Listening to Your Dreams
By Dr. Connie Rodriguez
We all dream. What are these nightly stories that seem so illogical and at times seem to have nothing to do with our waking life? The key is to learn to remember them and then, understand them. Why would you want to do this? Because, listening to your dreams can provide you with daily guidance about your life and gives us a peek into the unconscious realms that also tell us what is going on in our inner life. Take this dream for example:
Birthday Dream
I am painting a “set” for a play or production. It is an oblong set and I am spray painting the floor. As I spray, it comes out a golden checkerboard pattern. The back part of the set isn’t finished so I go back there and begin painting the walls, or finishing the walls in a green color. I recognize that I can see what needs to be done and I just do it without being told what’s next.
This dream presented itself to me on my birthday and I entitled it: “New Productions.” I felt that in the dream I was getting ready for a “new play” – or perhaps a new way to play in life. I had the feeling in the dream that the play was something like Alice in Wonderland. I associate Alice in Wonderland with being in altered states of consciousness, just the very thing I like to play in. The back part of the set could be my unconscious; the part that still needs work. I know what I have to do and do it; this knowing feels like “resolve” or an understanding of what I need to do to make the next step in my journey. The color green makes me think of new life, new growth. The golden checkerboard I associate with a chess game, the game of life. Because it is golden it tells me I am on the right path.
Dreams are an inner resource that can be a guide not only for our outer world life but also for the meaning of our psychological processes as seen in my birthday dream. These dreams can be extremely helpful in giving us a look at what is happening in the unconscious realm of our psyche that we are not otherwise aware of. Carl G. Jung, the eminent Swiss psychiatrist and prolific writer on dreams, once said, “An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter from God.”
Jung, whose work branched away from Freud’s in the early 1900’s, believed that dreams come from the unconscious, both the personal unconscious and the collective, believing some dream images have a universal or “archetypal” meaning. Jung noticed that imagery from the unconscious often replicates the images from alchemy, fairytales and myth, and therefore they have a universal meaning that he termed archetypal. For example, in my opening dream, gold has a universal or archetypal meaning of something that is precious, important, and often has a spiritual sense to it. Gold in alchemy was the opus metal, one that represented the ultimate evolution of the Self.
Jung stated that the unconscious has a greater understanding of ourselves than does our waking ego, therefore the dream psyche or unconscious is not hampered by the ego and its judgments during sleep states. Dreams often mirror back to us something that we were not “aware’ of in the ego (waking) state. Jung found that the psyche has an automatic healing response and will try to balance what is out of balance. Therefore dreams will often be compensatory, meaning that they will compensate for a waking attitude that may be out of balance to our greater Self.
Jung discovered that dreams are not only important for the life of an individual but represent parts of an immense “web of destiny” which pertains to all of humanity. He found that dreams include the collective memory of mankind that he called the “collective unconscious.” Dreams have always been an important part of history. In times past, they have been used as oracles and divination. At the turn of the 19th century, Freud began looking at dreams as a way to see into the unconscious drives of the personal unconscious, while Jung saw them as pointing outward toward universal motifs and archetypes. Both were seeing that dreams performed a meaningful function in the lives of their patients and they began using them as tools in analysis toward transformation and individuation.
Researchers have found that we dream when we are in REM sleep, a type of brain wave that indicates we are in the dream state. Although we have many dreams at night we usually recall only a few. Some dreamers can recall as many as four or five dreams, while others feel lucky to get a dream or just a dream fragment. We can enhance dream recall in several ways. The most important is setting the intention the night before to recall the dream. It helps to have a pad and pencil handy to record any images. Dreams are like mice, as soon as we awaken, they scurry away. But if we can catch the “tail end” of that “mouse,” we can often pull it back out to recapture most of the dream. For this reason, upon waking, it is very important to train yourself to not move and to ask yourself, “was I dreaming?” Usually this is enough to recapture the dream and get enough of it to record. I have also told people to drink plenty of water before bedtime so that they will have to get up in the middle of the night. The key to a capturing a dream in progress is to write some of the images down, or guaranteed, the dream will be gone by morning!
Today there are many books on dream interpretation that give ways to understand and use dreams for personal growth. I have worked with dreams for many years in dream circles and in individual therapy with my clients. In my own life, I can’t even imagine not looking at the meaning of my dreams as inner guidance and help from a rich inner resource. The wonderful thing about dreams is that they come from an unadulterated source; a source without the ego’s influence.
I have many examples of dreams that have guided others in their lives and many of them have led to major life changes. A couple of them in particular have led these persons to making important decisions in their life. Dreams may also bring information with regard to a problem one is struggling with. For example, our “ego” self may want to do one thing while our unconscious “knows” that we would be making a poor choice for ourselves. I remember one woman in particular who was looking at houses to buy. She found one she really liked and “incubated” a dream (asked the psyche to give her a dream) to get some guidance on whether the house she found was the right house for her. It was a house that she really liked and of course wanted a dream confirming her choice. Instead, she got a dream that showed her a house with windows that were falling off, cracks in the wall and dark spots on the ceiling. Still not satisfied with this answer, she asked again for another dream about the house. This time she got a dream in which the living room was filled with laundry and it was hard to find a place to walk without things strewn everywhere. In interpreting the dream, she felt the laundry indicated that there would be a lot of work and upkeep, which was also the feeling in the dream. As a result, she did not opt to buy the house, and instead purchased another. Later, she found out that the house she almost bought did indeed have quite a few structural problems that were not evident in the walkthrough.
Another dreamer had a dream that told her to get out of her job. She was working for several years in a cancer center with children in a comprehensive care program for families, a program she herself developed. This dream woke her up to the fact that she was burnt out from the weekly deaths of her child patients. Here is the dream:
“I dreamed that I was in a concentration camp somewhere in Germany. I was one of the people that brought in the wounded and dying on a stretcher. I was aware that the other person at the end of the stretcher kept leaving for America and I had to keep finding a replacement to help me. Finally, I realized that I could go to America too. At this thought I became elated in the dream and woke up.” Immediately she realized that she too could leave. She realized that she needed to quit her job and that it was okay to do so. At the time she was actually living in California and “going to America,” for her, represented going to a place she felt at home. She immediately knew it was the decision she wasn’t allowing herself to even think about due to the guilt about leaving the families in her care. This is one of those kinds of dreams that bring a sudden realization to underlying feelings that sometimes are just beyond the periphery of awareness.
People who may want to learn more about their dreams might want to take a dream class, where one can learn how to ask the right questions that leads to that “aha” experience; that sudden knowing that “that’s IT!” The ultimate goal for every dreamer is to learn to decipher their own dream language and symbols through associations. It is important to remember that dream dictionaries often carry someone else’s meaning about symbols. Dream dictionaries may be helpful to gain an understanding of archetypal motifs but not for the personal meaning that one gets from asking questions. One author that I found most helpful with deciphering dreams in Gayle Delaney, a strict phenomenologist who doesn’t use archetypal meaning to help understand dreams but nevertheless has developed a “tried and true” path to personal dream work. Once one gets to know one’s own dream symbols, instead of nonsensical images, dream deciphering becomes an awakening to a larger part of the self as well as a wonderful teacher and inner guide.
