“The Dream will never tell you something you already know.”
—Robert Johnson.
I have been in a dream group off and on for many years, and much of our time in spiritual direction training at the Haden Institute at Kanuga was also about dreams. (See: Unopened Letters from God: Using Biblical Dreams to Unlock Your Nightly Dreams, by Bob Haden.) In fact, my present spiritual director, Bridget, always asks me as soon as we meet, “Do you have a dream?”
There are some basic principles to understanding dreams, such as the insight that a house represents you, and every room is an aspect of you. A car represents your personal energy. However, so much of the symbolism in a dream may be unique to that person.
Three friends once took a dream group for several years to a women’s recovery center, where most of the women had a choice of going there or to prison because of alcohol and drug- related abuses. The women had led amazingly hard and grief-stricken lives. These were women who had grown up just like the rest of us, but who had not had the opportunities we had. They were hardened and prematurely aging, but still had a heart of gold. Almost all of their dreams had the same pattern: nightmares, being chased by some awful, violent creatures. Our hearts embraced them. Since we saw them only for a brief time, sometimes the best we could say was that the dream was letting them know that the “dream maker,” whom we called God, was letting them know that he or she knew about their terrible situation. There was a God who cared enough to reveal that this God knew how much pain they were in and how badly they had been treated.
Joyce Rockwood Hudson in her book, Natural Spirituality: A Handbook for Jungian Inner Work in Spiritual Community (p. 105), believes dreams are the fullest expression of the unconscious. My experience is that dreams are certainly one of many ways God speaks to us, and can be a powerful tool to use in spiritual direction. However, as always, dreams must be approached as we would handle the soul: held gently, honored as bearing a sacred message from one lover to another.
joanna . joannaseibert.com