Did you know each person dreams, on average, 6 dreams a night? That means if you live to be 80 years old, you will have spent 6 years of your life dreaming! There are many solid theories about why we dream and research that shows us dream deprivation leads to poor health outcomes. So we know that dreaming is important, even if we don’t recall them upon waking.
Instead of speaking to functionality, as there is extensive information and research out there on that, I want to know:
What would it look like for you to cultivate a relationship with your dreams?
Dreams are as natural as our breath, our digestion, our heartbeat. I want to propose that a relationship with our dreams is a deeper relationship with ourselves. Sure, we don’t need to pay attention to these processes in order for them to keep functioning but when we do, we enter into a greater sense of aliveness, awareness, and sensitivity. We move from objectivity into relationship. Cultivating, and tending to it, is inherently meaningful. Dreams humble us with their ludicrousness, horror, beauty, awe. They invite us into a deeper dialogue with nature, ourselves, and, as a result, those around us.
Many dreamworkers, while coaching people to enhance dream recall, will firstly invite people to take an interest in their dreams, and will subsequently offer a variety of ways to enhance dream recall. Journaling, recording, or drawing them for instance, even if they are simple fragments or feelings or colors. However, the late Jeremy Taylor, beloved and revered dreamworker, reverend, and activist, proposed that most people struggle with recall because they don’t have safe and encouraging spaces of interest to speak of them.
What if the therapy room could be one of those spaces?
Dr. Leslie Ellis, author of A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy: Demystifying Dreamwork, lists the following reasons that it should be:
- They are creative and engage our clients in the therapy process
- They point to our most salient emotional concerns
- They bypass our internal editing process and normal defenses and so are honest representations of our life situation
- Dreams can bring a new and wider perspective on a situation that is stuck or static
- Dreams provide diagnostic information and can be indicators of clinical progress
- Dreams help to regulate our emotions and are implicated in memory consolidation
- Dreams can be a safe pathway to working with trauma
I like to think of dreaming as the space where our egos go to bathe and merge back into the source from which they came. And working with our dreams intentionally, while we’re awake, helps us integrate what we saw, heard, felt, and experienced, allowing our new sense of ego to emerge in the process. But most of all, it communicates to this part of ourselves that it is valuable, worthwhile, and meaningful.
Taylor refers to dreams as “over-determined”, meaning that they have many meanings. On a physical level, they may bring us information about our health. On an emotional level, they might show us feelings that are repressed or inflated. On a spiritual level, they can reveal where we truly feel connected in our lives. Dreamwork inspires us, literally breathing life into us, as the etymology of ‘inspire’ goes. And the more dreamwork we do, the more flexible our egos, and the more adaptable we become. We already work on the flexibility of our egos in therapy, but why not bring in the voice of our inner therapist?
Go ahead. Try it out. Let me know how it goes!