Last night I attended a dream interpretation talk by Len Worley, a writer/speaker/therapist/rolfer/dream worker and Charlottesville resident. Now, regardless of how serious a person you consider yourself, no doubt you have dreams. Sometimes those dreams are magical, fantastical, sexual, and often times seemingly non-sensical. Well, that’s the part that has always tripped me up. I couldn’t believe that these things were just random pictures and stories. They often felt like something to me… I mean they really had a feeling about them as if I was dealing with some emotion through the dream. But that’s the farthest I ever got with interpreting them.
Two recent occurrences made me realize that there was something deeper to dreams. The first was that I read a book by Carl Jung, a man who had analyzed thousands of dreams from thousands of people, in which he stated that many people experience similar scenes in their dreams. For example, a common dream is one involving rotting teeth falling out. I’ve had the tooth rotting dream before myself. Apparently many people do. He went on to theorize about why that is but it’s beyond the scope of this piece. If you’d like to go deep into the dream world theory you can check out “Man and His Symbols” by Carl Jung. The second experience was a chat I had with Len about a dream I had. As he tried to help me understand it, he asked me to describe the place I was standing in the dream. At first I just said, it’s a ledge on a cliff. But he didn’t accept that, he asked me to step into the dream and look around. Sure enough, as I put myself back into the dream, what I thought was a limited view of the place turned out to be an expansive understanding of the place. I could look up and down and back and front and describe the place where I was standing. What I discovered in this moment is that often we think of the place in dreams as what was apparent right in front of us, but when we take a moment to explore deeper we really have a much more detailed awareness of the place. I know this may sound strange to all of my readers interested in business talk, but try it for yourself and you’ll see. We humans have a tendency to generalize when we see, think, or describe a place or event but if you allow yourself to be with the moment your mind opens up to all of the little details around you.
With these two recent revelations about dreams, the opportunity to attend this talk seemed like a good next step to learn more. Last night was a further exploration into what our mind goes through on a regular basis every evening.
There is some science to this: we dream about 2 hours each night, and go through approximately 4-5 REM cycles each night. As we move further into the evening, the REM cycles tend to elongate so that the final REM cycle is about 40 minutes long. We only remember a few seconds of our dreams. All mammals dream.
There was some history: Freud had a theory of dreams that they are just “day residue” – a chance for our subconscious to release the pressures of the days thoughts that we bottle up inside. They meant nothing in particular and were often there to deceive us in some way. Jung broke with this theory, felt that dreams were there to teach us something and were inherently good. To this day, our society largely holds the “day residue” idea and thus most of us “explain away the dream.”
Now for the good stuff – ideas on how to interpret dreams. In good dreams (not disturbing dreams which speak to the “shadow” side of us) the people, places, and things we see are reflecting things about us. With the nouns you encounter in your dreams, your goal is to get to the essence of each. Describe the things you saw in your dream, write down the descriptive words about it. What was the essence underneath those things. For example, what is the essence of a rocky cliff? Solid, earthy, treacherous, beautiful and it might feel challenging if you’re trying to descend it. Once you can get the essence of what you saw, you can ask the question “How am I unlike that?” You ask this because dreams are typically showing you images of your opposite. These are things that your subconscious mind is trying to bring into your life. Those sexual dreams you’ve had? Often times those are showing you ideas of yourself that you want to merge with – ideas that you want to assimilate. Describe the essence of the person you were intimate with and you may find traits about yourself you are trying to adopt.
In all, Len has 10 principles that guide his dream interpretation work. Though he outlined only a couple last night, he will be laying them out in a new book to be released soon. I’ll be sure to mention it when it comes out.
Suffice it to say, even this little bit of insight was a welcome window into the wild world of dreams. Whether you choose to go down the road of interpreting your dreams, whether you want to learn what your subconscious is trying to teach you (which can sometimes be hard to deal with), it is certainly worth opening up to the idea that there just might be something more to learn from them rather than just “explaining them away.” That’s where I stand with it right now and it’s feeling pretty good. I’ve already got last night’s figured out…
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