The Nature of Dreams
Jung believed in the messages that our dreams have for us. His great gift to psychology was to identify that we can understand the true nature of our unconscious, our inner life, and our authentic emotions and feelings by paying attention to our dreams.
At a passing glance, our dreams can be baffling, fragmentary, and incoherent. People from our past that we haven’t seen in years show up for no reason. Weird and fantastical scenarios that couldn’t exist play out. Animals speak. We find ourselves in the basement of a home torn down a long time ago. Dreams are just plain weird and indecipherable. They are mysterious and confusing.
On closer examination, however, we can see logic or patterns even though we don’t understand what they are. Our challenge is if we approach the dream from our rational conscious minds, we can be left even more confused and baffled. We must learn the language of the dream. When we do, we come to know that they are important messages from the SOUL. Dreams tell us something about our life, where we have been and where we are going.
Stories as Sources of Meaning
The universal nature of the human psyche is the key to the comfort and solace that we can find during life’s ups and downs. It is this level where we find the deeper universal storylines found in myths and fairy tales. When we look at the universal nature of the human journey, we can be transported out of the personal troubles and see the solutions to issues that human beings have struggled with for millennia.
The most common of these universal stories are
• the hero’s journey
• death and rebirth
• initiation
• good forces versus evil forces
By studying these stories, we can find creative ways out of psychological dilemmas. We don’t feel so alone. If we discover what these stories are, our suffering can be re-framed into something that provides a strengthening standpoint.
Dreams as stories
Dreams mirror these universal stories and connect us to a deeper intelligence that is always moving us towards being all that we can be.
If we ask what this dream means, we miss the point.
If we look at the dream as a story with a beginning, middle and an end, we allow the imagination to be engaged. This facilitates individuation. As a story, we see dreams have a dramatic pattern that all good stories follow – a beginning, development of the theme, a crisis that needs to be resolved and how that crisis is resolved.
Dreams are full of a range of characters – bad guys, good guys, helpful figures and animals. Each plays a role in our psyche and can show us what we don’t know about ourselves.
Following the Red Thread of our Lives
Over time, dreams create a rich woven fabric reflecting the nature of our lives where we have struggled, our delights, and the little red thread leading us to the center of our being. The archetypal motif of the red thread is found in the myth of the Minotaur. Ariadne is the daughter of King Minos of Crete. Minos had a labyrinth built, a house of winding passages – where he banished the Minotaur, a bull-man, the product of his wife’s intercourse with a bull. Minos sacrificed young men and women from Athens to the Minotaur. Theseus, the King, and founder of Athens volunteered to kill the Minotaur to deliver his country from these rites. Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and provided him with a red thread that he unwound on his way through the labyrinth so that he was able to find his way out again after he killed the Minotaur.
The myth provides us with a wonderful, unifying and connecting image that weaves aspects of our inner and outer life into a larger context as we encounter ourselves and our emerging wholeness.
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Christina Becker
July 2019