Dreams & the Subconscious

Lesson 2: Laying the Foundations

Remembering Dreams

Some people claim they do not dream and that may or may not be true. If you are so stressed and tense that during the night you are constantly on the edge of waking, you may not be entering the deep REM sleep where dreams occur. Or it may be that your conscious self is terrified of what your unconscious self may have to say and keeps bringing you out of dream sleep to avoid a confrontation. If you are not dreaming, you will wake in the morning exhausted and confused. Just as sleep brings rest and healing to the body, dreaming brings unity and healing to the psyche. If you wake feeling refreshed, then you are dreaming and simply are not remembering your dreams. In the case of being too stressed to dream, you need to do what you can to heal that situation because stress is deadly to the body and mind.

If there is distrust between the conscious and unconscious parts of yourself, either you will not dream or you will dream but will not remember the dream. The solution here is to work to build trust. You can repeat aloud that you know that your unconscious and conscious selves are both important and viable parts of your self, that both are important to self-wholeness and integrity, that each has its own structure and composition, and that you honor your unconscious self as well as your waking self. Your unconscious self may not immediately respond. It may think, “Talk is cheap,” and wait for a sign of commitment from your conscious self. It will want to see that the ego self is open and accessible to what it has to reveal and will not try to judge, force, or manipulate the inner psyche to its own purposes. There are parts of ourselves that can only be met with humble acceptance rather than denial and rejection.

Usually, dreams are elusive. You may wake with an image or scene from a dream in your mind and watch it drip like water from your hands and fade away before you can recall it. Again, show commitment. If you can, have a tape recorder by your bed and begin speaking into it, reliving the dream elements and the scenes you remember, as soon as you wake. Often, as you recall certain bits and pieces, the entire dream will return to you. If you don’t have a recorder, have pen and paper by your bed and begin writing as soon as you wake. Write down key words, persons’ names and descriptions or characteristics, whatever elements of scenes or pieces of action you can recall. You can fill in details as they arise later. Again, you may be rewarded by having the entire dream unfold before you. Try to remember as much of the dream as you possibly can, not anxiously, but by feeling relaxed and inviting.

Be prepared to wait. While you may grasp the meaning of a dream in one sitting, it is more common that you will only understand part of the dream while the rest remains an enigma. However, the next dream will reveal more of what the first dream addressed but from a different point of view, and a third dream will clarify even more. Each dream shows you where your energies are moving and where they are stuck. As you work on the dreams, your outer situation will change and the dreams will reflect those changes.

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