On the Way

Intention:
Tonight, I will remember my dreams.
Tonight, I will have many dreams.
Tonight, I will have good dreams.
Tonight, I will wake up within my dreams.
— Modified from Holecek, Dream Yoga

One of the most difficult parts of travelling through dreams, studying them, understanding them, is encountering them with an open mind. We are all raised in cultures with a long history of trying to understand dreams because they’re such an integral aspect of human experience, and furthermore, because they are ostensibly laden with symbolism and emotion – i.e. personal and cultural meaning.

From my own Western cultural background, for instance, Freudian and Jungian interpretation dominate the hermeneutic playing field. Not to shortchange these approaches, but if we are to ever really understand dreams — dance with them and explore the dreamscape — we have to let go of the simple authority of such dogmatic and rigid culturally historied interpretations (without the self-reflective ability to trace out the cultural and historical developments that led to these interpretations). In this line, I’ve found a phenomenological approach to understanding dreams to be very helpful because instead of positing universal, ontological symbols and then muting the dreamer when he or she disagrees, it relies on pushing the dreamer to tease out his or her own understanding of the elements in the dream based on his or her daily waking life. Dreams are taken as meaningful here, but they are personally meaningful rather than asserting tropes that are universally of the same significance, independent of the mind at hand.

Also, I’m compelled by Tibetan dream yoga’s understanding which delineates different types of dreams, indicating more depth and terrain to the dreamscape. There are three types: samsaric, insight, and primordial light. The interesting thing is that the vast majority of dreams in this categorization is of the first type: samsaric. This means that they’re dreams animated by the delusion in which we live our lives — the delusion of not being awakened, of not seeing the true nature of the universe. As such, these dreams, though laden with personal meaning, don’t have any more profound revelation to share — they are our thoughts, feelings, ideas, and half-cognitions writ large and allowed to fully express themselves. This doesn’t make them meaningless, rather a story about ourselves to ourselves without revealing the greater truth of the world. The other two levels of dreams are required for that greater scope of insight and are rarer.

These aspects, different perspectives on dreams, have led me to reevaluate my dreams on a more personal and intimate level — taking them to reveal much about myself but not jumping to greater conclusions just due to the fact that they feel very compelling. Holding them with this dynamic of piqued interest but only light seriousness has left me wondering what to make of the more charged emotional undertones which can pull and color the whole experience of a dream.

I recently had a dream that had a very strong emotional message which stays with me, even still coloring my daily experience several days later. It reveals feelings that were pushed aside, not actively engaged in my waking life. What does an onerionaut make of such personal, emotional insights? The dreamscape offers the opportunity to recognize them and address them well — integrating them into daily life with reverence and respect (as maybe they were withheld for some good reason and couldn’t readily be skillfully integrated without some effort and care). There’s such opportunity even in samsaric dreams, to better know ourselves in our lives and to better engage in our worlds. The only question is how to do so when these opportunities come up.

May this help you in your own interpretation of dream and investigations of your dreaming life.

Gassho!