“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.