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Dreams guide and illuminate us
By Lidia Fassio
They accompany us, inform us, anticipate what our conscience understands, and this is because they come from that part of us that knows who we are and what we really must become. It is in fact from this point of view that they manage to cross the borders of the watchful part of the conscience to manage to suggest to us what would be the best path to take and which "archetypes" are activated inside us. In a word dreams are "illuminating".
Dreams have their language; they do not speak the language of the rational mind and nor do they follow logic, and neither are they interested in logical processes; at least not in the sense that we normally give to the word "logical"; they do not allow themselves to be crammed into any patterns and do not comply with the canons of “linear time” or those of “definite space”: in short, dreams are a bit anarchic, without intending to submit to the tyranny of the left part of our brain, and they move on a completely different territory that needs reports.
C. G. Jung asserted that dreams are devoid of distortions and therefore they are provided with their own deliberateness; they have the power of summarising experience through images: in this way they contribute in a fundamental way to individual development; for him dreams were the best route to comprehend the unconscious.
Each one of us should make an effort to remember and to understand dreams because they can be very indicative of particular phases of our life in which prodigies of meanings and solutions appear; in fact our unconscious uses this tool to manage to integrate what is ready to be integrated.
Even when we do not remember dreams it can happens that some have an emotional intensity that they remain particularly impressed, and certainly a particular dream may connected with something precise that the unconscious wants to bring to our attention.
dreams can also manifest themselves based on our specific request: when we do not manage to understand anything, or when we are looking hopelessly for an illumination in order to take an important decision, we can go to bed asking our unconscious to allow us to "dream" something that is explicative.
The incredible thing is that it works and that is a unique tool and absolutely in line with us, which demonstrates to us that the unconscious participates in a decisive way in our development, and contrary to what many people think, it is interested in succeeding in its intention, because when it understands it then it transforms itself, the whole personality, and the whole psychic system makes a sudden improvement.
Dreams can accompany us in the phases of a big transition, and sometimes, the symbols that emerge are collective, and this is because they represent details of our conscience through which each human being tests himself/herself.
For example, the passage from childhood to adolescence that is seen by many people through a dream of a “house move”; obviously the house is our personality and, in such an important phase, “to change it” is absolutely necessary, and the image of a move is the most appropriate one for this phase.
The beginning of psychological therapy often coincides with dreams of “journeys“ that can be in cars or in trains; journeys in which you find yourself alone, perhaps because someone accompanies you to the station but then does not get on board with you, or a journey on which at a certain stop the person who is with us gets off and forces us to continue: a symbol that that means a “particular journey” which needs to be made without anybody at your side and that, in relation to therapy, it means our personal path.
The difficulties of dreams are in their reports: if they try to be interpreted by the rational mind it realises it that this is impossible: dreams must be "understood" at another level, a symbolic one. They speak in images and metaphors. The most interesting thing is that they always represent dimensions of the psyche of the dreamer, and even when we seem to be represented by images of known or unknown persons they always refer to us, to our internal parts that have already been seen or that are still in the background.
An important suggestion is that of writing down your own dreams, or at least, in the morning when you wake up, to write the fragments that are still in your memory. The best thing to do is to always have a paper notebook and a pen on the bedside table so as to be able to immediately record the impressions and the memories that are still present before they disappear completely.
If we do not remember our dreams it means that they are subject to the work of censuring mechanisms that it good to start getting round.
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