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Have you remembered a vivid dream lately? Can you remember the last time you paid close attention to a dream? An un-churched friend of mine, in his early retirement, thought it would do him good to read the Bible. He was surprised big time! He had to stop because of Biblically induced nightmares. I don't question his choice, but I do think he failed, like most of us, to see what dreams can offer. More on him a bit later.
My decades-long interest in dreams has always been tempered because, like many, I find dreams can be difficult. They lose value because they are too weird and obscure to rely upon, and we even find them humorous: "Hey, honey, last night I dreamt we moved to Istanbul and we bought an orange castle—how funny is that!"
I am now reconsidering this opinion. Slowly and over the last 10 years, I have changed my mind. I am now convinced we are missing value if we ignore our dreams. Let me tell you why you might want to reconsider and what you can start doing to find value in your nightly excursions. Dreams are elusive, but a more informed approach can make them much less so.
Why Dreams are Important
If we add it all up, we dream for many years, as many as six, in a lifetime. Six Years! Does this sound like a trivial phenomenon? So maybe nature is just wasting its time and couldn't come up with a better design for sleep than to fill our heads with meaningless images.
But when we observe natural processes, do we see nature wasting a lot of effort? Hardly. Everything is used and useable. Great minds, Jung, my favorite, and Freud before him, and James Hillman, who died recently, made the case that nature has a point in all this dreaming and that nature never wastes anything. (By nature we are not talking ecosystems and biology here, we are talking natural forces and phenomena.) Animals have natural instincts; so do humans. Food and sex are two of them. Dreaming is a third one: we all do it and we have no control over our dreams, like we can't really tell ourselves to not feel hunger. The psychological instinct of dreaming is at the heart of depth psychology that Freud and Adler and Jung suggested a century ago. And it is purposeful
Objection #1: "Yes, but I am asleep," you say. "Who cares? It is not my effort and I have no control."
Response: Well if it is not your effort, who's is it? And since when is control a criteria for what has value? Is it not possible that part of you that you can't fully control is dreaming and doing its own work in its own way? Do you control your body to fight infection or heal a cut, or does your body go about its business and we sort of aid the process as we can? Can't our minds be going about their business in ways we don't control or understand?
The lack of control over our minds can be creepy and challenging for most of us. What part of our consciousness could possibly be out of our willful control? What part of us could be dreaming? The short answer is the unconscious, a word that has fallen out of favor, unless maybe you meditate. Many of us would rather study brains than minds, and synapses rather than the unconscious. Another answer, for some who allow for this, might be that the spiritual part of us is dreaming, the part we can't touch. Or the psycho-spiritual part if you prefer. You don't have to believe this, that there are parts of us we cannot control and that they are doing their own work, but many of us can allow for it as a possibility.
Objection #2: "But dreams can be horrific, like killing people or having sex with my sibling. What good is that? I am not a murderer or incestuous."
Response: Dreams speak in metaphoric language. When someone is killed, that means something has to stop or end. If sex happens in a dream, think joining and union, not intercourse, and you may want to think symbolically about your sibling, not literally. This is another hard part for us. Science has won the day over metaphor and we think knowing is not knowing unless it is scientific. Wrong! There are many ways of knowing. Where does the wisdom of the Dalai Lama or a poet like Emily Dickinson come from? Not their years in a lab! There is a language of the soul, of the heart, of myth, the language that Joseph Campbell was speaking in as he commanded a piece of America's mindshare in his lifework. This much-forgotten language is the language of dreams and one we must employ to plumb their value.
So go back to my Bible-reading friend, who had to stop because of the nightmares. Again, I don't question his choice, but I do think he failed to see metaphors and got caught in a literal interpretation of violence in his dreams. And this is not to say that at times dreams can be very dark and disturbing.
What's to Do?
So what's to do if you want to begin working with your dreams?
1. Read a book or go to a workshop on dreams. There are many good ones, and shallow ones, too. Avoid the ones like "Ten Easy Ways to Interpret Your Dreams." Buyer beware. If you can handle depth psychology vocabulary, try James A. Hall, Jungian Dream Interpretation. Or go to the originals like Freud and Jung if you want to go to the source. Stanley Krippner is useful with his Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them. Don't be put off by the jargon and don't push through them if there is no resonance for you. Try the workshops or other steps below.
2. Journal your dreams and see what comes up. I have journaled my dreams for most of the last ten years and find patterns and meanings that I have come to rely upon and use. Psychology Today has a great blogger, other than me of course, Tracey Cleantis, who can give you more tips on dreams. Check it out his blog.
3. Find a therapist who knows what they are doing with dreams. Interview them first, of course, to see if what they say resonates.
4. Don't work it too hard. Dreams are elusive at best. While dreams can be amazing in their symbolic power, they are often baffling. Just ask yourself what the images in the dream mean to you. What do you associate with them? Tease out the meaning of a dream with questions and multiple types of thinking, not just the hard edged thinking that we use in waking hours going for the facts. Metaphor, symbols, myth, remember.
Billy Joel's In the Middle of the Night captured this:
In the middle of the night, I go walking in my sleep
Through the Jungle of Doubt, to a river so deep.
I must be searching for something, something so undefined.
It can only be seen by the eyes of the blind.
In other words, dreams are not for our waking, rational, get-through-my-task-list, minds. We must wear night goggles and practice metaphorical vision, the eyes of the blind according to Joel, to get past our doubt to valuable insight.
Or in the words of Jungian heavyweight and my teacher James Hollis from Tracking the Gods, The Place of Myth in Modern Life: "The depth psychologist is obliged hour by hour to wonder at the workings of the psyche—how a dream can weave disparate fragments into a telling critique of conscious life...Dreams are the inscape of the soul and constitute the myth-making process of the individual."
Dream on, readers. Bigger parts of you than your rational mind have important things to communicate, if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. The next time you dream of that orange castle in Istanbul, don't laugh it off—instead ask, what is it about your journey to personhood that is looking to the East?
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