Spirit Bear Dreaming

I cannot claim to have meaningless dreams in any stage of life. Given “meaningless” dreams and “I don't perceive the meaning” of a dream, how do you distinguish between those two states? How can you definitely confirm there is no meaning?

If you keep a dream journal for a long time, then reading old “meaningless” dreams will sometimes reveal patterns and meanings that you didn't see at the time. Also, sharing dreams will often reveal a different aspect of the dream that is meaningful, and sometime very much more meaningful.

I think it is too easy to simply say something is meaningless, it is often something that authorities or powerful people say to put down others' point of view or experience. So, overall, I think it is better to be a bit cautious with the term “meaningless”.

I don't reject the idea that there are meaningless dreams, only that the context of dreaming is not like reading the day's weather report. Dreams can be so different from waking experience that we can't just say that any dream report was truly meaningless. Rather, dreaming can encompass great complexity and grand inner narratives that work out over months or years or decades.

Dreams can also operate in a very nuanced way and be greatly influenced by our waking lives and impulses from unexamined areas of our lives. The decisions we make about what dreams are permitted to mean will change our dreaming. If you are convinced dreams are meaningless or random, then you will likely tend to dream in ways that at least seem like that. Contrariwise, delving into dreaming in depth will likely open dreams up in unanticipated levels of meaning and new sorts of experience. And these two approaches are only two of many, many ways we might feel about dreaming. I think it likely that each individual has their own unique style of dreaming.

It is also useful to recognize that a dream itself and the waking report of dream are not the same thing. One is an experience and the other is the telling of the experience. I sometimes find myself just waking and “unraveling” a dream of parallel events or multiple points of view, which are then put into some kind of narrative order in my mind so that I can record them in linear fashion in my journal.

And I've had dreams where time and space are distorted in some way, and again, they need re-framing somehow in order to journal them, and some aspect of self has a way of doing this. Not that all dreams are like this, but it can be difficult to go back into a dream that doesn't conform to our waking notions of normal reality. And this ignores the feeling aspect of dreaming itself and the way we feel about a dream on waking.

Given the above, the question seems more interesting in terms of how dreaming changes over time. I can think of many motifs and patterns that have changed over time in my own dreaming, and ways in which my engagement with dreaming has changed my style of dreaming. The way I recall dreams from childhood are of almost cartoon-like movies. Dreams from adolescence seem to involve the adjustment to adulthood and the many physical and social changes taking place in a life. I recall that a lot of these dreams seemed to focus on problems. My early adult dreams shifted to inner experience and had a more spiritual character as I defined distinct adult roles in my own life.

Dreams from my late twenties and early thirties had a particular focus on learning things. I had many hundreds of dreams of adventures in a version of my beautiful old high school building, meeting people and learning new things and going to and from classes. This was a time when I was working on my new career and marriage. Later, becoming a parent, I was rather chaotic in both waking and dreaming life and I have not formed a specific notion of the dreams of that time, other than not getting enough sleep. Which might explain the lack of good ideas about that time's dreaming. After that I had a period of work dreams, and many, many dreams of being on a college campus, a return to the learning theme.

Right around the start of middle age I realized that my lifelong desire to go deeper into dreaming would never be fulfilled if I didn't start very soon, so I started journaling and going to dream groups and workshops. I noted that as I engaged, my dreams first went through stages of getting longer and more baroque and extravagant, then getting shorter and more pointed. As I worked deeper with dreaming I noted that I'd have themes that that would play out over time, either characters or situations would recur in a way which seemed formed to provide discovery for someone who worked with dreams. Again, I am dreaming I am in classes, but often on a mountain or a wilderness park, and with other dreamers, some that I know and share dreaming with in waking life.

At this point the dreaming seems to be working in multiple parallel directions. I now seem to have a weekly dream about career or work. I also have dreams that seem clearly pointing to my spiritual life and to my major relationships, and so on. It is now as if my Dream Source knows what's going on in my life and that, as I am trying to keep up on everything, it does commentary on my life and the things arriving and departing my life at the time.

At every point in my life I've had Big Dreams, the kind of dream that stays with you your whole life and helps determine you life choices. I don't know how common this is, but I can look at a handful of dreams from every decade of my life and see how they are like lighthouses to guide me in the open sea. I've met many other people working with dreams who say something similar, so I imagine it is common but perhaps not something most people comment on or share with others.

Finally, this seems like a fruitful area of study. I wish there were more information available on this topic. I have not read all of Patricia Garfield's books, but she was such a prolific dreamer who journaled her dreams, and had done it for so many decades, that I suspect she might have a lot of interesting things to say on the subject. I have one of her books lying unread on the shelf near my desk and this makes me want to bump it up in my to-read list.

~~fran

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