Dreamways

A sleep dream is a series of images, thoughts, and / or emotions that pass through the mind during sleep.

This is the type of dream that many people think of when they encounter or use the word "dream." These are the often puzzling and baffling inner world occurrences that visit dreamers when they are asleep. They are the vivid, yet seemingly irrational picture shows that motivate people to seek interpretations and explanations in dream dictionaries and from dream experts.

Many spiritual or soulful traditions have considered dreams as a source of information and wisdom. The Old Testament has numerous stories that involve dreams as prophecy, predicting the future. Perhaps the best known is the tale of Joseph of the amazing technicolor coat, sold into slavery in Egypt, who was able to correctly interpret the dreams of the Pharaoh of seven fat and seven thin cows as a foretelling of seven fertile years to be followed by seven years of drought. His interpretation set the course for Egypt's grain strategy whereby it was not impacted by the seven-year drought. The tradition of Islam is built upon words of their fundamental scripture, the Koran, which came to their prophet, Mohammed, in a series of wrenching sleep dreams. For these scriptural traditions, dreams were a way for God to speak to lowly man.

Native spiritual traditions the world over have viewed sleep dreams as voices from a transpersonal source, be it a god or goddess, a spirit or the earth itself. Shamans journeyed in dreams to supernatural realms, where they found banes to bring back to the tribe. For Australia's aboriginals, dreams are the ongoingly living essence of all creation. For them, the world dreamed itself and mankind into being. Humans can and must know these dreams in order to continually re-create the physical universe through songs and songlines. Dreamtime understands the entire world as emanating from dreams.

In the scientific age, sleep dreams have been explained as simply a function of brain chemisty or brain electrical circuitry, pereforming, at best, the function of flushing out waste or sorting out waking experiences, and, at worst, no function whatsoever. Sigmund Freud, who was the Viennese doctor who reconnected modern Western humans with dreams as significant events, explained them as part of an unconscious psychological mechanism that disguises and suppresses humans' all-encompassing, yet dangerous, sexual desires, but that has no other value. Carl Jung, Freud's protege for a while, understood dreams to have intrinsic value. He too conceptualized that they come from the unconscious of dreamers and serve the function of facilitating growth. For Jung, sleep dreams are meaningful, balancing waking attitudes, and their message is to be brought into consciousness. He postulated that sleep dreams speak in a symbolic language with the purpose of helping guide individuals to becoming fuller and more complete, "individuated."

We have found that approaching sleep dreams with the assumption that they are meaningful is most useful. Conceptualizing sleep dreams as emanations from the unconscious, both individual and collective, allows a dreamer to understand dreams as information from an internal wellspring of not-rationally attained information. Coming from "inside" the individual, they can be a guide to constructing a meaningful life that is not dependent upon sources outside the individual. Springing not from the conscious mind, sleep dreams are irrational and balance the limitations of the mind.

Sleep dreams seem to have a life of their own, they are wild and undomesticated. They are beyond the control of our rational minds. Because of this, sleep dreams often comment on our waking lives, encouraging us to balance our conscious attitudes and actions that have become too narrow, compulsive or one-sided. Sleep dreams can be understood to give advice about how to proceed in our waking lives.

The language of sleep dreams is not limited by the constrictions of wakeful mind-logic. They can seem utterly foreign and threatening to our rational minds. But taking the trouble to learn their language provides wisdom that makes for a life broader and richer beyond anything the mind can envision.

Understanding Sleep Dreams

Sleep Dreams can be understood as a Language. That is, they are a system of signs, symbols and sounds used to communicate. Over the centuries there have been various explanations as to who or what is generating this language, doing the communicating. Sleep Dreams have been explained as the language of gods, of spirits, of totems, of God, of the land, of the cosmos, and, more recently, of the unconscious or subconscious. While there are those who would disagree with this, believing that sleep dreams are nothing more than static or the detritus of our waking hours devoid of meaning, it seems that this is ultimately not a very useful approach to dealing with this phenomenon. Such an attitude seems much akin to the stance of the ancient Greeks, who viewed non-speakers of Greek simply as Barbarians, those whose speech consists of nothing more than meaningless “ba-ba-ba” sounds, which could not possibly have meaning. Any language not understood is, indeed, foreign and holds no meaning. But, once learned and understood, any language becomes meaningful and enriching.

As with any language, there are steps that may be employed in order to gain understanding of the tongue of sleep dreams. Understanding sleep dreams, while it involves interpretation, is a process that involves various other steps in order to achieve comprehension.

First, one must apprehend the signs, symbols and sounds that have been generated in a dream. This means to take hold of what has been produced in the dream. On a literal level, apprehension means to take the contents of the dream into one’s conscious custody. The utterances, images and sounds produced by a dream must not be allowed to slip away. On a more abstract level, it means to become conscious of dream content, to engage in perceiving sleep dream, rather than blithely forgetting them. To some degree, dreams are always apprehensive, they expect and hope to be remembered.

Next, one must translate the apprehended dream. Translation is the process of restating expressions from one language into another language. Often this involves translating ephemeral and rich visual communication of sleep dreams into words. This may involve focusing on meaning, but dream translation primarily strives to find the appropriate words to get across the intangible experiences of a highly personal and internal experience that is a sleep dream.

Then we interpret the sleep dream. This is where we take the signs and symbols of the dream and engage in the process of making sense of them, of assigning a meaning to them. In the realm of sleep dreams, their interpretation has been a goal since the dawn of spoken language. We look at possibilities and options. It could be this, and it could be that, and then again the third thing. The often extremely puzzling language of sleep dreams, with its high emotional charge, has had people searching out what they mean, what their implications are for the dreamer. All too frequently, sleep dream interpretation has involved the aspect of one-answer-fits-all: this image means such and such a thing. It has involved turning to Experts to relay to the dreamer What It Means. Interpretation explores the various possibilities of what each dream utterance and sign might mean, what it has meant to others.

The goal of working with the language of sleep dreams is, ultimately, to comprehend them. Each sleep dream asks the dreamer to form a mindful, heartful, bodyful and soulful relationship with it. From the various options and possibilities uncovered in the process of interpretation, the ones that resonate most for the dreamer are found. Even if “everyone” has a certain take on a dream image, for the dreamer of a particular sleep dream, it could mean something completely different. It is not about being handed a computer-generated explanation that someone or something outside of us has generated. The goal is for us to fully take the dream in, to really listen to it, to really look at it, to really smell it, to feel it in our body. Dreams speak to us on all the various levels of our sensation, comprehension and being. They demand our full participation in interacting with them. They want us to be ready to be surprised. We must grasp onto each dream intentionally and passionately, reaching out and taking hold of the meaning it intends for us. We must fully own our dreams and the message they bear for us.

In their whisperings and shriekings, their singings and croakings, their dancings and sculptings, their colors and their shadows, sleep dreams are like compelling and mysterious lovers from a strange land whose language we don’t speak. If we let then, they capture our attention, they elicit our curiosity and our passion in spite of the seeming barrier of language. There is something there that intrigues us, something unknown, tempting, frightening and mysterious. Enriching. They ask that we engage in the struggle to learn their language so that we may more fully interact with them. Like any great lover, sleep dreams entice us to change and grow. As we learn the language of sleep dreams, we learn Dreamfulness, a language of Love, in all its intensity.