Dreams that Awaken

Little Nemo and the Walking Bed

“Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious” according to Sigmund Freud. Winsor McCay touched on this concept in a very public way in his 1905 comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland.” In one episode in particular titled “Little Nemo and the Walking Bed,” McCay highlights how every day events weave themselves into the world of dreams and more importantly he shows that our dream images represent parts our unconscious; fears, desires and the like, those things that lie just beneath the surface.

At the same time that McCay was developing his Little Nemo storyline, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were hammering out their own more clinical concepts of the dream world. Jung focused on dreams as a way to understand the many aspects our unconscious selves. His concept of integrating the unconscious and conscious, or individuation, is a description of how we come to be whole people, discovering, acknowledging and embracing all those previously unknown or only vaguely familiar parts of ourselves.

In their book, The Healing Imagination: The Meeting of Psyche and Soul, Ann and Barry Ulanov describe dreams as the “…principle language-in-ordinary of the unconscious…” This understanding is followed by a strong encouragement to allow ourselves to be “fed” or nourished by this “otherness” that comes to us while dreaming.

Since dreams are message bearers bringing good news from a far country to our conscious selves, since they have an innate capacity to awaken our souls, how can we steward this gift?

We can start with the practice of remembering our dreams, and I do mean practice. If you are not in the habit of taking your first few waking moments to stay just a little connected to where you’ve just come from, emerging from the place of sleep, actually another state of being, then it will take practice. But it is a practice that I guarantee will have a payoff much greater than the few moments of your investment each day. It may be a challenge at first to grab on to those last fading wisps of a dream, but with practice it becomes more doable and those wisps become more concrete and more numerous.

There are a few tools that I know of to help the process along. One I’ve just discussed. I only want to add a thought or two. It’s better not to coerce the images into the forefront, but to hold what you have loosely and keep it close. Whatever images you capture may produce other images related to the dream story. If you try too hard, the images tend to vanish, if you treat them with disregard they will leave you. It’s a matter of balance.

It’s helpful to have a writing pad by your bedside. Writing down even a few elementary thoughts before you get out of bed may jog your memory later. Using voice memo is another great capturing tool. When I go for morning walks, I try to free my mind from the normal linear barrage that fills my head. I try to be present in the moment. At those times I find that significant thoughts are making their way to the surface from somewhere deeper down. Many times they are the images from the dreams I’ve had the night before. They just float to the surface.

Once we begin to remember our dreams, we can allow the images to remain with us informing our understanding. Interpreting them is another story altogether, a complicated one, which has garnered many opinions and drawn out many self-made gurus. I’m not speaking against interpreting dreams; I am advocating for a sound approach, one that is not canned or preprocessed for the masses. The images in our dreams have specific meanings to us. Our primary question should be, “What meaning(s) does this image have for me?”

There are also universal symbols that come to us in dreams that Jung calls archetypes. These are the themes that remain constant in cultures throughout the world; The Wandering Journey, The Hero’s Quest, The Trickster’s Folly. These are big themes with big meanings that take time to unravel. A book that I’ve found helpful in taking my dreams more seriously is Robert Johnson’s Inner Work. He tackles dream interpretation in a way that honors individuality while acknowledge some universal symbolism. It’s a good balance.

James Hillman, described as a rogue protégé of the Jungian school, gives what I have found to be useful advise in approaching dreams. He suggests, I’m paraphrasing here, that we stay with the image rather than grab an interpretation, thereby boxing in the meaning. He also suggests we give those images legs… Since I’m not a Jungian scholar or a Hillman expert, I can’t elaborate on exactly what that means and I think Hillman intends it to be so. He’s rather elastic in his approach to psychological terms. I take him to mean, go with it, let your dream images play themselves out in your imaginative waking consciousness.

I’ve tried this with several of my dreams and have found it helpful, and a nice way to connect my unconscious world with my conscious one.

This has been a rather long post. It could have been much longer, or maybe it should have not been posted at all. The dream world is a complex and profound area of exploration. Perhaps, if after reading his post, you feel more inclined to visit the frontier of your own dream world in earnest, it will be a post that is just right.

Which of your dreams would you like to "give legs to?"

Writing Prompt For The Week: Nourished by Otherness