Many spiritual or soulful traditions have considered dreams as a source of information and wisdom. The Old Testament has numerous stories that involve dreams as prophecy, predicting the future. Perhaps the best known is the tale of Joseph of the amazing technicolor coat, sold into slavery in Egypt, who was able to correctly interpret the dreams of the Pharaoh of seven fat and seven thin cows as a foretelling of seven fertile years to be followed by seven years of drought. His interpretation set the course for Egypt's grain strategy whereby it was not impacted by the seven-year drought. The tradition of Islam is built upon words of their fundamental scripture, the Koran, which came to their prophet, Mohammed, in a series of wrenching sleep dreams. For these scriptural traditions, dreams were a way for God to speak to lowly man.
Native spiritual traditions the world over have viewed sleep dreams as voices from a transpersonal source, be it a god or goddess, a spirit or the earth itself. Shamans journeyed in dreams to supernatural realms, where they found banes to bring back to the tribe. For Australia's aboriginals, dreams are the ongoingly living essence of all creation. For them, the world dreamed itself and mankind into being. Humans can and must know these dreams in order to continually re-create the physical universe through songs and songlines. Dreamtime understands the entire world as emanating from dreams.
In the scientific age, sleep dreams have been explained as simply a function of brain chemisty or brain electrical circuitry, pereforming, at best, the function of flushing out waste or sorting out waking experiences, and, at worst, no function whatsoever. Sigmund Freud, who was the Viennese doctor who reconnected modern Western humans with dreams as significant events, explained them as part of an unconscious psychological mechanism that disguises and suppresses humans' all-encompassing, yet dangerous, sexual desires, but that has no other value. Carl Jung, Freud's protege for a while, understood dreams to have intrinsic value. He too conceptualized that they come from the unconscious of dreamers and serve the function of facilitating growth. For Jung, sleep dreams are meaningful, balancing waking attitudes, and their message is to be brought into consciousness. He postulated that sleep dreams speak in a symbolic language with the purpose of helping guide individuals to becoming fuller and more complete, "individuated."
We have found that approaching sleep dreams with the assumption that they are meaningful is most useful. Conceptualizing sleep dreams as emanations from the unconscious, both individual and collective, allows a dreamer to understand dreams as information from an internal wellspring of not-rationally attained information. Coming from "inside" the individual, they can be a guide to constructing a meaningful life that is not dependent upon sources outside the individual. Springing not from the conscious mind, sleep dreams are irrational and balance the limitations of the mind.
Native spiritual traditions the world over have viewed sleep dreams as voices from a transpersonal source, be it a god or goddess, a spirit or the earth itself. Shamans journeyed in dreams to supernatural realms, where they found banes to bring back to the tribe. For Australia's aboriginals, dreams are the ongoingly living essence of all creation. For them, the world dreamed itself and mankind into being. Humans can and must know these dreams in order to continually re-create the physical universe through songs and songlines. Dreamtime understands the entire world as emanating from dreams.
In the scientific age, sleep dreams have been explained as simply a function of brain chemisty or brain electrical circuitry, pereforming, at best, the function of flushing out waste or sorting out waking experiences, and, at worst, no function whatsoever. Sigmund Freud, who was the Viennese doctor who reconnected modern Western humans with dreams as significant events, explained them as part of an unconscious psychological mechanism that disguises and suppresses humans' all-encompassing, yet dangerous, sexual desires, but that has no other value. Carl Jung, Freud's protege for a while, understood dreams to have intrinsic value. He too conceptualized that they come from the unconscious of dreamers and serve the function of facilitating growth. For Jung, sleep dreams are meaningful, balancing waking attitudes, and their message is to be brought into consciousness. He postulated that sleep dreams speak in a symbolic language with the purpose of helping guide individuals to becoming fuller and more complete, "individuated."
We have found that approaching sleep dreams with the assumption that they are meaningful is most useful. Conceptualizing sleep dreams as emanations from the unconscious, both individual and collective, allows a dreamer to understand dreams as information from an internal wellspring of not-rationally attained information. Coming from "inside" the individual, they can be a guide to constructing a meaningful life that is not dependent upon sources outside the individual. Springing not from the conscious mind, sleep dreams are irrational and balance the limitations of the mind.
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