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In the weeks prior to losing a job early in my journalism career, one I was hanging onto primarily for security and status, my dreams were splitting at the seams with portents of how I actually felt about trading off passion for prestige and comfort.
Although I faithfully recorded them in my dream journals, as I had since high school, I very uncharacteristically did absolutely nothing to interpret them, because I think at some level I didn't want to know what they had to tell me. Which is really another way of saying I knew what they had to tell me.
In one dream, I was handed a stack of hundred-dollar bills and later discovered that most of them were actually ones and I’d been cheated. In another, I found a golden calf chained to the ground. In another, I lost my wallet with all my identification cards in it. In another, I was invited to the boss’s estate for a fancy pool party, but the pool was empty.
Not exactly rocket science. I was feeling cheated, losing my sense of identity, worshipping the false idol of materialism, and falling for an empty promise. That is, I was being invited to take a good look at what I was doing at that job, and how I really felt about being there. Or more specifically, how I felt about running from what my true calling was at that time—and had been for five years—which was quitting employment for self-employment and becoming a freelance writer.
But because I didn’t want to look at the dreams, when I suddenly lost the job—the only job I've ever been fired from—it came as a complete shock, when it shouldn’t have. And wouldn't have if I'd turned the receiver on and was willing to hear what I heard.
Dreams may be a royal road to the unconscious, as Freud called them—telling you what your inner-life is really calling-for from you, what you really know or feel about something—but we're often afraid to head down that road, royal or otherwise. Here are 3 reasons why:
1. Dreams can be unnerving in the same way that introspection or therapy are—they face you with yourself. Which is often an acquired taste. The truth may set you free, but first there's an even chance it'll ruffle your feathers, and highlight not only the gap that may exist between your deepest values and your status quo, but what your unfinished business is.
The truth is, it takes some nerve to study your dreams, the same nerve it takes to examine a firecracker that didn’t go off. And for the same reason we often avoid getting symptoms checked out—we'd rather not know—we often ignore the messages and marching orders our dreams send us. That is, until we get fired, or handed a shocking diagnosis, or some other form of the 2X4 approach to consciousness-raising.
2. Paying attention to your dreams is an admission that there's at the very least another psychic reality—if not a deeper or greater one—than that by which you generally steer your course. And for anyone cemented to the rational and scientific, the linear and observable, the ego and the five senses, opening to dreams is an act of humility, if not uncertainty.
Contrary to the rationalist hooey that dreams aren’t real (“You’re just dreaming”), dreams are very much real. They convey real information, real impact, real emotions, and have real consequences if you ignore them. They'll just keep coming back, for one thing, until you admit them (or admit to them), and the unconscious may well “dream up” other channels for its messages to get through to you, such as symptoms, neuroses and compulsions.
If you're feeling lost in life, or trapped, or actively avoiding something, you're likely to dream about being lost, or trapped, or chased. And the more you deal with these issues in your waking life, the less you'll be pursued by them in your dreams.
3. Dreams are wild, not tame, because the conscious mind doesn't control them. The poet Byron called them “a wide realm of wild reality,” and they know things about which you're otherwise in the dark, things which in the broad daylight of consciousness remain invisible to you, just as the stars play to an empty house during the day when the sun is shining. They also specialize in disturbing and confounding whatever is settled in your life, and requiring courage to face.
Some people even say that the inward equivalent of wilderness is the unconscious, with all its willful and unkempt energies, its suppressed desires and dreams, and that our primal intuition of danger out at the edge of the encampment has its counterpart at the edge of the psyche, where Reason, which normally sits astride bronze stallions in the town squares, can barely get a leg-up. Here, in the place where dreams bubble out of the ground, the rules and regulations of daily life thin out. “The depths of mind,” says poet Gary Snyder, “are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now.”
And as in the natural world, if you dream of being chased (or if your dreams themselves are chasing you), turn around and face them. If you're being chased by an animal (a big cat, a bear, even a dog), the general rule of thumb is “Don't run,” because whatever is running from an animal like that they tend to equate with food, which could lead to a fatal case of mistaken identity.
It's the same with dreams. The heart of dreamwork is assuming that whatever is chasing you is an ally rather than an enemy (though it may not feel that way in a chase dream), and so turn and face your pursuer, inquire what the chase is all about, and what the message might be that the pursuer bears.
For more, visit gregglevoy.com
