BRIGHT DREAMS: A METAPHOR OF OUR PROJECT

Introductory note
Man’s new vision recognises the theme of the Self, as a central aspect of existence: The Self represents the aspect present in man, which is at one with the spiritual dimension of his identity. The Self is beyond the individual ego and can be regarded as our capacity of getting in touch with the world around us, finding, at the centre of our personality, the collective traits of life which are to be seen as a greater aspect of our individual dimension. The Self rules, as a balancing centre, the sexual instinct and its corresponding mental images, such as the sentiments of love, tenderness or possession. Being the Self the central structure of our body and mind, it takes up the role of archetype responsible for the instinctual aspects of matter and the subtler ones of psyche. That’s why it is unconsciously responsible for human behaviours, at all levels: body, affections, and spirit. Man, in the course of his philogenesis, has integrated in his bodily and psychological structures the events of natural evolution: in fact Man can be regarded as a microcosm in whom the rules of the macrocosm/ universe are present. What represents the sea, with its salty composition, in man has become blood.
Cliffs and rocks on earth represent phosphates and calcium carbonates present in bones. Leaves, with their breathing action, are analogous to lungs, the roots to intestines. Even in psychic life we will find correspondences: emotions (from emos-agere: to act on blood) represent the most liquid aspect of our psychic life, while the will represents its most solid and structured aspect. The possibility of establishing relationships is analogous to the function of lungs. This parallelism between external world, man’s body and psyche form a complex system directed by the Self, the central archetype of ‘spiritual man’, authentic ‘daimon’ resting inside man and considering man’s heart the only force pushing towards beauty and universal harmony.

Relationship between the dream and the Self (Dr. Mara Breno)
Dreams have always been regarded as casual events, consequences of a psychic activity. Sleep is a fundamental need and has an instinctive nature.
It has 2 kinds of activities:
- slow-long sleep
- REM sleep, during which we have dreams: ocular globes move and record the actions of light. This phase oils memory circuits and gives life to brain synapses. In mammals it has been demonstrated that the RAM phase allows the cortex to remain active and the longer dreams lasted, the more the mammal evolved.
Dreams are always in activity, but our conscience makes such a noise that we cannot perceive them: during our life we prefer to rely on our left hemisphere for decisions, for our job, contacts and everyday communication, while dreams always utilize the right hemisphere.
According to Artemidoro’s ‘Oniromantica’ (IIIrd century A.D.), the interpretation of dreams meant giving back to the dreamer the sense of his life: the essential thing was being able to go beyond the superficial and more evident contents, understanding the true meaning. Artemidoro’s attempt was quite appreciated by S. Freud, who demonstrated in his studies the causal conception in dreams: the existence of a removed wish (a wish that our conscience, for a great many reasons, doesn’t accept) that becomes evident in the dream, thus giving vent to our compressed libido energy.Moreover our unconscious functions make use of censure, in order not to put our conscience in contradiction with our unconscious: that’s why we tend to flee from removed contents, trying to show more and more neutral subjects which apparently have no meaning. According to Freud everything is based on removed sexual wishes belonging to childhood, while Jung doesn’t completely agree with this view.
He says that a dream has a balancing-compensatory function: what has been overlooked during the day is reintegrated through dreams. That’s why a dream is also for us an enrichment of facts that, for many reasons, have been ignored. For instance, in case someone is unable to accept his aggressive behaviour, he will often be a killer in his dreams. This is why a dream should be regarded as an evolutionary process of personality, the single phases of which are the consequences of compensations of various sides of our personality. Once they are brought to consciousness and integrated, we will be able to understand how they are related to one another and to act what Jung calls ‘the individuation process’. To conclude, a quotation from Eraclito: ‘During their sleep, men work and collaborate to the accomplishment of the universe’.

Bright dreams (Dr. Diego Frigoli)
Sleep is, in any living being, the first concrete relationship of a rhythmic biology transcending its essence: the rhythm light/darkness, the oriental yin/yang, sun/moon. These rhythms are part of the inside of man. Sleep must be regarded as a sort of exercise made by biological matter to face the external world: it is in fact a way to recuperate energies, an anticipation of neuronal circuits, a ‘brain remodeller’. From a neurophysiological point of view, whenever we close our eyes and rest, even if awake, the rhythm of our cerebral waves slows down (alpha waves). When we get asleep, waves become wider and wider in a progressive calm (Delta waves), until, at a given moment suddenly quicker waves, similar to the Alpha ones appear. The REM cycle: our eyes start moving, but our bodily muscular tone decays, our heart and our breath slow down, while men’s penis undergoes an erection. Experiments on opossums have demonstrated that, during their sleep, these mammals mime the anticipation of their desires (they sleep and dream for 18 hours a day). In man, through the composition of a sequence of dreams (made during several nights)in a puzzle-like way, we can discern contents which clearly show the destiny, plans and choices of the dreamer.
Our unconscious, as a consequence, is not only the place where we can find our removed emotions, fancies and desires but in it is present the direction of our soul, towards the recognition of our Self. In dreams, there is often a speaking animal: in Penelope’s dream (Odyssey), the eagle which kills all geese is in fact Ulysses who will kill all those who want to marry her (we will also find the eagle in Castaneda’s anthropological studies): what is the meaning of this animal? In the dream there is an awakened part which explains the dream to the sleeper: the Self, our deepest and oldest part, in which the relationship with our more objective part assumes the role of an inner voice, of a direction. Around the end of the IVth century A.D., Dionigi the Aeropagite said that whenever simple minds get in touch with ‘dreams of the soul’, they dream concrete forms, while the noble and the elevated only dream a guiding voice: from a material aspect to a more spiritual one ( the eagle is in symmetry with the geese, the lowest aspect of birds who cannot even fly: they eat the food prepared by their owners. The king, Ulysses, the archetype of the male, who flies high and who will get rid of those parassytes). Of course it is a privilege being able to contact our guiding archetype, since our unconscious chooses its symbols in a compensatory way. In ancient times, there was a technique to dream the ‘dreams of the Self’; there was an active cult in order to accomplish it: in Epidaure, in Coo or in the Serapeus in Serapide not only did the person have to fast, but also to make his bodily fluxes be silent, to detach his libido from his relationships (chastity), to purify himself (inside and outside) and to meditate (sacred music and arts to clean the mind). In the end, during the last night this person was sent into the secret room of the temple, where Asclaepius would get in touch with the dreamer and dictate to him the method to follow to be healthy again.
Nowadays we are subject to dreams, we do not provoke them. Jung says that we dream all the time but our life distracts us through the plenty of noise it makes, in the same way as stars are also present during the day but cannot be seen owing to the sunlight. How can we get in touch with our unconscious? This statue belonging to the Iron Age (about 2000 b.C.) has, on its head two ‘horns’ and two shields on each side: it has been called ‘the warrior’, but in fact this man was not a warrior. The ancients knew very well a transactive way for getting in touch with the dream, not the kind of dream we mean today (full of latent wishes or removed emotions), but a way of contacting the ‘Self’. The horns show it was believed that our brain is a sort of aerial, capable of broadcasting messages in the air/ether. It is not by chance that Artemidoro tells us that false dreams come through the ivory gate while true and positive dreams pass through the ‘horn’ door. Ivory derives from tusks, teeth, from the mouth: a material trait, the most material aspect present in our face. If we go up, and arrive at the nose, we see that in it resides a subtler sense (smell), midway between matter (taste) and immaterial aspects. Still going further, we get up to the eyes (light) where frequences are only immaterial, and we understand that going even further we have the ‘horns’, epithelial protuberances in animals, which symbolically allow us to reach evolutionary modalities with subtler perceptions.
The dreams of the ‘Self’ have the following characteristics:
1) Very plastic dreams: colourful, vivid, well structured, full of details, rich in symbolical meanings. If its sense is explained to us in the dream itself, it means that it is the Self speaking to us. Dreams are often compensatory: if in my life I tend to leave apart my emotions devoting myself just to duties, study or my job, my dreams will be rich in sentiments and pathos, not only because I am in need of a compensation, but also because I must become aware I’m leading a life too stiff and rigid in its rationality. We must never forget the indicative meaning of a dream, which always refers to our deep exigencies. If we read the dreams of mystics and saints, we see how this hypothesis is confirmed; Padre Pio was constantly fighting with the devil during his dreams: a saint in the day, a fighter at night.
2) It is important to remember that ‘colours’ in dreams, mean sentiments. Should I be deprived of the capacity of uttering words, I would express my feeling with colours: a red face means being ashamed or angry; if my body becomes white it means I am dying. Even if nowadays psychoanalysis bases it assumptions mainly on relationships, we must not forget that dreams contain germs in themselves and that their importance is a great help towards self awareness.
3) Bright dreams are characterised by the fact that we remember we have been the actors of our dream. We may go as far as being aware of dreaming, witnessing an interpretation of what is happening in the dream itself. For a better understanding of a dream regarding the sphere of the ‘Self’, I will analyse Dante’s dream, in which he lives the encounter with his own Beatrice, in ‘La Vita Nova’. Historically speaking, Beatrice Portinari (wife of Folco Portinari ) died in 1290, while the ‘Vita Nova’, written in 1293, seems to be celebrating the death of this young lady, loved by Dante.
nfortunately Dante’s deep sentiments have not been understood by many critics: Dante called his work ‘Vita Nova’ not by chance and he spoke of Beatrice without mentioning her surname; with his friends Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni and some others, Dante belonged to the group of the ‘Fedeli d’Amore’ (Loyal to Love), which does not mean ‘boys in love’, but which underlines that they exalted the principle of research of the beloved, a woman who had no shape – since she had all shapes, being the archetype/symbol of the feminine (for a man, of his soul) – the dark side of their own personality. This research would bring the human being to Paradise, which derives from ‘Campi Elisi ‘, from Helios ‘the Sun – conscience’. Going towards Paradise means becoming aware, bringing experience towards conscience and in the end accomplishing the symbolical marriage with man’s female part that, at last, has been unveiled. It is in this light that the term ‘Vita nova’ should be interpreted. Dante did not mean that his attitude had changed at the moment when he had met Beatrice Portinari; by ‘Vita Nova’ he symbolically meant a new birth. In this work actually there is a great use of symbolism: number 3 and its multiples, are quite used: ‘when I was 9…or 18…’ ‘It was 9 o’clock: she spoke to me and at that moment I decided to detach from people and start thinking in solitude, in the silence of my room’, of course it is not a physical, but a symbolical room, in the silence of the soul.
‘Thinking of her, I started dreaming , and a very sweet vision appeared to me: a red cloud and inside it a man with a frightening aspect (it is the impact with the unknown: if the Self appears, it is frightening); nevertheless, even if taken by fear, Dante has the intuition that this experience will bring him joy. This man told him lots of things, many of which he didn’t understand, but one phrase was clear to him: ‘ego dominus tuus’: ‘I am your ruler, your god’.
This is the FIRST MESSAGE. In his arms he had a sleeping naked girl (identified with Beatrice). Who is this ‘god’? He is, in Dante’s allegory, to be identified with Love. He is frightening, but he announces a happy novelty. He is bearing in his arms the girl whom Dante met on the previous day: not the visible Beatrice but her soul. She is naked, which doesn’t mean sexuality: she is covered by a red veil. If we think about our soul, psychically speaking, we would think of the red colour, which is the colour of blood. It is as if we might see our blood in front of us. It seemed to Dante, in his dream, that the God of love was holding in his hands something burning: the poet’s heart. The god has, on one side the soul, wrapped in this red veil and on the other Dante’s heart. Love seems to be awakening the sleeping soul, trying to make her eat the poet’s burning heart: he joins blood and heart in a mystical marriage. Beatrice accepts to eat it, even if frightened and doubtful, but in the end she starts crying and detaches herself from the god of love, flying towards the sky. At this moment Dante undergoes such an anguish that he can’t bear his powerful dream anymore and awakens: he’s bound to anticipate the destiny of his beloved, who will die. Of course the death of this soul, feeding of the poet’s heart, is allegorical. While the death of Beatrice Portinari is physical, the death of Dante’s soul is the symbol of his soul which, still attached to love, after tasting the heart dies, and detaches itself towards the sky. In other words, when the Self manages to make us (males) get in touch with our opposite (the soul, the feminine), going as far as to create a relationship of such a love which, when it goes beyond its earthly characteristics (blood, heart), is able to transcend the physical level and go up!
This dream of the Self, by Dante, shows that human intellect can be surpassed in order to become divine: la ‘Vita Nova’ is our capacity of getting in touch with the cosmic Self, which can choose to direct us towards our evolution, even taking the shape of dreams. If we want to favour our disposition to be in touch with our Self, we should try to detach ourselves little by little from all that attracts our body and our senses (including sight and hearing); that’s why the advice is to avoid television, food, discussions in order to calm down our body and read something attractive or listen to some pleasant music, thus allowing the forces of the Self to emerge in the form of dreams.
Before going to sleep, then, we should try to imagine a shining sun, observing it in its movement from its rise to the apex throughout its decline, and link to this image our important question. Sooner or later we will get an answer. The great secret of bright dreams has two modalities: 1 – We must believe that even such an irrational manifestation as a dream, which we think impossible to master, is the witness of an inner part of ours. 2 _ Through a constant and progressive training, we will be able to make our Self speak; this means that we will succeed in getting in touch with the noblest part of our psyche.

DEBATE
Question: the foetus dreams. What about the Self? Does it take us towards a world beyond ours? Where does the dream originate from? What about the dimension of the Self?
Answer: First of all we must underline that modern science has instruments that show the foetus movements and even its cerebral waves. Psychoanalysts, who do not dispose of such instruments, have nevertheless noticed the existence of a sort of archaic pre-natal dreams in some of their patients. Some primary fancies, such as cannibalism, tearing people or animals to pieces, refer to archaic experiences where they witness the most ancient philogenetical aspects. Inside the relationship between mother and child there is a link between the foetus’s and his mother’s dreams, as if he/she communicated his/her dreams to his/her mother who, after metabolising them, sends them back to the baby in her womb. It is evident that a pregnant woman, going beyond her ego, since the very beginning prepares a subtle and profound dialogue between herself and her baby: it is a contact made of endorfines and of electrolytes (chemical messages), but during pregnancy it is the only possible one, and it nevertheless influences both the cerebral growth of the foetus and the mother’s experiences of thought transmission. This early and special dialogue between a mother and her baby establishes a sort of primary code which will later allow her, even if blinded, to recognise her child through smell or which will let her understand the nature of her child’s cry, while to fathers all babies’ shouts have the same sound. Some researchers have analysed the state of foetuses and have discovered they are linked to particular affective attitudes: so movement, brain, images, archaic images follow the same path. That’s why we can wonder whether dreams are a sort of parallel world pervading human beings to which we may recur in order to get in touch with something beyond us. Even if this theory seems crazy, there are physiologists and scholars in quantistic mechanics who have postulated the presence of a sort of Unus Mundus, of a physical/chemical totality outside our reality, made of a kind of quantistic experiences, wherefrom everything originates and whereto everything returns. It is evident that this quantistic universe can be postulated only by the most advanced studies of Physics, let’s think of Sharon, of Capra’s observations, of all those scholars who have busied themselves with the relationship space/time and all its complexities. The same subject can be interpreted in a mythological key in Castaneda’s descriptions of what is going to happen to us beyond dreams, beyond our lives: we will see the eagle (the reference to this animal is due to Mexican traditions) and we will become the nourishment of this animal, thus re-entering the eternal game in the form of ‘food’. Let’s think of the myth of Simurgh: after long consultations, plenty of birds decide to reach this mythical mountain, in the middle of an island where the wise bird named Simurgh lives: he has all answers and he knows the meaning of life. Many populations start this journey, even if nobody knows where the island is. The majority of these birds die, the weakest do not even find the strength to go back home and perish in the sea; but the few who accomplish their task and come in sight of the mountain, see some clouds and fog around it. Little by little, while approaching the place, they feel an intensifying heat and - when their wings are almost burning - they arrive in the presence of Simurgh, only to discover that his face is the face of each of them: burning the ego we understand that our essence is the Self; the divine has revealed itself and we are aware of his presence inside ourselves. All of us, in this final allegorical flight towards this mythical island (our unconscious), can reach the centre of our being (the Self/Simurgh) burning our Ego. If we accomplish our task, we become one with the Self, and if we are the Self, it means we are pure conscience: what we used to call ‘unconscious’ is now ‘awareness’, in a unique, continuous transformation: we are at one with the divine. Question: If I make a consciously active effort to find the Self, don’t I run the risk of polluting my research? Isn’t the Self far from a rational/conscious approach? Shouldn’t I expect the Self to look for me and speak to me?
Answer: First of all we must clarify what is the meaning of ‘active phase’: all of us know that there are two ways towards ascetic life and spirituality. 1- The path of the warrior, the way of privation. If you have a need, you must give it up. If you are cold, you must learn how to resist, how to control yourself. A woman? No women. In the end you will become insensible to earthly stimuli and you will succeed in transcending everything. No doubt, if you take off your skin from your body, you will get at the skeleton, you will reach essentiality. Clearly, through pain you don’t lose your awareness. St. Antony of the Desert used to burn himself whenever faced with temptations (and the name of the disease, ‘St. Antony’s fire’, comes from this legend). But there is a danger: a trifling episode or a dream, coming from uncontrolled aspects (that is often called the devil), can destroy all our efforts. And then, let’s be objective: if the Self implies a neutral condition, how can we be neutral if we are actively working to accomplish this state? There is a contradiction. 2- Instead of being so severe and hard with ourselves, why don’t we try a more natural way? Why don’t we learn from nature? Any instinct of ours implies a successive condition of calm: if we are hungry or thirsty, let’s eat and drink, after which we feel well. No spoliation, but allowing ourselves to accept our needs. This path runs through a natural study of the conditions of neutrality of our ego. It is up to us to decide whether to follow either option 1 (the dry way) or option 2 (the humid one), bearing in mind that our target is to reach calm and neutrality, since it is only in this state of ours that the Self pops in. How can I make my Ego die? How could the Self inhabit a dead body? It can’t be physically dead, it must be dead to all that the ego is used to give importance to, in order to let the Self become a noticeable flame. Another example: All of us, human beings are lamps. Each of us is a lamp on which mother, father, emotions, experiences, fears, studies etc. have put , at turn, a coloured veil. In the end the filtering light is the result of what the lamp wants to express and the mixture of these veils over it. Most people are very happy with this light and never dream of changing it, some try to lift one or two veils, and they happen to see a bit more around them, other ones (the most courageous) in the course of their proceeding towards the discovery of light, understand that the bulb is burning. One must learn how to lift all veils and not to fear the lamp-burn. When the last veil is off, we will see the pure light! Of course we are dealing with archetypes and myths and none of us is in the condition of knowing the number of missing veils… Novalis in ‘The disciples of Sais’ said that nobody has been able to lift Iside’s last veil, but he who can lift it will see, in the face of the veiled Iside, his own face. Everything is up to us, but let us not hope that, once we have unveiled the lamp, we will see our very face: we will see our true, profound essence in its origin, beyond forms, sentiments, mentality. This is the meaning of the aphorism at Delfi’s temple ‘KNOW YOURSELF’: the truth inside you, your own Self.
Question: Freud’s world was full of taboos and sexuality was completely removed, that’s why he discovered what was being repressed (unconscious sexual desires were disguised in the form of dreams). On the other hand Jung, who belonged to Swiss society, had to face another mentality, where what was removed was perhaps religion or the metaphysical side, but not sexual life. He said that in no dream there could be a cheating intention, because it enters our lives with the language of the unconscious. If there is, on our side, an active interest in discovering our truth, there can be integration in our conscience.
Answer: It is true, and it must be added that Freud belonged to the Jewish culture, which still nowadays treats sexuality differently from a Christian, an Indian, a Muslim. So we must never forget how culture can be at the source of the deformation of dreams, but it is evident, even if neither Freud nor Jung ever stated it quite clearly, that dreams always origin from the filter of our body. Today we know that our liver dreams, that our heart dreams! Today I ate some cheese: that cheese was made of the milk of a goat, that goat which had had its own animal emotions, had eaten some grass. All this being condensed in its body, in a physical situation, through its milk was transmitted to me who, eating those parts and taking them into my intestines (which anatomically correspond to the roots of a tree), send a message to my brain. The biological intelligence inside myself has in fact fragmented these substances and sent them to the ‘lower brain’ - the liver – which this way gets in touch with that milk, that goat, that grass and which in dreams will be deformed by this interference. That’s why the ancients said that in order to favour the coming of the Self, the body should be kept silent (the importance of fasting). The organs of our body are inextricably linked and in contact not only with the external world but with all that they absorb from the outside world, whose modalities become part of our inside: our body receives the world, it distillates it, reflects it in our psyche and as a result we have…dreams. In fact we dream with our body: our head is only the mirror reflecting the emotions that originate in our body from external or internal stimuli. Dante himself gives us very concrete images, as we have seen.
Question: What about recurring dreams?
Answer: It is nothing but a message. It is like an inner father or mother who is trying to let us become aware of a symbolical message: we need to receive some direction. The psychoanalyst is a sort of translator of the unknown language of his patient who, little by little will learn how to decipher it and be able to autonomously interpret his own dreams and solve his conflicts. Nightmares, like bright dreams, always take place during the RAM phase. A nightmare is a sort of violent attempt to put us in touch with reality. Dante awakened because he couldn’t bear those powerful images. When we awaken, anyway, we keep inside the fundamental image that guides the relationship.
Question: We have seen how dreams delineate a sort of project, but between our reality and the accomplishment of our project there is an intermediate path to face. How shall we behave to avoid getting drunk with an omnivorous culture (taking as much as possible with no selection) and try to individuate those key behaviours which can be useful for our happy existence and evolution of the Self?
Answer: This subject is not easy: if our target is the ‘Atman’, the ‘Self’, the ‘Spirit’, ‘Knowledge’, between this finality and ordinary reality, what can our behaviour be like, in order to favour this project’ I can only speak about my own experience, which derives from suffering human beings, from some psychological knowledge ( Freud’s readings and Jung’s treatises are nothing but instruments, they help to understand the secret world of dreams, but I am absolutely convinced that human beings and their dreams cannot be decoded through pre-worked patterns or through readings.). These big geniuses have shown us their way of facing some given situations, but if we look at Artemidoro, Shakespeare, Dante, Breton or other artists, we see that each of them has given his own personal contribution in this field of the unconscious. So, our job in hospitals makes us understand something more about pathologies and suffering, it also helps us to see projects and finalities. What I actually have learnt through years is humility in front of a suffering human being, who has always something to teach me. I have always tried to listen carefully. We should behave in a way similar to artists: the ‘Self’ comes little by little. An artist, at the beginning will work as a boy following his teacher’s advice, will learn how to mix colours (and this might be, for a psychoanalyst, the phase during which we follow the ‘sacred’ texts), but the project is discovering the artist within us. We might be able to paint beautifully or to make very modest pictures: it doesn’t matter. What matters is discovering who we are! All of us would like to be very important, but not all of us will become a Picasso. It is evident, nevertheless, that if within some of us a true artist is hidden, he will surely be recognised. From my own experience, the greatest spring towards knowledge has been listening to my patients: the Self speaks through symptoms, illnesses, pain. Even in the worst illnesses we find the voice of the Self who, through the game of metaphors, symbols, emotions, images is telling us something essential for our growth. To follow this path we must be able to go beyond the ego, which has its rules of space and time, and to learn how to treat as continuous facts those episodes that to our mind might appear separated. Nevertheless if we succeed in going beyond the logic and rationality dictated by our left hemisphere and if we manage to learn how to utilise the analogies and the symbolical hints proposed by our right hemisphere, our lives will appear to us linked to a secret plot easy to understand exactly like a commonplace book made of words just readable with the help of our logical left hemisphere. What matters is that we should employ both hemispheres, alternating them in order never to forget the real and the analogical approaches to the same situation: this way our conscience will get used to focus on an intermediate point that anatomists call interhemispheric connessure, which for oriental scholars is ‘the way in the middle’. Thus reality will appear to us at the same time true and symbolic, considering our capacity of shifting our conscience from one hemisphere to the other. It is not an easy job, but what matters is that we must never forget to treat all that happens to us in our existence not only as a real situation but also as a fact symbolical of something else. If I am convinced that I am nothing but the result of my ego, and not the symbol of something, I am annulling the voice inside me that is trying to explain to me who I really am. If the scholar of symbolism, and not the literary critic, approaches Dante, he will wonder why Dante’s beloved was called ‘Beatrice’ and Boccaccio’s one ‘Fiammetta’. Names are not there by chance, they are the result of a choice by those who know of a symbolism pervading a reading which should help us to enter that symbolical world, built by someone who knows and who, through the use of metaphors, wants to help those who do not know to acquire something very deep. All wise men, starting with Christ and backwards, have spoken through parables; we should remember that the parable (as a geometric figure) has its tangents, which go to the infinite.

Translated by Daniela Capsoni