Dreams have been described as ‘letters from the unconscious’; they are a communication from our wise and unconscious part that is inhibited and censored by our conscious mind. Dreams can tell us what we really want, but are afraid to admit it, and they tell us about our relationships, career, and life direction. Dreams reveal our destinies and authentic selves and reveal our true purpose and life path.
In psychospiritual psychotherapy, we explore the images and messages of dreams to gain information, understand and enrich our lives. We explore dreams, learn how to keep an effective dream journal, and learn a simple yet effective method for unlocking and understanding what our dreams are. they are saying. Through group sharing, role-playing, conscious dreaming, ‘holding’ the symbols and ‘following’ our dreams at vital points, we can recognize and accept the wisdom, guidance and help offered to us through dreams. .
Why are dreams so important?
Ancient Vedic wisdom points out that we live our lives in a cycle of three states or conditions. They are Wake, Sleep and Deep Sleep. Throughout the entirety of a human life we are in one of these three conditions.
Interestingly, contemporary human beings are mostly asleep in their waking lives and awake or attentive in their dream lives. We wake up and spend time with anyone who will listen recount our dreams from the night before, because it is so often more interesting to us than what we call ‘normal’ life.
And there is a reason for this. With the decline, in the outer world, of the sacred – the realms of mythology, ritual and symbol – the ceremonies of insight and guidance have now been internalized. When you are asleep your guard is down, the usual inhibitors are relaxed. So that is the moment when the unconscious rises and makes itself heard.
There is yet another reason for our interest in dreams; we have become compulsively visual people. Of the five senses, sight is the most emphasized in modern society. We take in, experience, and evaluate other people and the world around us primarily through visual impressions. The other senses are also important, but they are assembled around the central visual image.
We have become beings who crave visual distraction: television, video, in our pockets, in our homes and in the workplace, in our cars, magazines, images of food on packaging, photography, cinematography, images abound. Spectacular 3D visuals. So is it any wonder we’ve begun to experience the world as if it were some kind of Blu-ray video presentation: spectacular, over-stimulating, sense-numbing, emotionally and visually invasive? By comparison, the world can seem unspectacular and pedestrian.
However, the world of dreams knows no limitations like those of waking life. They are truly wild. We fly, perform tremendous feats and defy the restrictions of time, place and normal inhibitions. Dreams seduce us with fantasies of pleasure; we can meet people with whom we feel supernaturally close, perceive light and clarity beyond the vividness of waking life, and perform actions and deeds for which we may feel guilty or ashamed.
What value is there in listening to what your dreams have to say?
People have dreams and ignore them when they can save their lives. Or at least inform or guide their lives. People who normally read their horoscope or seek advice from a wise friend or family member may routinely dismiss their dreams. However, the dreams they ignore possess the same wisdom they seek.
Dreams offer us a world of symbols and guidance that leads us into an intimate relationship with our dark side, that part of our psyche that we have disowned.
By learning ways to understand our dreams, we gain access to a plethora of deep unconscious wisdom that leads us to inner wholeness and personal wholeness.
What about dream dictionaries? Aren’t they enough to guide us to a valid interpretation that we can make on our own?
Dream dictionaries have their place. But much better than consulting a book that tells you what your dream means is discovering it for yourself. That way you are already connecting with the deeper wisdom that is yours. Dream dictionaries tend to be overly simplistic – a kind of building block method, and by definition don’t have much to say about the dynamics, sequence, interrelationship of symbols, and the deeper layers of personal meaning in their dreams. dreams.
What methods do you recommend for working with dreams?
There are many dream methods, from analytical interpretation to Gestalt, from Jungian dreaming to daydreaming, archetypal and transpersonal approaches, symbol immersion, re-entry, etc. For me, the most important aspect of listening to our dreams is essentially practical and concerns time constraints. Most of us have very little time to work on our dreams, and yet we dream every night, and for the most part, our dreams have something unique to tell us. So I think the crucial point is how to work with dreams effectively and quickly enough to make it feasible to keep track of where our dreams direct our attention, or stay in relationship with what Arny Mindell would call “the body.” of Dreams”. the aspect of our psyche that offers us dreams.
So I have devised a simple, effective and fast way to work with the dreams that I teach in my workshops. At the same time, if a workshop participant has already adopted a dreamwork method, I honor that, because it seems to me that each of the various methods has something to offer.
So is it really about having a relationship with the life of your dreams?
By entering into a relationship with your dreams, you can develop a dialogue with the unconscious mind, request specific guidance, and access deep wells of wisdom. Which brings us back to the starting point: the three states of wakefulness, sleep, and deep sleep. The sacred syllable OM, or AUM, is the sound of the universe and is the direct experience of transcendence, manifesting as inner radiance.
Breaking down AUM, the A is the waking state of consciousness, the M is the transcendent state of consciousness, and the mediating or transitional sound in the middle is the U, which is dream consciousness. So dreams mediate between our waking self and our transcendent self.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell tells the story of a conversation he had with Jung. Jung was hiking in Africa with some friends when they came across a group of indigenous people. The lack of familiarity led to a confrontation in which each group seemed to be assessing what potential threat there might be. They had no way of communicating with each other. As each group relaxed and felt good about the other, primitive basic communication arose and, according to Jung, the sound he heard was OM… OM… OM.
This strikes me as a good metaphor for our relationship with the world of dreams. At first they are threatening because they are not familiar. Then, as we develop a relationship with them, we feel an underlying unity in them and in our relationship with them as well. They are really a part of us, a kind of secret and lost part that we can repossess and finally possess, which makes us richer in our soul life.
In our soul life instead of our ego life?
Every dream is a challenge to our sense of separateness, to our egocentric self. The dream encourages us to bridge the gap, open communication and resolve the differences between the different parts of ourselves. The result is an experience of inner oneness that we radiate outward in our waking lives.