Dream Interpretation
Dreams Work is a five-week intensive course the focus of which is to provide the tools and techniques for interpreting dreams without the aid of dream books or dictionaries of any kind. The dream is the "still, small voice" within that whispers the longings of our soul to be balanced and whole. By allowing the dream to act as a guide, individuals can experience a much greater harmony within themselves, their relationships and their environment.
Dreams are utterly unique to the dreamer and, as such; do not easily lend themselves to approaches, which are overly rigid and inordinately complex. However, for the purpose of beginning this kind of work, some structure is needed. The method we will employ is broken up into three stages: Sequence, Symbols and Speculation. The purpose of this approach is to provide insights, which will help you to understand what your dreams are attempting to communicate.
There is no such thing as a meaningless dream, only dreams that are not yet understood. Dreams, like every other aspect of the human condition, are directed toward a purposeful and meaningful end.
One reason dreams have been ignored in the present age is because we live in a culture that, for the most part, has an extraordinary bias for what is rational, and little tolerance for that which is not. Consequently, dreams in this culture are, primarily devalued. How many times has a child in distress heard, “Go back to sleep, it is only a dream.”
But, by disregarding the dream, we neglect a great source of inner wisdom. To avail ourselves of this precious resource we must recognize that the dream speaks the language of the unconscious, a language which is composed of symbol and metaphor. If we wish to understand the dream, we must first make an earnest attempt to understand the symbols of the dreamer. This information is readily available from the dreamer if we would but learn their associations to the symbols.
Here again, however, we discount the author and expert, concerning the dream, and prefer instead to consult a dream dictionary. A book which treats all dream symbols as though they emanate from a single source. If this were true, dreams would lose their unique ability to individually tailor a specific message for the dreamer and would indeed be as meaningless as the general population believes them to be. In spite of this, dreams will not always allow themselves to “go quietly into the night”. Every once in a while, a particular dream will ensue, which appears to be unusually significant. The dreamer may not know how or why the dream has made such a formidable impact, but the pervasive feeling that the dream is attempting to communicate something meaningful cannot be discounted.
QUOTES ABOUT DREAMS
For dreams are always about a particular problem of the individual about which he has a wrong conscious judgment. The dreams are the reaction to our conscious attitude in the same way that the body reacts when we overeat or do not eat enough or when we ill-treat it in some other way. Dreams are the natural reaction of the self-regulating psychic system.
C.G. Jung
The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.
C.G. Jung
Dreams give information about the secrets of the inner life and reveal to the dreamer hidden factors of his personality. As long as they remain undiscovered, they disturb his waking life, and betray themselves only in the form of symptoms.
C.G. Jung
Dreams are like a digital photograph of the unconscious at any given moment in time. They are not good and they are not bad, they are simply an expression of “what is”.
J.B.G Uhl
