Taking Dreams More Seriously Than Scientists Do ($)

Dreams are the symbolic process of your subconscious figuring out how it feels.

Whatever your subconscious mind believes, your conscious mind will accept.

In the 1963 book The Power of Your Subconscious, the Irish minister Joseph Murphy wrote, “Whatever your conscious mind assumes and believes to be true, your subconscious mind will accept and bring to pass.”

This is not true. Mr. Murphy is only aware of a superficial aspect of the subconscious disconnected from memories and emotions. You are ruled by your deeper subconscious.

Our shallow subconscious justifies our conscious thought. It is the emotional apologist for our rationalizations. It provides feelings to substantiate our prejudice and ignorance. It provides the words that come out of your mouth when you’re asked why you have certain feelings. It is not very honest.

Murphy is correct that this level of our subconscious does not control our thoughts. But there is a much deeper level to our subconscious that does govern conscious thought. It has access to memories and associations that we do not. It’s this deeper level that plays out dramas in our dreams

You Have No Business Making Sense of Dreams

There is a scientific study of dreams, but it is doomed by its shortsightedness. Objective standards destroy the subjective content of dreams. Science and logic aim to understand the meaning and purpose of dreams by focusing on their content.

This application of reason to what is fundamentally unreasonable is like a direct approach to climbing a greased pole. It would be difficult enough if the logic of dreams was slippery, but it’s not slippery, it’s nonexistent. During dreaming, the parts of our brain involved with reason, otherwise called “executive function,” are less active, while those parts connected with emotional processing are more active (Kahn & Hobson, 2003).

“It may be no coincidence that while our dreams are rich in social behavior, our reasoning about it is impaired.” — David Kahn and J. Allan Hobson (2003, p. 65)

We can accomplish more by examining the role of unreasonableness in ourselves. This is the job for which dreams are the tool. Chaos is the language of dreams, not reason. The difficulty lies in speaking a language that follows the chaos of dreams.

There are Tinkertoy and Lego thinkers who begin their thoughts with intact components. Their preconception is to build on something that’s consistent at the start. From this prejudice and need come questions like, “What does this symbol mean in a dream?” “How do we gain insight from dream recall?” “How might we become lucid in a dream?” and “What is this dream telling us?”

Dreams do not consist of symbols, they consist of implications. They are contextual. A dream image can imply anything, more than one thing, and usually a combination of contradictory things. While we cannot reduce dreams to symbols, we can reduce them to threads. And like threads, their “meaning” lies in the patterns they weave.

To reduce dreams to constructions of separate, symbolic pieces misses both the larger theme and the context. It also misses the dynamic, which is how the dream evolves. The most important information lies there, in what does or doesn’t develop.

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Use your dreams for better sleep and personal growth.