Jung: Call to the Dreamer

The New Year, 2018, is upon us and many of you have battled ferociously in 2017 with tumultuous events in our country and on the world stage. Political trends have held sway and have enveloped many in a reoccurring sense of foreboding leading to a constant teeter-totter between anxious alarm, fury, dismay and exhaustion, as forces, seemingly out of our control, have moved our country in directions never imagined. We require a way to sustain our inner balance and resilience as we weather the destruction of values that many have relied on as a democratic world-view.

I am inviting you to turn inward – in contrast to our current externalized way of life – as we are catapulted insistently toward outward preoccupation. We are pulled, dragged, mesmerized by the outer world: the constant stream of input, night and day – either by choice or by our propensity for distraction. Our brains fire up as we flit from topic to topic, picture to picture, posting to posting, until we feel fragmented, as we disintegrate into pieces of information and the emotions they fetch; up and down, in and out, we run like a wild merry-go-round – but a not so merry one. Then exhaustion and depression hit; we are drained.

Welcome to an inner world that can heal the fractured mind. Winter – dark, cold, crisp and cozy – invites us to participate in the quiet night ­ if we choose to make it so. In that space, we can dream our dreams in the solitude of sleep – no lights, no phones, no sounds or alerts – just sleeping in the utter darkness of the night. As we sleep deeply, we can dream our dreams in the safety and quiet of our own beds.

Our dreams become our nightly adventures in a realm we don’t understand as our causal daytime world dominates our perspective in a linear way. The dream world plays by other rules and informs us in non-linear and luminous ways. Dreams scare, provoke, inspire – bringing us new vistas to embolden our lives.

Jung, states in: The Red Book:

I must learn that the dregs of my thought, my dreams, are the speech of my soul. I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me. Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. (p. 233)

Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language. (p.233)

Dreams are rife with profound meaning and we can translate meaning from the maze of what may seem like meaningless fragments of the mind, images that make no sense and feelings that may be upsetting or soothing. Dreams may portray an inner situation, what our conscious mind denies or tries to obfuscate. The dream may shove what we need to face blatantly, even brutally, in front of us by a provocative dream, meant to wake us up.

There are many other purposes embedded in various types of dreams. I devote a chapter to this topic in my book: Whole Therapist, Whole Patient, coming out February 2, 2018. There is an online supplementary chapter that accompanies the book on: Jung, Dreams and Individuation. (add link)

As the New Year rumbles on, we have a choice to source our soul, deepen our experience of our life, listen deeply to all messages from within, take time to sit quietly, enjoy the night, put a frame around it so nighttime is a time for you. Relax and cherish the winter absent of light and sink into sleep with the hope of an amazing adventure; no matter what you dream, there is a message, information, a confrontation, an image that sticks, a question and a mystery to solve within.