Through its first four episodes (the fifth airs tonight), the USA Network television series Falling Water has already gone further than any other show in exploring the multiple dimensions of dreaming latent within the human mind. The three main characters—Tess, Burton, and Taka—have followed different routes into a realm of shared conscious dreaming. Where they go from here will be revealed in coming episodes. But already they have made a series of important discoveries about this realm that will certainly shape the unfolding narrative, discoveries that reflect deeper insights about the true potentials of our dreams. The three central characters have found the dream realm can be entered spontaneously and naturally, or by means of deliberate intention and technological assistance. They have found that some people have special powers in the dream realm (innately and by training), which can be used for good or evil. They have realized that what happens in dreaming can have a profound and even deadly impact on people in the waking state. And they have learned that the more they stretch their rational minds to accept the reality of the dream world, the more of its wonders the dream world reveals to them.
Among the various plot lines, I will be especially curious to see how Tess is affected by an experimental dream-inducing technology invented by a shadowy man named Bill Borg. Borg does not appear to be an especially trustworthy guy, nor does he seem fully aware of what his technology is actually doing to his research participants. Despite his utopian enthusiasm, or perhaps because of it, Borg is naively pushing the technology of dreaming further than he or his subjects can handle. More will be revealed about his earlier life and underlying motivations, I am sure, but for now he represents a reckless desire to use modern science to control and manipulate the dreaming imagination.
My hope is that the show will explore not just the discovery of conscious powers in dreaming, but the moral and spiritual consequences of having access to such powers. The fact that humans have amazing potentials for intensified dreaming is not an exclusively modern insight. The Paleolithic shamans who slept in their beautifully painted caves knew this. The mystics and sages of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism have known this, too, and so have Sufi Muslims, Jewish Kabbalists, Christian contemplatives, and indigenous people all over the world. In many cultures and religious traditions throughout history, dreaming has been recognized as a valuable source of connection with the powers of the sacred and divine, however people define those terms. They have devised a variety of technologies, including chanting, dancing, drumming, praying, purification rituals, and evocative settings to stimulate their capacity for intensified dreaming. The difference between these traditions and modern science is not the use of technologies to stimulate dreaming; humans have been doing that for tens of thousands of years. Rather, the difference is that the various traditions have provided a framework of meaning, a system of symbols, myths, and metaphors, to help people make sense of the strange and often frightening energies set loose in their dreams. Without such a set of guiding principles, the dreaming experience can descend into darkness, disorientation, and fragmentation.
As members of a modern, rationalist society with few cultural sources of support for dreaming, all three of the main characters in "Falling Water" face this challenge of finding a personal framework of meaning to help them make sense of their experiences. I suspect their lives will eventually depend on it.