Though we seem to be Sleeping,
There is an Inner Wakefulness
That directs the Dream,
And that will eventually startle Us back
To the Truth of who we are.
––>Rumi
Dreams educate us about the nature and workings of the psyche, how the soul speaks in the symbolic language of images and stories, and how we assemble our individual version of reality through a narration of our story.
Our ego mind experiences life by telling us into this story and that story, into many stories. Many of our stories aren't true. Others aren't even our own stories but rather imprints, impressions, introjects, projective identifications, defenses or delusions.
The dreaming will teach you that, in fact, we unconsciously choose our stories, and further, that we can awake and make better choices.
In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from
losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old
unforgotten wisdom that is stored up in us.
And where do we make contact
with this old man or old woman in us?
In our dreams.
––C.G. Jung
Consensus reality floats on a vast mythopoetic ocean, the Dreamtime, which is present and available to us at all times, We dream during wakefulness and during sleep, twenty-four hours a day. Only in sleep, when we drop below the threshold of reverie, do we dream without distraction.
The soul, or psyche, is at work twenty-four hours a day, mediating between our ego personality and all else that happens to us, inside and outside, in a continuous stream of images and associations. And these images connects us to everything in the visible and invisible worlds–the personal and the transpersonal–linking our individual stories to the great stories of the human enterprise.
What we dream reflects forward and backward on everyday waking reality. The ability to move easily between the two worlds of ego-awareness and the soul’s perspective––formerly the province of mystics, poets, artists, and shamans––is an open secret today and a valuable skill for a calamitous world.
What a marvelous natural mechanism exists within us! Human consciousness has more depth than we can know or imagine, greater even than scientific observation can reveal. Not the outer galaxies, nor the inscapes of neurobiology, but human personality is the Great Mystery, revealing itself to us nightly in our dreams.
Dreaming is a unique resource. In symbolic language and imagery, dreams concisely deliver important personal information to the dreamer. Your dreaming tells you what you need to know about your conscious circumstance and can help you to construct a life of meaning.
Dreams come to us through the conduit of the soul. The dreaming is the voice of the soul, the psyche, the part of us that is the experiencer of our experience. Soul is the reflective perspective on all our personal perceptions and awareness, a middle ground between the doer and the deed. Soul is not, as we have been told, a theological construct. Soul is what turns mere events into experiences. There is sleep laboratory evidence that even fetuses display the rapid-eye movements that signal dreaming. So the soul is present from the very beginnings of our earthwalk. And the soul’s language is images, it speaks in symbols and stories.
Call the world if you please, ‘the vale of Soul-making.’
Then you will find out the use of the world.
––John Keats
You can engage your dreaming for self-knowledge and inner guidance. The dream presents a comprehensive holographic view of your life experiences.
Dreamwork is a laboratory for inner development. Your dreams provide self-diagnosis while compensating and balancing your conscious attitudes. The skill-set to work with dreams is innate and the learning curve is gentle. There is a constructive approach to dream interpretation, a practical technique of amplifying and interacting with the dreaming, that operates on a simple assumption: your dreaming will never present anything to you that you are not ready to integrate.
We know from sleep studies that everyone dreams every night, many dreams, about one dream period every ninety minutes. Yet not everyone remembers their dreams. The process of recalling dreams is very suggestible. People who say they never dream are simply not remembering their dreams.
Your dream-weaver is working when you are asleep and awake, continuously creating an uninterrupted and personal image stream, a narrative constructed from your own sensorial life.
Why would you want to know what you are dreaming?
• Because dreams tell you what you need to know and ought to know about your life right now.
• Because your dreams reconnect you to your feeling life and restore balance to your moods and emotions.
• Because dreams are a source of inner guidance.
• Because dreams are a personal portal to making sense of your life.
• Because dreams will add depth and humor to your understanding.
• Because dreams connect us to the bigger picture of being human, allowing us to see the unique transformative path we must follow.
• Because life reveals itself to us in our dreams. It’s no wonder the ancients believed it was God who speaks through dreams; indeed, it is a higher power that sees the entire matrix of reality, not just the portions revealed by our limited senses.
• Because dreaming awareness produces the healing power of meaning.
Dreams are self-luminous:
they shine of themselves, as gods do.
Myths are public dreams.
Dreams are private myths.
By finding your own dream and following it through,
it will lead you to the myth world in which you live.
––Joseph Campbell
©Jeremiah Abrams, jeremiah.abrams@gmail.com
I have recently started my first novel which is heavily influenced by ideas in Jungian psychology. I have most of 
The Collective Unconscious. This is the idea that we all inherit thoughts and consciousness that we share across all humanity, the shared beliefs and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. (
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