Introduction

Dreams have been considered a source of guidance from the Divine since ancient times; yet, few people today consider their dreams to have this importance. Most people, if they remember their dreams at all, speak of them amusingly, seeing them as nothing more than a brief form of entertainment because of their colorful and bizarre occurrences.

For those who believe that a dream is far more important than this, it can often be confusing to know what to make of it, in spite of one's desire to understand. I felt this way for many years: I intuited that there was invaluable information being presented to me, yet I could not make meaningful sense of it. It was as if I were hearing a foreign language.

Like many, when I turned to books I was bewildered. There were dream dictionaries, each spelling out different meanings of dream symbols, and there were various schools of psychotherapeutic theory that held conflicting opinions about dreams. Some writers dismissed the importance of dreams entirely, believing they were merely a product of senseless random firings in the brain during the night, and that nothing about them was inherently meaningful. The result was that I was able to derive very little practical knowledge from what I read.

My Early Experience with Dreams

I became interested in dreams when I was a child. My mother was prone to terrible nightmares. Her cries would penetrate the night stillness, catapulting me out of my sleep. I sometimes wondered whether someone had broken into the house because her pleas for help were so realistic and so intense. My father, who was hearing disabled, rarely woke from my mother's distressing calls during her frightful dream states, but I could hear her from across the hall in another bedroom. They were that distressing.

I can't count the number of times I got out of bed to wake my mother. I couldn't bear to let her go on sleeping in such suffering. Most of her dreams were either about black men chasing her or of snakes surrounding her. (We lived, at that time, in the deep, segregated south). It puzzled me to see my Mother so anguished by her dreams. She never made sense of them, but the memory of her cries remains with me to this day.

In my early 20's while studying psychology I had a dear friend as my roommate. He, too, was very interested in dreams, and so we would often sit over a pot of tea and discuss our dreams from the night before. In spite of our energetic efforts, we never really had the feeling that we understood what was going on. We had plenty of ideas, but deep inside we knew something was missing from all of our explanations.

Eventually, I obtained a Ph.D. in counseling psychology and went on to work as a psychologist and marriage and family therapist. Still, even then, in spite of all the books I'd read, the dream world remained elusive, as if there were a great mystery surrounding this inner landscape, not permitting me to decipher the reasons for these strange occurrences at night.

Finding a Mentor

This all changed in my late 30's when I discovered a remarkable book while browsing in a bookstore. It was rather high up on a shelf, and were it not for the title, I don't think I would have noticed it. But my eyes seemed to zero in on it, and I read, By Way of Pain - A Passage into the Self by Sukie Colegrave. I was going through a personal crisis at the time, struggling over what to do with my pain, and so was particularly intrigued by the title. I was surprised when I read just how crucial dreams could be to discovering the causes of and the solutions to one's deepest despair.

Before I'd even finished reading the book I wrote a letter to the publisher asking that a request be forwarded to the author. I asked the author whether I could study with her. I could see that her approach to dreams was not theoretical or heady, but rather very practical and highly spiritual. This rang a bell for me, for as a boy, raised in a fundamentalist environment, I knew that dreams were often considered to be the mouthpiece of the Divine. There are many stories in the Bible of people being warned and protected through their dreams. Guidance was often conveyed at crucial moments this way. The idea of integrating psychology and spirituality appealed to me greatly.

About a month after I mailed my letter, I received a phone call from the author saying that she would be delighted to work with me. She and I lived about a thousand miles apart, so our work was done primarily by phone. I would speak with her for an hour each week and would review several dreams per session. This went on for a full year before I was to see her in person.

Off and on over the next 20 years I worked on several hundreds of dreams. My life long curiosity had finally paid off. Once I found someone who could open a dream to me, I was astonished at the uncanny intelligence at play. It was as if a second therapist was at work, revealing the issues that were most important for me to address, and what's more, solutions were being offered.

I had been in therapy before, but it had never reached the depth that dreamwork provided. There was an honesty and truthfulness revealed to me in my dreams that quickened the process of self-discovery.

Not long after I started this study, I began asking clients to tell me their dreams. The same thing happened; it was as if there was another therapist at work, clarifying the inner situation of the client and then providing solutions that had eluded both the client and myself.

What I learned from this process is how important it is to share your dreams with a skilled listener, particularly someone who understands how the unconscious works and communicates. I wish I could say otherwise, but I believe that dreamwork, the kind that unlocks deep mysteries within the self, is an art, and like most arts the student learns more quickly with a skilled mentor.

A Guiding Principle of Dream Interpretation

Now I want to give you one of the most important principles of dreamwork. It has to do with seeing the various aspects of your larger self reflected in the dream. By the larger self I am referring to the fact that each of us is multifaceted and complex, containing many qualities and characteristics, some of which are useful to us (like courage, honesty, gentleness), while others are limiting and restrict our ability to lead satisfying lives (like fearfulness, deceptiveness, harshness). You can consider that the dream is like a mirror reflecting the many different sides of the self, and that the many different people, places and things in your dreams are used to reflect these aspects of yourself back to you. It's like seeing a play performed and realizing that there is something about every character on stage that shows you something about yourself.

Let me give several examples. A number of years ago I had a series of dreams about the car that I owned at the time, a Volvo. In these dreams harm was being done to the car; once a young inner city black youth had torn the roof off. In another dream the car was at ocean's edge about to be swept out to sea by the tide. In the third dream it was lying in the humid jungle, decaying and turning to rust.

I will give you a technique that will work as a magic key to unlock many mysteries in dreams. Whenever you are confounded about the meaning of a particular dream image, ask, "What are the defining characteristics of this image? What makes it what it is?"

For example, with the Volvo I asked, "What is it about a Volvo that distinguishes it from other cars?" The first thing that came to mind is that a Volvo is safe. In fact, that is the very reason I had purchased the car. I had driven small Volkswagen Beetles for a number of years while getting through college, and when I was finally able to buy a larger car I wanted a Volvo because it was durable and most of all, safe.

The dream was showing me that my psychological orientation or attitude was too inclined towards safety; and consequently the unconscious mind was insisting that this had to be undermined.

This illustrates one of the humbling aspects of doing dreamwork: our unconscious wisdom may insist that we sacrifice an attitude in order to be more balanced, and in so doing, become more adaptive to the challenges of life. Here my unconscious wisdom made it very clear that I wasn't taking enough risks, that I was too orientated towards safety. I was moving too conservatively through life. The dream demanded that I begin to develop abilities more like those of the inner city black kid who was street smart, who trusted his spontaneity, and could act on the spot without pre-planning his life. This dream demanded that I loosen up, take more risks and call on this potential of adaptability that was being overshadowed by my concern for safety and control.

It wasn't a flattering image that was being shown to me, but it was extremely valuable information to have about myself. A dream, of course, has the great value of giving this information in story form, a story in which you are the participant, so you get the experience. This is far more valuable than simply thinking a concept. For example, seeing the roof of my Volvo being torn off had much more of an impact on me than a friend or therapist telling me to lighten up, and, besides, people closest to us often don't want to tell us unflattering things about ourselves. That is why I consider the dream to be the most reliable mouthpiece of truth about we are and what is happening at the deepest level inside us. Its perception is precise and doesn't spare your ego.

If I had taken any of these dreams literally, rather than seeing the symbolic meaning, I might have thought that the first dream, in which the roof was torn off, was predicting that my car would be damaged; or in the last two dreams, the car being swept out to sea or rusting in the jungle, I might have thought that the dreams were telling me that it was time to get a new car. However, none of these interpretations had anything to do with my inner world. These dreams of the Volvo weren't literally about my car (which is the mistake people too often make - interpreting the dream literally); rather the Volvo dreams were about a quality of my personality that was out of balance.

The Ethical Mandate of the Dream

Carl Jung said that every dream has an ethical mandate. By saying this he stressed the importance of taking the dream seriously and then applying it to your life. It is not enough to find an interpretation. That is only one aspect of dreamwork. The interpretation must be applied to one's daily life in order to build a bridge between the unconscious and conscious minds.

In order for me to bring the truth of the Volvo dreams into everyday life I had to take more risks, learn to trust my spontaneity and have confidence that I could do what was needed in the moment (which is how you learn to survive on the streets of the inner city). This was underdeveloped in me, and so the dream pointed to a solution: let go of the Volvo attitude!

For me this meant staying on the lookout for being too much like a Volvo. I found that by keeping the dream message close in my consciousness I started saying, "Yes" to opportunities that I might have foregone in the past. Rather than procrastinate or pull away from situations that might cause me anxiety, I started stepping into them, not holding back. Whenever I was ambivalent or confused over a decision I would ask, "What would that little inner city kid do?" This would immediately give me a larger perspective, helping me to recognize how my timidity and cautiousness was complicating authentic, spontaneous action.

How Nightmares Can Help Us

These dreams illustrate a valuable point of dreamwork: the very thing that we fear in the dream (me losing my Volvo) may actually be the very thing we need. Nightmares are a case in point.

Sometime ago, I encountered a bear in my dream. I was frightened and tried to run away, which made me feel even more helpless because I could never get away. If you consider that the dream reflects different aspects of your larger self, then you gain a completely new understanding of what your dreams, and particularly your nightmares, are about.

This was one of Carl Jung's great contributions: to see that there is a Self beyond your ego, that is, you are more than who you think you are; there are potentials inside you that are waiting to come out and be lived, and, of course, there are aspects of yourself you would probably prefer to keep hidden. All of this is part of your greater Self, and dreams can help you see beyond your smaller self, the ego, and realize the larger being that you are.

For me, bears are the epitome of strength. Like lions in the jungles of Africa, here in North America the bear is king. It goes where it wants to go; it is not intimidated and it knows its power.

When I first dreamed of the bear it gave me cause to see how I was living my life from a place of great limitation, from a weakened and inferior attitude, lacking belief in my capability and consequently making choices that were below me and not in line with my beauty and strength. You could say that the bears were pursuing me because I needed them. They had come to my dreams to bring into awareness the very thing that my personality needed: more bearness, greater strength in my personality.

Here is an example of how honest a dream can be… After my first dream of running from a bear I had a second one, perhaps a month later. In this dream I was going through a house and opened a door to what I thought was my bedroom, and there was a bear so enormous that its body took up the entire space of the room. It was the biggest bear in the world! Here again I was frightened. It was more than I could handle. Terrified, I woke up.

Even though I had been trying to become stronger after the first bear dream, I evidently was not making sufficient changes in my attitude. In the second dream the unconscious intelligence was growing the bear energy to enormous proportions to offset or compensate for a continuing weakness in me. This caused me to look even harder at how I was living my life - still under the influence of longstanding feelings of inadequacy and allowing myself to be treated badly in a particular friendship. Even though the dream was nightmarish, it was the strong wake up call that I sorely needed. As a result of understanding the dream, I began to question the choices I was making at that time in my life. Eventually, I was able to see that I must live my life from a greater sense of my power and capability. The message from the unconscious was that I stand up stronger and become more of myself.

You see, when you really get the message of a dream it helps you see yourself differently. I didn't initially like seeing how I was living my life without courage, how I was allowing myself to be taken advantage of, how I was not following through on creative ideas for fear of failure or criticism. Yet these humbling views of myself were the precise, healing antidote I desperately needed.

By the way, accurate interpretations always have an effect on us. They prod us, confront us, challenge us, inspire us and sometimes disturb us. Less accurate interpretations may be interesting and may offer plausible explanations about why you dreamed something, but they don't change you in any significant way. Be suspicious of any interpretation that doesn't provide you with something meaningful. Look for the interpretation that helps you mature and develop your potential, even if it shows you something about yourself that isn't flattering. Often, humbling messages in your dreams may prove to be some of the most productive.

Dream Images are Psychoactive

I have come to realize that dream images can have psychoactive effects; that is, they can act in ways that are similar to antidepressants. When you learn to meditate on and live with a meaningful dream image it can exert a countering effect to depressiveness and discouragement.

If you want to enable dream images to become potent in your life - images of an inspiring person or animal, for example- start breathing as if you are breathing the very presence of the dream image into every cell of your body. Practice this form of intentional breathing several hundred times over the course of a few weeks or months.

I actually did this with my bear image. Whenever I was conscious of feeling weak or inadequate, I would call on the bear and breathe its great, strong, capable presence inside me, right to the very places inside my body where I felt tense or uptight. I would breathe in the courage of the bear to dispel the negative feelings of inadequacy or inferiority.

This is subtle work. It requires many repetitions to change the old habitual ways of feeling. Yet, through patience and persistent practice, change can happen at the innermost part of your self. For me, breathing in the courage of the bear helped me to step into the opportunities of my life with greater vigor and thus drive out the old discouragement that had taken up residence for far too long a time.

This way of working with dreams, of finding their symbolic, rather than literal nature, is different from how most people work their dreams. Too often people look to the dream to tell them something about the future or to what the dream is telling them about other people who are in their lives. I don't deny that dreams sometimes foretell the future or show you something about the people in your life. However, I must say that I observe this to be infrequent if not rare. Most dreams appear to inform the dreamer about what is happening now, in the present inside his or her inner world.

Remember, the dream is far more likely to be revealing something about different aspects of your own personality than what is happening in the outer world. Keeping this guiding principle in mind can help you guard against losing the penetrating truth of your dream.

Sex and Gender

Let's take sex and gender in dreams to illustrate this point further.

A man can gain a glimpse of a more feminine side of himself by noting the particular qualities of women in his dreams. For example, the tender, receptive capacity of a man is often not as developed as it is in women, and so through the dream a man can discover what this other side of himself, is like. Likewise, women can see qualities of their masculine capacities by observing the men in their dreams.

A woman once told me of an inspiring dream of a Native American elder. He had a rugged face that had been weathered over the years by the misfortunes of his life, yet his eyes were very kind. When she considered what this was showing her about herself she came to feel that the Indian man gave her a picture of how to be strong, suffer with grace and not run from pain. There was something sturdy about his personality that was important for her to assimilate.

The Woman with Bare Breasts

A man told me he had dreamed of a sensuous, alluring woman who was enticing him with her full and bare breasts. As we discussed how this dream woman might be expressing a neglected side of himself, he soon came to realize that he had become far too busy and stressed in his life. In this case, the feminine capacity of his own nature was calling him to be more sensual so that he could take better care of his tired body and mind. If taken in merely a literal fashion, as most people would be apt to do, it would seem that the man simply wanted more sex, which could, of course, have been the case. But, by leaving it at a literal level, the opportunity to open to deeper potentials within the self are missed. In this case the dream was helpful in reminding the man of how dismissing he had been of his body and that he had a real need for rest and refreshment.

Sex is a powerful merging of opposites. One way to think of sex in dreams is that you are being drawn to assimilate into your own personality qualities represented by another person.

I know of a man who still dreams from time to time of a woman he loved many years ago. When she comes in a dream her presence always reminds the man of the importance of an open heart, since it was through this woman that he first learned to open his heart deeply. Dreaming of her years later, gives him a felt reminder - a feeling deep in his body memory - to keep his heart open.

If you take a dream like this in a literal way you might think the man is simply longing for what he once had (though when I questioned the man, he clearly had no wistful longing towards the woman in waking life). Instead, the dream woman served as a reminder that he must allow openheartedness to reside more fully within him. The lover he had once known was no longer outside but had come to live in him in the form of imagery. Dreaming of her helped him remember what was most important in life.

He told me that these dreams of his former lover have helped him to make better decisions at crucial times in his life. Once this former lover came to him in a dream when he was about to break up with a woman he was close to being engaged to. The dream woman acted with great vengeance, as if she was very angry with him. Even though it was disturbing at first, he recognized that she was angry with him for closing his heart and not giving love a chance to develop in his current relationship.

The Many Functions of Dreams

I have outlined one of the main functions of the dream: that of reflecting back to us the many qualities of our larger Self. I emphasize this first and foremost because this appears to be the most common motif I observe in my dreams and the dreams of others. This said, I also believe that there are dreams that warn us of impending danger or a health crisis, that give us a chance to change the way we are living. These dreams can even be diagnostic of an illness, or may present the needed remedy for healing [1]. In ancient Greece there existed hundreds of dream healing temples that allowed those suffering with physical illness to come and incubate a dream to serve this healing function [2]. Our modern day symbol of medicine, a snake intertwined around a staff, actually comes from these early practices.

A classic example of predictive dreaming that once served an entire culture, is the dream recorded in the Bible in which the Pharaoh of Egypt was warned of an impending seven-year drought. Joseph ("the Dreamer") interpreted the dream, and as a direct result of his interpretation, plans were made to stockpile food to anticipate this potential tragedy. It is said that a whole nation was saved because of it. There is also the dream that warned of the "Slaughter of the Innocents," which gave Jesus' parents time to flee and save the Christ child. These, of course, are extremely large dreams, in that they are reflecting the greater world psyche and the many people connected to it. A more contemporary example of this kind of dream was Carl Jung's account of a dream in which oceans of blood were flooding Europe. Years later, he recognized that this had been a prediction of the events of World War II.[3].

I observe, however, that predictive dreams are rare. Most dreams I have heard that were supposedly related to the future are initially considered this way for lack of understanding the inner aspect of the dream.

The way of approaching dreams that I have presented here offers an expanded and sometimes self-confronting view of who you really are. Consider that each part of a dream is reflecting something about your nature. This becomes difficult, of course, when you see dreams figures that are mean-spirited, abusive, or ill. But even these shadow views of your self (aspects you would rather keep hidden) offer the chance to know parts of the self that have been wounded and are in need of understanding, healing and love. I say more about working with these shadow parts of the self in other presentations.

After a time of working with dreams from a perspective of depth, you will come to appreciate how diverse and multi-layered you really are. This is intriguing and challenging work, but what could be more satisfying than to see yourself actually change and evolve throughout your lifetime to become the person you are most capable of being?

In closing I want to encourage you to stay aware of the great wisdom that lies at your doorsteps each morning. During the night your dreams have left one of the most brilliant and precise forms of guidance that any human being can receive. Some people travel the world over in search of wise teachers; they read untold numbers of books hoping to gain a better understanding of how to find joy and happiness. Yet, inside of us every night a great intelligence is at work, and if you pay attention and remember your dreams, if you persist in developing your skills, you can derive a wealth of wisdom throughout your entire life: crucial wisdom spoken at crucial times by the most intimate friend and advisor that you could ever have. It is your birthright to have access to this wisdom.

Don't settle for interpretations that leave you no different than before you had the dream. But know also that dreams are often like jewels in the rough. Many people don't appreciate the great treasure that has come to them simply because they have not taken the time to look closer, or because they have not taken the time to acquire the skills that can polish these seemingly meaningless objects into jewels of wisdom.

Through the dream you can make some of the most profound discoveries of your life.

(This writing is part of a forthcoming book by Len Worley on the use of dreams in spiritual practice. Copyright © 2007, Len Worley, Ph.D.)

Notes

1) She Who Dreams: A Journey into Healing through Dreamwork by Wanda Easter Burch and many examples of predictive dreaming in Robert Moss’ Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life.  [go back]

2) The Practice of Dream Healing by Edward Tick.  [go back]

3) Memories, Dreams and Reflections, the autobiography of Carl Jung.  [go back]