Every once in a while I’ll come across metaphysical/spiritual articles on a site called Llewellyn Journal. I always start out really hopeful, since the topics are generally interesting enough for me to have clicked on there from other sites, but then once I get into the article, they almost always just fall flat. The most recent example of this for me is a short article by Maria Shaw, called “Dreams - What are they trying to tell us?”

Actually, I think it’s really rare to find good articles about dreams and dreaming. This one centers around figuring out whether your dream falls into one of the following categories: Prophetic; recurring; precognitive; warning; factual; inspiration; or visitation. Of course, the author doesn’t really give any tips or hints at figuring out what kind of dream you had, she just gives a couple anecdotal examples. I don’t know. These kind of articles just annoy the crap out of me because not only do they not really help anybody do anything, they don’t even really contain any information. It’s just this endless running around in circles that seems to be extremely popular in New Age / contemporary spiritual fields.

Personally, I’ve had two really useful realizations about how dreams work, and how to work with them. The first is that dream imagery is sort of like like if your mind was playing Pictionary with you. But instead of squiggles and shapes, it gets to use your memories, knowledge and imagination as a palette. In a previous post on the subject I wrote:

… dreaming is like playing Pictionary with yourself, but on a much more elaborate scale. Like you have this other part of your mind, maybe call it the subconscious, which is really quickly putting together all these dream events, images, characters, feelings and situations, because this part of your mind isn’t able to use words & linear thinking in the same way as your conscious/rational/ego mind. …

You can get into the same sort of situation with your dreaming mind too, which you’d get into with any long-time Pictionary partner. You start to develop a common visual/symbolic vocabulary, which you use elements of again and again in different variations.

For me, this is really useful because it gives me a concrete idea of how to become more attuned to my dreams. You can go and develop and practice using this “common visual/symbolic vocabulary” used by your subconscious mind: doing things like writing down dreams, drawing significant characters & objects, researching possible meanings, etc. This has a lot to do with Jungian amplification, and the idea is that you sort of extend an invitation or an offer of friendship to dream images, starting a conversation with them. The more you do this, the more “fluent” you become in the language.

The other thing that’s helped me explore my dreams is this other idea I had about how they fold meaning over on meaning on multiple levels. In a previous post on that, I wrote:

…each little moment, feeling and action and character and everything in a dream can sort of be unfolded to reveal another sort of mini-dream inside of it. A little scene all its own. That can consist of a memory, imagination, whatever. And if you explore each of these individual mini-dreams on their own, they’ll offer up all kinds of important details about the larger dream. It’s almost like the larger dream operates by stringing together hotspots (pointing to smaller dreams/scenes), into a sort of plot. It’s referencing multiple layers of meaning, but only presenting you with a sort of shorthand reference to the underlying ones. And this has something to do, I think, with why dreams don’t make logical sense - because they are filled with these shortcuts and underlying references…

This also plays into the whole thing where a person in a dream can be multiple people at once. Or how a location can be your house, but also some other place at the same time. The idea here is that you look past the sequential plotting in the dream and start thinking about each element in the dream as a nodal point for further exploration. You can go in and unfold or explode each moment in the dream with a whole host of images and associations. This is part of what the practice of free-association does. In the end, it’s kind of like you start looking at your dream like a string of pearls - jeweled moments that are strung together in a particular sequence. And you have to realize that sequence in dreams doesn’t necessarily reflect cause/effect relationships. Sequence may also indicate a type of proximity of meaning, or a suggestion that multiple moments be looked at for the sum of their parts, or the interference patterns they cast upon each other.

Anyway, like I said. These are two things that I’ve developed which I found really work for me, and which have totally changed my relationship to dreams, and to my creative/unconscious mind. I’d like to hear what other people’s approaches are that have worked for them. If anybody’s seen any good stuff on dreams which uses this kind of approach rather than the (to me) nonsense variety described in that Llewellyn article, I’d love to develop this all further.