People think that our dreams are either superstitious nonsense or just a rehashing of what’s going on in our day-to-day life. But dreams are much more than that.
They are not just our repressed, disowned feelings sparking & shouting, they are also the bridge to our deeper self!
When I started getting interested in dreams (once again) some years ago, I found the work of Carl Jung. Unlike Freud who thought that dreams are only about unwanted desires we repress, Jung thought that dreams contain both repressions as well as the very “gold” in our psyche — our very best self, that mysterious essence inside that makes us endlessly creative.
In working with my dreams over the last few years, I have learned that although dreams CAN be very tricky (they speak in the language of pictures that is sometimes hard to understand and interpret), they also bring real nuggets of wisdom into my life.
Recently, I had this really helpful dream in which a person (who I have a conflict with in real life) and I were fighting. I was really going after this person and trying to hurt them physically. But as I chased this person down the stairs in my dream, the scene shifted suddenly, as it often happens in our dreams.
Now, I was in the middle of another scene. The person I’d been chasing had disappeared. Instead, in their place, stood another person (who I also know in real life), who was wounded and crying. And I had been the perpetrator.
Without realizing exactly how it happened, I had ended up hurting this person terribly.
To me, this dream showed clearly in pictures that if I acted out my anger in real life, there would be collateral damage to another relationship that is important to me. My dream told me that venting my anger was not going to be helpful in this case.
Instead, it would spill out and hurt and wound other people.
So, I did listen to my dream. I understood what it was trying to tell me. I paid heed to its message and held back from the angry words that were stinging at the back of my throat, that were constricting my chest as if it was in a vise.
It’s not that my anger has magically disappeared. It’s still very much there. But I have chosen to channel it in other ways.
Maybe, I will write down my grievances and light a match to that page. Maybe, I will take scissors and mercilessly cut out ribbons from pieces of paper. But in the actual situation, I have taken a step back.
I understand what I need to do to move forward in a positive way.
It’s good to know that inside me, there is a deeper something that knows which way to turn, and which turns to avoid.
That’s what dreams are at their very best. They are the light that leads us in our darkness. They are the bridge that joins us to our deeper self.
Something inside us knows what we need to do.
Maybe, just as I am learning to do more and more for myself, you will also now turn inward and listen. What’s happening when the curtain of the night falls? What’s coming through when your mind is silent? What’s the dream fragment that you still remember in the morning trying to tell you?
What stories will your dreams tell you tonight?
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the memoir The Empath’s Journey. Set during the first few years after she emigrated from India to the United States, it is one highly sensitive person’s inner journey to rewrite her relationship with her sensitivity. Working with dreams to tune into intuition is one of the topics The Empath’s Journey talks about.
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