by Stephen Martz
King Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a magnificent “tree at the center of the earth.” It is “great and strong” and “from it all living things were fed.” Suddenly, a “holy watcher, coming down from heaven,” cries out: “Cut down the tree and chop off its branches, strip off its foliage and scatter its fruit” (Daniel 4).
Earlier in the Bible, Pharaoh dreams of seven “fat and sleek cows” emerging from the Nile only to be eaten by “seven other cows” that “came up after them” and were “poor, very ugly, and thin” (Genesis 41).
If one of these dreams had been yours, would you know what to make of it? Neither of these ancient dreamers, great and accomplished though they were, could get a handle on his dream, and both turned to interpreters—Nebuchadnezzar to Daniel, Pharaoh to Joseph—to gain understanding.
Experiencing a connection between their inner and outer lives, our ancestors in faith tended to take their dreams seriously. As Western interest moved more to the outer world, the inner world was increasingly neglected and its preeminent product, dreams, became “God’s forgotten language”—a phrase coined by the Jungian analyst and Episcopal priest, John Sanford. Only the poets, artists, and assorted mystics continued to speak the old language.
This is no longer the case. Dissatisfied with a faith based on intellect and doctrine alone, and seeking a more direct experience of God, many people today explore the mystical practices and traditions of Christianity and other religions. The inner life is back—and with it, a lively interest in dreams.
Although Daniel and Joseph were interpreting dreams long before there were psychoanalysts, it was the birth of psychoanalysis that especially sparked the comeback of the inner life.
The renewed interest began with Sigmund Freud, who in 1899 famously wrote that dreams were “the royal road to the unconscious.” His one-time disciple, Carl Jung, has been even more influential. With an approach to dreams broader and more religion-friendly than Freud’s, Jung has become a key resource for the spiritual renewal movement and spiritual directors. The interest in dreams, the unconscious, and the inner life may be livelier today than at any period since biblical times.
Life-changing dreams
What about you? Do you take your dreams seriously? Should you? You bet! Just think. If Joseph of Nazareth or the three wise men had ignored their dreams, Jesus would have perished as a young child and Christianity would never have been born. Or if Pilate had attended to his wife’s dream and dismissed the charges against Jesus, imagine how startlingly different our theology would be. Dreams can change the world.
They can change our lives, too. A few years ago, a woman in my parish, “Mary,” told me of a dream she had just had. In it, I had invited her and her husband to a seminary class I was teaching. Her husband was confused by the subject matter, but she smilingly declared, “I liked it.”
A recent convert to the Episcopal church, Mary had never seriously considered a call to ordained ministry. But when I noticed that one of the students in her dream’s seminary class was also named Mary, I suggested we talk more about the dream. As we did, Mary became aware of God’s call to her in a new and unexpected way, and she is now engaged in a formal discernment process that may lead to seminary and ordination.
What has been most important about her dream is not that it might lead her to seminary, but rather that it has led her to abundant life. Like most of us, Mary was going through life living primarily from her conscious mind, unaware that there was more to her than “I,” or what Jung called the “ego.”
The dream asked her to pay attention to something greater than “I.” This something wanted her to listen to its desires and to stop living by ego alone. This was difficult at first for Mary. She has a strong-willed ego, but she is learning, and so is her ego, how much richer life can be when we live with and from something greater than the ego.
What is that something? Jung calls it the Self, and identifies it with the archetypal God image, what most Christians would understand as the imago Dei (image of God) dwelling within each person. He suggests that fullness of life comes when ego and Self—many Christians might translate these as will and imago Dei—are in right relationship. Our lives become disordered when one or the other becomes too dominant.
The language of dreams
My favorite way to think about dreams is that they help us to stay in balance, frequently bringing to our attention those things that we overlook or dismiss. They help us remember what we tend to forget. Another helpful image, as a colleague puts it, is that dreams are X-rays of the soul. They tell us what’s going on inside.
Of course, not all of us are great at speaking foreign languages or reading X-rays. Sometimes the language of dreams—image and symbol— seems exotic and unfamiliar. Other times, reading those X-rays that are filled with strange images, obscure references, and nonsensical plots may seem daunting. But with patience, resolve, and a willingness to let go, most of us can learn to understand our dreams.(back to top)
Keep in mind the idea of balance. A man dreamed he was in a kitchen searching for a bowl in which to mix light and dark liquids. When I heard this dream, it gave me goose bumps. The dreamer, a highly accomplished professional, had responded to an abusive childhood by developing a one-sided perfectionism that minimized the darker, “bad” parts of his being, and the dream image signaled a willingness to begin blending the light and dark of his personality and personal history. That’s exciting, because as he does, his perfectionism will modulate, and he’ll be able to embrace his humanity and find greater happiness.
The mixing of light and dark requires a container, says the dream. I believe the container image refers to a new and stronger self, a soul or psyche able to hold together the light and dark of his very human being. All of us must learn to accept our strengths and flaws as part of a single personality, and so this dream speaks of both the dreamer’s personal challenge and a universal human task.
Recovering a lost part
A woman recently reported a dream in which her schoolroom was overrun with rats, some living, most dead. It was a graphic image of darkness and disease, which reflected a conservative religious upbringing that had sought to squelch her creativity and sense of wonder. She has worked hard in analysis to free herself from the spell those religious voices cast in her psyche—voices telling her that she is “bad” for wanting to follow her own path, and the dream showed that hard, often distasteful work. In it, as in life, she must patiently shovel the dead rats from her psyche while catching and setting free the live ones. Doing this task will allow her to remake her room—her psyche—into a warm, clean, personal space.
In a similar vein, dreams can sometimes be about recovering a lost part of ourselves, or repairing a severed relationship. Dreams often seek to connect or reconnect parts of ourselves. Another woman presented a detailed dream that included a child that was mummified or in a cocoon state. In response, she was to marry a young man and with him care for the child.
One technique I find helpful in interpreting dreams is to think of each figure or thing in a dream as a part of the dreamer’s psyche. Though not all dreams work this way, many do. If we think of this dream in that way, perhaps the dreamer’s task is to care for the child within her. To do so, the dream may be saying, she will need not only her “feminine” self, but also the help of “masculine” parts of her.
A man in his 50s whose alcoholic father died when he was a teen dreamed of an extended family gathering to honor his father. The father, spotting his son, crossed the crowded room to tell him how proud he was of him. Some would interpret this dream as a kind of wish fulfillment in which the psyche of the dreamer, not getting what he longed for in life, concocted the image to make the dreamer feel better. Fair enough, but not far enough. For, as we’ve talked about that dream over several years, it has become clear that it was primarily about uniting two parts of the dreamer’s personality.
This raises a fascinating question: Where do dreams come from? Are they simply the product of the psyche, built from the stuff of the dreamer’s daily life and relationships, repressed desires and forgotten memories? Or are they in some sense transpersonal, coming to us from outside the boundaries of the individual human personality?
In my view it’s not a simple either/or. Some dreams certainly are the product of the individual unconscious. Others come to us from places we do not know, speaking of things and using a symbolic language to which we never have been exposed. Still others include both elements.
Balance and wholeness
The most intriguing dreams usually are those that emerge from what Jung called the collective unconscious. To illustrate, let’s return to Mary’s dream. As it continued, she noticed a second student named Diana and saw me, the teacher, with bandages covering my eyes.
Mary did not recognize the Diana of her dream as the Roman goddess of the hunt and the moon or link my bandaged eyes to the blind Greek prophet Tiresias, who has well-known encounters with Hera, Odysseus, and of course Oedipus. As Mary’s journey has continued, however, it has become apparent that she requires the energies Diana represents. Similarly, she has needed me to be Tiresias to her. She also, startlingly, had caught an unconscious glimpse of my soul, for Tiresias has been an important inner figure for me for more than 20 years.
All of this may seem a long way from Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh, but it’s really not. The human journey toward abundant life demands that we seek balance and wholeness, and our dreams can be an important part of this effort.
The dreams of Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh remind us of the human tendency to become one-sided. As prophetic dreams, they also reminded those dreamers—and now remind us—that what we do not attend to in our inner lives will make itself known in our outer lives.
The Rev. Stephen Martz is an Episcopal priest in parish ministry (www.onebreadonebody.org) and a Jungian analyst in private practice (www.jungiananalysischicago.org).