In his book Up from Eden, Ken Wilber writes on transpersonal psychology. He makes mention of the fact that young children passing through the "typhonic" stage of evolving consciousness dream about animals. It occurred to me yesterday that maybe middle-aged adults also dream in "stage-appropriate" terms. Why is it that we can't just will ourselves to have happy, sexy, fun dreams at night, but instead seem to have mainly frustrating dreams of vain efforting to fulfill some impossible task? Is it that we are stuck in a stage of an evolving consciousness? What would the transition/transformation into the new, more expansive, more inclusive stage of consciousness involve? Would we see dreams representing and validating the fact that we had made the transition? Do dreams of frustration and despair arise only in one discrete stage and not in another, say self-consciousness but not Cosmic Consciousness? Do we play these night dreams out in our waking experiences of "living lives of quiet desperation"?