A Journey in Fragmentation and Wholeness

Judy B. Gardiner

Presented at the 84^th Anniversary Conference of The Lifwynn Foundation for Social Research

These words, spoken by Woody Allen, could easily have come from the late Montague Ullman. Does consciousness survive bodily death: a subject which Monte was passionate about.

My talk today is dedicated to Monte Ullman, an explorer who set out to learn about the invisible parts of life. He used his imagination, memory, creativity and honesty – all his keys to dreaming – to write scholarly papers and to heal people through their dreams. For those of you who hadn’t the pleasure of knowing Monte, he was a happy, charming, brilliant spirit who never forgot to be human. His compassion affected dreamers in every walk of life. Not only was he a life force in the world of Dreams but also in his experiments in dream telepathy.

In the early ‘70s, Monte was inspired by the quantum work of physicist David Bohm and spent the rest of his life developing a theory based on the relationship of quantum physics to dreaming.  This birthed his last paper, “In Search of a New Abode,” presented at the International Association for the Study of Dreams in 2006. Monte described dreaming as a relay-station with input from two orders: The Implicate Order and the Explicate Order. Like the dream, Bohm’s Implicate Order is one of wholeness that includes “all that is” in a state of interconnectedness and actually reflects on what Monte had accomplished in his dream-sharing approach. Monte considered Bohm’s Implicate Order as a universal unconscious, linking us more authentically not only to our dreaming selves but to all forms of matter. In the Explicate Order (waking consciousness), "all that is" unfolds from the Implicate.

I believe this Ullman-Bohm theory has influenced the dreams I’m about to share. Admittedly, I have a slight advantage. Monte was not only my colleague but my partner for the last five years of his life. We had a profoundly deep telepathic relationship to the point where he would often answer a question before I could even ask it.   He left his body in 2008, but his mental agility seems not to have been affected in the least. If anything, it’s keener and he’s still answering before I ask.

Now begins an odyssey of interconnected dreams that journeyed me from Transcendence − to Fragmentation  − to the Paranormal − to Consciousness and, ultimately, to Wholeness. While this is my dream, the experience belongs to all of us.

The first dream, which I call Heaven and Earth, came to me in November 2008, five months after Monte passed. 

I am taken up high in the air. The sky is azure blue. Looking down, I

see a great expanse of green and am plunged into a    U shaped valley of

lush green grass which completely enfolds me.  It is a warm exhilarating

feeling I’ve never before known. Then I am lifted again even higher to

still more green.[1]

I realize this must be what happens when we die, for consciousness is still with me but I have become part of the vastness of space and am going from the depths of the verdant valleys to the heights of boundless mountains that have no end, no peaks, no summit, for the summit reaches beyond consciousness, beyond what the eye can see or the mind can know.

The adventure of the green odyssey finishes but the dream continues.

I am hurled once again into the same vast panorama, but this time it is red −

           redder, truer and more transparent than any red I’ve known. From the endless

plains of true red, I see a PART of a white concrete building floating

below me — enfolded in the same spatial landscape. There is no top or

 bottom or sides where I am; just pure freedom and the knowledge that

I’m in it, without a body.[2]

 The sensation is so powerful that at first it’s frightening, but fear dissolves to euphoria when I realize I am covered and blanketed in green and am now being taken to the same heights in red. No longer in danger, I surrender to the invisible power that has transported me for I trust it. As I’m on the threshold of hypnopompic sleep, I wonder if this is Monte’s experience and if he’s telling me what it’s like when only consciousness remains?

The dream begins its descent into the mundane. I am going through a box of photographs and another box of baby clothes. It concludes with my seeing green food like spinach. 

Was this dream illustrating the Buddhist concept of Samsara, the continuous cycle of birth and death?  Described as a continuous flowing movement, it mirrors Bohm’s concept of a continuous equilibrium of enfoldment and unfoldment. 

Montague Ullman’s interest in the possible relevance of quantum theory to dreaming was awakened in 1974 when he attended a week long dialogue between David Bohm and Krishnamurti, the Indian mystic.^e[i] As Bohm grew older, he became increasingly preoccupied with Eastern mysticism and parapsychology.

A month after the Heaven and Earth dream, I traveled to Paris where the colors of Christmas were in full regalia. The first night there, I walk into an elegant restaurant and am awestruck!  

The walls, furnishings, lighting: everything in sight is vividly bathed in a brilliant deep red, a replica of one fragment in my dream.

“Part of the white concrete building” also comes to life but instead of floating…, it is set on the ground and instead of only a part of a building, it’s a whole string of little white cottages flanking the Champs Elysee.

Had the Implicate Order sent only part of a building to my dream to illustrate how it unfolded to a whole in waking? This seemed to follow the unfolding that occurs in the Explicate Order. Each cottage was a booth representing a different nation and in its wholeness materialized as a Christmas fair for all nations, for society as a whole linking to quantum’s feature of Interconnectedness. Unlike the dream, the cottages are not made of concrete, but are concrete in the sense that they are physical.

Why so many fragments? 

Bohm says we view objects as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate "parts," but facets of a deeper, more underlying unity that is ultimately holographic and indivisible, meaning that every part contains all the information possessed by the whole.^e[ii]

This underlying unity was demonstrated in my journey between Heaven and Earth.

But why did parts of the dream materialize specifically in Paris? Fragmentation drew me in deeper. This Heaven and Earth dream so imbued in the magic of Paris connected with another earlier Paris trip and a dream following Monte’s passing.

I’m in a café in the Place des Vosges. I get the feeling of a lot of

concrete around, like the grayish color of French architecture

with its stone facades, columns and detailed indentations. I see

a beautiful swirl of yellows, oranges, pinks and some blue in the

window. [3]  

The café in this dream had no name but I knew I had been there before. I found in my 2003 Paris travel notes that it was the Café Ma Bourgogne in the Place des Vosges, an historical square originally known as Place Royale. 

While preparing a tribute for Monte, I recalled our many discussions around my dreams of black holes. Searching Google images for a black hole, I spotted the precise swirl of colors I dreamt and was stunned.

My return to Ma Bourgogne was met with disappointment. I secure a table at the window but there was nary a trace of the colorful dream swirl imaged online as a black hole. I leave and begin to stroll through the 17th century vaults of the Place des Vosges, now an arcade of shops and cafes, where I observe the same grayish stone and architectural detail as in the dream. I notice in the window of an art gallery a life-sized bronze sculpture of a man carrying a valise.

His torso and part of an arm and leg are missing, yet he appears whole. I am intrigued by the missing parts and compelled to explore further. Once inside the gallery, I learn that the artist, Bruno Catalano is inspired by the universal theme of travel and believes that, when we travel, we unconsciously leave parts of ourselves in the places we visit. He says that our words, our energy, doesn’t get lost in space but instead becomes a part of the place and stays there timelessly. I wonder if those invisible parts of us – our memories, our dreams, our consciousness – are somehow imprinted in places we feel so at home in.  Are we a reflection of what has been stamped on the cosmic surroundings so special to us?

Then a flash of insight!

These parts were all related and, according to Bohm, will ultimately dissolve back into a whole flowing movement to form and maintain itself in some other arrangement. In viewing Catalano’s sculpture, we see that the man and the stone wall appear as one, a provocative statement in fragmentation and wholeness. Catalano thinks of the empty parts, the unconscious parts, as going into a black hole.

This matched Monte’s theory that the dream contains an enormously condensed information mass of our personal universe. This he called the black hole of the psyche.^e[iii]

In physics, it’s been long held that nothing escapes from a black hole, but a controversial new study argues that nearly all of the information that falls into one comes back out.^e[iv]  That is, with the exception of light. Physicist Stephen Hawking describes information escaping from a black hole as mangled, reminiscent of the disjointed and jumbled fragments in our dreams.

To recap the black hole saga: The symbol made itself known in two different dream images at two different times, but in the same place. The café and the gallery were only steps apart.  Both held fragments pointing to the theory of a black hole. I began to wonder why this black hole was following me around.  Was the message organized by a morphic field that contains inherent memory through repetition, as suggested by Rupert Sheldrake.^e[v]

The theories of Catalano, Ullman, Bohm and, possibly, Sheldrake seemed to naturally connect. If memories are etched in physical places and imprinted in the psyche, the relationship between mind and matter was leading to the same conclusion.

Parts of us remain. Perhaps our remains are far more sentient than simply decaying bones and earthly ashes.

Following the Heaven and Earth dream by two months, the theme of ascending and descending made itself known in another dream.

Monte suddenly dies. I say, “When we go under the grass, we are

going home, but when we go above the grass, we go to another place

which is very clear and pure. I see “1” and “1” and exclaim, “Jubilee!” [4]

Jubilee is a year of remission of sins and universal pardon. In Leviticus, a Jewish Jubilee cycle happens every 50 years, so 50 plus 1 and 1 were adding up to the 52 year Calendar Rounds, the Mayan version.  Both versions reference sacred texts and spiritual angels in our distant past. Both are parts that unite in one totality.

Confronted with a set of inseparable opposites:  Heaven − Earth; Dreaming −Waking; Fragmentation − Wholeness;  In Body − Out of Body; it was odd that I would find myself in all of these states at once.

Monte believed the hidden unity of opposites in quantum theory’s complementarity described the dual nature of consciousness; that is the dual states of dreaming and waking as illustrated in the red and green dream-wake experience which could be considered precognitive in that it spans across time.

The telepathic dream suggests the possibility of non-locality by spanning across space. This slide illustrates the instantaneous transfer of a signal from one place to another through no known physical means. The light emanating from the head of each figure implies faster-than-light communication speed between the two. Non-locality was first described by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) in 1935. The EPR paradox draws attention to a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement.

In 1982 Alain Aspect, a physicist at the University of Paris discovered that electrons are  able to instantaneously communicate whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. These entangled particles are thought to be identical entities that share common origins and properties. Somehow, each particle always seems to know what the other is doing.^e[vi] 

Could certain electrons in one brain fire a photon, a particle of light, which at superluminal speed instantly recognizes which other brains to interact with?  My dreams of light and vision suggest that the optic nerve is the conductor of light which physiologically activates the sixth sense (the third eye) through some mechanism of conscious action.

Neurophysiologist Karl Pribram believes memories are encoded throughout the brain, making the brain itself a hologram. The synthesis of Bohm’s and Pribram's views is known as the holographic paradigm^e[vii] in which Monte included dreaming and telepathy. If our minds are fragments of the greater hologram and everything is perpetually interconnected, telepathy may be accessing the holographic level. But what happens at death when our physical brains cease to function?  Perhaps our minds, our souls, are composed of higher matter called Consciousness. 

Could this consciousness be the unsuspected key that unwittingly keeps us in contact with those gone before, no matter how wide the gap is between us?

Was I experiencing infinitely connected fragments of a cosmic depository of “all that is” in panoramas of brilliant color, vast stretches of nature, flashes of Paris, from descending below the Earth to ascending above it. The totality of the interconnected dreams so analogous to consciousness seemed a projection of a deeper order. 

The dreams continued to ascend.

In 2009, I dream I’m talking to Monte on the phone.  He says,

“I’ll meet you in 2 minutes on the moon.” Then the phone rings twice                               

It sounds like Call Intercept. I think it’s a real call and wonder who would be calling at 2 a.m. To this day, I'm sure that the phone actually rang, but I continued dreaming. Back to the dream:

   I ask a physicist if our planet is a continuum of life. He says “No.”

I picture the Big Bang and then a 2nd Big Bang.  I ask if the world

will end. He says, “Yes,” but when I ask “When?” he won’t tell me. 

This physicist has a friend who is also a physicist, a Barishnikov type.

We'll all be working together on a project which has to be finished

soon. Then my friend from Israel shows up, and she too will be working on it.[5]

Days later, I absent mindedly walked over to my bookshelf and put my hand on Einstein's Moon by David Peat, a book of Monte's which I had never opened.

 Monte had bookmarked page 79 in the Bohr vs. Einstein chapter. On it was a discussion revolving around the EPR experiment and the velocity of an electron. Two names of physicists were prominently displayed:

 Boris Podolsky, Russian   (represented by Barishnikov in the dream)

 Nathan Rosen, Israeli       (represented by my Israeli friend in the dream)

Monte was in the habit of saying things were squared. This dream squared many images: 2 minutes, the phone ringing twice, a 2^nd Big Bang and 2 physicists.

A year later, I dreamt:

I find a letter from Edgar Mitchell written in long hand. It has to do

with how Monte knew Mitchell.  I say "Mitchell was on the Apollo."

Monte says, "You want to keep this letter. [6]

 Monte wrote in long hand his entire life.

 In this collection of dreams, I again pose the question: Is Monte perhaps telling us what it’s like when only Consciousness remains?  First we return to the Earth, to the soil.  Then we ascend to a higher dimension. But in the Heaven and Earth dream, the order is reversed.  I ascend first and then descend. Even time, space and direction appear to be projections of this deeper order for each event carries the same theme but appears to occur at a different time and in a different order.

 This series of interconnected dream-wake experiences shuttling between past, present and future suggests that each present moment is an amalgam of all times establishing an interrelationship between waking and dreaming consciousness as a continuity of experience: one undivided whole.

This mysterious consciousness knew my mind, but my mind couldn’t know it. All my mind knew was that I was jostled hither and yon, but my dream, with Consciousness as its witness knew it was not bound to the space-time continuum. I let that invisible power, Consciousness, transport me. I couldn’t see it because it was the seer. It was real yet neither concrete nor abstract. But it was of an immense world bearing the mark of infinity. In quantum language, could Consciousness be the Observer and the Observed?

 If this was actually a telepathic communication from Monte Ullman sent from the Implicate for others to read, then we may consider that all forms of consciousness, in waking, sleeping, dreaming and afterlife, are interconnected in one divisible, yet inseparable whole.

 Images deeply graven in my dreams told me that mind and matter are not isolated, one from the other. Those inseparable opposites had united: Heaven and Earth. Dreaming and Waking. Fragmentation and Wholeness. In Body and Out of Body.  All One enfolded in the unspoken stillness of Consciousness, in Life, and in Death, and perhaps, back to Life.     

 As in Shakespeare’s Tempest, has Monte awakened from the dream of life into a true reality, or at least a truer dream? Either way, it appears he’s in his new abode still working on the relationship of quantum theory to dreaming to parapsychology and getting closer all the time, transmitting his thoughts to the Almighty Dream, that immense relay station between Heaven and Earth, or as he would say, between the Implicate and the Explicate.

 This intricate web of communication implies that Monte has made Woody Allen's dream come true and has conceivably achieved immortality through not dying. There is reason to believe that he's still watching over our dreams, imparting important information and loving and protecting us while working toward species-connectedness.

 If we trust in our higher Consciousness, our friends and loved ones who have made this transit are likely to be speaking to and teaching us in the silent language of the Dream, our most natural resource.

In Loving Memory

Of

Montague Ullman

(1916 to 2008 and Beyond)

    With great thanks to Lloyd and Kate Gilden for making this dedication possible.