Dreams

A bunch of irritating dreams last night, or one irritating dream with a lot of irritating interconnected parts. I suppose that dreams are very often addressing matters that we don't like to think about during our waking hours, so the mind says "Okay, I'll think about it while you're asleep."

I have long been persuaded that the unconscious mind is driven by a blunt sort of wisdom and compassion, a will to counsel the waking man from the unfettered, unpolluted fountain of his inner parts. The dream speaks in the tongues of angels, so to speak, through symbol and archetype and image, and addresses matters in ways that the conscious mind might find inappropriate or grotesque or foolish or shameful.

There was a time when I was a younger man, and after much reading of the works of Carl G. Jung, that I would set a notebook and pencil on the table beside my bed such that I might immediately note down the particulars of a dream upon waking--even if I happened to awake from the dream in the middle of the night. This hobby, however, soon became rather too exhausting.

Nowadays, I will turn the thing over in my mind when I awake, noting the most striking images or plotlines, such that I will not instantly forget them, and then as the day goes on, the parts will generally fall into place under the watch of an analytic appraisal, producing, on a good day, a number of "Oh yeah, I see" moments.

Very often, the dream will be addressing just exactly what you had been thinking about before you went to sleep, although this will often be less than apparent at first, given the different vocabulary of the unconscious voice. Often enough, as well, the intent of the dream will be to convey an appreciation of how very foolish your conscious thoughts of the night before had been!

Beware--Iron clad judgements may collapse into little mounds of sand; clever, foolproof schemes may drift away like steam. But it's okay, really. It's all for the best.