It’s Official – Dreams ARE Important!

If dreams have meaning beyond wish fulfillment, what can we learn from them?

An interesting article in TIME Magazine cites new research that dreams and sleep are really important to our emotional well-being.  While this has been the long held view of this post, it is none the less refreshing to see the benefits of dreams being taken seriously beyond the role of “sorting out clutter” or even the Freudian approach of “wish fulfillment.”  Scientific research can validate and extrapolate out to far larger samples than what we individually know to be true through personal experience.  This kind of authority can elevate the whole conversation of dreaming, and help add weight to the processes that hopefully can contribute to the happiness and well-being of all humans.

So thank-you TIME for your article.

To move the conversation on a little further, let’s take a look at one the main take-outs of the research.  One key proposal in the article is that dreaming helps us take away the emotion from an experience so we can remember events and experiences with out their associated pain or anxiety.  This is referred to as an “emotional rind.”  It is as if an experience is the juicy part of an orange, and the emotional rind the bitter peel we must remove and throw away in order to live happy and well-balanced lives.

I believe this may in part be true, but to me instinctively this feels like an over simplification.  What happens to this “rind” after we throw it away?  Where does it go?  I think this interpretation places too little value on the emotions themselves.  Rather than become separate from our feeling and discard them, I believe our task is to understand them, and in doing so, integrate them and assimilate them into our entire being.  I do not believe dreams are a process to remove parts of ourselves and our lives, but rather to take things in, and to grow from them.  What we “lose” then is confusion and anxiety as we learn not to react simply instinctively, or out of learned but redundant patterns.  Dreams help us take the pain from a situation by revealing the hidden lesson beneath the complex experience.  This then, is the “rind” that is lost – the misconceptions that the only real or valuable perception of life is the superficial and conscious one.  The real “juice” inside is our subconscious, wanting to nourish and refresh us, if we can only to learn to taste what it has to offer.

One of the reasons we have recurring dreams is because we have not yet seen the value of the lesson contained within the experience at a conscious level.  Our conscious and subconscious are not yet communicating clearly – we have not “integrated” the lesson.  We are effectively trapped in cycle of repeating ourselves until we recognise what is really going on, and how to release ourselves from the restrictions and pain of the past.  This is often not easy, and not not achieved in a single “epiphany” or sudden breakthrough.  It can take weeks, months, even years to learn how to move on from a difficult situation, and to discover the strengths and gifts within.  But move on we can, and our dreams, as the language of our subconscious, is there to coach and guide us.

Let me know what you think!  Do you agree?  Are dreams more than simply a “nocturnal soothing balm?”  Or not?  To see the full article, please click below.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1904561,00.html

Sleep On It: Decision Making with Dreams

 

Feel confused or don't know the answer? Maybe you should sleep on it

 

What to do, what to do, what to do???  We’ve all had the experience, where some issue just doesn’t seem clear to us, some decision just seems impossible to make, some problem just seems too difficult to solve.  We may have wrestled with the issue in our our minds, maybe tried writing a list of pros and cons, perhaps spoken to friends, family or experts.  And yet some how the way forward still isn’t clear.  We may feel torn, anxious or just at a dead end.  So, what to do?

 

It may seem like a meaningless cliche, but the advice to “sleep on it” is not as useless as it may at first seem.  In our sleep our subconscious mind takes over.  It is the role of this part of our mind to make meaning, to make sense of things.  This part of mind, freed from the normal waking constraints of annoying things like logic, laws and social convention, can also be our most creative.   We know our minds in this state ignore all the usual rules and regulations, or else how else could we fly or breathe underwater, and why else would we turn up to class naked or become another person as we do in our dreams?  It is precisely this kind of free thinking that can solve problems for us.

But dreams aren’t simply random creative ideas, dreams are the way our subconscious attempts to resolve conflict.  If there is something in our lives that is not working, if we hate our job or don’t know how to confront our parents with our true feelings, dreams will try and work it out for us.  The trick is to recognise the answers when they come.

This can be difficult when we have not even admitted to ourselves or recognised exactly what our issue or concern is.  But it is much easier when we know what the problem is, but we just don’t know the answer.  We can actively look for our answers in our dreams.  There are some tricks and techniques we can use to help tis process be more effective:

• Get as much advice, or do as much research as you can while awake about whatever the particular question of concern is.  This is like feeding our minds.  It doesn’t matter if we don’t remember it all or process it consciously, the information still goes into our minds, and when are asleep our subconscious can take over, looking for connections we may have missed, drawing conclusions we couldn’t grasp while awake.
• Think about the problem or question just as you go to sleep.  Write it down, draw it or even say it out loud.  Stating the problem clearly makes it easier to understand the answer.  Give a message to your own subconscious, tell yourself what you need to know and repeat this silently in your mind as you fall asleep.  This can trigger the subconscious to start working on that problem straight away.  It knows where to focus and will take up where you left off when you were awake.
• Think about the question you had as soon as you wake up.  Write down any fragments or images or words that come into your mind, however fleeting and irrelevant they may seem.  Take time to try and remember you dreams clearly, and record it in as much detail as possible.
• Persist and persist!  If the answer does not come after one night, do not give up!  Give it time, let your subconscious grapple with all the complexity, let it also try to formulate an answer in a way that in your waking state will make sense to you.  This kind of thinking is a skill, like any other, that requires time and practice to master.

 

Our subconscious mind may find creative solutions our waking mind can't see

But the rewards are well worth it.  Scientific breakthroughs, ideas for great works of art and literature, mathematical equations – all have come to people who cultivated their dreams to help them understand and resolve waking life issues (see “Famous Dreams” post).  But more simple, and yet more profound breakthroughs can happen for all of us on a very personal level.  It might be whether to leave our job, whether this person is the right one to marry, or how to tell someone that significant secret we have been harbouring.  Whatever it is, if we feel lost, confused, and don’t know which way to turn, we can always find support and guidance by looking within, by listening to the voice inside of us, through the special language of our dreams.  We would all do well to heed the advice, and “sleep on it”