Dreams – The Meeting Between the Waking and Sleeping Worlds
Are you a dreamer?
Do you remember your dreams and do you desperately try to understand them when they don’t make sense? Some people dream intensely and remember the details while others don’t think they dream or forget them once they wake up.
Neuroscientists are telling us it that if you don’t dream you would be dead as the brain needs this time to recover and the dream you remember the most is the last dream you have or are awoken by.
I have always dreamed for as long as I can remember. I have been flying and floating in rooms of people, observing others from the heights above; I have been up to my knees in a quagmire of sinking sand, fearful of moving in case I sink to the depths below; I have been chased by people firing arrows and bloodied axes in their hands; talked to strange spirit like people and found my name on books piled high in a cave. Dreams can be disturbing, intriguing and forgetful and yet we all dream, even those who say they don’t, dream.
How do dreams help us in our waking life?
What are we open to and what are we closed off to in our lives? This style of question forms the basis of exploring dreams from an existential perspective. Merdard Boss a Swiss Psychiatrist believed in dreams and went on to analyse more than 1000 dreams of his patients and published two books – The Analysis of Dreams and I Dreamt Last Night.
The basis of his theory was to challenge the traditional view of Sigmund Freud and later his close friend Carl Jung. He went on to challenge Freud and others of there being no such thing as a hidden repository within the brain called the unconscious. He believed the there was no difference between the waking and the sleeping worlds. Both are inter-related; connected by the individual and their experience in life as expressed in a dream. The clue was to explore the dream from the dreamers’ perspective not the analyst.
Dreams help us to focus our attention on our lived lives
Boss used the analogy of light in his theory of dreams, identifying dreams have a mood or a feeling associated with it. Just like my friend who was convinced that I needed to have a skin check, the sense of urgency in the dream provided her the platform to contact me with her genuine concern. All dreams have a mood attached to it, and Boss called this attunement and in paying attention to the overall mood of the dream can also provide a rich opportunity to allow space for the dreamer to begin the process of discovering what the dream may hold. Think for a moment on a dream you recently had. Call to memory as much as you can and then notice what mood your dream leaves you with.
Dreams help us to attune to our moods
In accessing the mood of a dream a felt sense is experienced in the body. Boss believed we also recount our dreams not only in attunement to the mood of the dream but also we experience the dream through our body expression. Moods of frustration, fear, excitement, are common and our body movements also help us to get in touch with the meaning of the dream.
Dreams tell us about how we are living our lives today?
This brings us back to the question of what we are open and closed to in our lives? Stop for a moment and think about this question and challenge yourself to reflect on this important question. Is there a mood or feeling attached to the parts of your life that you are open to and closed to; does your body also give away your mood associated with your dream? What did you learn from this simple but powerful exercise?
Boss didn’t see any distinction or division of the two worlds – waking and sleeping; both are on a continuum, one is in direct relationship with the other. We don’t need to look to external sources to find the meaning, the meaning lays with the dreamer. The dream shows how the dreamer illuminates one part of their life over another; dreams can hold important information for everyday concerns.