The Expanse of Our Unconscious Is as Immense as the Night Sky

The universally experienced world of dreams and dreaming has always been a deep mystery, ever since the first confusing hints of self-awareness arose in our instinctively nervous, curious mammalian ancestors. Awakening and remembering that we were dreaming just a moment ago always suggests that we live in two successively alternating worlds - one of made of dreams, and the other composed of our waking experiences.

Today, if contemporary western psychology has taught us anything, it has demonstrated that our unconscious "dream worlds" are always present, both asleep and awake. It only appears that we live in "two worlds" - in fact, we live in one world that looks one way when we are awake and appears in startlingly different form when we experience it sleep, (as well as in certain trance and visionary states that also straddle waking and dreaming).

The classic, archetypal metaphor of this state of shape-changing self-awareness is experiencing the alternating rhythms of night and day. Today, pretty much everyone knows that even when the stars "disappear" at sunrise, they are in fact still there, hidden in "the wild blue yonder" by the brightness of the sun that blinds us to their continuous presence.

The sun is the most primal, archetypal, natural symbol of waking consciousness, and the night sky filled with seemingly "fixed" stars, and the other, even more mysterious "wanderers" is the natural symbolic analog of the mysteries of "the unconscious". Looking up at the night sky is the deepest, longest view we get of the universe we live in, as well as the most universal natural symbol of the immense expanse and depths of our own unconscious lives. This is one of the reasons why dreaming of the night sky is so often associated with and celebrates the growth and development of the dreamer's waking consciousness and psycho-spiritual self-awareness.

True, these depths are difficult to see when the "sunlight" of consciousness and our worries and waking concerns flood our lives, but they are still there, hidden, but still influencing and shaping our feelings, thoughts, and actions. Our dreams, and the images and metaphors they regularly present, place our lives in a potentially infinitely large context of meaning and implication. Our closest waking connections to these profound depths within are the mysterious fragments of dreams we remember upon awakening.