By Bridgette: “Dream is a fragment of involuntary psychic activity, just conscious enough to be reproducible in the waking state. So, a dream is strong enough or conscious enough to penetrate the consciousness when we wake up, but it is a fragment of involuntary psychic activity”. The psychologist “Jung” makes it clear that dreams arise out of the unconscious.
It is involuntary because it is not normally subject to the control of rational thought processes. This is very different from waking consciousness, where we work on the premise that to be meaningful, things must be logical, rational, and under control. Dreams cares nothing for the view of consciousness, in fact dreams can be embarrassingly blunt and honest, often presenting in vivid detail images of thoughts and feelings the dreamer tries to suppress in life. Frequently of a sexual or violent nature.
Dreams are largely compensatory, we don’t always get what we want in life, particularly emotionally. This may cause pain, sadness and longing… the dream mind picks up on this and gives it to us in sleep. I think what is most significant is that dreams are mostly irrational, and therefore difficult for the waking mind to understand. Many people regard dreams as adjuncts of the waking mind, and seek to interpret them rationally. This misses the point, which is that dreams are complete statements on their own term, those terms are non-rational. Usually a dream is established by “bad qualities” such as lack of logic, questionable morality and apparent absurdity or nonsense. Dreams do not exercise censorship, they just throw up whatever is in the subconscious mind, and if we don’t like it or don’t understand it, we say “that’s” bad. The fact is that the unconscious has not been socialized and may not subscribe to our ideas of good and bad.
Learning to work with our dreams entails learning the language of the dream mind. One key is not to try to rationalize what the dream is saying, but just to immerse ourselves in the underlying energy, the feeling, whatever is there, so that it can slowly communicate itself and soak into the rational mind. Doing this can be a lot of fun because we learn to let go of our rational, prescriptive, thinking process, and allow ourselves to drift into this wonderfully crazy realm of dream and connect with whatever energy is there. Intuition begins to play a part. When looking at dreams we should not forget (that we are our dreams). We are the unconscious, it is not another individual, it is not some external being presenting us with this material. It’s part of us, and dreams present us with imagery of specific purposes. They seek to establish balance within the psyche and to promise psychological integration, which conscious attitudes prevent.
There is meaning associated with dreams, but the problem is to understand it, because the language of dream is not the language of the waking mind. The psychic structure of the dream is unlike that of other contents of consciousness… It doesn’t follow the same rules of time and space, it allows us to move backwards and forwards in time and float in the air. People appear and disappear and in dreams we are quite comfortable with this. In a way it could be understood as an interface between different degrees of subtlety of bodies, the gross level, the subtle, and very subtle level. In a way, sleep is a form of nourishment for the body, or meditative concentration. Understanding dreams entails understanding the dimension of oneself. I wish you all dreams of beauty and love, be gentle with yourself.
Love and Light,
Bridgette
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