Dreams
“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. Much time in spiritual direction training at the Haden Institute at Kanuga involved learning about dreamwork. (Unopened Letters from God: Using Biblical Dreams to Unlock Your Nightly Dreams, Bob Haden) In fact, my present spiritual director always asks me as soon as we meet, “Do you have a dream?”
There are some basic principles in dreams, such as a house represents you and every room an aspect of you. A car represents your personal energy. Every person in the dream represents parts of the dreamer. However, so much of the symbolism may be unique to that person.
Three other friends, some time ago, took a dream group for several years to a women’s recovery center, where most women had a choice of going there or to prison because of alcohol and drug-related abuses. They had had a tough and grief-stricken life. There were women like us, but they did not have the opportunities we had. They were hardened and prematurely aging, but still had a heart of gold. Almost all their dreams had the same pattern, nightmares, being chased by some awful, violent creatures. Our hearts embraced them. Since we only saw them 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. The God of their understanding cared enough to let them know that he knew about their great pain and how badly they had been treated.
In her book, Natural Spirituality (p. 105), Joyce Rockwood Hudson 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 in spiritual direction. Still, as always, dreams must be treated like the soul, held gently, honored as hearing a sacred message from one lover to another.
Joanna joannaseibert.com