For many years now, working with dreams has been a valuable resource in my own enquiry and growth, and as such, I invite my therapy clients to bring their dreams into our sessions for exploration. With some clients, engaging with dreams has been the key to positive change and progression.
Science has a reductive approach that de-mystifies and disenchants dreams into information and emotional processing, memory consolation or simply the random firing of neurons during sleep. This decoupling of dreams from any real meaning impoverishes us. The reality is our dreams are an inexhaustible wellspring of wisdom that rises up from the depths of our being. Dreams can teach, heal, and guide us through this bewildering labyrinth we call life. If we listen and take notice our dreams respond in kind. The more we engage with them the more they give.
People of other times and cultures have well known the power of dreams. The use of dream incubation for healing was widespread in the ancient world in Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia. Traditional cultures such as native Americans and Australian Aboriginals also saw dreams, not as subconscious noise, but as portals to ancestral wisdom, spiritual guidance and direct communication with a vital, active and sacred reality.
Our western culture stands alone in its devaluation of dreams. Despite this, dreams have had an enormous impact on our world. James Watson dreamed of a spiral staircase which inspired him to discover the double helix model of DNA. The song Yesterday came to Paul McCartney in a dream. The book Frankenstein came to Mary Shelly in a dream. The chrome skeleton of the Terminator came to James Cameron in a dream. These are just a few examples, and I suspect that our dreamlife influences our waking world much more than we would care to admit.
The importance of dreams to healing has been recognised in the field of psychotherapy for many years, most famously by Freud and Jung. Freud described dreams as the “royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind”[1] and Jung wrote that “the dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche before there was any ego-consciousness”[2]. Given these words by two behemoths of the therapeutic world, any depth psychotherapy practice without the inclusion of dreams is an omission of a precious resource of enquiry.
When working with dreams I like to give the following analogy. Dreams are like fish that inhabit the deepest depths of our oceans. When these fish are brought to the surface they cannot survive because they have adapted to live in the immense pressures of the deep. Similarly, if we bring the dream to the surface of waking awareness and apply surface level logic and scrutinization, the dream dies. The dream needs to be met on its own level, on its own terms. This invites a kind of surrender or respectful bow. We need to reverentially acknowledge that the dream came from an intelligence behind our ego that knows us better than we know ourselves. This mysterious another side of us loves us and wants the best for us. Even if the dream is terrifying in its intensity, or we object to its message, it does what it does because it seeks healing and integration. It is trying to help.
Dreams communicate with us through the language of the symbolic, metaphorical and archetypal[3]. On first glance, our dreams can be bewildering in their apparent absurdity and downright weirdness. My approach is to simply hang out with the images, to rest and allow them percolate in awareness. To just sit and see what bubbles up.
A few nights ago, I had the following dream:
I am a substitute player in a rugby match for a team in white. The coach indicates it is time to join the game, but I have forgotten by boots. He hands me a pair. When I put them on, I realise they are way too big. I do the laces up to the max, but this is akin to my 7-year-old son wearing my wellingtons. I simply won’t be able to play or run with any fluidity.
I had a familiar feeling of bemusement when I woke but wrote the dream down to prevent it disappearing. This morning the dream came to mind again. The quintessential British saying “too big for your boots” entered my awareness. This phrase is suggestive of inflation and arrogance - a mismatch between one’s view of oneself and outer reality. In my dream there is a kind of reversal to this. I was not too big for my boots, but my boots were too big for me. Then it dawned on me how there is a tension in my life between outer and inner. I have found myself entertaining borderline grandiose aspirations. After seven years of training, I am finally an accredited psychotherapist. I am chomping at the bit to have a thriving and packed practice when the reality is it has recently shrunk. I have also taken up writing and am bursting at the seams to express my ideas about how to integrate Tibetan Buddhism with western therapeutic approaches. However, my blogs on the Medium platform have chalked up only one read[4]. My aspirations of having external recognition, a large following and plenty of clients outsizes the reality of the situation. I am discordantly and impatiently trying to put on boots that are too big and this will hinder my ability to walk the path of life.
This meaning spoke to me. Working with dreams is a bit like walking into a room and immediately forgetting what one went in for. Then, ah yes! I remember[5]. We get a feeling in our body that is just right, like finding the right key for a lock. Getting the meaning of a dream is like this – it feels wonderful.
Today, I have imaginatively gone back into the dream, only this time I put the right size boots on and am able to thrive on the playing field. Doing this exercise has the effect of engaging with my unconscious mind on its own terms. To work behind the scenes of my psyche to instigate change so that I can play on the rugby field of life. Maybe, I will now be able to work with my situation as it is. To be more grounded in presence whilst maintaining a respect for my wants and desires without letting them create tension and distort my being.
Sometimes, we have dreams that instigate a shift in the heart. These dreams tap into the mythic collective unconscious and are of the kind that we will remember for the rest of our lives. Whilst in the throes of grief, in the weeks after my mother’s death from cancer, I had a one such dream. It teetered on the precipice of forgetfulness before I clawed it back to safety.
In the dream I held the image of my mother. She was standing with a black dog by her side. She was not dead but recuperating in a Viking settlement. I could see that behind her, on the other side of a river, was a cluster of longhouses with wispy rising smoke. I asked her, “what is it life like there?”. My mother replied that “now that its winter it is cold, but come springtime, it will be time to move on”.
There are universal mythological themes in this dream. My mother was Danish and seeing death as a reunification with ancestors is commonplace in traditional cultures[6]. There is a sense of returning to our rightful home – a familial place of rest, care and comfort.
In many myths rivers are the liminal boundary that separates the living from the dead. The river Styx in Greek mythology is an obvious example of this[7]. In addition, dogs are commonly seen as guardians of the gates to the land of the dead or psychopomps that guide the soul to the other side[8].
I was astonished to discover a quote by the Wixarika shaman Ramon Medina Silva which almost perfectly mirrors the dream of my mother.
“There is a water over there, where the soul of one who has died must pass. And there is a dog there, a little black dog with a white spot on its throat. And one must ask permission from that dog to pass, so that one may travel on, to reach that other level, where those who have died are waiting, where those ancient relatives are living in their rancho”[9].
When reflecting further on this dream about my dead mother it is her words that never fail to tug the tender strings of my heart.
“Now that it is winter it is cold, but come springtime, it will be time to move on”
The rhythmical change of seasons is reflective of the universal cyclic truth of birth and death - existence and non-existence. The descent into the bleak depths of winter is resonant with the descent into death. Nowhere is this more explicit than in the ancient Greek myth of Persephone. In this myth Hades, the god of the underworld, was beset by loneliness and isolation when he abducted Persephone to be his wife in the land of the dead. Persephone’s mother Demeter, the goddess of the harvest was distraught at the disappearance of her daughter and searched the heavens and earth for her whereabouts. During this time Demeter’s grief caused the earth to be in eternal frosty winter. With Hermes's help, Persephone was discovered in the underworld with Hades. A deal was struck to free Persephone from the underworld once a year for 6 months. And this reemergence coincides with the vibrant uplifting rebirth of springtime.
Myths can be described as “things that never happened but always are”[10]. This rings true with my dream. My mother’s descent into the winter of death and eventual “time to move on” in springtime directly parallels Persephone journey of descent and rebirth. And my grief is Demeter’s the dark winterly despair.
The effect this dream had on me is difficult to describe. When pondering the symbology, I am overcome by wonderment and awe. Something mysterious is at play, something that gently moved and shifted my heart into an alignment with truth. I have been delicately touched in the raw sensitive core of my being. In this way, the dream is both a solace and a refuge – it tells me that everything is OK. Somehow, I know my mum is safe.
[1] Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dream. Penguin. P769
[2] Carl Jung: Civilization in transition, CW, Vol 10 par 304.
[3] I consider the reduction of the gods to psychological archetypes to be a secularisation of the sacred. However, I use the word archetypal here to emphasise the Jungian viewpoint in the hope it is more palatable to the reader.
[4] Better than none I suppose.
[5] I owe this analogy to Eugene Gendlin in Let your body interpret your dreams. Chiron Publications.
[6] For example – African traditions such as Yoruba, Akan, Shona and Igbo. Asian traditions such as Daoist folk practice, Japanese Shinto. Polynesian cultures such as the Maori. Mesoamerican cultures such as Aztecs and Maya. There are many more.
[7] Other examples include the Gjoll in Norse mythology and the Vaitarani in Hindu and South Asian traditions.
[8] For example, Anubis of Egyptian mythology and Xolotl from Aztec mythology.
[9] Ronnberg: The book of symbols, reflections on archetypal images. Taschen. P269
[10] This quote is attributed to 4th century Roman philosopher Sallustius.
