Dreams and What Can be Learned from Them

An ancient Greek concept: we hurtle through life with our backs to the future, able to see only what is past, never what is to come.

Dreams have fascinated me throughout my adult life. They seem so mysterious, and I have always wanted to understand them. Do they truly have meaning, beyond simply your unconscious organizing and clearly out the experiences of the day? I wondered why some stayed with me, seemed to be important while most I never, or only partially, recall after waking.

I thought there must be a reason for that and was thrilled to learn that Carl Jung had developed his own interpretation of dreams, and the archetypes he discovered that helped him to understand them in his own work. I have read much of his what he wrote on dream interpretation but claim no special expertise in understanding them.

I just wanted to understand my own and whether they did have something to teach me. I especially enjoyed studying his thoughts on the subject and how closely his archetypes meshed with some of the archetypes discussed by Joseph Campbell in his book Myth and Mythology, a great book I used in my Religious Studies program at university.

That book holds a prominent place on my bookshelf, as do Jung’s works. Admittedly, Carl Jung’s work is denser to read, more for study than pleasure reading, as opposed to Joseph Campbell’s easier to read prose. But I have found both to be of great help in my own life.

Many years ago, I contracted an illness, a disease for which it was too late to cure and was told I could expect to live for no more than a year, or maybe two. On the drive home from the doctor’s office, I cried, of course, angry that it had happened to me. I stopped at the grocery store on the way and when I got home and I made myself a German chocolate cake, which is what my mother had made for me on my birthday every year when I was a child. I wanted, I needed, something comforting and ate half of that cake that same day.

A house, in Jungian dream analysis, is the archetype for body. More particularly, the body/ego structure in which one currently resides. It is everything referred to by the personal pronoun “I”.

I dreamed, it was dark, it was night, and I was walking someplace, carrying a blanket, my blanket. I carried my blanket, my covering, and my legs got weak, like rubber, no strength at all.

I was looking for my place; I carried my blanket and kept looking, kept searching, growing ever weaker. I did not think I would make it. I could not find my place, and I realized that I had no house. I was homeless. I lay down in the dark, behind a warehouse, blanket crumpled in my arms.

I dreamed, I was in my house, not my real house, but in my dream, I knew it was my house. The house was ragged, falling apart. Broken windowpanes clung to their frames, the drywall had fallen off most of the interior walls, so they had no covering, just a few ragged pieces hanging from the wall studs, leaving the walls mostly hollow, the studs exposed. I climbed between two of the wall studs and onto the stairs behind, then walked up the stairs to the attic. A man was there, working on a table saw, and with a circular saw, cutting new boards. I wondered how he was using the saws because I knew the house had no electricity.

“How are you doing that?” I asked him. “There’s no power in this house.”

The man looked up from his work, a sort of knowing smile on his face. “I don’t need the power of this world”, he said and went back to work.

Then I am outside the house, floating at roof level, looking down at the barren front lawn, and new grass begins to grow, fills in and lush green grass quickly covers what had been dead, like spring greening after a long winter, and I felt it in my soul, I knew a new season had begun.

Jung equated the growth of new grass as meaning a new season in one’s life.

And I know I was fortunate to get a new season, to get far more time than I expected thirty years ago.

And I am thankful for every day I have been given. I know many people do not want to acknowledge their birthday, do not want the reminder that they are yet another year older.

But I celebrate every birthday I have as a gift, a day to rejoice in the fact I have lived another year, a year I never expected to see. Each birthday, each day, is a day of happiness for me, a day for which I am thankful.

I am glad to grow older, I welcome the gray hair, the growing difficulty of doing things that were once so easy, knowing the alternative would have been so much worse.

I celebrate life despite its sorrows because I can experience its joy.

I rejoice, because I am alive.

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

This was originally posted on Medium.

Thank you for reading this short piece and I hope you enjoyed it. I have other stories and poetry written and more to write, along with my thoughts on issues of the day, spirituality, religion, politics, and more. You can subscribe to Vocal using my link and see all new work as I publish it and you can also read the thoughts, stories, and viewpoints shared by thousands of writers. And part of the money from every membership helps us all continue to publish and share our work.

I can also be found on Medium, Simily, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

I hope you enjoy my work, and a small tip will help me to continue writing.