Why Journal About Our Dreams?

Routes from the visible to the invisible are discovered in acts of attention…our recognition of what lies in the here and now.

                 - Christopher Merrill

Dreams are the rainbow bridge between your waking mind and the deep unconscious, the realm of creativity, myth, and healing.  

Most dreams occur during the REM cycle of sleep, its most restorative phase. Science tells us that our REM dreams - whether you remember them or not - bolster both emotional wellbeing and the associative, problem-solving aspects of creativity.  They selectively 'digest' emotionally charged moments from our day and integrate them into pre-existing memory structures, providing a sense of continuity. They also process troubling or "edgy" events, good and bad, from our waking life, and therefore serve a necessary therapeutic function. All the more reason to get a good night's sleep.

We are just beginning to uncover the important role dreams play in the nightly 'smoothing out' of our private psychologies. Yet the study of dreams, as both science and interpretive art, has flourished for millennia - as has our understanding of their oracular and creative gifts. 

To ancient peoples dreams were gifts from the gods: they contained prophesy and wisdom, diagnoses for body and soul. Surging up through the chinks of a deeper stratum of reality, the dream, if read correctly, could illuminate one's proper place in the cosmos and help to navigate it with a little more finesse. Dreams provided insight into what encumbered our lives and what we could do (or stop doing) in order to thrive. The dream-world ran parallel with and animated our own; actions committed in them had weight and consequence, and their revelations were best obeyed.

I've recorded my dreams since adolescence and been astounded, time and again, by their insight and predictive power. They've served as a kind of 'shortcut' to my unconscious, a window to what it's meditating upon - and where it might be valuable to consciously place my attention. If they don't always foretell concrete events, they communicate and depict a deeper psychic will-to-evolve. What I've come to believe about the nature of dreams is that they reflect a kind of genius - the instinctual movement of consciousness toward wholeness and healing. 

I also find some validity to Jung's taxonomy of dreams as "little" and"big": the former collect fragments of our life and persona, and rub up against the limits of our familial conditioning and sense of social taboo. The latter address big, overwhelming existential questions, and are dredged up from the 'ocean,' or the collective unconscious, and its stories and archetypes. They feed us symbols that activate and lead us from the personal to the mythic. 

To access and translate the content of dreams, you simply need to engage. I've refined a method over the years to work with my own, the Dream Extraction process. (Far less painful than it sounds.) If you're eager to get to the exercise, then please go here. If you'd like a brief history of dream-theory in both science and culture - and how it might serve you - please read on. 

The Science of Dreams

In Why We Sleep, researcher Matthew Walker details the REM-cycle dream phenomenon and its delicate chemical dance, something he calls "overnight therapy:"

"Concentrations of a key stress-related chemical called nonadrenaline [the brain equivalent of adrenaline] are completely shut off within your brain when you enter the dreaming state. REM sleep is the only time during the 24 hour period when your brain is completely devoid of this anxiety-triggering molecule." ¹

Simultaneously, structures of the brain related to emotion and memory are switched on, producing the cascade of images and stories that constitute our dreams. All of this is happening, however, in a "neurochemically calm" or "safe" brain environment (i.e., adrenaline-free). Walker's dreaming-as-therapy model posits that REM-sleep dreams allow us to both harmonise and release daily events:

"[We are] sleeping to remember the details of valuable, salient experiences, integrating them with existing knowledge and putting them in biographical perspective, [and also] sleeping to forget, or dissolve, the visceral, painful emotional charge that had previously been wrapped around those memories. [The] dream state supports a form of introspective life review, to therapeutic ends."

Walker's description called to mind an interview I did several years ago with two clinicians involved in early trials of MDMA therapy. In this modality, patients with acute and chronic PTSD take several doses of MDMA, (commonly known as 'ecstasy') in a controlled environment. The euphoria-inducing drug essentially "offlines" their overworked amygdala, (the part of the brain that controls our fear and survival responses), and allows the patient to process their traumatic experiences in a "safe" brain environment, free, that is, of primal, adrenalised impulses to fight, flee or freeze. 

Walker's research reveals the brain's innate ability to assimilate both novel and difficult episodes in our life, essentially performing a very low-intensity version of MDMA therapy every single night it has uninterrupted REM sleep cycles. Mother Nature, as the old saying goes, doesn't leave us defenceless. As Walker writes:

"If REM sleep did not perform this operation, we'd all be left with a state of chronic anxiety in our autobiographical memory network; every time we recalled something salient, not only would we recall the details of the memory, but we would relive the same stressful emotional charge all over again."

In support of Walker's theory I can add, anecdotally, that extended deep sleep was a common thread I found while interviewing refugees who had had to remain in 'survival mode' for long periods of time. After weeks or months of war-time chaos, forced flight, hunger, loss of family and home, injury and other extraordinary stressors, many of my subjects reported that, once they found shelter, their bodies would surrender to sleep for days on end. One Bosnian woman told me that, upon finally reaching a "safe" camp in Croatia, she slept for more than a week. Others would wake her to administer food and water, but she remained in her cot, "just sleeping and dreaming." I heard similar stories over and over, and wonder now, in light of Walker's research, if the sleep was more than physically restorative, but also allowed their brains to feast on REM-cycle dream states and integrate the harrowing events of their recent past.

There is a caveat to the brain's generous REM-dream gifts, and it occurs in the presence of significant trauma. Walker discovered that the "traumatised brain" will generate repetitive nightmares about a shocking or disturbing event, but doesn't stop the flow of adrenaline during the REM cycle. Rather, the most searing moments will replay ad nauseam, with an acid rinse of anxiety to boot. Some patients, robbed for years of the nurturing benefit of REM cycle sleep and subjected to tormenting dreams, exhaust myriad therapies and medications in pursuit of equilibrium. Hence the use of more powerful compounds like MDMA, that saturate key brain centres with waves of chemical rapture, is truly a healing boon. 

Time spent in dream sleep can begin to heal our wounds, but to receive their daily, therapeutic benefits, dreams must be relevant. They must reflect (albeit obliquely) the emotions and themes of our present waking lives. Walker cites another researcher, Rosalind Cartwright, who looked into connections between dream and 'waking life' content, and their relative benefits:

"Cartwright showed that it was not enough to have REM sleep, or even generic dreaming, when it comes to resolving our emotional past. Her patients required REM sleep with dreaming, [about] the emotional themes and sentiments of the waking trauma." 

A separate study confirmed the importance of 'relevant' dreaming, but added the element of attention and reflection. In this experiment, women going through break-ups and divorces were put into two groups, one control, the other engaged with dream interpretation. Evaluated after a 2-month period for changes in "anxiety, depression, coping, and self esteem," those involved in an active process of dream interpretation showed greater resilience and more promising results in adjusting to the transitions in their lives. The key, however, was making a conscious link between the dream-theme and their present reality.²

Jung's "Little" Dreams

Most dreams are like those detailed above - local and germane - but cloaked in colorful veils that can obscure their hot emotional core. From the many dream journals I've kept over the years, I've learned that paying attention to the emotions I experience in dreams is as important as their narrative or cast of characters. My theory is that the 'plots' of these daily, minor therapeutic dreams are orchestrated - quite ingeniously - to induce powerful sentiments. They reveal what I'm most afraid to feel. Jung referred to them as "little" dreams, elucidated here by Joseph Campbell:

"Little dreams come from a level of dream consciousness that has to do with quite personal complications. They emerge from the level that has come to be known as the unconscious. Little dreams are autobiographical in their character, and there will be nothing in these dreams that you would share with others - you are sorting through the expansion of consciousness as it bumps up against the taboos and "thou shalt nots" of your childhood and infancy."

This last part, regarding the "thou shalt nots," explains why many dreams involve scenarios that conjure strong feelings of social embarrassment and shame. (The naked-but-for-your-underwear-in-public is a classic). Because they have a subtle purgative emotional effect, such dreams are laying down tracks for resolution and transformation. We essentially 'live' through our worst case scenarios of humiliation, abandonment, grief, heart-break, displacement, etc., but benefit the next morning from this nocturnal catharsis. We have a sense of having survived or 'moved through' a particular trial or inhibition. In this way, I believe the psyche, by playing out the fear or restriction, is revealing the dream's inverse: what it's 'outgrowing' or liberating from within, and in what direction it now wishes to evolve.

While the landscape of our "little" dreams might be riddled with self-aware 'taboo,' the dream environment, paradoxically, appears to be distinctly amoral. We do what we would never do in our waking lives. This atmosphere of ethical neutrality and freedom lends itself to another potential benefit, similar to the release of emotional fears: the disclosure of that which we are afraid to know. By dispensing with our waking binaries of right and wrong, good and bad, dreams sometimes reveal truths that our conscious mind represses, the 'reality' of certain situations we keep at bay for fear of disruption or change. 

It's all too human to avoid heartache, even if it means abiding within a lie. I've dreamt of painful betrayals and the ends of relationships and partnerships before they happened, truths my conscious, at times profoundly deluded, mind would strongly resist. Such dreams, however, have a galvanising force - like someone clapping their hands rudely in our face - and can serve as powerful catalysts, should we choose to act. 

"Big" Dreams and Connecting to our Personal Myth

If the "little" dream cracks open our ego defences, forcing us to feel and know what is just below the surface, then Jung's "big" dreams are those that will draw us into even deeper water. Here Campbell describes the more timeless concerns of this realm: 

"There's another kind of dream where you find yourself facing a problem that's not specific to your peculiar life or social or age situation. Rather, you've run up against one of the great problems of man. At such times the psyche and the ego consciousness are forced to wrestle with two huge mysteries: the nature of the cosmos and death. These are what Jung called big dreams.[...] When you face these questions you're in a field of profound problems." ³

These "profound problems," regarding the nature of existence and how to reckon with it, are precisely those that our mythologies endeavoured to address. Myths present the actions of deities, heroines, and legendary ancestors, providing an exalted model for human behaviour. They help us reconcile some of the more tragic and bewildering truths of human life, and thus keep us out of 'analysis paralysis,' orienting us toward bold and effective decisions. The symbols encoded in myth are the 'keys to life,' meant to provoke powerful, unconscious responses, and thus activate part of our ancient memory. 

The "big" dream can be seen as the eruption of the mythical world and its symbols into our often myopic and time-bound one. Such dreams are vivid, yet apparently 'disconnected' from  waking life; as with our "little" dreams, the onus is on us to make them relevant. To awaken their potential, Campbell notes,we are invited to forge a connection with deeper dimensions and befriend their archetypal powers: 

"These symbols stem from the psyche; they speak from and to the spirit. They are in fact vehicles of communication between the depths of our spiritual life and this thin layer of consciousness by which we govern our daily existences. And when those symbols - those vehicles of communication between our greater and lesser selves - are taken away; we are left without an intercom. This split leaves us schizoid; we live in a world up in the head, and the world down below is quite apart."

After the in-between of reflection, action must follow. The creativity of dream analysis lies in the associative mind and its capacity to meaning-making, but also how we apply it to our lives. The "little dream" gives us practice in translating the revelations of one realm to another, priming us for the potentially greater demands and initiations of the "big."

 The Mistress of the Dream-Sea

Dream interpretation served in ancient cultures as a prophylactic against Campbell's "schizoid" split; it provided a way to stay personally connected to the sustaining narratives and symbols of one's environment and orient correctly within them. 

If this seems like a formidable task to undertake alone, then it is perhaps why dream interpretation was an important collaborative ritual in the Ancient Near East. In ancient Sumer, and later Assyria, great distances were travelled by those in search of temple priestesses skilled in oneiromancy. An offering would be made to the priestess to perform a rite, a sacrifice, or administer intoxicants and clear the channel between the 'dreamer' and the gods. The seeker would then sleep in the inner sanctum, where the deity of the temple lived, and the following morning, offer their dream to the priestess for evaluation and diagnosis.  

Dream interpretation has traditionally been a feminine art. The priestess would sometimes act as a conduit, and dream on behalf of a seeker. Seals and clay tablets from this period depict women lying on beds, a tell-tale moon above, a scorpion scuttling below, a supplicant at her feet, keeping vigil. When Enheduanna, the high priestess of Sumer and earliest poet of record, was ousted from her temple, she laments the loss of her role as "unraveler" of the "gift of dreams." 

Indeed, the deity believed to preside over the netherworld of the unconscious was female, Goddess Nanshe, ruler of the "strong dark waters" where shadowy, demonic forces lived. In the earliest cosmologies there was no 'underworld' that personified and contained our shadows or the mysteries of death, only the image of an encircling sea that lapped at the borders of the "known" world. Nanshe's power was to serve as a bridge, a communicator between the city's people and the deep water teeming with both life-giving food and demons. Her domain was an underwater shrine that resembled a maze, a "knot of threads" where the above-ground father gods could visit and ask for her aid. 

Nanshe was, of course, the great Mistress of Dreams, a "dream opener," who could shuttle between the mysterious, dangerous, watery world of the unconscious and the safe terrain of the temple. She was called upon to induce or 'incubate' dreams in those desiring answers to the pressing problems of their lives. In his translation of an ancient Assyrian dream book, Leo Oppenheim details remedial measures prescribed for "bad" or "evil" dreams, noting that such dreams are dangerous "only as long as [they] remains enigmatic, and therefore interpretation is necessary." 

Nanshe's power of "immunity" is instructive of how we can potentially hold our experience of dreams: She was exempt from the grip of the "demons" of the sea/unconscious because she had the power of interpretation. Her practice was to face and engage with the "messages of the night." She dispelled potentially negative potencies by transforming the "demons" of the unconscious into messengers; she turned the dream into meaning and creative action. 

For a process to interpret your dreams, go here.

To Promote Dreaming:

1. Get 7-8 hours of sleep every night, optimally beginning before midnight. This allows your brain to have two cycles each of both restorative deep non-REM, and dream-inducing REM sleep. 

2. We all have multiple dreams every night, but remembering them can be tricky. As you're falling asleep, tell your brain that you will remember the dreams in the morning. It may take a few nights, but if you give the command, eventually it will follow. 

3. The more you actively remember (i.e, write it down), the more you'll remember. Even if you are barely holding on to a few thin wisps of dream content as you awaken, write them down. With each act of recording, you will remember more. A poet once trained herself to write as she was falling asleep and then waking up, eventually creating a whole book of incandescent verse from these twilight zones of consciousness. It can be done. Keep a pen and paper by your bed, or record your memories as a voice note and write them down later. 

4. Don't drink. This isn't just folk-wisdom. Sleep science has confirmed that alcohol inhibits our ability to drop into REM sleep, the cycle that produces the majority of our dreams. From sleep researcher Matthew Walker:

"Alcohol fragments sleep, littering the night with brief awakenings. [though you're usually not aware of them.] Alcohol-infused sleep is not continuous, and therefore not restorative.”

Alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep that we know of. When the body metabolises alcohol it produces by-product chemicals called aldehydes and ketones, which block the brain's ability to produce REM sleep. It's rather like the cerebral version of cardiac arrest, preventing the pulsating beat of brainwaves that otherwise power dream sleep."

The cerebral version of cardiac arrest! Yikes. This sounds extreme, but I admit, does track to my own experience. If I've consumed alcohol, I rarely feel refreshed the next morning, and will often wake up at least once in the wee hours, shot through with anxiety, and have trouble getting back to sleep. Along with a host of other negative effects, including the impairment of: learning capacity, the assimilation of complex memory, and the recalibration of centres used to discern facial expression (which then influences our social-relational acumen), alcohol will also wipe out the brain's magic therapeutic dream powers. 

One has to wonder what effects a prolonged lack of healthy REM has done to heavy-drinking cultures on a collective level over time. As Walker sums up:

"It's hard not to sound puritanical, but the evidence is so strong regarding alcohol's harmful effects on sleep that to do otherwise [advising us, that is, not to drink] would be doing you, and the science, a disservice." 

5. Sleep in a cold room. The REM cycle apparently loves a more Nordic atmosphere. I find my sleep is deeper and my dreams more vivid in the middle of winter, central heating off, window cracked. 

6. This last is a more complex, not a quick-fix but an ongoing practice, and perhaps the most vital. It is to "activate the imagination," a creative process in which you 'play' as an adult with what has always had a strong intuitive pull for you. What does that mean?  Joseph Campbell describes the process through which Carl Jung began to access his own unconscious, and "seek out his own myth:"

"His process of discovery is interesting in that it was so childish. Here he as, 37 years old, and he asked himself, 'What was it I most enjoyed doing as a little boy when I was alone and allowed to play? As it turned out, what he liked to do was put rocks together and make little cities out of stone. 

So he said, I'm a big man now, I'll play with big stones. He bought himself a piece of property in a beautiful place on the lake opposite the city of Zurich. He began planning and building a house in this lovely place, Ascona, and as he worked with his hands, he activated his imagination. 

You can't do this by taking suggestions from someone else. You must find that which your own unconscious wants to meditate on. With his imagination activated, Jung found all kinds of new fantasies coming, dreams of all kinds. He began making records of what he had dreamed and then amplified it by all kinds of associations. 

He found that his dreams were becoming important to him and very rich; he began writing about his dreams in a little journal. He put down each silly impulse, each theme that came up in his dreams. He recorded the dreams so as to bring them up to his consciousness, and as he kept the journal, the underlying images began coming through. Then he would make pictures of some of the dreams, always in a very solemn way. It was his ceremonial, ritualistic exploration of the place from which the mystery of his life came."  

Now, you don't have to build a lake-front property in the Swiss hills in order to activate your imagination. The magic of this practice is that it is unique to your life, and will often seem entirely irrational. You must simply use Jung's question:

"What was it I most enjoyed doing as a little child when I was alone and allowed to play?" 

If that feels unavailable, you can also begin by following any genuine impulse toward play - even if it seems ludicrous: archery, tap-dancing, open-water swimming, sculpture, exploring the woods, forming sand into castles. Anything. Anything. Whatever the impulse, don't shut it down, just follow it. Find a way to practice and embody it. 

This is a strange, nonlinear practice, not a direct route - but it will take you very quickly where you need to go. It's likely you'll only be able to recognise its underlying wisdom in retrospect. Then, see what dreams may come, and do the work of connecting and making them relevant to your life. 

To start your dream-interpretation process, go here.

[1] Walker

[2] Falk, D. R., & Hill, C. E. (1995). The effectiveness of dream interpretation groups for women undergoing a divorce transition.

[3] Campbell, Joseph