Exploring the Power of Healing Dreams

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Jung made it a point to seek out Hopi Indian elders and African shamans to learn their opinions on the subject. Those conversations contributed to his conclusion that our minds contain not only our own personal unconscious, but also a deeper stratum of universal motifs. How are the contents, which he called the storehouse of relics and memories of the past, transmitted from one generation to the next? Jung seems to suggest that such collective images are contained within what could be called a “nonmaterial sphere of awareness.” For the past 50 years, researchers have used many labels to describe such a sphere, hoping to explain cognitive functions that shouldn't by rights exist: clairvoyant reality (Lawrence LeShan); nonlocality (David Bohm); one mind (Erwin Schrödinger); totality (Jung); mind-at-large (Aldous Huxley); morphogenetic fields (Rupert Sheldrake).

Whatever name or concept one applies, there is pure mystery in how healing dreams appear to draw upon unfamiliar myths and icons, “know” the archaic meanings of words and even, seemingly, display images of the future or the thoughts of distant minds. While these almost occult elements should not overshadow the need for careful, humble psychological work—or for healthy skepticism—it is also no good hiding our heads in the sand, pretending such phenomena don't exist. Some would say that the healing dreams are simply presenting back, in exotic form, our own intelligence: We are talking to ourselves; where else would it come from? But I am persuaded that the tracks of something beyond the egocentric “I” are unmistakable.

It now seems clear to me that any dream theory I've heard is, if not wrong, at least radically incomplete. Any single interpretive strategy is inadequate. To expect conventional psychological theory to explain it all is akin to playing by the rules of checkers when the healing dream is playing four-dimensional chess.

We live in a practical era, one that stresses the productive usage of things. Yet healing dreams are not easily reduced to the utilitarian. Although they offer practical revelation, they have more in common with the realm of art, poetry, and music, where what you “do” with an experience is not the overriding issue. Such dreams open up a gap in the ordinary, allowing something new, and often indefinable, to enter our lives. We can work with our dreams, “unpack” them, analyze them, learn from them. But it is that residue of mystery that gives them enduring power, making them touchstones we return to again and again.

Many people wonder why they should bother with their dreams at all. A common answer is that they will help us with our lives, and this is certainly true. Even the most extraordinary dream, properly investigated, has much to say about bread-and-butter issues like work, love, and health. But the healing dream is less the promoter of our waking goals—material achievement, perfect romance, a modest niche in history—than an advocate-general for the soul, whose aims may lie athwart those of the ego. It is often uninterested in the self-enhancement stratagems we mistake for progress. “It's vulgarizing to say that we can use dreams as tools, like shovels,” a dreamworker once told me. “It's more like the dream uses you.”

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