Spirituality and Self Help
Hanusia
DREAM WORK – Another View Of Our Lives
Dreams have fascinated many people and cultures all across time. There
are Biblical tales of crucial decisions directed by information
available in a dream. We often talk about the dreams that we have for
our lives. Many aboriginal cultures still seek guidance from the dreams
of their shaman or leader.
Sigmund Freud was among the first of the modern age of scientist-healers
to study dreams more systematically and incorporate them into the
understanding and improvement of our mental health. Of course, Sigmund
had his own particular fascinating approach, which alienated some of his
contemporaries. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung is regarded as the
spiritual godfather of dreams, moving beyond the troublesome Eros
principle of his former mentor and exploring the complex dance of our
conscious minds with the wider world of spiritual, intuitive and
symbolic understanding.
There is little doubt that dreams are a type of important mental
activity. According to available research, everyone dreams or at least
spends time in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep each night. Not everyone
recalls dreams. Even those of us who are actively studying them recall
them to differing degrees. I go through cycles in which I only catch
glimpses and other times when I seem to have created a story of epic
proportions. It is a rich and varied world, this other side of waking
consciousness.
As our minds grapple with the billions of pieces of input that come to
us daily, they are constantly recognizing, cataloguing and associating
them with similar bits of information. In addition, information has
emotional weight, it has implications for the scheme or strategy with
which we approach the world. In dreams, we seem to wrestle with the less
obvious aspects of reality. If we are busy thinking and doing, then
dreams often bring us face-to-face with the feeling and meaning aspects
of our lives. They do so without much regard for the laws of physics or
the kind of straight-line continuity that we imagine to be real-time
life. Therein lies much of the confusion.
I work actively with dreams, both in my personal development and in my
work as a counsellor. Dream work has become an aspect of my spiritual
life, as I explore the depths of my person and the symbolic threads that
flow across time and amongst all of humanity. Taking the time to really
sit with these products of our amazing minds, I look for patterns of
meaning , feeling and similarity that fit my current life and the lives
of my clients. Some very helpful methods and guidelines have been
developed by psychologists and therapists such as Dr. Gayle Delaney,
Jeremy Taylor and Marion Woodman (a Jungian analyst from London,
Ontario) that I will be glad to share with you I future installments.
