How can we understand the meaning of dreams?
This is a rich and deep area of study that usually requires making some amount of effort if one expects some level of reward and achievement. Some of the oldest human writings concerns dreams and their meanings, and over the ages many approaches to dreaming have been developed.
In the modern era one only has to scratch the surface to find many methods and groups or “schools” devoted to this rich seam of human experience. Having spent decades on my personal quest in dreaming, it has been the foundation of every profitable spiritual effort I have made since beginning to focus on dreaming.
I started with the works of Patricia Garfield and Jeremy Taylor, who I see as advocates of the modern “people's” style of dreamwork. I then worked my way through the dreaming books of Jane Roberts and then to the shamanic approach of Robert Moss. I have developed some definite ideas about how one can approach dreaming and develop some basic skills that will help one navigate life in a better way.
The most basic skill is to record every dream you recall. These dream reports grow in value the longer you keep a dream journal and review it. If you don't record dream reports you're missing the bulk of their value and will never have the joy of being surprised by what you find there in the future.
The second thing is to find people with whom you can share dreams in a friendly way. Garfield and Taylor and Moss go into a lot of detail on the hows and whys of this part. Suffice it to say that friendly and non-judgemental sharing that does not try to impose some other's meaning on your dreams will help you find more value as you work on your dreams.
Thirdly, you need to act. Your Dream Source sends dreams to you to help you and if you ignore them or fail to assign the importance to them that they deserve, they will fade or become trite. I have dreams that date from my childhood that I still work with, since they continue to provide valuable insight and advice that have helped me over and over.
And finally, I want to point out that the word “meaning” doesn't do the study of dreaming justice. Just assigning meaning is, at worst, a form of categorization that lacks real value. If we approach a poem by assuming that looking up the definition of every word in the poem will reveal “the meaning of the poem” we'll be quite disappointed.
Dreams are not just like the stories one finds in a book that can be interpreted as a way to understand “the meaning” or to simply entertain. They can be that, no doubt, but when you actively engage your dreams and see them as real events that occur in a real dream space, it opens up new avenues of development and understanding in your life. I have had many important dreams for which I, and my dreamer friends, have not been able to clearly understand or assign some kind of meaning to, but which have led me into areas I would have never found using my waking mind.
Jung reportedly claimed that of the many things that interested him, only if his dreams led him that way would he devote himself to working in earnest on something. I also find this to be true, that my dreams are great signposts to the passages of life and are worth deep study and extended work. So, I want and expect more than simply meaning from dreams and I do indeed find that, and more, in dreaming.
~~fran
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