

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Contents

Foreword

Cover Art

Dedication

Chapter 1 The Dream Method of Composition

Chapter 2 Student Dreams and Analyses

Chapter 3 Student Dream Stories and Analyses

Chapter 4 Student Class Critiques

Index

Foreword

In 1965 I was teaching in the English Department at Florida Southern College in Lakeland Florida. That summer I was assigned a remedial class in English Composition. This class was comprised of incoming freshman students who has passed everything on the entrance exam except composition.

I was especially concerned about one student whose math scores were extremely high, but his writing was significantly below acceptable college level as far as content was Concerned. However, it was flawless technically.Pondering this, I asked him to describe one of his dreams. The dream essay was brilliant.

Next time I asked the entire class to describe a dream. The result was the most extraordinary college of student essays I had ever received. From that time on I asked the entire class to write their weekly essays describing personal dreams.

The Rhetoric of Inner Space is a result of that approach expanded to college student writing at no less than four colleges and universities, Including Georgia Tech.

Cover Art

The cover art is by R. J. R. Rockwood, using acrylics on canvas. It depicts a sleeping college student who is dreaming that he is scaling a giant ball.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my former English 1001 students at Georgia Institute of Technology who wrote essays describing their dreams and then gave me written permission to quote their work in a future publication.

Chapter 1

The Dream Method of Composition

The Rhetoric of Inner Space—is an approach to composition with a difference: it is involves the use of DREAMS as topics for composition. This course considers the problem of CONTENT as well as FORM, and it achieves its results in a dramatic and unique way. Because these results are concrete and demonstrable—as even a quick perusal of the anthology of student writing that comprises the great part of this text will attest. They show that one can LEARN TO BE CREATIVE, a discovery that tends to reaffirm the student’s sense of worth and dignity.

The most important book in this course is the one that the student will write: it will be the student’s DREAM DIARY. The dream diary will be the depository of all the data from the unconscious that the student can collect in the next ten weeks. This is how to go about it: the diary must be where it can be reached immediately. Upon awakening, one should record as much as can be remembered, even if only fragments.

Who has not had the experience of dreaming, then waking up struck with the fact that one does not remember the content? If one does not immediately tell it to someone, or write it down, or think about it actively, one will lose it. When a dream is lost, one had been foiled by the unconscious agency in charge of seeing that content from the unconscious remains unconscious. Probably the first entry in the dream diary would be dreams from the past that one can still remember, usually dreams that derive from a more impressionable period of childhood. It is important to get as much dream data as possible into the diary, and where feasible each dream should be dated. The dreamer should not be alarmed if the meaning of the dream is not understood. At this stage the important thing is to record the dream: understanding can come later.

In this class the purpose of describing dreams is to enhance the effectiveness of student composition techniques. However, dreams represent a message from the unconscious to be the dreamer’s consciousness, and they communicate using archetypal language and images of the collective unconscious. To learn about this, students should read the following book on archetypal symbolism:

Man and His Symbols, ed. Carl G. Jung. Dell Publishing (A Division of Random House), 1968.

It is astonishing how many people there are who think they dream seldom, or never. One must not be deceived: the problem is that one forgets dreams. This is the result of repressing the unconscious. Dreaming is a compensatory function to consciousness and is absolutely essential if the individual is to remain psychologically healthy. If one can get ten dreams fully recorded in the next ten weeks, or, for that matter, even three or four, that will be more than enough material for the purposes of this course. Should anyone fail to recall any dreams at all, then the anthology of student writing will provide ample dream material that can be used. There is, in other words, no need for anyone to be anxious about obtaining dream material.

I mentioned that at first the dream material may seem incomprehensible. I should stress that there is much in this course that the student will not understand, at least not immediately. The beginning of wisdom, I think, is to realize that if one must wait until full understanding is reached, then that time might never come. Dreams are symbolic, and a symbol, unlike a sign, can never be grasped fully by the rational intellect, since there is about every dream an aura of the unknown and unknowable.

It is a fact that no one dreams dull dreams. Dreams are intrinsically interesting. They are highly creative: indeed, dreams are perhaps the most available expression one’s innate creativity. If anyone has been led to believe—as have most people in this materialistic age—that the Ego is synonymous with the Self, that one is not more than the Ego, then a close examination of one’s dreams should demonstrate just how false that assumption really is. People do not consciously invent their dreams; on the contrary, dreams present themselves as discovered or REVEALED experience in the realm of the non-Ego. The newest, most fragile, most insecure part of the mind is the Ego. The Ego is the product of conditioning, something into which things are put, rather than the other way around. It is my contention that the student should be shown how to reach into the healing waters of the unconscious, as from a deep well, that which can then transform the often spiritual wasteland of the Ego into fertile plains and green pastures.

The student will ask, Where does one find data of the unconscious? This is easily answered: such data come from dreams and fantasies; they are embodied in religion, philosophy, folklore, mythology, art, and literature. Patterns and relationships that can be discerned in all of these various statements of the spirit are in effect relationships that are present in psyche itself, so that, say, a particular work of art may be said to serves as a vehicle for the projection outward of the structure and dynamics of the psyche, an entity that like magnetism can be discerned only indirectly through its effect on other things.

Perhaps I should also point out that the so-called religious truths are metaphoric statements (usually, however, expressed in exceedingly concrete terms) of psychic (or spiritual) laws. This is likewise true of myth: one might better say that the religious truth is stated in mythological terms. Here when I use the word myth, it does not have the connotation that it has in political discussions, where myth refers to certain attitudes that can be proved wrong, yet persist in the political orthodoxy of the time. In this case the meaning is clearly a lie, or a misconception. But when one speaks of myth in terms, say, of classical mythology, one refers to a figurative expression of certain psychological relationships, and here the word has a meaning identical to what I have just referred to as religious truth.

The characteristic feature of myth and religion, then, is that these truths of the psyche are communicated in a concrete way, and carry with them a wisdom that is often deeply felt despite the fact that it tends to elude conscious understanding. At this point one is approaching the domain of the dream; in fact, in many respects one is there already as soon as one begins to examine folklore, mythology, and religion. As one of the greatest scholars in the field of myth has put it, Myth is the depersonalized dream, dream the personalized myth (Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949).

I have referred repeatedly to the unconscious, but I have offered no hint as to how one should try to visualize it. The truth is, the unconscious is a function of the psyche. Ideally it should not be visualized at all. If one must do so, however, then think of the psyche as composed of layers. What Jung refers to as the collective unconscious is the deepest layer of all. It is transpersonal, or collective, as opposed to personal and individual. The dreamer may experience dreams in which his own, unique, personal experiences are in no way mirrored, but which share motifs with mythologies and religions of which he is perhaps completely ignorant. The collective unconscious contains primordial inherited patters known as archetypes. The archetypes are, in effect, the laws of the imagination. The next layer of the unconscious is, however, purely personal. The collective unconscious is the source of all that is eternal in man. There are certain relationships between literature and dreams. It is particularly noticeable in what may be described as great literature, there is often something strange and at times ever otherworldly about it. One should reflect on this characteristic, and ask if this is not also a feature of one’s own dreams. I want to emphasize once again that it is not crucial for the student to understand the entire significance of the entries in the student’s dream diary. The dreams will supply data