Dreams as Portals to the Soul
More than any of the other pathways toward healing and transformation that I’ve explored, dream work has invited me to look myself squarely in the face, unmasked, and see the parts of me that I would rather not acknowledge. Scary as this may seem, I’ve come to believe that all dreams come in service of our health and wholeness.* This is exactly why nightmares are so frightening: though they strike us as threatening or even malicious, they are simply alerting us to something that we’d rather not admit is there. True transformation always requires discomfort. It requires courage. It pushes us through the painful depths of our habitual patterns and ways of being; only by letting older versions of ourselves “die” can we be reborn into something new and transformed. So when we go through the sometimes painful process of interpreting a dream, the potential for transformation is profound.
I teach AP Psychology to high schoolers, and of course there’s nothing in the curriculum about dream interpretation. Since it would be difficult to prove anything scientifically about the meaning of our dreams, the research largely explains them as merely random fragments of information being categorized into our long-term memory, or the result of our cerebral cortex trying to make sense of random neurons firing during sleep. Ironically, though, the one class period in which I took a brief segue into dream interpretation kept my students’ attention more than most any other lesson throughout the entire year. Why is this?
Regardless of what can be proven by modern science, the reality is that until recent times human cultures throughout the world, almost without exception, shared a belief that dreams carry some kind of meaning. Dream interpretation featured in the founding of almost all religions (even if those religions’ institutions no longer sanction it, because it gives too much autonomy to individual believers to interpret divine will in a way that matches their own experience!). This makes sense, considering dreaming is such a regular part of the human experience; we all dream nightly, whether or not we remember them.
The method of interpretation I follow is based on Jungian psychology but also falls right in line with many other indigenous traditions. Essentially what it holds is that our dreams are messages from our unconscious to our conscious mind. They use the language of symbols to get us to understand or accept something about ourselves or our circumstances that we have so far been unwilling to. It also holds that everything that comes up in a dream—people, objects, places—are at least in some way symbolizing a part of ourselves. That means that if I dream about being in a fight with my Mom, it’s not necessarily because I’m in conflict with her in my waking life. Instead—and this is the paradigm shift that makes the power of dream work start to click into place—it’s probably a part of myself that I’m in conflict with. The question, therefore, isn’t why I’m mad at my Mom but, “What part of myself is the image of my Mom representing, and what is my conflict with it?”
Dreams put to rest the modern myth that we have one coherent, stable personality and lay bare our contradictory, messy, multi-facetedness. Though it varies by culture, gender, generation, etc., we’ve all been encouraged since childhood to develop certain parts of ourselves and suppress others. Most of us are taught, for example, that being hard-working is good, and laziness is bad. This makes sense, as it helps us grow up to develop skills and be productive people; there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is that an additional and unseen consequence is that we will suppress the part of us that needs rest and regeneration. We might start denying that we have a lazy bone in our body. Well, the truth of course is that all humans are sometimes motivated to be hard-working, and sometimes would rather relax. When we start denying one part of our human makeup, it doesn’t disappear: it simply finds a new home in what Jung called our “shadow.”
When we overinflate a part of ourselves, we are also, by necessity, denying another, opposite part and pushing it into the shadow. Here’s an example from my own life. For a long time, I wanted to present myself to the world as a completely selfless person, someone who was always doing what was best for the greater good. While there is a part of me that is, indeed, selfless, I was denying the self-interested part of myself that I share with all humans. When we do this, our dreams will compensate for it by overinflating its opposite, shadow aspect. In my case, this meant my dreams started overinflating the “selfish” part of myself that I had been suppressing, and portraying it in gruesome ways, so that I would acknowledge its existence. One particularly vivid image in one of my dreams was of a pastor who had a shiny face and was outwardly very put-together and righteous, but was actually controlling and manipulative, creepily taking advantage of another person in my dream. If it weren’t for paying attention to and working through the symbolism of that and other similar dreams, I’m not sure when I would have ever been able to be honest with myself and say hey, you do some selfless things, but you’re still a human with normal human needs, desires, and self-interest. This is the key piece of transformation that dream interpretation helps with: accepting our WHOLE selves, including the parts we’ve suppressed or exiled.**
Truly seeing and understanding these hidden or “shadow” aspects of ourselves allows us to feel more compassion toward them, which leads to less inner-conflict and more harmony. It also helps us feel compassion for other folks’ “negative” qualities when we encounter them in waking life. If, on the other hand, we’re unconscious of how these same qualities also live in us, we end up projecting our own baggage onto others. Much of the ramped up political polarization of our times is due to this very phenomenon: we disown parts of ourselves that are painful to acknowledge—whether weakness, anger, aggression, selfishness, jealousy, etc.—and project them onto whatever group it is that we want to scapegoat, thereby outcasting them and denying their humanity. Though it’s by no means the only thing that needs to be done to heal this broken world, recognizing and accepting our own shadow is an important step in that direction, and often ignored by movements for justice.
So how does one interpret dreams? There are many methods, but what I’ve found to be most effective and life-giving is through the community of a “dream circle.” When I facilitate dream circles, participants—who, by the way, almost always start remembering their dreams more once they belong to a group where dreams are taken seriously—share their dreams, and then others make projections: “If this were my dream, it would mean….” This way, no one is telling the dreamer what their dream means. After all, the only person who can definitively interpret a dream is the person who dreamt it. Instead, the dreamer is getting ideas and perspectives that they wouldn’t be able to come up with themselves because of the limitations of their own conscious mind. Some of the projections won’t resonate, but many do, and when they do, they usually come with powerful “Ah-ha!” moments. Once one has experienced a couple of these moments, the validity of dream interpretation becomes undeniable, and the insight can usually be applied to life immediately. And the other folks hearing the dream, by putting themselves in the position of the dreamer, are often able to gain insight into and work through some of their own internal conflicts.
I’ve benefited so much from dream work, and have been determined to guide others to discover the wisdom of their own dreams. I’ll be running a six-week dream circle starting mid-April and would love to have you consider joining us. If you’re interested but not sure, there will be a free workshop the week before on the 10th in which I give more details and some practice with dream interpretation, so you can see if the circle will be a good fit for you. I hope to see some of you there. Until then, happy dreaming!
*This and many other ideas in this post come from Jeremey Taylor’s “The Wisdom of Your Dreams: Using Dreams to Tap into Your Unconscious and Transform Your Life.”
**If you’re familiar with the therapeutic model “internal family systems” or parts work, you’ll notice a clear parallel here.
