Dreamspeak
Research has shown us that dreams are not just the machinations of the unconscious on random play.
But dreams, with their colorful characters and settings, can play out that final scene while we sleep, processing the emotions we encounter in our waking lives.
Forty years of research on dreams suggests that they are not just the random firings of our brains. Neither are they highly symbolic visions that should chart the course of our lives. But dreams do, in fact, have meaning. And our research shows that the nature of that meaning helps determine our mood the next day. That, in turn, determines how we function and what we can accomplish. Quite simply, the dreams we have at night set the stage for our actions the following day, priming us to either rise and shine and conquer the world, or crawl back under the covers and duck the challenges that lie ahead.
Research has shown us that dreams are not just the machinations of the unconscious on random play. They have order, and they reflect important psychological aspects of our lives and personalities. When we examined the dream reports from a representative sample of people from Cincinnati, we found that there were similarities among the dreams of distinct groups—men and women, young and old, blacks and whites, married and single people, and between those of lower and middle social classes. If dreams were random, we would not have found any similarities.
We also have shown that dreams vary from person to person—they are individualized, like fingerprints—as well as from day to day, reinforcing the idea that the events of each day play out in the night's dreams.
These psychological regularities prove that the dream experience has order, and as we have seen in the laboratory, order paves the way for meaning. The nature of that meaning can change our mood for better or worse from night to morning.
It is important to note that the specific individuals in the dream are unimportant. It is the roles they represent that carry the meaning.
They are actors in the theater of our unconscious, playing out the day's emotional dramas that have been left ‘to be continued.’
Western culture has privatized our dreams, regarding them solely as products of our innermost life. But certain dreams take us well beyond ourselves, tearing down the gated communities of our psyche.
We in the West have had only a sketchy understanding of what I call Healing Dreams, ones which, if we heed them, can guide us toward greater wholeness and have the power to transform our lives.
It has been standing policy in psychology that dreams are not meant to be enacted on the social stage, they are treated as personal creations that speak to the dreamer alone. Dreams are often socially transgressive. They champion the rude, lewd and wholly unacceptable. People who act out their dreams on the social stage can be dangerous, becoming prey to delusions, dragging others along with them.
Western psychology been too eager to bottle up the dream in the consulting room, forbidding it a wider life. Healing Dreams often speak to collective issues. They crave the give-and-take between the inner and outer worlds.
Though most of us are only too glad to see the upside-down world of the dream dissipate in the morning sun, these images are a potential source of social healing, telling us we cannot remain comfortably distanced from others' suffering. In our prejudices, fears and abdications of human connection, it is ourselves we are rejecting, the tender, wounded parts that contain our greatest wealth of soul.
Psychology Today
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