Our Dreams Are Deeply Meaningful?

Some of the clients I work with bring their dreams into our sessions for analysis. These are often significant as they help us gain a greater understanding of our unconscious lives.

We are all familiar with 'stress' dreams, where we might find ourselves being chased by monsters, or falling out of a plane with no parachute! In such encounters, the expression of 'fear' is the important part, and less so the different constituent parts of the dream itself.

For more complex dreams, I often turn to Jungian Analysis (named after the Psychiatrist Carl Jung). In this approach symbolism is important, and we ask the question, what is the context of the dream, and who/what are the characters in it? The key point is that the symbolism is understood in a deeply personal way - so we need to be cognisant of that individuality. So, for example, if I had a tea pot in my dream, I would likely have a very positive association with it - I love tea! However, for someone who may have been scalded by hot tea as a child, may have a negative association.

Viktor Frankl, the founder of the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy (Logotherapy & Existential Analysis), had remarkable insight into the relationship between dreams and what he termed ‘The Unconscious God’. His understanding, developed through empirical investigation, was that we all have a hidden relationship with a hidden God, and that dreams are one way in which we can make that dynamic conscious.

I would suggest though, that the concept of 'God' is a wide-ranging one, and again, open to personal interpretation. We can hold that tension together, in our minds, and also in the therapy room. What matters are the free associations we make during the process, and the insight and meaning we derive from them.

Anyway, back to Frankl who made the following observations In his book, ‘The Unconscious God; Psychotherapy and Theology’:

‘Genuine religiousness, for the sake of its own genuineness, hides from the public. That is why religious patients often do not want to deliver their intimate experiences (dreams) into the hands of people who would perhaps lack understanding and thus misinterpret them. Such patients may be afraid that a psychiatrist will try to ‘unmask’ their religiousness as ‘nothing but’ the manifestations of unconscious psychodynamics, of conflicts or complexes’.

Frankl goes on to point out that occasionally, ‘flagrantly religious motifs’ appear ‘in dreams of people who are manifestly irreligious. because we have seen that there is not only repressed and unconscious libido (bodily needs, or Freud’s id), but also repressed and unconscious religio‘ (spiritual needs).

So, our dreams are important, and in Franklian psychology they provide insight into the spiritual and religious aspect of our lives, and when they are made conscious, they can assist us in exploring wider meaning in any given set of circumstances.

Finally, although the theory of dream interpretation can seem rather dense and complex, not to mention highly subjective, it can open up the therapeutic journey for those who wish to delve deeper.

If you wish to discuss this further in the context of personal therapy, please fill in the 'Contact Me' form and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

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