Attending to Your Dreams ($)

If your intellect draws your focus, and your emotions motivate you, then dreams are your recollection of who you are.

“Before embarking on a journey it is always important to take stock, consider the destination, what will be required and that you have it available.”
― Martin Milton, ecopsychologist (2009)

We follow Milton’s advice in waking life, but in dreams, we never do. Dreams are what happen when we don’t plan; when we let the conscious container dissolve.

I tell the people I work with in counseling that they should attend to their dreams, but I don’t think people know what this means. In most cases, people cannot attend to dreams because they have no relevant connection to them. How does one attend to something whose meaning escapes you?

Dreams speak to us at a level below our emotions, at the level of our identity. They are like vandals swinging baseball bats at the mailboxes of perception. They grapple with your identity, so that attending to one’s dreams means paying attention to who you are.

Last night, I had a dream full of symbols from my distant past. The symbols addressed the issue of the viability of myself. Most dreams involve strange characters and situations whose context, while clear at the time, escapes us upon reflection. This dream involved strange ideas which I could not verbalize.

If you consider how you think about yourself and your world, you’ll notice that your memory settles in layers. The top layer is your memory of connected events. Below that are your feelings and attitudes. The next layer down is your focus, maintenance of attention, and executive function.

Near the bottom of your personality lies your sense of self. This is a combination of memories, associations, feelings, and ideas all slightly out of reach. They must be out of reach, or else they’d be subject to change as the result of current events. Your personality must be protected, out of the wind, and relatively indifferent to the flow of feelings and ideas.

Dreams tend to muck-about at this lowest level. Their lack of sense and difficult recollection protect our personality from being otherwise disrupted. If you lived with clear dream recollection and their chaotic emotions, you’d be schizophrenic during your waking hours.

Relax and Float Downstream

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If you’d like to explore dreamwork for growth and healing, speak to me.

https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/schedule15

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