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Dreams & Dreaming
Written by Christine Breese, D.D., Ph.D.

Introduction

Dreams have long been a source of intrigue and mystery to humankind since the beginning of time. When was the first dream? It is speculated by scientists that dreams began 130 million years ago. This theory was explored by observing animals with varying levels of nervous system development. Observation was done by means of brainwave recordings and REM observations. It has been concluded that amphibians, like bullfrogs, do not sleep or dream at all. Reptiles might sleep, and birds have only two different stages of sleep. The chimpanzee is the closest to early mankind’s type of nervous system. The first human dream was probably fairly simple, as Robert L. Van De Castle says in his book Our Dreaming Mind (1994) “…when a hairy creature re-experienced briefly during sleep a strong smell that had caused its nostrils to twitch during the preceding day, or the taste of some earlier feast.” Human dreams most likely evolved into more complex imagery as humans evolved in the nervous system and gained more experience as a species.

The idea that sleep is a “little death” is a common notion in cultures all over the world. Almost every primitive religious tradition has some reference to dreams as being a small version of what occurs at actual physical departure from the Earth. A traditional saying among American Indians is that “to die is to walk the path of the dream without returning.” Having a relationship like this with dreaming changes the very nature of our relationship with death.

The world of dreams is getting more and more mysterious, and we are no closer to mapping the dream worlds than we are of knowing the secrets of the universe. Elsie Sechrist says in her book Dreams: Your Magic Mirror (1968), “The more the unknown continent of sleep is explored, the more it discloses wider and vaster territories to be explored. And the findings discovered tend not only to outdate but to contradict the early work by the first explorers in the field. It is as if one compared the charts of Columbus’ day with the modern maps of America’s Eastern seaboard—the subject is the same but no other similarity exists.” In this field, there is still an infinite amount of exploration to be done.

So how, then, do dreams affect us, and can they improve our waking lives? Dreams are highly underestimated by our society and could be put to better use than they currently are. Dreams can be used more effectively for growth, fulfillment and identifying the self, or the many selves within one self than they presently are. If an individual uses the dream world to enhance conscious understanding of the self, perhaps the waking life will be lived more effectively and with more joy. This applies to all the shades of dreaming, from simple dream recall to full lucidity in dreams. (Full lucidity means that one has woken up in the dream and realizes it is a dream, yet goes onward in the surroundings of the dream without waking up physically). Full lucidity is the ideal “sound-stage” for working out our decisions, gaining skills, and exploring Self, God and the universe. Simple recall is limited to one story, but full lucidity is limitless in its uses, outcomes, trials and errors, and capacity for solving problems. Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold state in their book Exploring the World Of Lucid Dreaming (1990), “The world of lucid dreams provides a vaster stage than ordinary life…almost anything imaginable, from the frivolous to the sublime…lucid dreams can help you find your deepest identity—who you really are.”

The dream world, especially the lucid dream world, is our own built in virtual reality machine. The attempts of computer engineers, who are trying to invent virtual reality programs for the computer, are falling far short of what we already have built into our consciousness right now. If we could learn to tap into this inner resource of wisdom, experience, and exploration, we could avoid many of the mistakes or problems we encounter in everyday life. In ordinary life there is only one chance to play out an event—and only one conclusion. In the dream world, different versions of an event and its outcomes can be experienced without lasting consequences.

For instance, an individual who has a difficult time speaking publicly could practice dealing with stage fright and the mechanics of delivering a speech in front of thousands of dream characters. If the person first fails this speaking engagement, the stage could be reset and one could try again with a different approach. A person who has to communicate something to another, whom he or she is having a conflict with and is unsure about how it will go, can use trial and error attempts in the dream world to find just the right way to communicate without negative outcomes. Another person who is having difficulty with some area of study or creativity could use the dream world to gain access to knowledge or skills that are otherwise unavailable in the waking life.

There are billions of ways that one could use this built in virtual reality machine that we all have inside us. Our imagination is the limit. Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold state in their book Exploring the World Of Lucid Dreaming (1990), “Research on how to cultivate peak performance suggests that lucid dreaming may prove to be an ideal training ground, not only for athletics, but also for any area in which skill can be developed… Dreams are the most vivid type of mental imagery most people are likely to experience…Waking mental images are weak sensory impressions that resemble actual experience, but are generally not as vivid. Dreams, however, are mental images of completely convincing vividness... The more the mental rehearsal of a skill feels like the real thing, the greater the effect it is likely to have on waking performance. Because of this, lucid dreaming, in which we can make conscious use of dream imagery, is likely to be even more useful than waking mental imagery as a tool for learning and practicing skills.” Imagine what a person could do with all that extra time in life to gather skills and abilities, even while the physical body sleeps!

The book Dreams & Dreaming (1990), by George Constable, Editor In Chief, states that, “Sleep learning was first the stuff of science fiction… However, it is now scientifically documented that sleep learning is a reality. Experiments have shown that sleep learning cannot replace daytime learning, but the two can sometimes be used in concert together. Snoozing students can absorb facts…mathematical formulas, historical dates…but more complex learning requiring abstraction, analysis and reasoning seems to be beyond the powers of the slumbering mind. Nevertheless, hypnopedia could be a real boon for students, adding hours of painless instruction that could speed their educational progress. Soviet researchers assert that months of hypnopedia produces no fatigue or other unwanted side effects.” Hmmm… I have always been bored to death with having to memorize dates, lists and all the presidents of the United States in order, a common list that students in the U.S. are required to regurgitate sooner or later in the educational process. If I could have memorized such things in a soft doze during the hypnagogic state, a state that is related to dreaming but on a lighter level, I could have saved myself immense amounts of time. Could I have averted my painstaking journey through Algebra and Calculus with hypnopedia? How many lists, facts and formulas could a human brain hold if as children we are taught early in our education to take advantage of such a skill?

Perhaps the dream world is the root of our waking life, a place where some deeper consciousness is figuring out how to play the game of life. Perhaps it is the wire mesh that the physical reality is laid upon. No one really knows. Jane Roberts says in her book The Unknown Reality, Volume One (1977), “The ways in which dream material becomes real, the processes involved, are the same ones by which the universe itself becomes objectified… The universe is the result of a certain kind of focus of consciousness…the matter rises out of inner wonderworks, of which the private wonderworks of each of us is a part. If we really understand how dreams worked and allowed ourselves to explore dream levels, we’d see how the universe is formed… it is the …creative product, en masse, of our individual and joint dreams.” She also says in the same book, “from the ‘chaotic’ bed of your dreams springs your ordered daily organized action… Your present universe is a mass-shared dream, quite valid…based not upon chaos but upon spontaneous order.”

I feel it is important to find out what this dream world is really for, since dreams have been with us since the earliest memories of mankind. This is undiscovered territory for us as a species. Perhaps it is even the final frontier! Robert H. Hopcke says in his book There Are No Accidents (1997), “If you presume that dreams have a meaning…you will undoubtedly find out more about your inner life than you ever thought possible.” I agree! We are missing a very useful tool for enlightenment and self-understanding. The sacred books of India, composed between 1000-600 B.C., explain in great detail how to use dreams as a tool for gaining enlightenment. So do Tibetan texts and oral teachings. Using dreams for self-understanding is an ancient art form, one that could serve us just as well today in our search for who we are and our purpose for being alive.

Dreams could lead to higher consciousness if one constantly applies what is revealed in dreams. The Tibetan Rinpoche Tarthang Tulku, quoted in Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold’s book Exploring the World Of Lucid Dreaming (1990), instructs us to “maintain unbroken continuity of consciousness between the two states of sleep and waking.” He then went around the room, pointing to various people, and laughing he said, “This dream!” indicating that the body itself, the personality, all of it, is a dream. The two authors also said in their book on lucid dreaming, “By cultivating awareness in your dreams, and learning to use them, you can add more consciousness, more life, to your life. In the process you will…deepen your understanding of yourself.” Examining dreams, according to the Tibetans, inevitably causes us to learn more about the self and also about the dream we are inhabiting in waking life as well.

Jeremy Taylor says in his book Where People Fly And Water Runs Uphill (1992), “…Not only is dreaming significant from an evolutionary point of view, dreaming itself is the workshop of evolution…Clearly, we are still dreaming. Evolution is not done with us. We are not finished or completed, either as individuals or as a species… The Divine…is not yet as consciously developed and self-aware within us as it longs to be.”

Yes, there have been multitudes of workshops, books and studies done on dreams, but up to now, these endeavors have been considered frivolous and unimportant by society, and have even been called the junk of the mind. Most people feel that dreams, their recall, interpretation and meaningfulness, are for those who have too much free time on their hands. People who investigate their dreams are often considered hobbyists, rather than what they really are—brave explorers of an unmapped and misunderstood world that may have just as much reality as this physical one. Exploration of dreams is considered by most in society as frivolous play at best. However, according to Jeremy Taylor in his book Dream Work (1983), “In non-technological societies where people use fewer tools and are virtually without machines, dream life tends to have much more importance and prominence than it does in industrial/technological cultures.” Perhaps we would do well to observe the more primitive societies in existence today, for they are more proficient at dreaming than we in our highly technological societies. We could learn from these primitive societies, for they excel in their understanding and uses of dreams.

John Layard says in his book The Lady Of The Hare (1988), “All primitive peoples recognize [that dreams are messages from God], and accordingly pay great attention to them…all knowledge of the other side of life came to mankind through [dreams], later canalized into dogma, which is its static representation, true but lacking in redemptive efficacy so long as it is divorced from its organic source.” This points to the fact that all religious doctrine, rituals and beliefs are based on information originally received via channels of other worldly nature, like dreams. It is well documented in the Bible that many of the most important messages came to mankind through dreams, but why are dreams not used in such a way now? We are left with only the static conclusions that others made in their own dream analysis early in history, yet is not spirituality a constantly evolving thing? Perhaps we should look at our dreams in the present day as messages from God, universe, Self, whatever the source might be called by any given individual. These may be the changes that are needed as human spirituality evolves. Spiritual messages through dreams did not end upon the point of crystallization of the Bible.

Many of the visions and divine realizations in the Bible are products of dreams. John A. Sanford quotes the Bible, Numbers 12:6, in his book Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language (1968), “And he said, ‘Hear my words: If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord make myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream.’ Thus equating clearly the common origin and significance of dreams and visions [in the Bible].” Elsie Sechrist states in her book Dreams: Your Magic Mirror (1968), “In the Bible there are constant references to communication between man and God, between man and the angels, and between man and his higher self through the medium of dreams.” She also addresses meditation, as in metaphysical methods: “In Meditation, man opens himself to those benign powers which are the strongest forces in the universe, as well as to all time, all space, and all levels of consciousness. It is his attempt to communicate with his source, with God. Whereas prayer is ‘man talking to God,’ meditation is ‘man listening for God’s voice.’” So could dreams be likened to meditation at our deepest level where we clearly receive messages from some higher source or power? Are dreams actually the “ultimate meditation?”

Unfortunately, modern day religious leaders do not acknowledge our continuing ability to receive messages from God, our divine source, or our own personal connection with the powers-that-be. John Layard states in his book, The Lady Of The Hare (1988), “Though God spoke to the prophets in dreams and visions, the Church is now apt to frown on them, considering them to be vain fancies, a view that has now percolated to the common man, or else, if they are clearly important, to be, except in rare instances, of the Devil. The truth is that they may…point the way to spiritual growth, but equally as being of the Devil if we fail to see below their manifest content which so often darkens and distorts the spiritual meaning that lies beneath.”

Bob Larson, the most famous Doubting Thomas in the literary world when it comes to metaphysical concepts, says in his book Straight Answers On the New Age (1989), “It is true that in the Old Testament God sometimes revealed His will through dreams. But we observe no continuing occurrence of this practice. When God did use dreams it was under His discretion and at His prerogative…” Is this to say that God no longer communicates at all with mankind? Is religion now just an unmoving, non-evolving entity? Has God died, or something, and we are now left to fend for ourselves without any further direction or intention for our evolution from a higher source? Are dreams truly dead ends for spiritual messages and understandings? I highly doubt it, myself.

Why is the dream world a possibility for a healthier human psychology? It is because the mind and personality has unlimited freedom. It is a place to express and address everything that the human psychology gives attention to. It is a place where trial and error can happen without consequences on the Earth plane. It is a place where true therapy can take place at the deepest levels. I have experienced many such healings as a result of my dream activities. They have changed my life for the better—permanently. I believe this is possible for everyone.

It is absolutely certain that we must dream or we will have terrible problems psychologically. In Dreams & Dreaming (1990), George Constable, Editor In Chief, describes an experiment done at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital by a psychiatrist named William C. Dement. In this experiment, subjects were woken up as soon as they began to have REM periods (Rapid Eye Movements are indicative that dreaming is happening). He did this for five nights in a row until he was awakening the subjects at least twenty times. Then he allowed them a night, finally, of undisturbed sleep. “As if hungry for dreams, the volunteers spent more time on the recovery night than normal in the REM stage. By contrast, a control group of volunteers who had been awakened just as frequently but only during non-REM sleep did not increase their dream time during the recovery night. The tendency to make up for lost REM sleep suggests that dreaming is important for both psychological and physical health.” The book continues to describe that the subjects became increasingly agitated, unclear, and irritable as the experiment went on until they were allowed to dream normally on the recovery night. This is an obvious indication that dreaming is absolutely necessary to human psychological and mental health. I would not like to imagine an experiment of this sort that deprived a person of dream time for, say, three or four months. Would we then have a monster on our hands?

Great inventions have come about through dreams, including the singer sewing machine, the discovery of the benzene molecule, and the creative works of many literary, visual and musical artists. In the book Where People Fly And Water Runs Uphill (1992) by Jeremy Taylor, he says, “Dreams have been and continue to be a source of genuinely innovative thinking, invention, and discovery in fields ranging from philosophy to physics, from architecture to agriculture, and electronics to zoology.” I wonder, personally, if we would have ever invented anything at all if it were not for our capacity to dream. These people who invented such things were called dreamers, but it is these very same dreamers who have catapulted us into our ever evolving future.

Much of the visionary art in the world is the product of dreams. It is stated in this same book by Jeremy Taylor that, “dreaming holds great promise for the future of humankind: dreams are reflections of our inborn creativity. Creativity is our universal human birthright. All creativity has its source deep in the unconscious. Dreams have always been one of the major vehicles for the appearance of the creative impulse in waking imagination and awareness.” Jane Roberts says about creativity in her book The Unknown Reality (1977), “Some inventors, writers, scientists, artists, who are used to dealing with creative material directly, are quite aware of the fact that many of their productive ideas came from the dream condition. They see the results of dream activity in practical physical life. Many others, though untrained, can clearly trace certain decisions made in waking life to dreams.”

This brings us to the fact that millions of people from the ancient to the modern have solved personal problems with dreams, which might not be reported much throughout history, but we can assume that it has been done since the beginning of humankind. In the book Creative Dream Analysis (1988), Gary K. Yamamoto says that dreams, “all have one thing in common. All our dreams can help us solve our problems. Every problem we have is a candidate for our dreams to solve.” He also says, “our inner intelligence knows what we have to do… Each moment requires a new decision that forms the foundation for all future decisions. Fortunately, our dreams are adaptable, moving, and changing in step with anything we choose to do… Every decision we make, every action we take is recorded by our inner intelligence. Based on this ever-changing input, our inner intelligence creates new dreams. The dreams identify any new pitfalls, provide possible solutions, and may reveal the outcomes of the paths being followed.”

I think that without dreams, we would have great difficulty knowing what to do, for dreams are our exploration of probable futures and probable outcomes. Dreams are the testing ground for actions and decisions. Jane Roberts says in her book The Unknown Reality (1977), “The future of the species is being worked out in the private and mass dreams of its members… Few understand, however, that private reality is like a finished product, rising out of the immense productivity that occurs in the dreaming condition.”

Dreams had by great leaders often directed their path to victory. For example, the great victory of Constantine when he had a “vision” was most likely a dream. He was instructed in his “vision” to embed the symbol of the cross on the shields of his warriors, and then he was assured victory. After this victory, he made Constantinople the central city of Christian beliefs. Among all the books I use as references for this material, there are hundreds of reports where dreams have made life better for the dreamer or the masses that the dreamer affected in his or her life. Dreams influence physical reality in very real ways. Dreams are part of the equation in mankind’s evolution, perhaps a bigger part of the equation than we know.

Not only that, but dreams are our most definite and tangible proof that we live eternally, independent of the physical body. Dreams give us proof that there is more to us than meets the eye. Robert L. Van De Castle says it best when he says in his book, Our Dreaming Mind (1994), that dreams have “also given us a basis for believing that there is a nonmaterial component to our existence, as well as a continuity of existence which is not interrupted by physical death.” We literally spend at least 90 minutes a night in an entirely different world of experience—independent of the physical body. The implications of this are important in our search for proof of life after death. In the book Dreams & Dreaming (1990), George Constable, Editor In Chief, says, “The importance of dreams in causing primitive man to conceive of himself as possessing a soul, a non-material self that moved and acted in the dream world,” was emphasized. It is further stated in this book, “Dream experience made men aware that they were constantly in contact with a mysterious supernatural world, from which much might be learned about their own destiny in this world and the next.”

And what of the dreams of animals? It is a fact that most animals dream. It could be speculated that even plants might dream. I’d like to take it a step further and ask if rocks dream, or oceans, or dirt or perhaps the very molecules and atoms inside us. Do they dream in some way or another? Jane Roberts verifies that they do in her book The Unknown Reality, Volume One (1977), “All consciousnesses dream. We have said that to some degree even atoms and molecules have consciousness, and each one of those minute consciousnesses forms its own dreams, even as on the other hand each one forms its own physical image. Now, as the field of individual atoms combine for their own benefit into more complicated structure gestalts, so do they also combine to form such gestalts…in the dream world.” She goes on to say, “Because it is connected to you through chemical reactions, this leaves open the entryway of interactions, in animals as well as men. Since dreams are a by-product of any consciousness involved within matter, this leads us to the correct conclusion—that trees have their dreams, that all physical matter…also participates in the involuntary construction of the dream universe.” She goes further to say that even cells, molecules and atoms have their version of dreaming, although “Atoms do not dream of cats chasing dogs, yet, there are indeed ‘lapses’ from physical focus that are analogous to your dreaming state.” Just because something is small or insignificant in our opinion does not mean that it does not perceive life and the other worlds in some way. This is noted in the book Where People Fly And Water Runs Uphill (1992), by Jeremy Taylor, in his following statement: “There are those organized collections of atoms with relative speedy metabolisms that are obviously and observably alive, and then there are those organized collections of atoms that seem to have slower metabolic rates that up till now we have mistaken for ‘inanimate,’ when actually their life is simply too slow and subtle to be observed with our short attention span.” This, I would think, includes such things as rocks, tables, chairs, crystals and other objects that seem quite inanimate to us.

On a larger scale, dreams have created, shaped and changed the world throughout history. Jane Roberts states in her book Dreams, Evolution, and Value Fulfillment (1986), “All of your grandest civilizations have existed first in the world of dreams. You might say that the universe dreamed itself into being.” This is truly a profound thought, in my opinion. Is it possible that all we know of the physical universe has only been created because some great intelligence dreamed it into being, and is still dreaming about it? This could throw all our ideas about this thing called physical reality into confusion. Is it actually but a thought, a dream, in the mind of God, and when God stops dreaming and wakes up, will it all simply disappear the way our dreams do when we wake up from our sleep each night? This is a mind shattering concept to wrap ourselves around, is it not?

What is this sleeping and dreaming thing anyway and why is it so necessary for most living beings? Neale Donald Walsh, in his book Conversations With God, Book III (1998), states that dreams may simply be in existence because, “The soul literally drops the body…when it is tired of the limits, tired of the heaviness and lack of freedom of being with the body. It will just leave the body when it seeks ‘refueling.’” In her book The Unknown Reality, Volume One (1977), Jane Roberts states, “Dreams provide a steady give-and-take between conscious and so-called unconscious activity.”

Why do we go insane without dreams? How do they keep us psychologically functional in waking life and why are dreams so important to emotional health? Is it possible that we interact with each other in our dreams, or are dreams just a static place containing only material from only our own minds as individuals? These are some of the questions I have wondered, and some of this will be explored and answered in this report, but most of these questions only serve to spur more questions that simply cannot be answered at this time in human evolution.

End of Introduction.
We will work more with the idea of lucid dreaming in the Master’s section of the curriculum. You will receive many exercises and techniques for inducing lucid dreams at that point. For now, you will receive detailed information about history, dreams, and exercises for recalling your dreams more vividly and interpreting your dreams for more understanding.

Review Of Literature

It was quite a challenge to narrow my selection of literature down to only these sources. There is so much literature on dreams and interpretation that it is mind-boggling. Many of these sources would be redundant to have in the bibliography, so I have chosen the most pertinent ones that don’t have so many similarities that they are practically the same book in relation to one another. In no way does this give a portrayal of how many books are printed on the subject of dreams.

Some of the books selected here only mention dreams in passing or only have a few paragraphs, like the Seth books by Jane Roberts, but these books are some of the first ones to give me the idea that dream worlds might be a key for me in my growth and self-discovery. The Seth books are channeled material, Jane Roberts being the channeler and her husband Robert Butts being the transcriber and questioner. I believe channeled information can sometimes be more accurate and informative than information from the human mind alone. If the person doing the channeling is adept at the task, information that has either been dormant in the human collective unconscious or has yet to be discovered, can be brought forth. Roberts has many books, about twenty, but I only refer to four of them in this essay. Each book has a different focus, and the comments on dreams come from different perspectives, depending on the focus of the book.

The first of Jane Roberts books that I have listed is The Nature Of The Psyche: Its Human Expression (1979). This book delves into the human nature in depth, expounding on sexuality, personality problems, and includes psychic exercises that one can do to improve on his or her intuition. Dreams are also addressed.

The second of Jane Roberts books is Dreams, Evolution, and Value Fulfillment, Volume One (1986). This is also channeled material and as per the title, is completely focused on the nature of dreams and how they work as another arena for consciousness to have experiences which are just as valid as waking life experience. Not only are our nightly dreams discussed in this book, but so are the dreams of the mass consciousness of humanity, animals, plants and other such beings on Earth. There is constantly an unconscious dreaming mass self at work underneath the fabric of physical reality.

The next two books by Jane Roberts that I refer to are called The Unknown Reality, Volume One (1977) and The Unknown Reality, Volume Two (1986). Both of these books are very large in scope as to the subjects addressed, for there are many kinds of unknown realities. The future and how it is created is discussed, probable realities, how events at the individual and mass level are created, past/present/future lives, and how idle daydreams and unfulfilled desires shape our lives. I found exquisitely interesting material on the nature and uses of dreams in these books, mostly in Volume I.

The Lady Of The Hare: A Study In The Healing Power Of Dreams (1988) by John Layard is a wonderful book with a gentle and soft approach to dream work. It includes an account of his work with one woman who had a life changing dream about the sacrifice of a hare (rabbit). This spurred an entire book about the mythology and symbolism of the hare, like the Easter Rabbit of the Christian tradition, and an examination of the archetypes the hare holds in many different religions and cultures. The part of the book that is useful for this essay, however, is what Layard writes about dreams and how archetypes are an essential part of their content.

Leaving The Body: A Complete Guide to Astral Projection (1983) by D. Scott Rogo is a wonderful book that does not address dreams as the subject for the entire book. However, there is some lengthy information about dreams and how they can lead to an OBE, or out of body experience. If a lucid dream is achieved, an astral projection can easily follow by instructing yourself to do so while in the dream state. This causes the consciousness to shift into yet another dimension that is similar to the dream world, but is overlaid on the physical world and doesn’t change as easily. The book also suggests that the dream body is just one of the many bodies we use in order for our consciousness to have an experience. These experiences happen whether we realize them or not.

Harper’s Encyclopedia Of Mystical And Paranormal Experience (1991) by Rosemary Ellen Guiley is a book about many metaphysical subjects. I found her portion about dreams, approximately five pages, quite informative and useful. The Encyclopedia Of Psychic Sciences (1966) by Nandor Fodor is another one of these books about all things metaphysical. I found that the information about dreams in his book was informative and useful.

Sexual Dreams: Why We Have Them, What They Mean (1994) by Dr. Gayle Delaney, who has written other books on dreams, definitely perked my attention, for I hadn’t seen many books addressing the sexual nature of dreams except books influenced by Freud and Jung. I definitely had to take a peek into this book and it was quite interesting what I found. It is a precise and intelligent look at the sexual material in dreams, explaining that sexual dreams are not always about sex. This book is filled with vivid erotic dreams of both men and women and the analysis of those dreams and their symbols. Dr. Gayle Delaney graduated from Princeton University. She is also the Founding President of the Association For The Study Of Dreams. Her co-founder is Jeremy Taylor, the author of the next two books listed in this chapter. She lectures around the world in several languages, including French, Italian, and Spanish. I must admit that I am very impressed by this woman, who was actually quite young at the time this book was written, and has accomplished so much already in her physical life.

Where People Fly And Water Runs Uphill (1992) by Jeremy Taylor is a wonderful book about using dreams to tap into the wisdom of the unconscious. Jeremy Taylor has studied dreams for over twenty years and has worked with thousands of people from all walks of life, both individually and in groups. He is a Unitarian Universalist minister and co-founder of the Association For The Study of Dreams. In his book, he explores the many levels of symbolism and archetypes. He also gives us exercises for dealing with dreams, from recall to interpretation and to deriving the spiritual messages of dreams.

Another book by Jeremy Taylor, Dream Work: Techniques for Discovering the Creative Power in Dreams (1983), is an older work of his, but very helpful in understanding how to use dreams creatively. This book is not quite as full of techniques as the book listed in the previous paragraph, although it does offer techniques, even in the area of lucid dreaming. He talks more about the origin of ideas, inventions, and revelations that dreams give, and have already given, throughout history. He talks about how to apply that desire to receive creative ideas from your dreams.

Interpreting Dreams A-Z (1999) by Leon Nacson is a cute and colorful book with a layout that is ideal for teaching children about dreams. It is very artfully done. I liked it because it had some very simplistic definitions for symbols in dreams.

Understanding Your Child’s Dreams ( 1999) by Pam Spurr, Ph.D. is another very colorful book. It is also geared toward children. I really liked the simplistic definitions for dream symbols as I did in the book listed above. Sometimes simple really is better!

Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language (1968) by John A. Sanford is written from a Christian perspective. It is religious in nature, and refers to many biblical experiences of dreams as found in traditional bible text. Sanford was a priest and is now a rector in the Episcopalian tradition. He is not convinced that God has stopped speaking to us in dreams, as many Christian traditions would have us believe.

Unlocking the Power Of Your Unconscious Mind (1999) by Lauren Lawrence is a wonderful book on understanding how the brain registers experiences and uses these experiences in the inner worlds, one of which is dreams. The most useful part of this book for the purposes of this dissertation is the list of common dream symbols and their meanings.

Dreamworking: A Comprehensive Guide To Working With Dreams (1991) by Strephon Kaplan-Williams is a huge book with multitudes of exercises and a focus on self healing through dreamwork. “Comprehensive Guide” is an understatement about this book! I don’t believe that there could be any other work that has as many tips and precision guidance through exercises for dreams and interpreting those dreams. If this book isn’t famous, it should be.

Dream Back Your Life (2000) by Joan Mazza is another book, not quite as large, but just as comprehensive in its offerings of exercises and tips for understanding dreams and interpreting them. It is focused on do-it-yourself healing. It also introduces lucid dreaming as a means for healing.
Yet another book focused on self healing is The Dreamworking Handbook (2001) by Helen McLean and Abiye Cole. This one is also chock full of exercises and tips on dreaming and interpretation.

The Art Of Dreaming (1995) by Veronica Tonay, Ph.D. is full of charts and exercises for dreamwork.

Working With Dreams (1979) by Montague Ullman, M.D. and Nan Zimmerman uses many case histories and facts to explain how dreams work. This book is full of techniques and ways to interpret dreams. It goes through all kinds of scenarios and explains how to work with them, including working with recurring dreams or nightmares.

Dreams: Your Magic Mirror (1968) by Elsie Sechrist contains dream interpretations that the late Edgar Cayce did long ago. Elsie and her husband consulted the famous psychic about problems they hoped to solve. This book uses hundreds of actual dream interpretations in order to demonstrate how to understand dreams and derive vital information about business dealings, social dangers, sexual entanglements, religious beliefs and other aspects of life—from the most spiritual to the most commonplace. Edgar Cayce’s son, Hugh Lynn Cayce, wrote about this book:, “a summation of years of study and work in many new, thought-provoking concepts. Good common sense, humor, practical psychological insight, and spiritual purposes are blended here to challenge the reader…”

Dreams & Dreaming (1990) by Time-Life Books, George Constable, Editor In Chief, is a beautifully arranged tribute to dreams and dreaming. It is full of beautiful color pictures and has many articles and prose about dreams, from the history of dreams to speculation about the purpose of dreams. Also explored are symbols, archetypes and events that happen in just about everyone’s dreams sooner or later. This book does not go into techniques as much as some of the other books, but it is a very beautifully arranged synopsis of dreams and what they might be for.

Our Dreaming Mind (1994) by Robert L. Van De Castle, Ph.D. is a huge volume with extensive information about the history of mankind and dreaming. It contains early philosopher’s ideas and twentieth century ideas about dreams. He explores the role that dreams have played in politics, art, religion, and psychology during all eras. He also discusses the mechanics of dreams and what the different classifications are. Multitudes of dreams are interpreted and analyzed in this wonderful book as well. It should be a textbook for colleges.

Women’s Bodies, Women’s Dreams (1988) by Patricia Garfield, Ph.D., an esteemed dream expert, shows in her book how women dream differently than men and how those dreams reflect a woman’s passages in life. This book is geared toward women of all ages and assists women with understanding dreams and adjusting to the female body’s changes and emotional states. This book might not be as interesting to men, but it is quite useful for women.

The Inner World Of Daydreaming (1975) by Jerome L. Singer isn’t about dreams per se, but about daydreaming while awake. I found information in this book that is quite applicable to the night dreams we have, and how the mind needs these dreaming times, both while awake and while asleep, in order to have health and balance. As in nighttime dreams, daytime dreams are also therapeutic and useful to the human psychology.

Sigmund Freud (1971) by Richard Wollheim is a book about the famous psychoanalyst who came up with some of the first theories and techniques known to western psychology. Included in this book are some of his theories and writings about dreams and their meanings. He has a tendency to think that everything wrong with people is some kind of sexual dysfunction, so I must admit that I am not necessarily a subscriber to everything he says about the human psyche. However, since he is one of the first people to even think of examining dreams as an official form of therapy, he should be included in this material, not to mention the fact that his name is nearly synonymous with the concept of dream analysis. His points of view on these matters has been a cornerstone of western psychology even though most of western psychology uses Jung’s methods more than.

The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung (1959) edited by Violet Staub De Laszlo also should be included in the reference material for this dissertation, for he is another founder of western psychology in the area of dreams and their interpretations. Jung and Freud were colleagues of sorts until they realized their theories were going in different directions and they split off from each other. Jung is an early psycho-analyst who is famous for his dissertations on the shadow self. In this book are his basic ideas about dreams.

My favorite book out of all these books is Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming (1990) by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. & Howard Rheingold. This book is one of the most informative books on the subject, and there are not many books about lucid dreaming per se. It is packed with material that has not been addressed in most dream books except in a passing nature. I used this book like a Bible for techniques, inspiration and knowledge about how lucid dreaming works. This book is solely about lucid dreaming, written by people who have done laboratory testing and research in the field. It is the most information one will find about lucid dreaming all in one place.

Stephen LaBerge is the founder of the Lucidity Institute, the leading organization and authority on the subject of lucid dreaming. A workbook put out by this organization contains multitudes of charts for self-teaching and analysis of dreams. This workbook was invaluable to me in learning how to track my progress and get my mental body in the right mode of attention for observance and noticing the irregular things that occur even in daily life, which is a necessary state of attention for attaining the ability to dream lucidly. Not only did this book with its charts and questions help me learn how to wake up in dreams, but it also helped me wake up in my waking life, assisting me in becoming more observant of the subtle details that are around me all the time. The name of this workbook is called A Course In Lucid Dreaming (1999) by Stephen LaBerge and it is an invaluable tool for learning how to have lucid dreams. This book is published in house at the Lucidity Institute and comes included when an individual buys the Nova Dreamer, a device that will be mentioned further in the Findings part of this thesis. In short, it assists the dreamer in waking up in a dream.

The Universe Within (1982) by Morton Hunt is a book about many things within, dreams being one of them. This book is a collection of information derived from scientists on the leading edge of the exploration of humankind’s inner self. He portrays the work of researchers who are “investigating such mysteries of the mind as memory and forgetting, concept formation, logical reasoning...” He reports on the scientific studies on how we solve problems and get creative ideas. Artificial intelligence is also addressed. This book is mostly about the mechanics of human psychology and how it works. Dreams are included in this book in only very small ways, but most importantly, it discusses how a famous dream was the source of knowledge about the benzene molecule, which had stumped early scientists for years, and was the key to greater scientific feats with chemicals and such.

Creative Dream Analysis: A Guide To Self Development (1988) by Gary K. Yamamoto is a wonderful book with the same intensity that the book Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming has for the how-to type of person who is exploring consciousness. It is not focused on lucid dreaming however. It is focused on the recall and interpretation of dreams, which is important for understanding any kind of dream, including lucid dreams. It is packed with exercises and tips for recalling dreams and interpreting them. It is a practical guide for using dreams to increase mental and physical health.

All In The Mind (1981) by Ian Wilson addresses many subjects, like reincarnation, regression, stigmata, multiple personalities, and other “little understood powers of the mind.” Dreams are not addressed in a huge way in this book, for its subject matter is mostly about proving or disproving that reincarnation exists. However, what it does say about the dreams of the fetus are quite interesting.

There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity And The Stories Of Our Lives (1997) by Robert H. Hopcke is not about dreams per se, but dreams are included in his material. This book is more about synchronicity in our lives. Dreams are one of the triggers for synchronicities take place. Dreams and synchronicity are explored together in this book, including many other aspects of synchronicity and ways it shows up in our lives.

Conversations With God, Book III (1998) by Neale Donald Walsch is channeled material although it is not called such. It is a dialogue between the author and God, and the author translates what God is saying in answer to his questions. There is only one reference in this book on the nature of dreams but it was quite interesting to read that the soul is the one who needs the break from human life, not necessarily the personality or the body.

Straight Answers On The New Age ( 1989) by Bob Larson is an opposing point of view to the value of dream work. He is against the New Age movement and feels that everything metaphysical and “other worldly” is a sham. I want to include Larson’s point of view in this dissertation so that opposing thoughts to the subject matter are fairly observed.

The following books are all the same kind of book. They are dream dictionaries that list, from A to Z, symbols and words that appear in dreams. They describe what each of these symbols and words might mean in the context of the dream. They are quite basic in list form and don’t describe much in other areas about dreams, like how to recall them, dream lucidly or seed a dream. Some of these books have short introductions to dreams but do not have in depth material about dreaming techniques. They are directed toward giving the dreamer a dictionary to use in interpreting events that have appeared in the dream. The following books are the dictionaries I have used in my own dream interpretation endeavors: The Complete Dream Book (1966) by Edward Frank Allen, The Dreamer’s Dictionary (1974) by Lady Stearn Robinson & Tom Corbett, Zolar’s Encyclopedia & Dictionary Of Dreams (1984) by Zolar and Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted (1999) by Gustavus Hindman Miller. The Encyclopedia Of Dreams (1993) by Rosemary Ellen Guiley is a dream dictionary, but also has a good amount of introduction material about dreams, techniques and recall. It is not just a dictionary like the others, but an instructional book on dreams.

Beliefs About Dreams

The Greek god of sleep is named Hypnos. The Greek god of dreams, son of Hypnos, is called Oneiros. The Greek word for dream is oneiron. The practice of dream interpretation is called oneiromancy. The dream adventurer is called an oneironaut even in today’s English language.

Ancient Mesopotamian Beliefs

The first materials depicting dream content date back 5000 years to the population of Mesopotamia, the center of civilization at that time, which is now the central region of modern Iraq. Agriculture flourished and substantial cities were created with as many as 100,000 inhabitants. First there were the Sumerians, then the Akkadians, the Babylonians and finally the Assyrians, among others.

The materials found were fragmented writings, approximately 25,000 clay tablets, nestled in King Assurbanipal’s royal library, an ancient king of Assyriah. Some of these writings were about religious beliefs, mythology, and dreams. Twelve of these tablets were recitations of a legendary hero-king called Gilgamesh, who still lives in folklore today. These early stories included the dream sequences of Gilgamesh and the adventures that ensued as a result of these dreams. These dreams were had by a fictitious character, but there were also the recorded dreams of King Gudea of Sumeria, who was led by dreams in the building of a temple to his favorite deity.

The Mesopotamian writings showed that this ancient population was familiar with the practice of dream-seeking, asking for messages through dreams or incubating dreams. They even had a goddess of dreams named Makhir. They classified dreams in three categories: message dreams, mantic dreams and symbolic dreams.

Message dreams were usually had by rulers, or priests who advised the rulers. Messages were most often delivered by a deity of some sort who appeared in the dream. The dreamer usually awoke immediately after the dream was over. A ruler who sought a message dream went to the temple of the deity he wished to receive a message from. He participated in ceremony and recitation of prayers for the dream, slept overnight, and if the dream was not achieved, he would try again the next evening.

Mantic dreams were prophetic dreams, indications of what would come in the future. There were “omen-texts” with particular dream omina (omens, or signs) defined. Many cause and effect scenarios were translated from the dream world to their physical world meanings and a list of these were kept and referred to by dream interpreters.

The third class, symbolic dreams, were complex, with interactions and personality dynamics of the dreamer and other characters. These dreams were considered dangerous to one’s health, and they were never recorded unless their interpretation served to ease the situation. They used these dreams as a warning to dissolve some impending danger by taking action to avoid the outcome, even if it was just to dispose of unwanted emotions that would cause the unwanted event.

The Mesopotamians had a practice of telling their symbolic dreams to a lump of clay, then throwing the clay into water where it would dissolve the negative energy of the dreams it heard. A variation on this was telling the dream to a reed and then burning it completely. Amulets and charms were created to protect one from the negative effects of symbolic dreams. It was believed that evil spirits were always willing and ready to attack people in their dreams in order to take away health and vitality. It was also believed that evil dreams could be sent from an enemy and would deplete the vitality of the dreamer.

Dream interpreters were few, and they were mostly women who also served as necromancers (communicators with the dead). Later they were called soothsayers, exorcists or diviners.

Egyptian Beliefs

The Egyptians believed that the Ba, or soul, traveled during sleep and collected the dream. They also believed that dreams were messages from the gods. They took these dreams seriously, especially the ones that came to rulers. Thutmose IV (1400B.C.) was visited by the god Hormakhu who promised him riches if he would remove the sand covering the Sphinx. Thutmose removed the sand and recorded the dream on a stone column in front of the Sphinx, which is still in existence and can be seen today.

Bes was a joyful minor god who protected the household against bad dreams and his image was carved on the headboards of beds. Serapis was the god of dreams and there were many temples dedicated to him. Professional dream interpreters lived at these temples. A “shingle,” or advertising sign, of one of these interpreters was uncovered reading: “I interpret dreams, having the gods’ mandate to do so; good luck; the interpreter present here is Cretan.” Incubation of dreams was widely practiced. Through ceremony, fasting, donations and prayers, a dream could be procured.

Dream omina, or “omen-texts,” were also found in Egypt. In Mesopotamia, these texts pertained to many types of divination systems, dreams being only one of these. In Egypt, the “omen texts” pertained to dreams only. The earliest collection of dream omina was created sometime between 2050-1790 B.C. known as the Chester Beatty Papyrus III, in honor of an Englishman who donated it to the British Museum. It is incomplete at both ends, meaning that it is only a part of a larger document. This text lists 143 good and 91 bad dreams, with interpretations, the Egyptian word for “good” was written in black ink and the word for “bad” was written in red. The omina, or symbols, appear at different places in the interpretations, but no pattern is evident. Perhaps the missing part of the text would explain. The portions of this text which are available list certain ways to protect oneself against the contents of a bad dream, one of these being that the dreamer must rub his face with herbs, beer and myrrh in order to avoid the negative effects of the dream. It would also remove the contagion that the dream depicts within the dreamer.

The second and only other “omen-text” found in Egypt dates back to 200 A.D., a more recent documentation of dream omina, and it is known as the Carlsburg Papyrus. There were originally 250 omina listed, but 100 are damaged and unreadable. There are also section headings. Six of these sections are legible and one of them deals with women’s dreams and issues.

Chinese Beliefs

The Chinese believed that the hun, the immaterial soul of man, not the physical soul of man, was involved in dreams. It could separate from the body for nighttime communication with the spirits. It was believed that the dreamer was vulnerable, and the soul could have trouble getting back into the body if the sleeper was disturbed. Alarm clocks were not welcome in many areas of China when they were first available.

The T’ung Shu is a Chinese almanac of life that has a 4000 year history of collected knowledge. It’s section on dreams is called “Chou Kung’s Book of Auspicious and Inauspicious Dreams” dating back to 1020 B.C. Chou Kung was a mathematician who may have also been involved in the compilation of the I Ching. Mr.Chou is a term attributed to dreaming. If a student dozes in class, he will often be aroused with the question, “Have you been visiting Mr. Chou?

The T’ung Shu has seven categories of dreams. Many interpretations about events and symbols are listed in the material. The categories are arranged by association, like “heaven and the weather,” “houses, gardens, forests, etcetera,” “human body,” “animals and birds,” and “clothing and jewelry.” An example of the entries under these categories would be that to dream of an orchard with trees heavy with fruit, “houses, gardens, forests, etcetera,” means that one will have many children and grandchildren. Another example under “human body” is that to dream of one’s teeth falling out means the parents are in danger.

One of the most famous Chinese dreams is that of Chuang-tzu who is associated with the development of Taoism. He could not figure out, upon awakening, whether or not he was a man dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was a man. It seemed to him that both existences were real, depending on the perspective that one looks from.

The Lie-tseu is a Taoist text defining several classes of dreams. These classes are ordinary dreams (without emotion), terror dreams, thought dreams (about what one was focused on thinking about that day), waking dreams (what one said or did that day), and joy dreams. Explanations and definitions are put in the concept of Yin and Yang energy and the constant balancing act between the two. It was believed that dreams “compensated” for what was missing in ordinary life. (Yin represented darkness or negative, Yang represented light or positive.)

Incubation of dreams was widely practiced in temples and other sacred places. Once the dream was achieved, there would be a divination done to determine if the dream was really sent by a god. Only if the dream was sent by a god would it be analyzed by a dream interpreter. Even political figures, judges, government officials and visiting dignitaries were required to spend their first night in a temple of the city’s god in order to receive guidance and wisdom. Robert L. Van De Castle makes an interesting statement in his book Our Dreaming Mind (1994), “It’s fascinating to speculate what would happen if our government encouraged its officials to spend some nights in a dream temple, seeking and sharing guiding dreams.”

Tibetan Buddhist Beliefs

The Tibetan Buddhists believe that dreams are practice for realizing illusions after death. It is of utmost importance for aspirants to cultivate the ability to dream lucidly. The Tibetans believe that through cultivating lucidity in dreams while alive, it is easier to perceive the Bardo Worlds for the illusions that they are. The Bardo Worlds are what happens after death for about forty days. At first, the Bardo Worlds are pleasant and seductive. However, toward the end, they begin to disintegrate and become nightmarish. Demons appear, the happiness is gone, comfort is gone, and the entity experiencing all this becomes frightened and wants to escape if he or she does not recognize the Bardo Worlds as illusion. The entity runs back to incarnation in order to escape the Bardo Worlds, instead of attaining nirvana, freedom and final oneness with the Source. According to the Tibetan Buddhists, nirvana, freedom from the re-incarnational wheel, can only be achieved by overcoming the dream illusion, fear, and the Bardo Worlds.

Dream demons appear from the discarnate soul’s own fears, regrets and sins. This karma is not handed out by an external authority, but is created by the dreamer himself or herself by the self judging conscience within each being. The discarnate soul flees the Bardo Worlds by frantically searching for a copulating couple, slips between them, and re-enters the world in order to escape the self created demons, believing that they are real. The possibility of nirvana is lost, and the soul is once again incarnated into the world, driven by terror and the illusion of the Bardo Worlds.

The Tibetans believe that our nighttime dreams can be used to prepare us for our final challenge after death when we must face the Bardo Worlds. They see lucid dreaming as the ultimate exercise in learning how to deal with illusion. It is the highest order of importance in spiritual discipline. Sleep is like a “little death” and dreams give us the chance to practice how we will handle the Bardo Worlds upon physical death. The experience of lucid dreaming allows us to change our relationship with death itself.

Spiritual aspirants in the Tibetan traditions are taught to stay calm and unmoving when frightening characters appear in dreams, and thus also to act the same in the Bardo Worlds after death. This is the most important thing to learn. This also applies to waking life, in Tibetan Buddhist traditions.

Eastern Indian Beliefs

Prophetic dreams played an important role in Indian epics, adventures and stories. Of all the types of dreams, prophetic dreams were the most important to Eastern Indians.

The Vedas were written between 1500 and 1000 B.C, and dreams were recorded and interpreted in this text. Dreams had particular interpretations, much like the omina in the early Mesopotamian “omen-texts.” For instance, to ride an elephant is a lucky dream, while riding a donkey is an unlucky dream. Verses, recitations, rites of purification, and different types of baths are suggested as medicine for dispelling the negative aspects of a bad dream.

It was believed, pertaining to the Atharva Veda, that the time of night the dream was had indicates whether the dream will come true sooner or later. For instance, a dream early in sleep means that it will take a year for it to come true, for it is further away from the conscious mind and thus further away from manifestation. Dreams close to awakening were thought to already be present and half realized. Also, if several dreams followed one another at close intervals, only the last dream was significant.

The Upanishads are philosophical material that deal with deliverance from the material world. They were written between 900 and 500 B.C. In the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, two theories about dreams are proposed. One theory is that dreams are expressions of the dreamer’s desires, creating that which he or she does not have in physical life. The other theory is that the soul leaves the body during sleep and wanders to different locations where those same objects the dreamer desires actually exist. If a person was awakened too quickly from this other location, the soul would not make it back and the person would die. It is also mentioned in this text that there are different levels of sleep, one of them being dreamless sleep where the soul becomes one with the Absolute. It was also believed that childhood dreams were visions of a former world. The elderly dream of the world they are about to enter that they came from before incarnation.

A third text is also considered important in the understanding of dreams. It is called the Sushruta Samhita, a collection of medical and surgical material compiled around 600 B.C. by a surgeon named Sushruta. It contains many interpretations of dreams, mostly pertaining to illnesses and their resolution.

Greek Beliefs

The first references to dreams in the Greek culture are found in Homer’s epic poems, usually dreams had by the heroes in the poems. The practice of oneiromancy (dream interpretation) was considered a sign of civilization, and dream interpretation became a profession in Greece. Dreams were considered a passive experience by the Greeks, so one “saw” a dream, one did not “have” a dream. The earliest Greek view of dreams was that a real god made a visit by entering through the keyhole in the door, delivered a message at the bed, and then exited through the same keyhole. Later views were most likely influenced by Eastern Indian beliefs that the soul could travel without the body and have adventures or visit the gods. The earliest recorded dream book, appearing in the fifth century B.C, was written by Antiphon, an Athenian statesman.

Dreams were considered a vehicle for getting information and relief from physical suffering when sickness was involved. Prophetic dreams were sought through incubation at temples dedicated to Aesculapius. Aesculapius was a talented healer who was later deified. He was known for successfully curing many illnesses through the use and interpretation of dreams. Temples were created around his image for incubating and interpreting dreams. The temples were decorated with beautiful, carved, weaving snakes. Today’s modern medical symbol, intertwining and weaving snakes, was a symbol of Aesculapius. Snakes were thought to be a healing emblem.

When a person sought a healing or prophetic dream, the person had to refrain from sexual intercourse, adhere to a special diet, and bathe in cold water. An animal sacrifice, usually a ram, would be made and the dreamer would sleep on the animal’s skin. Aesculapius was then beseeched in prayer and the lighting of lamps. When it was time for sleep, the priests would say encouraging words to those seeking a dream. Through the power of suggestion and long preparation, the desired dream was often produced. Aesculapius would appear to the dreamer and indicate what type of medicine should be taken or what action to pursue. Sometimes his daughters, Hygeia or Panacea, delivered the message.

Hippocrates was alive at the same time as Socrates. While Socrates was thought to be the father of philosophy, Hippocrates was called the father of Greek medicine. The Hippocratic Oath that graduates of medical school swear to is derived from the writings of Hippocrates (the general statement is: the doctor promises to keep life going in the physical body in whatever way possible.) Hippocrates wrote a collection of material, and one of these texts was titled On Dreams. His theory was that the soul is passive and the sense organs of the physical body were predominant during the day, but during sleep, the soul then produces the images instead of receiving them. He believed in prophetic dreams, diagnostic dreams, and psychologically revealing dreams. He maintained that disharmonic dreams indicated somatic malfunctioning or psychological malfunctioning. He also believed that some dreams were simply “a wish of the soul.” He used dreams to diagnose illness on many occasions.

Plato was most interested in the emotional implications of dreams, and believed that dreams were a result of the “beast within” that appears only during sleep. Only by raising one’s ability to reason could one then experience dreams that are morally acceptable and then be healed of illness.

Aristotle was Plato’s student and he belittled the idea of others that dreams were of divine origin or that dreams could be interpreted astrologically. He argued that animals also dream, and the gods would never send dreams to such creatures. He had three small books called On Dreams, On Sleep and Waking and On Prophecy in Sleep. He speculated that dreams might be more closely related to the body’s internal sensations and awareness of external somatic disturbances, which then resulted in dream imagery. He also pointed out that dreams, upon awakening, influence waking life behavior, which then resulted in dreams seemingly being prophetic, whereas in truth, the dream only provided the idea and then the dreamer acted on it. He believed that coincidence was the most likely factor in prophetic dreams.

Another Greek physician named Galen felt that dreams had diagnostic utility. He carried out complicated operations based on the dream guidance he received. He claims to have saved many lives with dream diagnosis and dream prescribed treatment. He was the first to dissect human corpses in order to map the inside of the human body.

The Romans were heavily influenced by the Greeks and practiced dream incubation widely, despite the disdain of intellectuals. Cicero was a well known Roman critic of dreams and gave many contrasting interpretations of dreams as examples. He viewed dream interpreters with disdain, reflecting some of the feelings the public had toward necromancy. He concluded that dreams had such a huge variety of interpretations attributable to them that no interpretation could possibly be arrived at that was all inclusive and correct. There was no order or regularity in dream interpretation, so he proposed that the practice of divination by dreams be abandoned, for it oppresses the intellect.

Artemidorus of Daldis was a contemporary of Galen. He wrote the most extensive material on dreams called Oneirocritica, meaning “The Interpretation of Dreams.” He named himself Artemidorus of Daldis, instead of Ephesus where he was actually born, in order to memorialize the birthplace of his mother. He also wrote earlier works on augury (divination).

The Oneirocritica is an encyclopedia of dreams containing five books. The first three were intended for the general public, and the last two were intended for the private use of his son, a budding dream interpreter.

Book 1 of Artemidorus’ work deals mainly with dreams about the human body. It is well organized. He covers every human body part from head to toe, literally, and the dreams that one might have about them. He has other categories about bodily transformation, activities, food and beverage consumption, and sexual acts. Book 2 deals with dreams about objects and events pertaining to the natural world. He covers animals, weather, fire, bodies of water, the gods, the deceased, flying, numbers and clothing. Book 3 is a bit disjointed for it covers everything else for the general public that might be of concern for interpreting dreams. These are varying subjects and categories that did not fit into the first two books.

Book 4 contains suggestions to his son with regard to his role as a dream interpreter. It is a how-to book on techniques of interpretation. Given are the guidelines for the data needed about the dreamer, the necessity for the interpreter to know about the culture and background of the person seeking interpretation, and how to collect every detail about the dream that the dreamer can explain. Book 5 was a collection of 95 dreams that Artemidorus recorded and verified the outcomes of himself. These were intended as practice sessions for his son and to illustrate how the interpretation of the dream could vary only because the person who had the dream was a particular type of individual.

Artemidorus consulted with many dream interpreters for years in order to compile the information he had in his books. He went to many cities in Greece, Asia Minor, Italy, and the larger islands. He calls upon experience and testimony as the guiding principles for his statements in his material. Robert L. Van De Castle says in his book Our Dreaming Mind (1994), “The Oneirocritica can be considered the great-grandfather of all dream books and stands as an impressive monument to the dedication and diligence of its author.”

The Oneirocritica is the only surviving complete text from twenty-seven more dream books mentioned by Artemidorus that were in circulation in antiquity. We have only his comments about them to go by, but they seemed to be very limited in their content compared to Oneirocritica.

In his book Our Dreaming Mind (1994), Robert L. Van De Castle quotes Robert White, who translated Oneirocritica into English in 1975. In his preface, White says that dream study, “…continues to be a field with a future. It is also a field with a past… In a sense, Freud, Jung, and others were not so much innovators as restorers, since they were reassigning to dreams and dream-readings the importance that they had held in antiquity, and which they had lost in more recent centuries.”

Hebrew Beliefs...

(Course continues with more material on beliefs about dreams from various cultures. Skip to next section...)

Freud & Jung On Dreams

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud’s assessment of dreams was a revolution in understanding the psyche of the human mind. He made the “unconscious” the foundation of his psychoanalytic theories, and sexuality was a huge component in his analysis of the unconscious. He was born in 1856 and had a career in the treatment of nervous disorders. He also studied hypnosis. He is well known for his idea that sexual frustration is at the root of all nervous disorders. He alienated himself from his contemporaries in many instances because he took the idea to such an extreme level. His opponents called him intolerant, for he did not deviate from his ideas about psychotherapy, and his followers called him passionate for the truth.

Freud was met with much criticism. His relationship with Carl Jung and several other contemporaries dissolved over differences in ideas about psychotherapy. He was quite unbending in his convictions. However, if you ask anyone on the street who discovered the unconscious, dreams or using dreams to understand oneself, almost everyone would reply that Freud was the father of these concepts. Of course this is not historically accurate, for the word unconscious appeared in the English language as early as 1751 and many other writers had speculated on such things as dreams long before Freud was alive. Freud was a bit arrogant and helped create this image for himself by not acknowledging previous work by others who came before him or the work of his colleagues. He claimed to be the first to truly examine dreams, discounting previous efforts by others, and this has echoed throughout time until the present day, even though it is not true.

Freud believed dreams were of the utmost importance in understanding the nature of a patient’s mental illness. He was a supporter of Plato’s idea in 400 B.C. that our beast nature appeared in dreams, uncontrolled and easily expressed in dreams. His first book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published in 1899, although the date was depicted as 1900 by the publisher so his views did not appear to be emerging from an antiquated time period, but instead depicting the new ideas of the 1900s.

Freud divided dreams into two levels. The first level was the manifest content, or that which one could consciously recall. Freud thought this material was not important and had no meaning or significance. The second level was the latent content, or that which remains unconscious, like the true reasons for the dream that are not known to the conscious mind. These were the unconscious wishes and fantasies which have not been lived out in the physical life. Freud believed that the manifest content was a cleaned up version of the latent content, which was raw and crude.

Freud introduced the idea of the censor, a sentinel in oneself that prevents primal and crude material from getting into the conscious mind, and also puts unacceptable conscious material into the unconscious. This is called repression. During sleep, the censor is not quite as alert as usual, so through dreams it is possible for the language of the latent content of the unconscious to be translated into cleaned up language of manifest content in the conscious. This transformation is called dream work. Freud also concluded that latent content is always more extensive than the manifest content, therefore a process called condensation takes place. When something in the dream that is unimportant is exaggerated, this is called displacement. Secondary revision is the term Freud gives to the process of the mind organizing the dream into an intelligible story, or sequence of events. This creates the dream façade. He believed that secondary revision did not always happen in every dream, and that is why some dreams ended up disjointed and unintelligible. He believed that this process of secondary revision happens before the manifest content of the dream appears.

Freud first discussed symbolism in dreams in his fourth edition of The Interpretation of Dreams. Others in the same field were far more knowledgeable than Freud on the topic of dream symbols, but he caught up to them later. He believed that a symbol in a dream was a substitute for something else which came from the unconscious.

Freud’s methods of dream interpretation consisted of two main techniques. First was the symbolic interpretation of the dream. The other was the decoding method in which dream symbols were signs that coincided with a fixed key, like a dream dictionary. He worked backwards from the manifest content to the latent content by asking the patient what the pieces of the dream meant to him or her by association, finding the symbology, and eventually finding the latent content. Freud would put before the dreamer a few different possibilities for the symbol, and the dreamer would pick one that he or she most resonated with.

Freud often had his patients report the same dream twice in order to find the differences or changes in the manifest content. In this way he could find the weak spots in the dream’s disguise and also find the strongest points that did not change in the first report. He wanted all the information on manifest content if more than one dream were reported in one night, too. He believed they were complimentary and he could find similarities between them in order to decipher what the unconscious messages were.

Freud did not believe that dreams function in a problem-solving capacity. He did believe, however, that by examining dreams, repressed emotional problems could be addressed. He believed that dreams were also like safety valves to release pent up psychological tensions, and thus wish fulfillment dreams were the result.

Freud believed that there were four possible origins for wish fulfillment dreams: 1) consciously remembered wishes that were aroused during the day but left unfulfilled, 2) wishes that arose during the day but, because of their unacceptability, were repressed into the unconscious, 3) wishes arising during the night stimulated by such bodily needs as hunger or urination, and 4) wishes originating in the unconscious that are incapable of ever passing beyond the censorship into conscious awareness. These were often called infantile dreams, or they represented childlike wish fulfillment for things one cannot have. Freud also coined the phrase counter-wish fulfillment dreams. These are the dreams where frustration is experienced because the wish is not realized. He believed these dreams revealed a masochistic nature in the patient. He later believed that these actually were truly wish fulfillment dreams, but the inner censor had failed to do the translation correctly.

Freud was perplexed by telepathic dreams and other sorts of very clear dreams where mental faculties were present. He felt that these dreams were not true dreams and that they were dream fantasies, which are not necessarily disguising latent unconscious wishes. These dreams were afterthoughts of the conscious mind and weren’t really dreams at all. Any dream that was reasonable was not useful for analysis in Freud’s view. He believed that true dreams were devoid of reasoning or mental reflecting.

Freud never personally had a telepathic dream, but he regularly encountered people who did. He thought perhaps telepathic dreams were an exception to the way dreams were normally constructed and translated. He believed that sleep provides favorable conditions for telepathy, and that is what it truly is, not dreams. He believed these were separate functions. He believed that the occult was a viable field of study, but refrained from engaging in psychic study because he did not want to discredit the field of psychoanalysis. The occult always fascinated him, however, and he wished he could conduct experiments in the field. He was fascinated by the psychic abilities displayed in some subjects, and thought that it was an entirely different field of study. He made a comment in a letter to a colleague that if he did not have such an extensive career in a scientific field, he would have gladly pursued the field of psychic research. It would be interesting to see what Freud would have done in that field.

Freud is viewed with mixed feelings in the field of psychoanalysis. It is not really known whether he was truly a genius or a self-aggrandizing user of other people’s ideas. He did have a talent for convincing people that he was the first to uncover the secrets of dreams and how they work. Perhaps he is somewhere in between these two extremes. What he did do for the study of dreams was bring professionalism and scientific focus to the field. He significantly advanced the study of dreams, even though some would say that he created unfavorable connections between dreams, neurosis, and sexuality. He often insisted that even an innocent dream disguised the Oedipus complex in the dreamer. (Oedipus was the character in mythology who slept with his own mother.) Freud assumed that all dreams were disguising sexual content unless it could be proved otherwise, so in a way, he gave dreams a bad rap. Only until late in his work did he seem to open up to other possibilities for the motivations in dreams, but by then, most of his published work attributed dreams to sexual wish fulfillment.

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 in Switzerland. He was somewhat younger than Freud, but also became one of the most well known names in the field of psychoanalysis and the study of dreams. Freud and Jung are the two most important and well-known forefathers of these fields, and at one point were friends. Their friendship lasted during the years of 1907 to 1913, and was terminated in anger by Jung in 1913. Jung found Freud to be unbending in his ideas, and not open to Jung’s or anyone else’s ideas about dreams, and therefore found a conflict that could not be resolved. This may have had to do with Freud’s status as being older than Jung, and seeing Jung as a student or patient rather than an equal. This was frustrating for Jung, and he later moved in a different direction with dream analysis than Freud.

Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, was begun through dictation to a secretary at the age of 82. He reflected on forty-two of his dreams in this book, but he had written extensively throughout his life. His published works fill eighteen volumes in the Bollingen Series of Princeton University Press. Two of his books remain unpublished, the Black Book and the Red Book. Jung was also an avid dream journal keeper. He wrote down and drew his dreams every morning. He used himself as his most studied subject. He was very creative in this process and some thought he even had a “creative illness.”

According to James Matlock in his book Harper’s Encyclopedia Of Mystical And Paranormal Experience (1991) Jung considered dreams to be, “compensatory, to provide information about the self, achieve psychic equilibrium, and offer guidance.” He also believed that, “dreams had a deeper meaning, that they were involved in bringing spiritual direction to a person in a process of unfoldment or evolutionary growth,” according to Gary K. Yamamoto in his book Creative Dream Analysis (1988). Jung also coined the phrase collective unconscious. Yamamoto goes on to say, “Carl Jung thought that people were tied together through a common and vast intelligence called the ‘collective unconscious’… which is the storehouse of the total experience and knowledge of all mankind. Though this unlimited source of information seems to lie just beyond our ability to recognize and use it, it is actually providing constant guidance. Messages from the universal intelligence flow in a continuous stream, guiding each of us from moment to moment. Some people call this their conscience or say that they hear a ‘small voice’ inside their mind.”

Jung introduced the idea of archetypes as a psychic structure for the collective unconscious of humanity that was reflected in every individual. The term archetype was coined by Saint Augustine, meaning a genetic encoding or impression in the brain tissue. Archetypes are forms that have mass associations and certain emotions attached to them. In volume 18 of his Collected Works, Jung wrote: “The archetype is… an inherited tendency of the human mind to form representations of mythological motifs—representations that vary a great deal without losing their basic pattern.” He believed that the unconscious of any given individual contains inherited information that predated the individual’s existence and was a remnant of the species’ past. There is evidence that our bodies contain remnants of our ancient past, for instance, a fetus has gills in early stages of pregnancy, so Jung argued that the mind could also contain remnants of our ancient past, just as our bodies do. He encountered many references to ancient belief systems that the patient could not have known about in sessions.

Jung’s theory of personality development consisted of the idea that one is always moving toward maturity and completion and that life is a series of transformations toward that goal. Crisis leads to maturation as problems are overcome and assimilated. Archetypes appear in these crises, especially in dreams. The hero archetype could be a triumph over a problem if it appears in a dream. The shadow archetype is associated with the dark side of the personality, the primitive animal instincts within mankind. As children, we learn to ignore these impulses, but Jung believes that they are often the culprit at the root of negative situations. Guilt is present when these feelings arise, for the child has been taught to self-regulate these urges.

This shadow side shows up in dreams unrepressed and unchecked, and much can be learned from examination of these dreams. Jung believed that acceptance of these disowned and ignored layers of our personality is the beginning of the move toward maturation and self-understanding. The shadow usually shows up as a negative or unsavory character in the dream and could appear as the drug addict, pervert, criminal, Nazi, deformed or sinister presence that might remain unseen in the darkness.

Jung describes the archetypes of the soul as the animus and the anima. The animus is the masculine side of a woman’s personality and the anima is the feminine side of a man’s personality. He believed that by getting in touch with the animus or anima within oneself, relationships could be less volatile and difficult. When we encounter strong sexual opposites in a dream, we are receiving information about our animus or anima. Fear of our own embodiment of the opposite sex is usually at the root of these types of dream. As these animus and anima figures transform in dreams, so do our personalities in waking life. An archetype acts like a magnet, attracting relevant experiences. After enough of these experiences have clustered around an archetype, it breaks through into consciousness. After this it becomes more developed and refined.

Many Jungians capitalize the word Self because Jung believed that Self is the final product of life. This is a larger transpersonal self—God. When one is in touch with the archetype of Self, it would feel as if some sort of divine force was present, a larger force directing everything, and some greater plan being carried out. As the elements of the personality are discovered and worked with to gain maturation, the transcendent function is in operation. This is the capacity to bring opposites together, thus resulting in the actualizing of the archetype Self.

Jung was an artist. He drew what he saw in his dreams, mandalas particularly. These images are associated with the Self archetype. A mandala is a symmetrical, balanced, and centered image, often circular. Mandala is a Sanskrit word for magic circle. Mandalas were a theme in Jung’s book Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works, Volume 12). He started receiving his own mandalas after working with the young man who is the main subject of this material. The young man received hundreds of mandalas in dreams, each one successively more complicated than the previous one. Jung was inspired by this so mandalas appeared in his dreams as well. The concept of “fourness” was a re-occurring theme for Jung, not only in himself but also in others. He knew that four was a sacred number in some cultures. It appeared often in his mandalas. Jung believed that dreams were a rich source of creative energy.

Jung believed that the psyche is in a compensation and balancing process all the time, just like our physical bodies. Our physical bodies perspire or shiver, depending on what balance needs to be done in temperature adjustment. Our psyche does the same. The goal of life is that all the components of the personality must become balanced.

Jung said that dreams are dramas on one’s interior stage. These have a series of steps. First is the opening scene introducing the setting, characters, and initial situation of the main character. Second is the development of the plot, third is the emergence of a major conflict, and fourth is the response to the conflict by the main character or another character. Some dreams are too short or fragmented to be classified in these terms. These are still attempts at problem solving in the personal structure. The ending of the dream shows the possibilities for the dreamer in waking life to solve similar problems.

Jung was puzzled by paranormal dreams. He could not classify them the way normal dreams could be, but the mystery did lead him to expound on his principle of synchronicity. This concept is that events occur together in time but are not linked through cause and effect connections. For instance, a clock might stop at the moment of its owner’s death, but these are purely synchronistic and unrelated events. Jung concluded that perhaps there is some sort of order in the universe, where a manifestation appears psychically while the related manifestation in physical reality happens at the same time.

Jung did not try to establish a particular school of thought or acquire disciples, so his concepts were not well known outside of his home country, Switzerland. While Freud created an international society around his work, Jung remained obscure in public view. He is also not as good a writer as Freud, so his texts did not gather the kind of attention Freud’s did. Jung is labeled a mystic by some intellectuals, and at the same time, his viewpoint of the personality is more optimistic and positive than Freud’s.

Jung differed from Freud in many ways, particularly in the area of seeing dreams as something that actually happened to the dreamer rather than wish fulfillment as Freud endorses. Freud did not encourage his patients to keep dream journals, and Jung did. Freud did not believe the dreaming mind has reasoning faculties. Jung did, and in fact, he believed that the dreaming mind contained abilities that the conscious mind would never have. Freud looked at dreams as infantile fantasies, while Jung looked at them as arenas for working out problems as life progressed for the individual.

Most dream analysts and psychology practitioners use the Jungian methods for analyzing dreams rather than the Freudian methods. In a way, Jung did surpass his predecessor and colleague because his methods have lasted over time while Freud’s deductions and methods have not.

Archetypes

Archetypes, some of which are described above in the section about Carl Jung, are symbols used in almost every dream in some way or another. In this section, let’s look at what these particular archetypes are. The following excerpt is from the book Dream Work (1983) by Jeremy Taylor:
“Just as there are basic patterns, or archetypes, of biological form, so there are also basic structural patterns to the human psyche. Each person is an absolutely unique physical specimen, while at the same time embodying the same basic physical structure shared by all human beings. So it is with the psyche. Each one of us embodies the archetypes of the objective psyche, or "collective unconscious," in our unique and personal fashion, while still repeating the same basic pattern shared by all human beings.

Understanding the archetypes and how they inter-relate is a complex and subtle task without apparent end. The archetypes are reflected both as personal, interior categories of experience, and as collective patterns of history and culture. Very briefly, some of the major archetypes often encountered at the beginning of dream work are:

Persona - the part that shows, the "mask" - analogous to the skin - made up of our choices about how we
wish to be perceived, individually and collectively.

Shadow - the part that is denied and repressed, the dark, scary, "immoral," unpredictable, and unconscious/
unknown part of ourselves.

Light & Darkness - archetypes of consciousness and unconsciousness-the quality of light in dreams is most
often a metaphor of the extent to which the main theme of the dream either is or is not already
known and acknowledged in waking life.

Animus & Anima - the man inside a woman, and the woman inside a man respectively, figures representing
our deepest intuitions and feelings about the opposite sex.

Trickster - a figure representing human consciousness itself-simultaneously knowing and foolish,
overblown, yet the source of all the gifts of culture.

Divine Child - a figure representing new consciousness and self-awareness-born amidst trouble, yet most
often surviving with its miraculous powers and the aid of Divine sources.

Animals - figures often representing instincts and natural drives-elements of life that are vital but not yet
consciously differentiated, creatures and servants of Divine sources.

Great Mother - Mother Nature, Mother Earth, cyclic time, the divine perceived in feminine form, the
feminine principle[s]-multiplying, dividing, nurturing, bringing forth all life, and simultaneously
condemning all to inevitable death.

All-Father - the thunderer, the law giver, linear time, the divine perceived in masculine form, the masculine
principle[s]-abstracting, constructing, judging, and calculating with objectifying will.

Spirit Bird - a figure representing and embodying communication with the divine-unites the realm of the sky
with the plane of the earth.

Wise Old People - the figures representing the oldest and wisest and most loving possibilities of our being-
figures sometimes referred to as "mana-personalities."

Willing Sacrifice - a figure representing and embodying the increasing consciousness of interior and exterior
oneness-the One dividing itself into the Many, and the many in the act of dying to rejoin the One.

Mandala - an image uniting the circle and the angular figure exhibiting radial symmetry and a defined
centered image of harmony, beauty, balance, order, often used as a visual aid in meditation/worship.

Spiral - image of evolution-the spontaneous archetype of cyclic, repeating rhythmic processes occurring amidst the
forward flow of time-visible at all scales and levels from the shape of galaxies to the DNA helix.

Perilous Journey - image of life and being alive, often a sea journey, a descent into the earth, or into a
labyrinth, the journey to the land of the dead, the search for treasure, wisdom, immortality.

Death & Rebirth - in the realm of dream and myth, as in physics, energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed. Each
dream death is a liberation of psychic energy from specific form and is linked inevitably with a new birth.”
(end of excerpt)

Symbols and archetypes have lived throughout time in every culture, in every race, and in every individual that has ever walked the Earth. This is why legends across cultures are so similar. There must be something more to symbols than physical experience. Perhaps symbols and archetypes are something instilled into the human experience from the spirit worlds long before humans ever set foot on the Earth. Gary K. Yamamoto, in his book Creative Dream Analysis (1988), says, “Symbolic language allows stories to be passed on with minimal distortion. Symbols are usually very concrete. They are not dynamic as are abstract thoughts or philosophies. Their meanings change little with time.”

John Layard has a lot to say about archetypes in dreams in his book The Lady Of The Hare (1988). This book follows a patient through her exploration of re-occurring dreams about hares. She had no conscious knowledge about the mythological nature of the hare, but her dreams reflected all the associations with the hare that were common in the archetype of the hare. The four associations are 1) its sacrificial nature, 2) that it is a willing sacrifice, 3) its bright eyes, and 4) the whiteness so often associated with the hare. Layard attests to the possibility that archetypes live in our collective unconscious, and this is why someone like his patient, with no conscious knowledge of their attributes, can have dreams that are perfectly in conjunction with common traits of any given archetype. This is unconscious knowledge that is available to us all in the collective unconscious.

In The Encyclopedia Of Psychic Science ( 1966) by Nandor Fodor, the author quotes Letourneau, who wrote Bulletins et Memoires do la Societe d’Anthropologie de Paris: “Certain events, external or psychic, which have made a deep impression on a person, may be so deeply engraved upon his brain as to result in a molecular orientation, so lasting that it may be transmitted to some of his descendants in the same way as character, aptitudes, mental maladies, etc. It is then no longer a question of infantile reminiscences, but of ancestral recollections, capable of being revived. From that will proceed not only the fortuitous recognition of places which a person has never seen, but moreover a whole category of peculiar dreams, admirably coordinated, in which we witness as in a panorama, adventures which cannot be remembrances, because they have not the least connection with our individual life.”

Jeremy Taylor, in Where People Fly And Water Runs Uphill (1992), quotes Greek therapist Evangelos Christou: “It is not so much that the archetypes are in us. The more important truth is that it is we who are surrounded by and immersed in the archetypes.” Taylor goes on to say that the archetypes are capable of evolution, just like humans. The personal work of the individual influences the development of archetypal forms and goes into the collective unconscious mind. “This may sound very theoretical, but I believe that ‘ordinary people’ do this psycho-spiritual work of evolution on themselves and the archetypes every day… Every person who succeeds in breaking the ‘trance’ of conventional attitudes…manages to break the chain so that these attitudes and self-limitations are not passed on to the next generation. In this way, the individual dreamer contributes in a most profound and real way to the liberation of all people, and the planet as a whole… Our individual triumphs and defeats…feed back into the realm of the archetypes, in the same way that the archetypal energies embodied in our dreams and myths influence our waking lives.”

The fact that we dream in symbols and pictures is based on the fact that this is the universal language of all beings. This was the first “language.” Even in our conscious mind we think in symbols and pictures. This is the only language that is common among all people, no matter what language they speak or write. In Elsie Sechrist’s book Dreams: Your Magic Mirror (1968), it is stated, “We dream in symbols because we tend to think in symbols or pictures at the conscious level. If someone mentions your wife or husband, you immediately picture a human face rather than the word wife or husband. Man first learned to write by using pictorial images… Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of symbology is that it is universal language, teaching and preserving permanent basic truths. What shorthand is to words, symbology is to ideas.”

Archetypes are in every one of our stories and these stories abound in every culture. Many movies and TV shows depict the most famous of all the archetypes, the hero on an adventurous journey of triumphing over evil. The book The Art Of Daydreaming (1995), by Veronica Tonay, looks at how archetypes play a crucial part in the stories that influence young people in the media arena of entertainment. “The fact that the huge world interest in television, movie or popular music personalities has become a mammoth industry in itself attests to the great need all of us have for a constellation of ego ideals or alter egos, whose adventures we can follow and whose fates we can share vicariously. For relatively young persons such fantasies and identifications form a critical part in the molding of their personalities and of the direction of their goals, as well as their aesthetic tastes.”

The Shadow Self

Our greatest adversary in dreams is our own fear. The shadow part of the self is the part that most of us contend with in dreams. The shadow is represented by the archetypes that are less desirable than the others. It is most recognizable as figures who are threatening or repulsive in other ways. In waking life, our shadow is recognized as people we dislike or fear. If these shadow forms remain unrealized as the projections that they are, we will never fully mature. Elsie Sechrist says in her book Dreams: Your Magic Mirror (1968), “Broadly speaking, you usually meet yourself in your dreams in a myriad of artful disguises. People of authority such as policemen, ministers, parents, and judges usually represent the higher self, the conscience, and its dictates. Immoral, lawless persons, and groups from the lower strata of society relate to the lower or undisciplined self.” This is further supported by Jeremy Taylor’s statement in his book Where People Fly And Water Runs Uphill (1992), “…Everything and everyone in the dream is a living representation of some aspect of the dreamer’s total being and psyche… The life in all dreams, and in waking experience too, for that matter, is a blending of the individual’s own personal vital energies with the larger life of the archetypes and the cosmos itself.”

The shadow is indicative of the parts of ourselves that must grow and become integrated into our whole being. These are the parts of us that have not fully developed, or the parts that we have not made peace with. Jeremy Taylor says in his book Dream Work (1983), “The shadow is that very thing that has been lacking and is the most required for further healthy development. The ‘dark’ figure of the Shadow always bears the great gift. In order to receive the great gift, the fear and repugnance first awakened by the ‘dark’ aspect of the Shadow must be overcome… By the same token, when we flee from death in dreams…we are often fleeing from inner promptings that it is time once again to grow and change.”

Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold say in their book Exploring the World Of Lucid Dreaming (1990) that lucid dreaming lends itself well to dealing with the shadow figures of the self. The authors have some useful suggestions on how to handle the shadow figures, as well. “If you become fully lucid in a nightmare, you will realize that the nightmare can’t really hurt you, and you don’t need to ‘escape’ it by awakening. You will remember that you are already safe in bed…attacking unfriendly characters may not be the most productive way to handle them… hostile dream figures may represent aspects of our own personalities that we wish to disown. If we try to crush the symbolic appearances of these characteristics in dreams, we may be symbolically rejecting and attempting to destroy parts of ourselves… a conciliatory approach is most likely to result in a positive experience for the dreamer… would generally cause them to look and act in a more friendly manner.” LaBerge and Rheingold go on to suggest, “Lucid dreamers can deliberately identify with, accept, and thereby symbolically integrate parts of their personalities they had previously rejected, or disowned… Don’t slay your dream dragons, make friends with them… the true way to healing is to seek out the ‘barking dogs of the unconscious’ and reconcile with them.”

Jeremy Taylor has much to say about the uses of lucid dreaming for confronting shadow characters in his book Where People Fly And Water Runs Uphill (1992). “…The lucidly ‘awakened’ dreamer transcends the fear and confusion in the dream…One of the best gifts is to ask the seemingly menacing and hostile figures or elements in the dream what they are up to… If a dreamer can gather his or her wits together sufficiently in the lucid state to ask a question… will always be rewarded with an answer. Most will be an answer of profound importance to the dreamer’s waking life.”

Scientific Facts & Research On Dreams

Laboratory Testing

In laboratory testing, mentioned in almost every book about dreams, electrodes and/or sensors are placed on the face and skull to detect brain activity and eye movements during sleep. These electrodes can tell the experimenter what level of sleep the subject is in. This is how this information about brainwaves and REMs has been found. However, it was not until fairly recently, the past forty years, that any data was retrieved from these machines for they had not been invented yet. There have been multitudes of studies around dreams and sleep activity in the centuries that preceded the possibility to measure actual brain waves. The experiments and observations are far too numerous to list here in this material, but I will speak of some here.

Apparently, the first systematic effort to investigate the effect of external stimulus manipulation in dreams was carried out in 1831 by C. Girou de Buzareingues. He was a physician and a report of his work appeared in the first volume of The Lancet, a British medical journal. He played with different physical stimuli in order to induce dream events. In his first experiment, he left the back part of his head uncovered during sleep. In his dream, this showed up as an outdoor religious ceremony where members of that faith were allowed to have their heads uncovered while worshiping, which was uncommon at that time. In another dream, he left his knees uncovered and dreamed that he was in a stagecoach traveling at night, and everyone at that time knew that the knees were the first to get cold in night-time stagecoach travel. This was the first proof that external physical stimulus can induce dream events that are related in some way to the external world.

J. Borner published a book in 1855 describing how he tried to induce nightmares with external stimulus. When he experimented on himself, he buried his face in a pillow as he fell asleep, trying to induce nightmares of smothering. When he used someone else as a subject, he covered their mouth and nostrils with bedclothes, inducing dreams of not being able to breathe.

Alfred Maury, a French scientist, published a book in 1861 (expanded and revised in 1878) called Le Sommeil Et Les Reves, “Sleep & Dreams.” He carried out many experiments using himself as the subject. He had an assistant apply all sorts of physical stimuli one at a time and reported dreams that coincided with the stimuli. Another French experimenter studying sensory stimuli and dreams was Marquis Hervey Saint-Denys. He published his work on dream imagery and lucid dreams in 1967. He played with perfume scents that coincided with particular places he was familiar with. When these different perfumes were applied sporadically to his pillow at night by a servant, he dreamed of the places that the perfumes were associated with.

Taste stimuli were researched minimally during the nineteenth century, but there were experiments with this. So were visual stimuli experimented with, although it was quite difficult to introduce visual stimuli after the subject had fallen asleep. It was mostly done by giving the visual stimuli before sleep, and then the subject would dream about those visuals later.

George Trumbull Ladd did some experiments in the late 1890s around visual dreams. He theorized that the visual dreams which follow immediately after going to sleep originate predominantly from the condition of the retina, and later he proved it. He awoke from dreams, remembered the dream, and immediately examined his retinal field. He discovered that the rods and cones in the eye corresponded with what he saw in a dream and vice versa, examining the retina before he fell asleep, and then noting what his dream was.

J. Mourly Vold, a Norwegian psychologist, did extensive examination of pre-sleep visual stimuli, using himself as the primary subject. Over seven years, and three hundred exposures, he would open a packet containing a number of small objects or figures cut from cardboard, place the objects on a black or white background, and gaze at them for a specific length of time, between 2 and 10 minutes, even up to a half hour. In the subsequent dreams, the forms and sometimes the colors of the objects remained unchanged. He also experimented with restraining a limb during sleep. He noted that in the dreams the limb subjected to restraint played some important part in the dream, either of being restrained or being used in an exaggerated way.

There were many experimenters with physical external stimuli and dreams, but for the sake of this course, we will not go into every single one. In fact, all sorts of experiments were done, from exploring the power of suggestion to planting desires in dreams. Multitudes of psychological experiments were done and many dreams were recorded. However, the most important information about dreams and sleep patterns came with the invention of the electroencephalogram (EEG). This new technology showed the brain’s electrical activity during sleep and wakefulness and was a godsend to those who were experimenting with sleep patterns. It solved many mysteries! The EEG was invented in 1930, and by the 1940’s vast amounts of data had been gathered about the patterns observed during sleep. Very few experimented with dreams, for at that time dreams were still considered unimportant and not worthy of scientific study. Dream research did not really begin until the 1950’s and 1960’s.

The first true dream research using the EEG began with Nathaniel Kleitman, a physiologist at the University of Chicago, and Eugene Aserinsky, one of the medical students working in Kleitman’s laboratory. Aserinsky, observing the sleeping behavior of infants in their cribs, noted that there were periods when the baby’s eyes were moving for certain amounts of time. He and Kleitman monitored the duration of these movements by attaching electrodes around the baby’s eyes. Then they wondered if adults had these eye movements in the same patterns and durations. They discovered that they did. They named these movements Rapid Eye Movements (REMs). They decided to wake the sleeper during these movements in order to find out if the subject was dreaming at that time. Out of 27 of these awakenings, 20 detailed descriptions of dreams were recalled. They also woke people when these movements were not present 23 times. For 19 of these occasions, no dream was reported.

Aserinsky and Kleitman also recorded the brainwaves, heart rates and respiration patterns present during these REM periods. When they looked at all the data, they realized that during REM periods, there was a higher heart and respiration rate, and an EEG pattern showing a different electrical activity from the more passive periods of sleep. They published a short two page summary of their findings in the journal Science on September 4, 1953. That was the first serious research done on dreams up to that point. What came afterwards was an outpouring of research by many inspired researchers. Aserinsky and Kleitman published a much more detailed description of their investigation in 1955.

Aserinsky left the university after he finished his doctoral dissertation and another student took his place. His name was Dement and he was primarily focused on psychiatry. He monitored only mental patients at first. He monitored them with the EEG machine quite differently than his predecessor, however. He turned the machine on for one minute out of every five instead of occasionally during the night, as was done before. This extra monitoring proved to be of utmost importance in discovering more about sleep patterns and dreaming. Dement noted that REM activity always came after a frequency of about ten cycles per second was being recorded.

Dement published a landmark article in 1957 with Kleitman. They left the machine on all night, and the results were incredible. This created a foundation for all the dream experimentation that came after that. They discovered that REM periods occurred every 92 minutes. Subjects were awakened during REM states and NREM (non-REM) states alike. During the REM periods, subjects reported dreams 80% of the time. When awakened during NREM periods, subjects only reported dreams by 7% of the time. REM awakenings made within 8 minutes after the end of an REM period, dream recall was 29%. After 8 minutes, the recall rate was only 5%. This indicates that dream recall fades rapidly after the REM period. Awakenings were also conducted during REM periods, from 5 to 15 minutes of REM, to determine if the length of the dream had any connection to how long the REM state was going on. It was determined that the length of time the REM state took and the length of the dream were associated with each other.

They published yet another article in 1957 where subjects were monitored uninterrupted just to see what patterns were noticeable. They discovered that in a six hour period of sleep, four REM periods usually happened between one and seventy two minutes. The average amount of sleep time spent in REM activity in a six hour sleep would average 18%. This percentage was higher if an eight hour period of sleep were used. They discovered that REM periods became progressively longer as the night wore on and the REM activity happened more often closer to morning and the more sleep time, the higher the percentage of REM time.

Much experimentation was done on dreams after this, and the terminology began to get mixed up. It was not until 1968 when a committee of experienced sleep researchers got together and devised a standard terminology for measuring sleep patterns in A Manual Of Standardized Terminology, Techniques and Scoring System for Sleep Stages of Human Subjects.

Basic Facts

Everyone dreams, even if the dreams are not recalled upon awakening. There is no one who doesn’t dream, even though they might say they do not. There are two phases of sleep: the passive phase and the active phase. During the passive phase, not much is happening, although the brain still may show some activity at the electrical level. Dreams happen during the active phase in sleep when REMs occur. REMs happen for everyone during sleep.

REMs are an indication that a dream is taking place. It is believed that the eye movements are a reaction of the dreamer to the events happening in the dream. Not only the eyes move, but also fingers and other muscles twitch, depending on what is happening during the dream. During the active state, the brain burns just as much fuel as it does in waking life. No human has ever been discovered yet who does not have REM periods during sleep. Some yogis in the past have claimed that they no longer need dream time and therefore do not dream. As of yet, this has never been documented or tested.

Everyone has watched a cat twitch during sleep. It certainly appears that the cat is trying to catch a mouse or a bird, or is running and jumping. The reason that the body does not act out more than just a few twitches or eye movements during a dream is because a natural sleep paralysis is induced in the body during sleep, in animals and humans alike. This was certainly good planning on nature’s part! This is also why it might seem so difficult to wake up at times, or once awake, cannot move for the first minute or so. Dream paralysis wil