Month: August 2020

I recently had a dream that I would like to share with you.  Because dreams are so personal, I’m sometimes hesitant to tell them to others.  My thoughts about what the dream might be expressing are also personal.  And yet, the main purpose of my blog is to show the many ways that hope is present in our lives.  People becoming aware that dreams are meaningful is a source of hope.  So here is my dream:

I’m outside looking at the space along the house owned by friends of mine.  It used to have landscape rocks with weeds growing through them.  But now the whole area has healthy green grass growing there.  My friends had done the work of removing the weeds and rocks and then planting the grass seed, resulting in a pretty space both beside the house and continuing into the back yard, which in the dream is larger than it is in physical reality.  I’m going to tell my friends how impressed I am with what they’ve done. 

This is a reassuring dream.  The imagery of the green grass is positive in that it portrays something pretty to see, especially in contrast to how the area looked before.  The grass also is healthy vegetation that adds oxygen to the air and provides food for some insects and animals, thus being a life-giving image.  It seems to me that the fact that the yard in the dream is larger than the yard is in physical reality adds emphasis to these positive images.

Another affirmative aspect of this dream is that I have positive associations to the woman and the man who have done the work to significantly improve their yard.  According to Jungian dream theory, when people who we know appear in our dreams, it is helpful to identify our associations to those people.  I care about and think highly of the two people and therefore recognize their images as representing the positive inner feminine and positive inner masculine of myself.

This dream also suggests that time and effort were required of the couple to transform their yard.  I take this as a message that it’s important that I try my best to do what I’m meant to do, to be watchful of the part of me that sometimes is lazy or uncaring.  And to try my best to follow the guidance I discern to be from my inner voice through dream work, synchronicities, and intuitive promptings.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”  These words by Marcel Proust, a French novelist and essayist, can apply to many aspects of life.  What they bring to mind for me are the discoveries I made about dreams when I started to look at them in a new way.

About 30 years ago some things occurred that led to my decision to seek the assistance of a therapist, and I began meeting with a Jungian psychotherapist.  It was in our work together that I first became aware of the idea that dreams are meaningful and serve a vital purpose.  As is the case with many people, I had previously thought that dreaming was just something that happened sometimes when we are sleeping.  At times I would notice a dream if, for example, people I knew were in the dream or if it depicted a strange story.  But my noticing a dream never led to my being curious about whether there was a reason for my having had that dream.  I also knew that people sometimes had disturbing dreams and nightmares, and I felt fortunate that I didn’t.  But I still thought of dreams as a type of cognitive occurrence that happened randomly and for no particular reason.

It turns out I was totally wrong in these assumptions and that the opposite is true.  Rather than being random, the dreams we have are personal to each one of us.  According to Jungian theory, when we remember dreams we are being given information from our unconscious.  When we record our dreams and try to learn from them, we’re taking steps toward integrating aspects of our unconscious which helps us to become more conscious and whole persons.  It didn’t take long after I started writing down my dreams and learning about what images in a dream might mean that I began to see how personal they were to what was happening in my life.  I learned about how the images of people we know in physical reality who appear in our dreams can symbolize certain characteristics about ourselves, which helps us to understand ourselves better.  I also learned how the various objects and creatures that appear in dreams are symbolic of certain qualities and/or have archetypal meanings, which again add to our having more integrated personalities.

Through their stories, images, and symbols, dreams give us information that leads us toward becoming the persons we were created to be.  They help us to discern what is occurring in our inner lives which in turn helps us to make the right decisions in our outer lives.

I, along with many other people who have been fortunate enough to learn about the significance of dreams and who embrace doing dream work, view dreams with “new eyes.”  The dreams were there all the time.  It was by seeing them in a new way that we discovered them as a source of wisdom and meaning.