Introduction
In the daylight world, we go to work or school, we eat, do the shopping, pay the bills … we build relationships with other people. Essentially, we do the work of creating and maintaining our lives. But at night, in sleep, we enter a world that may resemble the waking world of mundane reality, or it may be a world that is medieval or futuristic or something else entirely; time becomes completely distorted; and we meet a host of characters including faces that are familiar, faces that are not, and faces that look like they have risen from the pages of books on mythological creatures.
We may wake from a dream joyous or sad or absolutely terrified. And at some point, most of us will ask, “What was that all about?” Are dreams significant or is a nightmare merely a bit of dinner gone wrong? Many ancient, primal cultures believed that the dream world was at least as significant as the waking world. People used their dreams for personal guidance and some people in the tribe, like Black Elk, the holy man of the Oglala Sioux tribe, dreamed dreams that carried significance for the entire culture. As some cultures evolved in a more scientifically rational direction, the belief that dreams were of importance to human beings was cast away. Then a man came along, Carl Gustav Carus (1779-1868), who postulated that in addition to human beings having a conscious existence, they also had an unconscious mind that was simultaneously biological, material, and psychological in nature.
Later, Sigmund Freud went further to postulate a structure of the subconscious mind and the ways in which it interacted with the conscious mind, including methods by with this subconscious communicated with the conscious through dreams. His protégé, Carl Gustav Jung, went even further than his teacher. He blurred and expanded what he considered to be some of Freud’s rigidities and postulated an entire structure of what he called the unconscious mind and theories of the ways in which it relates to waking consciousness. Jung believed that there was purpose in the existence of each human being, that each life was called to a process of what he called “Individuation” by which a human being grew into his unique authenticity by bringing the unconscious parts of himself into consciousness. The most significant route to this union is through dream analysis.
Modern Jungians have gone far beyond the initial discoveries of Dr. Jung. Marion Woodman, James Hillman, Robert Bly, Robert Johnson, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Michael Meade and a host of others have investigated the world of the human psyche and have made its language accessible to all of us. There is some divergence in the teachings of these wise people but perhaps that merely reflects the diversity of humankind. But all agree that believing our dreams are a healing process that carry message and meaning combined with an active desire to understand what the dreammaker is communicating every night to us is the beginning, the middle, and the end of sacred commitment to becoming ourselves – authentic, complete, honest, and whole.
Lessons
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