Dreaming is a universal human condition and dreamwork is considered an ancient spiritual practice that dates back to possibly 60,000 years ago. Shamans often receive their calling in dreams and use dreams to travel to spiritual dimensions and acquire knowledge and power to help their community in different ways including healing. Tibetans consider dreams to be a source of guidance for everyday life as well as a source of spiritual knowledge. They understand that dreams portray the state of the dreamer and condition of their relationship to the different energies on a deep level. They believe that emotional difficulties and wounds in the psyche can be healed by removing energetic blocks that may be disrupting the free circulation of energy in the body. Dreams have played an important part not just in Eastern wisdom traditions but in almost all religious traditions around the world. In religious context, dreams have been considered revelations from the spiritual realm, messages from God, and a source of religious inspiration.
Modern-day dreamworkers from different schools of thought do not speak of the gods, but often believe that dreams come to us from a sacred place. The field of dream studies however is much younger in the West. Pioneered by Freud who considered dreams a psychic phenomenon and believed that they come from the unconscious mind. He suggested that the dreams’ primary role was to fulfill wishes of sexual or aggressive nature and to act as guardians of sleep, arising to deal with any bodily urges that may develop during the night including sexual urges.
For Carl Jung (father of Analytical Psychology), the general function of dreams was to restore psychological balance. He believed that dreams were messages from the unconscious communicated through symbols to bring meaning to our lives and to foster individuation. Although they differed greatly in their approaches, both Freud and Jung used dreams in therapeutic settings and for healing the psyche. After working with an estimated 80,000 dreams of himself and his patients, Jung learnt that not only dreams are important in varying degrees to the life of the dreamer, but that they are all part of one great web of psychological factors. He also discovered that dreams follow a pattern which he called the process of individuation which is a directing tendency towards psychic growth. Through working with dreams, both Freud and Jung observed that there exist psychic energies and psychological urges that manifest in dreams that are not specific to the dreamer. Freud called these elements archaic remnants and Jung called them archetypes. These energies may be understood as emerging illnesses or deeply rooted complexes or archetypes in the West, but they are the same energies that are known to shamans as energetic disruptions and spiritual emergencies.
While some of the more recent findings of empirical dream research challenge the influential ideas of Freud and Jung about dreams, there is a great deal of evidence that supports the healing potential of understanding and working with dreams. Dreamwork is a set of skills that help us consciously engage with dream contents before, during, and after recalling a dream. Through dream-work we learn that areas of psychological constriction are closely interconnected to areas of physiological tension or somatic symptoms and vice versa. Dream scholars have suggested that dreams relate to emotional and spiritual intelligence and that working with dreams teaches us to connect our inner life and outer life to one another. This helps us cultivate the ability to find guidance in dreams which can lead to transformative action. Dreaming can play an important role in our physical, mental, and spiritual health. A study conducted by Rosalind Catwright (1991) suggests that there are some aspects of dreams that are associated with what she calls “a positive response to a stressful event.”
The ultimate value of a dream might not lie in its interpretation but more in its direct experiential impact on the dreamer. Additionally, dreamwork in group settings can lead to increased empathy towards others as the dream becomes an opportunity for the group members to see themselves through its images. As a result, issues relating to our shared humanity easily surface and psychological wounds are openly dealt with through the empathy that flows in all directions in the group.
By incorporating dream-work into our lives, we can heal old wounds, facilitate healing of our community, live in harmony with nature, and contribute to the wellbeing of the world. As Stanley Krippner puts it, “this tattered world has never needed knowledge and direction from both the world of dreams and the world of Nature, from both intuition and reason, and from both imagination and common sense, as much as it needs it now.” Engaging with these practices within a psychological framework helps us appreciate that Science and Nature can work together for the greater good.