Our Dreams Really Are Trying to Tell Us Something.
If you're feeling stuck, a Jungian approach to dreams may be the missing piece to help you move forward.
Upcoming Events:
A Few Spaces Remaining For Jungian Somatics- Movement For Trauma with Jane Clapp & Laura Wenger (starts 9/9)
Now open for registration: Better Breathing for Trauma w/ Jennifer Snowdon (& me!) 10/4.
Jungian Somatics Dream Method- 2 day online immersion this fall
We dream 3-5 dreams every night (though we may not always remember); approximately 1500 per year. If we live just until we’re 90, that’s 135,000 dreams in a lifetime.
Dream language speaks in symbols, metaphor, and images that are strange and confusing. We dream of falling, or flying, or our teeth falling out. We dream of breakfast and the Queen of England. The messages seem so far-out, so bizarre, that we treat them as unimportant or meaningless, or just “the mind working through what happened that day.”
How can something that happens so consistently, so persistently, to *all* human bodies, be meaningless or unimportant? Our dreams are full of fantasy, desire, sometimes murder, mayhem and terror. Yet only 14% of Americans have ever spoken to a “professional” (medical or psychological) about their dreams-- to me, this is a tragically missed opportunity.
Jung believed that dreams serve a teleological function; this big word just means that they have a purpose, that they’re trying to nudge us toward something. Often, he said, dreams are compensating for an imbalance in our conscious or waking life.
Said another way: your unconscious mind is like a best friend that knows *everything* about you-- your darkest secrets, your deepest fears; the ugly truths you’d rather not face; the brilliant qualities you can’t own up to.
Every night, through dreams, this friend does its best to communicate with you, to share with you the pieces that are missing from your conscious (waking) mind. It tries to tell you what you’ve been ignoring; it points out your blind spots; it tells you where you’ve been missing out, and shows you where you’re stuck. Sometimes it offers comfort, and other times it warns us of danger.
A 90-year old human has had 135,000 messages from our unconscious mind. That’s a lot of support to miss out on.
If we fail to hear our unconscious mind when it tries to communicate, it will make itself known in other ways: creating incidents of parapraxis (“Freudian slips” that are often embarrassing or shocking); bursting out in unexpected emotion that we can’t control; or showing up in our body as illness, injury or other mysterious symptoms-- as some Jungians say, “That which we can’t symbolize, we somatize.” (though not every physical symptom is a secret message, and nobody deserves or causes their own illness!)
Working with dreams, in my experience, is often the missing piece to help us to understand what we really need; where to go next; what lies beneath the surface. But just like our honest friend, we may find the truth difficult or painful to hear, and we can’t do it alone. Just like we can’t see the back of our body without a mirror, it is almost impossible to “see” the truth in our dreams unless we share them with someone who can reflect them back to us. Our conscious mind needs that mirror to “see” what our unconscious is saying. But that can be as simple as sharing with a good friend, and writing our dreams down is a great start.
How can we start to work with dreams? In my next post, I’ll offer some guidelines and thoughts to get you working with your own dreams. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on dreams. What do they mean to you? How have you worked with them? And what would you like to know about them?
I love the variety and strangeness of dreams.