More About Dreams

More About Dreams

“If we go to that realm (the inner life or unconscious) consciously, it is by our inner work: our prayers, meditations, dream work, ceremonies, and Active Imagination. If we try to ignore the inner world, as most of us do, the unconscious will find its way into our lives through pathology: our psychosomatic symptoms, compulsions, depressions, and neuroses.”—Robert Johnson in Inner Work, Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth (Harper&Row 1989), p.11.

My spiritual director best helps me, and others, connect with God through dreams. Dreams are certainly one way that God, the dream maker, speaks to us. Studying our dreams is like learning a new language. It is the symbolic language of the unconscious. We connect to the unconscious with dreams, imagination, synchronicity, coincidences, or serendipity.

We study our dreams, learning about the personal symbols that are specific to us. For me, the sea, water, and trees speak most often to me. However, there are also collective symbols that are universal, such as water representing the unconscious, light being our consciousness, a child being the creative part of us, animals representing instincts, vehicles representing energy or how we get along with a car representing our independent energy, and buses, planes, trains being collective energy.  

Dreams also speak in the language of mythology, fairytales, religious rituals, and music.

 Consider learning about dream work as a spiritual practice. Join a dream group. The gold in dreams is more easily and richly mined with the help of others. Two initial books to learn more about dream work are Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, by Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, and Natural Spirituality: A Handbook for Jungian Inner Work in Spiritual Community by Joyce Rockwood Hudson. Both are also excellent books to read together in a group.

If this spiritual discipline interests you, simply keep an electronic or old-fashioned notebook by your bed, write down your dreams as soon as you awaken, and see what happens!

Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Dreams

Dreams

“The Dream will never tell you something you already know.”—Robert Johnson

I have been in a dream group on and off for many years. Much of the time in spiritual direction training at the Haden Institute at Kanuga was devoted to dreamwork. (Unopened Letters from God: Using Biblical Dreams to Unlock Your Nightly Dreams, Bob Haden). Many still see the classic work on dreamwork, Robert Johnson’s Inner Work, as one of the best ways to learn about dreams. 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 representing 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 just 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 briefly, sometimes the best we could say was that the dream was letting them know the “dream maker,” whom we called God, knew about their very difficult 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   https://www.joannaseibert.com/

A Poem For the New Year

A Poem for the New Year

Guest Writer: Karen DuBert

Rocks, Stones, and Pebbles

Is it rocks in your pockets, a stone in your shoe, 

A cloud that envelops whatever you do?

It’s been a rough year for this tilted old world 

Witnessing horrors freshly unfurled.

Each of the pebbles we carried this year 

Is a slanted perspective from things that we hear

From sinister algorithms designed to cause dread; 

Like small, helpless creatures, we’re caught in the Web.

Children are starving and people are maimed 

By missiles and drones and long distance planes,

The heartache is more than our souls can fathom;

We feel so helpless with justice abandoned.

As we search for the Truth, let’s not click on the bait 

Created to make us blind creatures of hate.

Let’s stop for a second, shake the stone from our shoe

Toss the rocks from our pockets–-start this fresh year anew.

Karen DuBert

Joanna Seibert joannaseibert.com