Dreams, helpful or useless?
“I dreamed that my son was in a car accident last night but I’m glad it was only a dream.” I phoned him this morning and he is fine. How silly of me to worry.”
This woman’s dream leads us into our second discussion in our workshop on dreams which underlines that dreams are seen in many different ways.
a) In the first place we see that many people treat dreams as peculiar silly happenings which take place when they are sleeping. They take them in the most superficial kind of way, and, in my opinion, are the poorer for it. These are the people who ask what you ate the night before if you tell them you had a disturbing dream. About their own dreams they say, ‘I had the most awful nightmare. I’m so glad it was not real.” They never think that the reason that it was a nightmare was because it was so real. Most people in our culture fall into this class. Dreams are entertainment or a nuisance, but not to be taken seriously, certainly not looked to for wisdom and direction.
b) In the second place, many people take their dreams literally. They run all the way from the woman who accused her husband of having an affair, because she had dreamed it, to the man who attempted murder because he had dreamed that he should. Generally, one should not take dreams literally.
Generally, if people attend to their dreams at all, in our western culture, it will be to take them literally. If they dream that a family member is dying, that their car broke down, that they are shopping for clothes, then they assume that the total message of the dream has to do with their family member’s health, their car, or their wardrobe. The problem is that when we take this approach, the vast number of our dream images must be dismissed as unintelligible.
c) In the third place, some people take their dreams seriously, sure that they have a message to give. They attempt to conquer them and wrestle out their meaning. The largest number of books on dream interpretation tend to take this view. Yet this method, in the long run, is disappointing. It just doesn’t work. It can be very discouraging to realize that dreams do not participate in the kind of experience that can be attacked and conquered.
d) The most effective way to understand dreams is to see that they function on several different levels. 1) The first level is that of the everyday personal dream. Here I think of the lovely 92 year old lady who had a very practical dream. She dreamed that her lost library book was in her housecoat pocket. 2) In the second place there are dreams that seem to go beyond the everyday. They are trying to get us to finish some psychological task. For example someone who needs to decrease a parent’s influence in their lives might dream that that parent has died. 3) Finally, there are dreams that are charged with power. They fill us with awe and wonder. They are numinous because they come from what Carl Jung called the archetypal realm. This is that area of the great, central overarching themes of the human journey. When we have a dream with unrecognized, unusual or precocious figures in it, we are in this archetypical area. The images in these dreams, although unfamiliar to the dreamer, can often be found in folklore, mythology, fairy tales and religious symbolism.
So we need to look at the level of our dreams. Are they everyday dreams which solve some practical problem? Are they trying to get us to attend to some psychological task we are blocking, like depending less on our parents and their rules? Or are they archetypical in nature that may change the whole direction of our lives? I will be going into this difference in more detail in my next post. Happy dreams!
Any comments on your dreams and dreaming I will appreciate. Do we agree so far or not?