Dream Theatres of the Soul - Empowering the Feminine through Jungian Dream Work

Part ONE

Understanding Your Dreams

1 Why Analyze Dreams?

People ask me why I analyze my dreams. Those who ask because they are captivated by their nightly dramas, or because they hope to acquire some insights about themselves – these are the people for whom I write. I analyze my dreams for the same reasons they ask about dreams: Because we are fellow seekers after self-knowledge, crusaders for the truth about our destinies, questers for inner treasures, lovers of divine mystery. I analyze my dreams because I want to know who I am, what my purpose is on earth, and how I can become the person I was meant to be.

Dreams are messages from the sacred Self – the mysterious, regulating center of the psyche. Although we do not know the exact nature of the Self (written with a capital S to distinguish it from the conscious ego-self), we recognize that it functions within us in ways that have often been associated with the deity. In religious language, it may be helpful to think of the Self as the image of God that exists within each human being. Others might equate the Self with the Holy Spirit, or the Christ within. In psychological language, the Self can be envisioned as the totality of the psyche, as our mysterious energizing center that encompasses everything about us, both the conscious and the unconscious – not only that which we are, but also that which we have the potential to become.

Regardless of the language we use to describe it, the Self is that inner force that relentlessly prods and urges and nudges us to become more aware of our true natures, to heal our wounds, to become individuated, and to fulfill our God-given potential as unique individual souls. To that end, it provides us with messages, including those that come through dreams. The Self is the writer, producer, and director of our nightly dramas. It is responsible for the plot, theme, setting, characterization, style, and format of each dream.

Through our dreams, the Self shows us who we really are, what is happening in our unconscious worlds, and what we need to do to progress on our earthly journeys. As we learn to honor our dreams as legitimate forms of communication from our Source, as we learn to decipher the symbols of our dreams and heed the advice they give, we are involved in soul making. We are acquiring meaningful insights, developing our fuller personalities and God-given potential, and becoming empowered to move into health, wholeness, and an ever closer relationship with the Supreme Being. This, I believe, is the journey to the sacred, our task on this earth, and the reason for which we have been born.

If this is so, then why do we fail to avail ourselves of the rich inner wisdom that lies within each one of us? Why do we dismiss our inner messengers from the sacred realm without hearing what they have to say? Why do we ignore the communications they bring to us as we sleep?

I think there are three reasons. The first is ignorance. Most of us do not learn from our dreams because we do not understand their meaning, purpose, or value for our lives. We do not realize that they are legitimate messages from the sacred realm. In our world’s obsession with the rational, scientific search for objective proof and immutable physical laws, we have neglected the subjective, non-rational truths that lie within. Because the unconscious and its products cannot be seen except in the most individual and personal way, and because dreams cannot be measured, replicated, or made to fit in a snug box in the objective ordering of reality, it has been easier for the scientific community to ignore them until recently, preferring instead to focus on the external, physical world which it can more easily understand and control.

The elevation of psychology to a position of respect as a legitimate scientific endeavor has occurred only in the current century. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were the principal initiators of this emphasis, and as their work has been carried on by their followers, the study of the human psyche has gradually attained its present position of some prominence. But because of a long tradition of neglect, many people today still have difficulty believing there is any value in exploring the dreamy, nebulous phenomena of the psyche’s inner world.

The second reason we neglect our dreams is fear. It seems that we humans are made in such a way that the thing we most desire is also the thing we most fear. We long to understand ourselves, each other, and the Supreme Being. We sense deep within ourselves that we can never be happy until we do. Yet when we are faced with some unpleasant truth or an unexplainable phenomenon, we often run away as fast as we can, like animals startled by a clap of thunder and frightened of the awesome, unknown power behind it.

Many of us spend our lives escaping from consciousness and self-awareness. We will do anything to avoid feeling our fear and pain: drink or eat too much (or too little), work too hard, watch too much television, drug ourselves into a stupor, or cling fanatically to charismatic leaders and pat doctrines that profess to have all the answers and provide simple paths to salvation. Anything to keep us from suffering, anything to avoid facing our terror of the unknown.

The third reason we ignore our dreams and other messages from the unconscious is mental laziness, or inner inertia. Inner work is profoundly daunting, especially to those who have become accustomed to having their answers served up like a frozen TV dinner. We may be willing to create some recipes of our own occasionally, but not if it is too difficult!

Unfortunately, there are no simple recipes for creating the empowered personality – no maps to the centers of our souls, no street signs to show us where the detours and the dead ends lie. The labyrinthine journey to the inner mysteries requires diligence, commitment, and a willingness to abide the paradox, the puzzle, and the riddle with no certainty that we will ever find the answers. Unlike the textbooks we studied in school, there are no answers in the back of the book of life. And there are so many easy pleasures to distract us from such serious endeavor!

Sometimes we cover up our reluctance to involve ourselves in the hard work of self-discovery by keeping ourselves busy with outer activity. With secret disdain for those we consider to be weaker or needier, we focus on the outer world, convinced that introspective self-examination and dreamwork are foolish and selfish pursuits for which we have no use and even less time. But all the while, we are stuck in a secret hell, and our absorption in outer activity is a smoke screen to cover our inner emptiness and our unwillingness to do anything about it.

As we approach midlife, many of us can no longer deny our secret dissatisfaction with ourselves. We want to change, but it is extremely difficult to shift our focus from collective pursuits in the physical world to the private, isolated, totally individual work of self-examination, the soul-making work that leads to the development of our potential. Many of us, especially those who have been successful in the outer world, and those who have been irrevocably wounded by it, ignore the call to change directions; as a result we simply become more and more numb inside. But apathy – or resignation to our pain and to struggling through life without passion, energy, or creativity – is the true evil. It is the opposite of living. As M. Scott Peck pointed out in People of the Lie, live spelled backward is evil. We are meant to live our lives to the fullest, and when we do not, when we have no energy or motivation or desire left with which to struggle toward the truth, we fall into evil and live in hell.

Pulling ourselves out of our hells and making the journey through purgatory to the kingdom of God is what this book is about. Why analyze our dreams? To keep us moving on our journeys to the sacred, to develop our souls to their fullest potential so that we might become empowered to fulfill our destinies and receive our total inheritance as children of a loving Supreme Being.

2 Interpreting Your Dreams

Carl Jung was a pioneer in dreamwork. He began as a student of Sigmund Freud, but after several years he broke away from his teacher because of some fundamental ideological differences. While Freud believed that the basic motivator of human behavior was the sex drive, Jung’s approach was more mystical. His detractors in the scientific community used this term in a disparaging way because they saw religious or spiritual needs as mere symptoms, or as neurotic outlets for a sublimated sex drive. But Jung did not consider spiritual needs to be pathological; he believed that an inner, spiritual life was essential to the healthy personality. Indeed, he said:

We moderns are faced with the necessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit; we must experience it anew for ourselves. It is the only way in which we can break the spell that binds us to the cycle of biological events.¹

And also:

For thousands of years, rites of initiation have been teaching spiritual rebirth: yet, strangely enough, man forgets again and again the meaning of divine procreation. This is surely no evidence of a strong life of the spirit; and yet the penalty of misunderstanding is heavy, for it is nothing less than neurotic decay, embitterment, atrophy, and sterility?²

The Purpose and Nature of Dreams

Wholeness

Jung believed that dreams come from the Self, whose goal is to bring us to health and wholeness. After many years of examining his own psyche and the unconscious worlds of hundreds of his clients, he concluded that humans have a natural inner drive to become whole. This involves overcoming our narrowness and one-sidedness and accepting ourselves as we really are, in all our strengths and weaknesses, with all our positive and negative qualities. As we learn to accept these parts of ourselves and integrate formerly repressed or denied material into our conscious lives, we become more whole, more empowered to act from our authentic centers.

From a Jungian perspective, dreams are seen as natural inner processes that are as real and necessary to our well-being as the natural processes we observe in the physical world. Just as studying outer events helps us understand the material world and our place in it, so studying our inner events helps us understand our invisible, inner world. Most of this inner world remains in our unconscious, which we can think of as being like a deep ocean flowing just below the surface of our conscious awareness.

The ego is the center of consciousness, the part of us that thinks and registers information and makes decisions. But what we consciously think or know about ourselves at any given time is only a small portion of our total Self. The ego is like the tip of an iceberg or the fin of a shark or the waterspout of a whale. This is what shows above the water, but below, in the ocean of unconsciousness where the human eye cannot see it, there is much, much more.

The unconscious aspects of the personality – everything that exists and swims and floats in the watery subterranean world below – are made available to us through dreams. I like to think of dreams as buckets holding little splashes of water and pulled up through a narrow well into our conscious world every night, or whenever we sleep. Each bucketful, or each dream, shows us something about the nature of our unconscious inner world. Seeing these heretofore hidden aspects of ourselves can give us a better perspective about who we really are. Gradually we realize there is much, much more to us than the meager little bit we can see above the surface. Gradually we sense that there is a wonderful, exciting world below, filled with unimaginable treasures.

When we go to sleep, our conscious egos are no longer in control of the things we do, think, and say. Then our dream egos, the nighttime twins of our waking egos, take over. Our dream ego is the person or character in our dreams we identify as ourselves. They are the stars of our nightly descents into the depths. The way our dream egos think and behave is usually a reflection of the way our waking egos think and behave, although sometimes the dream ego performs in new and different ways that indicate some new potential emerging into consciousness. Occasionally our dream egos do things that are directly opposite from what we think we do in waking life; when this happens our dreams are expressing some truth about ourselves of which our waking egos are not aware.

Our dream egos live in a very different world from our everyday life, and they are confronted with adventures that you and I will never experience in waking life! Why is the dream world so different? Because dreams compensate for the one-sided view of the world held by our waking egos. They show us unknown and unsuspected aspects of ourselves. We deliberately shove many of these unknown aspects into our unconscious when we are young because they are too painful to face, or because those who care for us consider them shameful or unacceptable. And so we often submerge them and forget they ever existed. But they remain under the surface, like a frightening Loch Ness monster whose existence we occasionally suspect when it gets close enough to the surface to disrupt the water with violent churning. This is sometimes what is happening when we lose our temper and say things we would not normally say, or when we become unusually fearful or obsessive or sad without understanding why.

These aspects of our personalities can be frightening, and our first instinct is to escape and forget about them. But they will not go away. One way to stop them from disrupting our lives is to dive down into the water, face them honestly, and make peace with them. Then they can become our friends instead of our enemies.

Other aspects of our unconscious are positive potentialities that have always been there, like unexplored underwater mountain ranges filled with unmined lodes of gold awaiting discovery. When our dream bucket contains an unexpected fleck of gold and we realize there may be much more down there, the search can become as exciting as any exploration for treasure in the physical world. Moreover, we know that when we find it, the gold is our inheritance, a special destiny placed there by something greater than ourselves, a treasure that cannot be claimed by anyone else.

It is important to remember that dreams are almost always about the dreamer. They may be peopled with those we love or those we hate. They may be filled with monsters, intruders, critics, or lovers. They may contain earthquakes, tidal waves, wars, or plane crashes. We, the dreamer, may be actively involved, or things may happen while we simply observe. But regardless of the content of our dreams, no matter how familiar or foreign it may be, every person, setting, event, and symbol from the outer world that appears in our nighttime world seems to be there for one purpose: to show us something unsuspected about ourselves.

Jung saw dreamwork as an essential aid to rediscovering the inner life. Most of us have focused for a long time on the external quantities of life, such as money and material possessions, instead of on the quality of our lives. We may become dissatisfied with this single-minded approach, but have no idea what to do about it. Instead of pursuing an inner search for the sacred meaning of our lives, we cling neurotically to youth and material palliatives. The result of this misguided focus is often more misery and bitterness.

Attending to our dreams can help reverse our focus and bring us closer to the sacred. Dreams can bring self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and a full awareness of our power; they also bring us to greater consciousness of the spiritual world and the sacred power that prevails over us. Recognizing our own authority and the authority of the Supreme Being over us are the two essential ingredients of a healthy, whole personality.

Compensation

A major purpose of dreams seems to be to compensate for what we consciously know about ourselves, in order to bring balance to our personalities. Think of the human mind as one of those old-fashioned scales with a little pan hanging from a chain on each side of a bar that is balanced over a central fulcrum. These pans are meant to contain everything we can know about the opposites within our personality: the things we consider good and the things we consider bad; our masculine and feminine aspects; our beliefs and values; our personality traits like introversion and extroversion, sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving. The ideal is to have balance: to be consciously aware of the opposites within our personalities. But most of us prefer to acknowledge only one of any pair of opposites, and we allow the other to remain buried deep in the unconscious. Then one of the pans of our scale becomes too heavily weighted and our personality is unbalanced.

Dreams are internal regulators; they are powerful forces for equilibrium. They compensate for our one-sidedness or imbalance by showing us aspects of our personalities that we are not aware of or that we need to develop. Just as scales are