Spirituality and Self Help
Hanusia
DREAM WORK � Another View Of Our Lives
Dreams have fascinated many people and cultures all across time. There are Biblical tales of crucial decisions directed by information available in a dream. We often talk about the dreams that we have for our lives. Many aboriginal cultures still seek guidance from the dreams of their shaman or leader.
Sigmund Freud was among the first of the modern age of scientist-healers to study dreams more systematically and incorporate them into the understanding and improvement of our mental health. Of course, Sigmund had his own particular fascinating approach, which alienated some of his contemporaries. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung is regarded as the spiritual godfather of dreams, moving beyond the troublesome Eros principle of his former mentor and exploring the complex dance of our conscious minds with the wider world of spiritual, intuitive and symbolic understanding.
There is little doubt that dreams are a type of important mental activity. According to available research, everyone dreams or at least spends time in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep each night. Not everyone recalls dreams. Even those of us who are actively studying them recall them to differing degrees. I go through cycles in which I only catch glimpses and other times when I seem to have created a story of epic proportions. It is a rich and varied world, this other side of waking consciousness.
As our minds grapple with the billions of pieces of input that come to us daily, they are constantly recognizing, cataloguing and associating them with similar bits of information. In addition, information has emotional weight, it has implications for the scheme or strategy with which we approach the world. In dreams, we seem to wrestle with the less obvious aspects of reality. If we are busy thinking and doing, then dreams often bring us face-to-face with the feeling and meaning aspects of our lives. They do so without much regard for the laws of physics or the kind of straight-line continuity that we imagine to be real-time life. Therein lies much of the confusion.
I work actively with dreams, both in my personal development and in my work as a counsellor. Dream work has become an aspect of my spiritual life, as I explore the depths of my person and the symbolic threads that flow across time and amongst all of humanity. Taking the time to really sit with these products of our amazing minds, I look for patterns of meaning , feeling and similarity that fit my current life and the lives of my clients. Some very helpful methods and guidelines have been developed by psychologists and therapists such as Dr. Gayle Delaney, Jeremy Taylor and Marion Woodman (a Jungian analyst from London, Ontario) that I will be glad to share with you I future installments.
