Dreams & the Subconscious

Lesson 2: Laying the Foundations

Working with the Dream -- Final Stages

Recall the dream of rejection in the previous section. We approached the dream scene by scene and recognized in it a theme of rejection. The dreamer may be carrying the feelings of rejection and perhaps despondency. It is not necessary to leave the dream experience at that point. The dream can be worked with in order to heal the situation posed by the dream. Remember that the dream tells you where your energies are and where they are moving. You can consciously work with those energies to move beyond the place you were in in the dream. How could a dreamer work with the rejection feelings exposed in the sample dream?

After finishing with the dream, you could then sit in a quiet place and enter a meditative state in which you comfort the child in you and reinforce your own value and worth, knowing that all humans experience rejection. You can use positive self talk to undo the sting of rejection. You can recall times when being rejected by what you later discovered was an unfaithful lover allowed you to be open to a better relationship to follow. In other words, you can find psychic healing.

Dreams are mysterious and often perplexing. That is because the dream world, the world of the psyche, is a 360 degree, multidimensional world. That is why dreams are structured as they are. You will rarely have a wise old character show up in your dreams to say, “Here is your problem and here is how you fix it.” In dreams, we experience ourselves on all levels – physical, emotional, intellectual, instinctual, psychical. Because in the modern world we tend to live in our heads and intellectualize and rationalize everything to death, our dreams will compensate by emphasizing the other levels of our being.

To the degree that we’ve repressed or denied parts of ourselves, our dreams will reveal more intensity, drama, and often chaos in those areas. Jung emphasized that the Self is the source of healing and the creator of the dream for just that purpose. If you have had, for example, a painful or irritating encounter with someone at work, that night in dream world, you may find yourself screaming, wailing, totally hysterical. If you have shut off your pain center, the psyche will carry it full force and will express it in its totality in the dream. On a basic level, the dream shows you where your energy is flowing and where it is blocked because, in essence, we are beings of energy. Remember, the final dream scene will show you the direction in which your energy is currently flowing.

In summary, there are many ways to remember a dream. If you are too stressed to hit deep REM sleep, find methods of relaxation that work for you. If your problem is an estrangement of inner and outer worlds, work on making a committment to your soul work. Prepare yourself either with a recorder or with pen and paper to write your dream upon waking. When you've completed the dream work, consciously address the issues left unresolved in the dream.

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