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Lesson 21 Secondary Reveries, Primary Reveries, and the Reverie Nucleus

Certainly, you notice moments in your day-to-day life when you are daydreaming. For example, when you are hungry, you “daydream” about food. This almost always happens when you have needs or desires, and find yourself in certain other circumstances we will talk more about later. We call these daydreams “reveries.” In general, reveries compensate for deficiencies or try to solve difficulties through the imagination. This will momentarily lessen unpleasant tensions. When one has a temporary problem, such as when one is hungry and has a reverie about food, we call this a situational or secondary reverie. But if hunger were a continuous situation for one, or one’s economic situation permanently threatened one with hunger, one would then have continuous or permanent reveries about food, and we would then call these primary reveries. Primary reveries are the most important to study because they tend to direct many of our activities, and they also help to discharge permanent tensions. The best way to trace one’s primary reveries is to pay attention to the images, the reveries which appear when one is about to go to sleep or when one is waking up. One will then be in the level of consciousness known as “semi-sleep.” These images also appear in the “vigilic” level of consciousness (the normal waking state) when one is tired, and they are easier to trace here. It is considerably more difficult to trace primary reveries in the level of sleep because the images that appear as “dreams” are sometimes primary reveries, but are also frequently secondary or situational reveries which are compensating immediate sensations of thirst, hunger, heat, uncomfortable bodily positions, etc., and it is quite difficult to distinguish between them. We will now carry out several ways to trace the primary reveries in the following exercises:

Exercise 6 Take notes on which images or reveries repeat most often when you are in semi-sleep, or in vigil when you are tired.

Exercise 7 Place a very dim light, like a candle, about a yard in front of you. If possible have it be the only light in the room. Keep your eyes fixed on this light for about ten minutes. Take notes on the images that appear, whether or not they are related among themselves, and then later write a short story based on them.

Exercise 8 Melt a piece of lead or wax, and pour it quickly into cold water. The lead will immediately take on intricate shapes and harden. Put the resulting shape on the table a few feet away from you. Run your eyes over it without trying to force anything, and when you discover “figures” write a story about them.

Exercise 9 Place several small cotton balls on a piece of black cloth about a foot square. Run your eyes over them until you see some “figures” appear. Write down the story these figures represent.

Once you have done all four exercises, look them over and see what kinds of images are repeated. These repeated images are the permanent, primary reveries. If you do not find any repeated images, repeat these exercises again until some become evident. Study the primary reveries you find in relation to the situation you presently live in (Lesson 16). In particular, ask yourself what deficiencies these reveries are compensating. Next, review and compare the stories themselves, not simply the repeated images. Although these stories may be quite different, their plots will have a common background, emotional mood, or climate. This tell-tale common climate, which coincides with the general mental climate you live in, reveals your reverie nucleus. Although difficult, it is very important to determine your reverie nucleus because it denotes the basic problems you live with, and your most fundamental attitude towards yourself and the world. The reverie nucleus is the basic background mental climate or emotional mood one lives in. It generates the primary compensatory reveries as images that discharge the strongest internal tensions; at the same time these images guide one’s behavior in the world. The reverie nucleus is stable and determines one’s basic activities throughout a long period of time by means of the images (primary reveries) which appear as a compensation to it. However, when a change of stage in life (from infancy to childhood, from childhood to youth, etc.), an accident, or an abrupt change in one’s situation does alter the usually fixed reverie nucleus, then the compensating primary reveries will also change, and therefore one’s behavior and activities guided by these images will change as well. Occasionally, a person’s reverie nucleus or basic mental climate becomes stuck and remains fixed in an earlier stage of their life. We see in this person characteristics typical of an earlier time they no longer live in. In contrast, in other people we can notice in just a short time a dramatic change to a new attitude practically opposite to what they had before. We may then infer that one nucleus has disappeared in them and a new one has appeared to replace it. Consequently, this person’s system of primary reveries, and therefore their behavior and outlook on reality, changed decisively. It is of fundamental importance to study this lesson and work on the exercises proposed here. Many of the discoveries you make at this point will enable you to coherently structure the conclusions you reached in the previous lessons. We recommend that you review your biography (Lesson 17), and try to determine the moments of your life in which changes of reverie nucleus took place, changes that necessarily generated profound transitions in your behavior and whole stage of life.