“Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth….” – Carl Jung
When asked why so many indigenous cultures have animals in their creation myths, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously replied that “animals are good to think with.” And because, as Jung says, dreams are “pure nature” and “they show us the unvarnished, natural truth,” I contend that dreams are likewise, “good to think with.”
People frequently ask me if I “believe” in dreams, but I tell them that this is not the right sort of question. I tell them that faith is not required. The only faith required for working with dreams this way, is a kind of psychological faith that understands “psyche is not out to get me.”
Let me give you an example of this. Think back to when you have read a novel. Now think of a character in that novel. When you put the book down to answer the phone, let’s say, or when the book ends, what happens to that character? Does he or she cease to be? Or were you able to hold the character somewhere in your imagination while you talked on the phone, and even now, as you read this? Yes. So although the character needs to be written in a “believable” way, one is not required to “believe” in the existence of the character outside the world of the novel in order to read the book and get something out of it. In other words, if the author has done a good job, the character created makes an impression on you, an impression that, if it’s to have any personal meaning, lasts and lends itself to your particular imagination. How you see and understand that character will be different, for example, than how I see and understand that character. And how you see and understand that character when you are 20 years old, let’s say, might be quite different from how you might see the same character 20 years later. In other words, we see and understand others based on our uniqueness and our unique experiences.
It’s the same with dreams and dream images. We are not required to believe in them in order for them to be able to make an impression on us, for them to call out to our imagination. And it’s precisely these kinds of imaginal relationships that we open ourselves up to when we tend our dreams using an archetypal approach. For more information or to schedule your free introductory dream-tending session, call 661-288-1901 or email: dreamtending@gmail.com.