Page 23 - NAMAH-Jul-2020

Namah The transcendent function of dreams

archetypal and mythological associations, back and forth between personalities and
not just from one culture, but the world over. not force an answer from the ‘other’. Yet it
works, and with practice, one gets better at
Dialoguing with our dream bypassing the observer-commentator ego and
letting the active imagination unfold. There
Not only is dreamwork an exercise of is a psycho-spiritual reason for the success
associations, a dream can be passed through in dialoguing, as Kaplan-Williams explains:
the prism of language and be processed as
a dialogue, for language too hides symbolic “From my own experience and as well as
clues. Psychologist Erich Neumann says, other’s experiences, I can say that dreamwork
“And because the symbol-forming process of is soulwork. That somehow, somewhere there
the unconscious is the source of the human is a more central part of ourselves than we
spirit, language, whose history is almost usually know who welcomes the chance to
identical with the genesis and development speak to us….
of human consciousness, always starts out as
a symbolic language (6).” This is why dream “A dialogue is a relationship between a
analysis asks us to pay attention to the words known and an unknown. Dialogue penetrates
we use to describe dream objects. If we hear mutual isolation. We have the choice to listen
proper names of people and places, they are perpetually only to our known selves, or to
important clues; just as images and their size, take the leap towards a relationship with the
colour, texture and positions are. stranger who stands in the corner waiting for
us to wait no longer. Every dialogue is a reach
We can ensoul a dream object or dream into the unknown where we listen to more
personality by dialoguing with it, using active than the echo of our own solitary being (8).”
imagination. We can ask it why it showed
up in our dream. Why it did what it did. Taxonomy of dreams
What is it feeling, what does it need from
us?We speak as the dream object; then we Dream experts in all cultures have paid
return to our dream-ego, and speak as our special attention to dreams as a means for
self. We allow full freedom to the dream reaching a non-ordinary state of consciousness.
object. Kaplan-Williams shares the magic of Dreams have been interpreted by spiritual
dialogues in his chapter called ‘Dialoguing masters, medical healers, medicine men,
with dream images’: shamans and oracles. Various classifications
of dreams have been done by many dream
“What an exciting possibility it is not to have specialists. Let me classify them in three
to always try and be in control of everything, categories by the roles they play in our lives.
but to be able instead to follow, to work with, At the basic level, they prepare us to survive
to create together a life direction superior in by providing us with: prospective warning
meaning to anything the ego can consciously dreams; making us practise fight, flight,
manufacture itself! (7).” falling; urging us to propagate our genes;
enhancing our creative faculty; providing
It is hard to believe that a person can switch solutions to problems. In the second level,

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