Exploring the Power of Healing Dreams

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But we're “used” only if we're willing to dwell for a time within a dream's ambiguities without resolving them. In some cases, we may not be meant to solve the mystery, at least not right away. Rather, it means to solve us. Solve comes from the Latin solvere, “to loosen, release, or free.” It is the same root as in the word solution—one of whose meanings is the dissolving of individual ingredients into a greater whole. In dreams our narrow selfhood is loosened; the ego experiences itself as an element in something larger.

No interpretive task is more dicey, more fraught with peril and promise, than depending on dreams in crisis. We are being confronted with an ancient, urgent question: not merely What does the dream mean, but What does the dream want? Here, when our lives may be at stake, dreams persist in their symbolic utterance (though sometimes the dreams themselves get fed up with the bobbing and weaving of metaphor and opt for a gloves-off punch in the eye). Even more troubling, healing dreams may ultimately care as much, or more, for our spiritual growth as for our physical survival. In the case of illness, for instance, our only reasonable goal should be how to get better; but dreams seem to insist, over and over, that it is not enough to cure our physical maladies. Become well for what purpose? they inquire, sharply, persistently. To what end?

I've puzzled over my dreams, cherished them and run from them, and when I couldn't figure them out, saved them as one would save stray bolts in a junk drawer, wondering if they might someday prove valuable. But to take dreams seriously—enough to act on them, to live by them—is potentially subversive. Dreams smash down the barricades: They admit all, proscribe nothing, view life through a different moral aperture. They do not always flatter us. They are a mirror of human imperfection, held before the face of our most burnished ambitions. They may scare us: A nightmare is a concrescence of our most private terrors. But even a purely exhilarating dream, a flight to the heavens astride a winged horse, stirs a different sort of unease—a suspicion that we may harbor an unrealized greatness, a potential that, if we dared fulfill it, would bring an end to ordinary life.

These days, I try to listen to my dreams, even for critical decisions, though such a provisional reliance on phantasms may mark me for a fool. I can't help but see life in a binocular way, through night eyes as well as day sight, and this changes everything—my relationships to others, to myself, to reality in general. Some dreams, I think, area form of reality. These don't seem “dreamy” in the normal sense, denoting things that are wispy and indistinct. To the contrary, they make the everyday seem cloudy, evanescent. The closer I look, the more my dreams seem to insist upon the same spiritual onus: You must live truthfully. Right now. And always.

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