How Dreams Help

“Growing numbers of people are fascinated by the dream world. From psychological scholars and analysts to spontaneous groups and cults, the dream has a compelling voice. … I make the point in this book that our dreams are our most creative inner source of wisdom and hope. … The criterion for selection is simply that each one illustrates a common human life experience that all readers have had or are likely to have.” – From the Introduction by the Author


Introduction

The myths that we hold about our dreams are insipid compared to the mythology and spirit revealed in dreams. From time immemorial, people have looked to dreams in fear or hope to foretell the future and guide the dreamer. In antiquity, it was believed that dreams were messages sent by God. There have always been a few extraordinary people who were sought as dream interpreters. Dream stories in the Bible have moral connotations.

To speak of dreams as if they were all one class of marvelous phenomena is as foolish as to discount them all as rubbish. Nobel laureate Francis Crick, physicist and discoverer of DNA, wrote that dreams were like waste being processed or like garbage that should be ignored and discarded. Pure scientists view dreams as manifestations of superstition, magic, and occult phenomena. Psychoanalysis, despite its efforts, has never made the case for being a science.

Contemporary deification of science is a new mythology ruthlessly discounting nonscientific points of view. Yet in this scientific era, supernatural phenomena are increasingly popular in films, theater, song, television, and fiction. Poets, artists, and dreamers conjure up their own truths to spin out-of-this-world experiences.

The Naskapi Indians of Labrador, Canada, live in small nomadic tribes or communities. Their lives depend on the food they hunt. If they did not find food, they starved to death. Their chosen leader relied upon his dreams to direct them to the land where the animals were. The dream was their guiding star. [[The Montagnais-Naskapi Indians are nomadic hunters in Labrador who believe that the animals needed for survival must be revealed in dreams and visions. Each hunter depends on his own dream revelations and [there is] nothing others can do to aid in his survival. Game is so scarce that only two or three families are able to hunt together during the long winter. The oldest man in the group is the leader and his dreams gain insight and power with increasing experience in the ways of the animal. ]]

Growing numbers of people are fascinated by the dream world. From psychological scholars and analysts to spontaneous groups and cults, the dream has a compelling voice. Is it possible that dreams, nightmares, and visions have assumed urgent power because of the dawn of thermonuclear bombs? The decision to drop the atomic bomb out of the heavens was supposedly made and defended by rational arguments such as how many American lives it would save by killing a certain number of Japanese people - a sort of self-evident equation based on a value judgment weighing the numbers of two different classes of presumed human corpses. Destruction was salvation. Perhaps this intellectual argument was the right one, but another type of argument will never end about whether the action was right or wrong. There is an inescapable uncertain moral factor in that decision.

Religious scholars and ecclesiastical and academic authorities build cases for moral decisions on scripture, history, philosophy, biography, and the like. Scientists attempt to frame their works in value-free objective purity - an academic daydream based on the elimination of all dependent variables that would jeopardize the outcome.

I find that many dreams and nightmares of ordinary people are commentaries on morals, values, and ethical judgments - and I should add that abused indefinable concept family values. Usually there is that Jungian "light at the core of darkness." From every corner of the world we hear of horrifying atrocities, genocide, and massacres. To survive, people follow political leaders, dictators, generals - tyrants who dare not submit to self-examinations out of fear of being transformed into brooding, indecisive Hamlets.

Experience tells me that it is a dead certainty that monsters dream of hell. Despite the inhuman appearance of perpetrators of evil, they are human like us - and that is the worst nightmare. No major power politician would want to broadcast an unheroic dark side or the fact of seeing a dream analyst. If these things leaked out, the politician's sanity would be judged as insane.

The hope of the world, I believe, rests in ordinary people becoming enlightened, educated, and healthy by not rejecting the wisdom of the dream in making moral judgments.

I intend to make the point in this book that our dreams are our most creative inner source of wisdom and hope. If dreams are such priceless treasures, their understanding should not be limited to the authority of the professionals (a moral judgment). It is a basic Jungian assumption that our dreams serve the purpose of balancing and correcting our conscious attitudes and opinions. Nonetheless, from long experience, when I refer people to therapists who will interpret their dreams, I send them off saying, "Good luck." There is more than meets the ear in that salutation.

I present my basic dream data as evidence, not proof, of my hypothesis. I acknowledge that my selection is neither random nor unbiased. It includes my dreams, and those of my patients who have given me permission to use them. The criterion for selection is simply that each one illustrates a common human life experience that all readers have had or are likely to have.

The dreams relate to normal life crises, such as birth, adolescence, love, marriage, children, illness, and death. The dream narratives are presented as evolving drama as they unfolded in my presence, with my commentaries as listener. Some distracting dream ramifications have been edited. I readily acknowledge an emotional factor in picking one dream from among many because it appealed to me.

This kind of selection process brought to mind the story of a man who walked to work every day passing an iron railing surrounding a large orphanage. One day, he heard a voice cry out to him, "Daddy!" He turned to see a small boy holding onto the railing with both hands, his face pressed between them. In the playground behind him there were many other orphans. The passing man adopted that little boy. The director of the orphanage told him that the child had been at the railing for weeks calling out, "Daddy."

My intention in writing this book is to convey the enormous power of the dream narrative and to present a dramatist way of retelling the story of selected dreams presented in dialogue with me as analyst. I have no particular interest in selling Jungian, Freudian, or any other method of dream analysis, But I draw on my experience of once having been a Freudian analyst and later becoming a Jungian analyst. I am reporting these dreams as if they were literature and not clinical case studies. It would be a pity if dream work were to fade away from professionals or to fall into the mishmash of the dilettante or to be viewed through high-powered lenses of the microscopes of those scientists who believe in just the facts - a narrow view.

I am fully aware that the majority of Americans have no interest in dreams, and are suspicious of what they have heard. I am writing for people who are curious about human nature in all its ramifications and wonders, good and bad. If you react with the feeling, "But I don't have those kinds of dreams," I ask you, "How do you know that?"

When I assume the mission of ferreting out moral issues in dreams, I am aware that I have already assumed a moral position - that is, I am posing an unanswerable question: "Is my hypothesis that dreams can help one make moral decisions right or wrong?" Only in the court of law or logic can one be forced to answer a question - right or wrong, yes or no. Therefore, I remind myself of the following advice by Huanchu Daoren from Back to Beginnings: Reflections on the Tao: "Don't be too severe in criticizing people's faults; consider how much they can bear. Don't be lofty in enjoining virtue, so people may be able to follow."

Harry Wilmer

Salado, Texas