reading

‘A light in the darkness of mere being’ for me encompasses the process of counselling and the therapeutic relationship on which it depends. Initially both client and counsellor, patient and therapist, are metaphorically, in the dark. The healing process illuminates ‘the darkness of mere being’.

The journey taken together includes the land of dreams, stories, myths and fantasies as well as recalled experiences of pain and psychological insecurity. The reality of day-to-day anxiety and suffering is the tip of the iceberg below which the world of dreams and the unconscious are submerged. In this sea, where unexpected collisions may occur, some of titanic proportion, the counsellor often needs to be the anchor that holds the steady line. By appreciating the vastness of the dream world, we can plumb the depths where danger lies, understand how it may be circumvented and even enjoy the magnificent beauty of the awesome territory in which we travel, because travel is what we do — counselling and therapy are a process, not an arrival point.

The unconscious, the metaphorical unseen part of the iceberg, has a particular capacity (Von Franz, 1987) to:

… transform and guide the human being, who has been blocked in a situation, into a new one. Whenever human life gets stuck and arrives at a shore from which it cannot proceed, the transcendent function brings healing dreams and fantasies which construct on the symbolic level, a new way of life which suddenly takes shape and leads to a new situation.

However, first, as part of our preparations for this journey, we need to look at our shared understanding of dreams. What do we mean when we talk of dreaming and what have those who have gone before made of them?

Dreams are a different form of consciousness to our waking consciousness. Whilst sleeping we operate with images, characters, and time frames that do not follow our usual, waking pattern. People may ‘shapeshift’ or morph in front of our eyes, a dream ‘friend’ may transform into a wild cat. But why is this? What have we to gain from the altered state of consciousness (ASC) that dreaming brings about? Why do we need to dream?

The need for dreaming has been shown to exist independently of the need for ordinary sleep and is not an accidental by-product of sleep: ‘one may sleep in order to dream.’ On a psychological level, dream deprivation causes:

~memory intrusion — the waking person feels they are dreaming and dream images break through whilst they are awake

~feelings of emptiness and depersonalisation, as shown by the crucial research of William Dement.

In addition, there is increasing evidence that being deprived of dreams leads to personality disorganisation. Thus, if dream deprivation causes personality disturbance then it would seem reasonable to assume that at least one of the functions of dreaming is to maintain personality organisation.

In dreams we travel through layers of connection that may be blocked by the rational, more constrained and censoring aspect of our waking being. Dreams come largely unsolicited, and frequently indicate the action or the path we need to take. That storehouse of memory, the unconscious, is revealed symbolically in dreams. Dreaming allows us to expand our state of awareness so that we can tune in to that part of ourselves which has many labels: the unconscious, our higher self or higher nature, the inner self or inner wisdom, the source of our original being or our divine self or God. Whatever label we choose to use, dreams ‘translate’ these deep inner experiences into symbols and images we recognise and sometimes only after lengthy work can understand. As in meditation, dreams touch the intuitive rather than the rational self.

Candace Pert’s work described in Molecules of Emotion is highly relevant. She says that, when we dream, different parts of the body mind are exchanging information:

the content of which reaches your awareness as a story. On a physiological level, the psychosomatic network is returning itself each night for the next day. Shifts are occurring in feedback loops as peptides spill out into the system … and bind to receptors to cause activities necessary for homeostasis, or return to normalcy. Information about those readjustments enters your consciousness in the form of a dream, and since these are biochemicals of emotion, the dream has not only content but feeling as well.

Before looking at healing in any form, it is important to understand that health and well-being are not discrete entities divorced from the social fabric of our lives. They are woven into the warp and weft of the whole person and the whole process of therapy. Dreams draw from interwoven memories and felt experiences and the everyday dynamic that the dreamer is living. Based on the belief that each person holds the key to their own healing, part of the role of the counsellor or healer is to enable people to access that personal power, to connect to that deep wisdom. Dreams reveal the multi-layered tapestry of life in all its intricacies, which is why they are so valuable in the healing process. (One particularly important aspect is the way in which dreams offer intimations of physical or mental ill health before the dreamer has any conscious awareness of it; in subsequent chapters we will explore in more detail the potential that such dream diagnosis offers.)

So, how do we define healing in relation to dreams? Perhaps in its widest sense, healing looks at the whole person which includes mind, spirit, emotions and body and is concerned with the cause and meaning of ill health. Whilst we are not looking at ways of treating a client as a doctor would a patient, we are nonetheless concerned with the impact of attitudes on well-being.

Together, client and counsellor work in a healing space, a sacred space that is dedicated to the process of finding some relief and understanding of the distress that initiated counselling. In this space the purpose is to find a path forward, a healthier, more satisfying way of being in the world; indeed, many who seek therapy talk of having ‘lost their way’. Those involved in the therapeutic process are thus companions on the journey to the wise heart and this journey takes place in the sacred space of the counselling room. It is sacred because this healing place honours the process of connection to the innermost aspect of humanity. It is a dedicated space, protected from interruption and intrusion as we work through anger and anguish. The client may experience a level of vulnerability that they have never before allowed another person to see or share and the space must honour and respect this experience. If the place in which counselling is taking place does not accommodate the client in this way, it can signal a lack of care or a devaluing of the person that may make it very difficult for the client to trust both the counsellor and the therapeutic process. Of course, in reality, counselling takes place in all sorts of venues which are less than ideal and in many instances hardly adequate. Where this happens it is all the more imperative that the counsellor recognises and guards the sacredness of the interaction by their complete presence and attention in the session.

One process lies at the heart of counselling: listening. As Lao-Tzu, the author of Tao-Te Ching, on which Taoism is based, said:

Such listening as enfolds us in silence in which at last we begin to hear what we are meant to be.

Active listening — listening to the music behind the words, taking into account the body language of the client as well as the subtle inflections of words — is at the very core of counselling. Listening in an active, accurate way is essential. It encompasses other skills such as empathy, understanding, attentiveness and awareness. Listening is an underrated skill and possibly a dying art since it is more and more difficult to find an uninterrupted space in which to listen or be listened to. Yet, as Thomas Moore so lyrically describes in The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, our soul longs for quiet in which to reflect. Effective counselling can satisfy this longing.

It is the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking that I am troubled withal.

(Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2)

Active listening applies not only to what the client is saying but also to what they are listening and responding to — you, yourself, your reactions to the voice within as you attend the client and empathise. From the quiet, deep insights often emerge to illuminate the path you travel together but sometimes finding that silence within is difficult. However, as Fritz Capra tells us: ‘When the rational mind is silenced, the intuitive mind produces extraordinary awareness.’

Dreams and healing spaces have played a part in human life since the dawn of time when our early cave-dwelling ancestors painted dream-like images on walls. Tribal societies as far apart as Africa and Australia, America and Ireland, have all believed that the ‘Great Spirit’ spoke to people in dreams and could heal the body and soul.

Dating from at least 2000 BC, the world’s oldest heroic tale, ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’, tells the story of a quest for immortality and is full of dream accounts. It reveals how dreams were highly regarded in ancient Mesopotamia, both in their capacity as bearers of omens and portents of the future and as a way to penetrate other realities. In one dream, Enkidu, the travelling companion of Gilgamesh, sees what the afterlife is like and, in common with many others, from shamans to visionaries, thereafter his certainty of life after death influences his whole view of the world.

The relationship between health and dreaming is not a new phenomenon. Healing temples were consecrated in the honour of the ancient Greek Aesclepius, a healer in the eleventh century BC. These were staffed by temple priests who were part physicians, part metaphysicians and part shamans. Skilled in medicine, incantations and with a knowledge of herbs, they not only interpreted the dreams of those who sought answers to problems and cures for illnesses, they also prescribed medicines according to the nature of the dreams. They knew that dreams had the power to heal.

Oneiros, the Greek god of dreams, gave his name to The Oneirocritica or The Interpretation of Dreams which was one of the first books ever written and only the second book to be printed on the Gothenburg Press. In five volumes and written by Artemidorus of Daldis, Asia Minor, in the second century AD, this first ever comprehensive book on the interpretation of dreams was the most important book on dreams right up to the nineteenth century when Freud used the same title for his own seminal work on dreams. The Oneirocritica is somewhat similar in style to modern dream dictionaries though it also contains broader advice on how to interpret dreams.

Artemidorus’s view is very close to the present outlook on dreams in that he postulated that they were unique to the dreamer and were affected by the person’s occupation, social standing and health:

If we wish to interpret a dream correctly, we need to take a note of whether the person dreaming it is male or female, healthy or sick, a free man or slave, rich or poor, young or old.

Throughout antiquity there was a belief that dreams had a divine origin and carried messages from the gods. The ancient Greeks believed that the great god, Zeus, god of gods, sent warnings, messages and prophecies in dreams with the help of Hypnos, the god of sleep, and Morpheus, the god of dreams. This is an area we will consider in later chapters.

Many Greek philosophers devoted time to the subject of dreams. Plato (428–348 BC), in his early works, for example, Apologia and Symposium, viewed dreams as channels of communication between man and his gods. Plato recognised that dreams could radically influence waking actions and gave as an example the fact that Socrates studied music and the arts because a dream had instructed him to do so.

Plato’s biological theory of dreams argues that dreams originate in respective organs in the body, with the liver being the most important. He noted that dreams can be triggered by over-gratification or frustration of bodily organs — theories taken up and developed in more recent times by many psychologists, including Freud and Jung. They also developed his notion that when reason is suspended in sleep: ‘the other two elements of the soul — desire and anger — and all the repressed aspects of personality break through with all their power, and the soul can accept incest, murder and sacrilege’ (J.R. Lewis).

… in all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.

(Plato, The Republic)

Other Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle (384–322 BC), attempted to study dreams in a rational way, though Petronius, Nero’s counsellor, is the first person recorded who had a ‘rational’ approach to dreams:

It is neither the gods nor divine commandments that send the dreams down from the heavens, but each one of us makes them for himself.

Aristotle argued that so-called ‘prophetic’ dreams were simply coincidences and he proposed that the most skilful interpreter of dreams is ‘he who has the faculty for absorbing resemblances’, that is, the person who can make connections between waking events, society at large and the life history of the dreamer. He also argued that dreams could reflect the physical state of the dreamer and could therefore be used as an aid to diagnosis — an idea later supported by Hippocrates (460–357 BC). The Greeks believed that each person carried within them the knowledge of their own cure, and that such inner wisdom needed to be expressed and used in healing. Access to this came via dreams.

At the peak of this dream incubation culture, there were some 420 temples to Aesclepius all over the ancient Greek world, the most famous being the temple at Epidaurus. Healing cures at Epidaurus were well known and recognition of the power of dreams was a given. However, the ancient knowledge of using dreams in the diagnosis and treatment of physical illness has been steadily undermined throughout history, as we shall see — doctors today do not routinely ask about their patients’ dreams.

The incubation of healing dreams continued in the Roman Empire. The word ‘incubation’ is derived from the Latin word, in (on) cubare (to lie down). It refers to the practice of deliberately seeking help from dreams in healing temples. During the process, the seeker of healing would sleep in the company of sacred snakes. The snake was the symbol of the god of healing and symbolically represents renewal. The snake casts off it old skin and has a new one beneath. Modern medicine has inherited this link between healing and renewal in the form of the staff of Aesclepius — a staff wound around with two snakes, the emblem known as the caduceus which is used by physicians today. The caduceus is the symbol of the eternal science of transformation and integration.

From the marble stelae — stones inscribed with affirmations — around the Temple of Aesclepius at Epidaurus we have details of miraculous cures:

Arata, a Roman of Lacademon was dropsical. Her mother left her in Lacademon and came to Epidaurus to beg god to cure her daughter. She slept in the Temple and had the following dream: it seemed to her that the god cut off her daughter’s head and hung up her body in such a way that her throat was turned downward. Out of it came a huge quantity of fluid matter. Then, she took down the body and fitted the head back on the neck. After she had seen this dream, she went back to Lacademon where she found her daughter in good health; she had had the same dream.

Arata’s experience is in no way restricted to ancient Greece. It happens now in the twentieth century (later, we will hear more of people who share the same healing dream on the same night).

A woman from Athens called Ambrosia was blind in one eye. She came as a supplicant to the god. As she walked about in the Temple, she laughed at some of the cures as incredible and impossible, that the lame and the blind should be healed by merely having a dream. In her sleep she had a vision. It seemed to her that the god stood by her and said he would cure her, but that the payment he would ask of her was to dedicate to the Temple a Silver Pig as a memorial to her foolishness. After saying this, he cut out her diseased eyeball and poured in some drug. When day came, she walked out of the Abaton completely sound.

This is similar to the dream of Heather who discovered the cause of her ‘dry eyes’ in her dreams (Chapter 3).

Hippocrates, known as the father of modern medicine, believed that some dreams were divinely inspired whilst others were a direct result of physical activity within the body or stimuli from external sources. A poem written by Lucretius (80 CBE) expresses the essence of this physical influence on dreams:

… kids wet the bed

Soaking not only sheets, but also spreads,

Magnificent Babylonian counterpanes,

Because it seemed that in dreams he stood

Before a urinal or chamber pot.

A modern example of the inclusion of external stimuli is the classic ‘alarm bell’ dream. A bell ringing in a dream may be the incorporated sound of an alarm or telephone ringing next to the bed. The brain receives the signal and enmeshes it into the dream so that the dreamer can continue sleeping. However, if the noise continues it will finally force the dreamer awake to the true source of the sound. This function of dreams as the protector of sleep, as described by Freud, explains why some internal and external stimuli become the stuff of dreams.

Dreams can also incorporate physical events into the dream narrative in highly dramatic ways. Alfred Maury, a French doctor whose book on dreams was published in 1861, believed that they would occur almost simultaneously with the outer stimulus. He gave an example of his own dream which was set in the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. In it he was condemned to death and led to the guillotine. As the blade of the guillotine fell, he woke to find the top of the bed had fallen and struck him at the exact point at the top of his spine where the guillotine would have cut.

Early Christian worshippers sought dream-healing at pilgrimage sites, particularly at churches built over the remains of Aesclepius’s temples. Just as the Christians built on earlier sacred sites, so they inherited ideas about the world, the universe and the purpose of dreams. Layers of history physically available on these archaeological sites provide evidence of continuity, in much the same way that metaphorical levels of awareness of the past are carried in dream work. Our connections with this distant world are still with us, not only in our dream investigations but in our language. Panacea and Hygea, the daughters of Aesclepius, gave us ‘panacea’ and ‘hygiene’ and the word ‘clinic’ is derived from the Greek Kline, which was the name for the bed on which the ‘patient’ lay. All are linked to health and healing and stem from temple practices of dream incubation.

Early Christian writers such as Tertullian (160–240) recognised the value of dreams, saying that God ‘especially intended dreams to be of particular assistance in natural foresight’, thus continuing the Greek and Roman view of dreams as omens and portents. Christians revived the idea that dreams could come from a supernatural source — though not from the gods; rather, God. There are more than twenty accounts of dreams in the bible which refer to divine guidance and some of these changed the course of history. In one of his own dreams, Moses was told of their powerful significance:

‘Hear now my words,’ he dreamt. ‘If there be a prophet among you, I, the Lord, will make myself known to him in a vision and will speak to him in a dream.’

The early Christian belief that dreams came from God diminished after St Jerome’s intervention. Plagued by sexually explicit dreams, he denounced them as the work of the devil, so dreams fell from grace, and by the time of the Inquisition they were seen as the work of the devil. The Church was the interpreter of God’s word and only priests had the power to interpret his word. Any revelation given to an individual in a dream was seen as satanic. Later, Martin Luther (1483–1546), the founder of Protestantism, endorsed this view. In his eyes, sin was ‘the confederate and father of foul dreams’. Thus, dreams were relegated to the realm of evil and any interest in harvesting their power was dismissed if not punished. Today, this view is still held in some quarters, which explains the reservations some people have about working with dreams.

Dream interpretation played an important role in Jewish life. Around the time of Christ, the Talmud records that there were twenty-four dream interpreters in Jerusalem. Rabbi Chrisda said: ‘The dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which has not been read.’ All dreams were seen as meaningful.

Dreams are also significant in Islam. The prophet, Mohammed (circa 570–632), had his first revelation in a dream and received spiritual instruction that was profoundly important to the foundation of Islam. This invitation into the mysteries of the universe happened during a great dream known as ‘The Night Journey’. He said that most of the teachings of the Koran were given to him in a dream. He interpreted his disciples’ dreams and dreamt that on the way to heaven he met Moses, Abraham and Jesus.

The Muslim scholar, Avicenna (980–1037), was one of the most amazing men of his age. Born in Bukhara, Persia (now Iran), he was a polymath and his writings covered science and philosophy, but more importantly in our context, he wrote extensively on healing. Avicenna’s two major works were The Book of Healing and The Canon of Medicine.

The Book of Healing, a large encyclopaedia covering the natural sciences, logic, mathematics, psychology, astronomy, music, and philosophy, is probably the largest work of its kind ever written by one man. The Canon of Medicine became and remained the definitive work in its field for centuries. In it was a systematic exposition of the achievements of Greek and Roman physicians. Much of Avicenna’s work was subsequently translated into Latin and thereby became available throughout Europe. His contributions to medicine, theology and philosophy are invaluable in the Islamic tradition and beyond, though he is still largely unrecognised in the West.

In many cultures, dreams have a special importance to the tribe or community and there are many different approaches in which dreams are taken to provide structure, guidance and wisdom.

Australian Aborigines, in their five hundred distinct tribes, share the certainty that nature and human life are inextricably intertwined, as are the past and the future. The dreamtime is the mythical age of the past which is at the same time the present. The link with this heroic past is kept by rites of initiation in which participants act out their early myths. Waking and sleeping life have equal importance for the Aborigine. Many of the rituals which appear in dreams are later applied to waking life, as are ceremonies which are first witnessed in the dream state.

The native American Mohave tribe of the south-west United States also interpret their culture in terms of dreams rather than interpreting their dreams in terms of cultural influences. Omen dreams, for example, are seen as foretelling what could happen rather than what would happen and the dreams of their shamans are told to the tribe and are used as a basis for decision-making and problem-solving. The Mohave also believe in the power of dreams to cause illness. These pathogenic dreams come in two forms: the first, in which the dreamer falls ill because of harmful events encountered in a dream by the soul; the second, in which a dream is so upsetting that the dreamer reacts by becoming ill. Particularly dangerous are dreams in which the dreamer is fed by the ghosts of the dead or has sexual intercourse with a ghost.

The Jesuits in the 1600s thought that the Iroquois had only one deity — the dream. They followed the dream literally and acted out the content of their dreams — for example, travelling over a hundred miles to get a dog in Quebec after they had met the dog in a dream.

These visitation dreams are similar to the ancient Aesclepian healing dreams of the Greeks (see particularly C.A. Meier, Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy). The Iroquois recognised the importance of the dream signal and the whole community would often become involved in visitation dreams. Supernatural figures would appear in dreams and usually spoke personally to the dreamer, bringing a message of importance to the individual and/or the community. Such figures that appear in dreams are likely to be archetypal ones or people who have special significance.

In a highly diversified and individualist society, each person becomes his or her own myth-maker. The Iroquois had their own specialists who would help tribal members to understand their dreams. The dreamer’s relatives would be involved in working out what the dream meant and, as in family therapy, each member could contribute to the process of understanding and would help clarify for the group the significance of the dream for each and all of them.

Barbara Hannah has described how the Senoi: ‘… a group of Malay aboriginals who had succeeded in creating a culture of peace and harmony based upon working with dreams’, regularly set aside a time each day for the community to discuss dreams and to act out their dreams through dance and communal reveries. Dreams were not seen as an end in themselves. The Senoi sought power in their dreams. In power dreams, dreamers can do things which they cannot do in reality — fly, breathe under water and so on (Tart):

The Senoi [of Malaysia] believe that any human being, with the aid of his fellows, can outface, master and actually utilise all beings and forces in the dream universe. His experience leads him to believe that, if you co-operate with your fellows or oppose them with goodwill in the daytime, their images will help you in your dreams and that every person should be the supreme ruler and master of his own dream or spiritual universe and can demand and receive the help and co-operation of all the forces there.

Senoi children were taught to be responsible for what happened in their dreams — to be of service to their friends if they were present, to face animals or monsters if they appeared and to match their strength to them and not run away — and were encouraged to be active and fully expressive in all dream encounters (Tart): ‘The child’s dream was taken as a vivid and non-symbolic representation of the child’s needs and problems.’

This gradual process of learning from childhood to maturity, with dreams as a central part of the process, encompasses many cognitive and behavioural techniques:

We can still use these techniques as a means of increasing self-confidence and personal esteem in the counselling setting, as we will see in Chapter 2.

Usually when we talk of reaping rewards from dreams, it is a psychological understanding or gain that we refer to. In Japanese myth, however, rewards can be tangible and stories show the link between dreams and the supernatural and physical worlds. In one story, two pedlars were resting on a beach. When one fell asleep, his companion saw a fly come from the sleeping man’s nose. It flew towards an island called Sado and then returned to creep again into his nostril. At this point the man awoke and related a dream he had had in which buried treasure was found on Sado. Following this, the dreamer took money for the relating of this dream; in effect, he sold his dream. The ‘buyer’ of the dream went to Sado, found the treasure and ‘then went his way, not to become a pedlar again, but to enjoy the luxuries his dream investment had brought him’.

Though the idea of selling dreams is not usual to us, there are many reported cases of people dreaming, for example, of winning lottery numbers. We examine this precognitive element of dreams in Chapter 8.

In the eighteenth century, Johann Fichte (1762–1814) and his disciple Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) suspected that dreams revealed unconscious fears and desires but it was not until the early twentieth century with Freud’s publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 that this idea was fully developed and the new psychology of dreams was born.

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) was a psychotherapist who put forward the view that the human race had one universal language which was the symbolic language of dreams — the ‘forgotten language’ as he termed it. Fromm divided symbols into different categories: conventional symbols were regarded as those with only one meaning, such as a plus or minus sign; accidental symbols were personal to the individual in the dream or personal to a group of people, but not real to people in general; universal symbols were those found in common throughout the world, such as water representing emotion and intuition or fire representing power, energy, purification.

Sigmund Freud (1865–1939) was the founder of psychoanalysis. He came to believe that dreams represented the royal road to understanding the unconscious. Of his seminal work on dreams, The Interpretation of Dreams, he wrote: ‘[It] contains even according to my present day judgement the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insights such as this fall to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.’

Regarded as the father of modern dream interpretation Freud in his introduction to The Interpretation of Dreams wrote:

In the following pages I shall attempt to prove that a psychological technique exists which permits the interpretation of dreams and that, by the use of my procedure, every dream will show itself to be a meaningful psychological structure, capable of taking its place among the psychological drives of waking life.

His main theory was that the purpose of dreams is to allow repressed infantile fantasies, such as those of a sexual nature, to be expressed and satisfied. He stressed the sexual dimension of dreams which centred around sexual frustration. He identified five processes during dreaming:

~secondary revision, where all the aspects of the dream are brought together to give it a comprehensible surface meaning which Freud called the manifest content.

The process of psychoanalysis involved exploring and decoding the dream to access the hidden, or latent, content of the dream. He believed dreams always had serious meaning and reflected our earliest, deepest desires. Freud’s theory purported that though dreams may be triggered by external events, they really represented wish-fulfilment. He acknowledged that anxiety, fears and sexual difficulties, for example, affected the body and resulted in psychosomatic states.

Dreams were cryptic, a puzzle to be unlocked and understood and, for Freud, the tools were in the symbolic language of the dream and in particular in the sexual symbolism — the root of it all. Freud encouraged patients to talk about their dreams, to freely associate to them, that is, to talk about whatever came into their minds as they reflected on the dream and the connections it made for them. He argued that by doing this they accessed repressed, emotions that were censored in daily thought.

Freud’s personality theory of ego, id and superego provided a template to be used with dreams. Ego dreams reflected the conscious aspect of our selves; id dreams, the primitive side; and superego, our socially conditioned, culture bound self. The id, with all its savage, untrammelled urging towards reproduction and survival, came to the fore with the expression of the full force of the dreamer’s latent sexual drives. To protect the ego and the superego, Freud argued, dreams were disguised so as not to shock the dreamer into wakefulness and, for this reason, he called dreams the ‘guardians of sleep’, though many have disagreed vehemently with this view.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), a prominent Swiss psychotherapist, broke away from his mentor Sigmund Freud to set up his own branch of psychoanalysis. In the unconscious, he argued, lay both our baser, instinctual drives as well as higher spiritual impulses and the purpose of dreams was to communicate to the conscious mind. Unlike Freud, Jung argued that, far from being deliberate disguises, dreams inform the dreamer directly and teach what he or she needs to know. Far from concealing desires, dreams reveal our deepest wishes and longings and help us to realise our unconscious ambitions and potentials. The dream gives voice to the unconscious which seeks to guide and assist the conscious self. For Jung, each person’s symbols are idiosyncratic, unique to each individual and situation, yet they also connect to a universal, collective communication and understanding, often taking further symbolic form.

According to Jungian theory, dreams have two functions. The first is to compensate for personal imbalances, making up for that which might be missing in waking life or which was being neglected at the time — he believed dreams heal by bringing the psyche into balance. The second function is to assist in the individuation process by bringing about prospective dreams which indicate future potential or events.

Jung also introduced the concept of archetypes, that is, the storehouse of human experience which is contained in prototypes. Archetypal dreams are linked to core issues: death and rebirth; the Hero’s journey; rites of passage; and creation. Some examples of these eternal motifs are to be found in the anima/animus, the wise woman or wise man, the shadow, the mandala and the persona.

The anima/animus for example, represents the inner qualities balancing aspects of gender: for a woman the animus is her male aspect; for the male dreamer the anima is his female aspect. The whole self is formed when we can integrate these complementary sides — the anima/animus is to the inner world as the persona is to the outer.

In Jungian work with dreams, the process is one which aims to help interpret messages coming from the unconscious. As he said in Memories, Dreams and Reflections: ‘the dream is a little hidden door to the innermost recesses of the soul.’ He said that we must first approach a dream at its simplest level. If an umbrella appears in a dream, then first take it as an umbrella instead of assuming it is a disguised phallus, for example. The sexual factor in dreams was not regarded by Jung as the determining aspect. He believed that dreams were not censored but were the revelations of the unconscious, a communication from one part of the dreamer to another. And he saw dreaming as a way to contact not only the inner wisdom of the individual unconscious mind but also that of the collective unconscious.

Jung’s research took him further into the world of depth psychology which he divided into the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. For Jung, the unconscious is nature and so it never lies. By this he meant that there is at work in the world a principle existing beyond individual experience and physical history and yet determining both.

Dream analysis had a prime place in Jung’s approach to understanding the unconscious. He used dream amplification to expand the dream content and place it within the dreamer’s life, to imagine a way deeper into the dream scene and then to move it further in relation to myth and symbol. As Kovel says in A Complete Guide to Therapy: ‘In this way the dream itself was revealed to be a higher form of cognition, guiding the patient to a superordinate knowledge.’ Jung believed healing could occur if contact with the deep unconscious could take place. It is akin to tapping into the foundation, the basic roots of existence which keep each one of us, each organism, stable.

Jung distinguished between two main types of dreams: ordinary, everyday dreams; and numinous dreams. ‘Numinous’ derives from the Latin numen, which means ‘deity’ or ‘presiding spirit’. In such dreams there is the sense of the divine or sacred and for some people a numinous dream has led to major life changes. The other ‘smaller’ dreams are less immediately impressive and are more usually to do with everyday aspects of life. Although they are still very useful for dream work, they lack the vividness and urgency of numinous dreams.

His extensive travels, including journeys to Africa and the United States of America to visit black Africans and Native Americans, confirmed Jung’s belief that there are two levels of consciousness, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The latter comprises archetypal symbols that represented all the knowledge and wisdom of all humanity. He put forward the theory that each individual carries all the wisdom of previous generations, just as scientists have argued more recently that we each carry in our cellular structure knowledge of everything that has happened since time began.

These original images he called ancestral memory archetypes and we inherit them just as we inherit the colour of our eyes. Archetypal images are symbols that are not invented but contained in the subconscious of all people, no matter what their race or colour. He found that these archetypal symbols frequently occurred in dreams of people who were experiencing life-threatening conditions or were in life-transforming crises. This is a view supported by others such as Maria Louise Von Franz and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, whose work was with those nearing death.

Jung explored Eastern philosophies, the occult, alchemy and anthropology in order to understand what is at the core of what it means to be a human being. He regarded the spiritual journey of each person, which he termed individuation, to be central to the human condition. The individuation process, which counsellors may be familiar with in Maslow’s concept of actualisation in his hierarchy of needs, is the force within each person to seek greater self-understanding, to become more self-aware and integrated and to seek personal fulfilment.

The monumental range of Jung’s work led to a re-evaluation of the importance of mythology and influenced people like Joseph Campbell, who showed how mythology actively influences psychological make up. Campbell’s later work carries this view into the market place of everyday life in the form of film, for example. He was crucially influential in the Star Wars series of films which depict the mythic journey of individuation and the quest for truth. The films, like enduring stories, touch the very essence of our own personal journeys whether we are familiar with the concepts or not.

Innumerable difficulties during Jung’s life arose because he believed dreams to be prospective, that is, forward-looking, as well as retrospective. Mainstream scientists of the day viewed this idea as the mystical meanderings of an occultist. They saw him as a man who had lost his way by becoming involved with ideas such as synchronicity, which could not be proved by scientific methods nor repeated in laboratory conditions. There are many who share that same attitude today — if you can’t measure it, tabulate it, then market it, it isn’t ‘scientific’ and if it isn’t scientific it isn’t important.

This reductionist attitude is limiting. The vast wealth of dream experiences of ‘ordinary’ people who have had prospective or telepathic dreams is impressive in both volume and consistency, as we will discover in Chapter 8 when we explore insight from dreams that cannot be explained ‘scientificically’. Common-sense knowledge, which was so often abused by early scientists and then vindicated by other scientists at a later stage, seems to have served us — women in particular — well for a long time.

A specific aim of Jungian therapy is to bring about contact with the transcendent, ineffable and mysterious. ‘The spirit still reigns supreme in Jung,’ as Kovel points out; he ‘provides the most systematic and serious grounding for the transcendent approach to therapy.’ We have a sense of the unique support system of the collective unconscious. In the healing process it helps to know there are powerful unseen aspects of existence which aid our survival and growth. Such contacts touch the transcendent, albeit fleetingly at first, like a butterfly’s wing on a petal, but as with dream symbols, the more archetypes are appreciated, the richer the depth to be mined.

At one time closely associated with Freud, Alfred Adler (1870–1937), like Jung, broke away to develop his own form of psychotherapy and dream theories. His focus was on power and status and he believed that the most powerful human drive was for control. He introduced the terms sibling rivalry and inferiority complex. Dreams, for Adler, were part of this process — to master life. They were rehearsals for future events so that people can prepare for them, anticipating the future rather than discharging tensions from the past (see Chapter 7). However, he did acknowledge that some dreams are misleading and would lead to failure rather than success. Adler played down the unconscious and sexuality, preferring to focus on social influences as well as aspects such as assertiveness, self-esteem, goals — the active striving of the individual in the therapeutic setting.

Gestalt psychology is based on the idea that the mind seeks to make a whole out of various parts: the sum of the whole is greater than the parts. In relation to dreams this means that, when all the different aspects of a dream are explored and combined, we get a fuller picture than the fragmented pieces we initially see. Fritz Perls (1893–1970) saw dreams as the way to integration rather than to the unconscious, as in Freud’s view, and he saw them as being the most spontaneous product that we have. And, as Jung before him, Perls recognised that we need to acknowledge the negative in ourselves if we are to become whole, integrated human beings. By doing this we re-own the hidden potential that is also present in our dreams.

A Jungian analyst, Arnold Mindell developed process oriented psychology and the term dream body. This he describes in his book Dream Body