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Thriving Together Series

Thriving Together Series: Well-Being and Our Dreaming Minds

 

By: Mark Thurston, Ph.D., associate professor in Mason’s School of Integrative Studies   

Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?” – Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

When we think about practices to enhance well-being, we probably don’t consider our dreams as particularly influential. But consider how these nightly experiences have the potential to directly impact several of the most significant aspects of well-being: resilience, meaning, and the recognition of our strengths. Let’s explore how paying attention to our dreams can strengthen our well-being.

First, it’s important to know that we all dream, whether or not we remember our dreams. This fact has been clearly established from decades of research in sleep and dream labs. But for most people, dream recall is spotty – remembering only brief fragments of a couple of dreams a week. The good news is that most people can learn to increase the frequency of remembering a dream, especially if they feel motivated and interested in the potential fruits of working with dreams. We can enhance dream recall by giving ourselves a suggestion as we fall asleep – an affirmation that we say silently to ourselves (and really mean it), such as: “I will remember my dreams upon awakening.” Then, when we wake up, we can record the dream using tools such as a notebook and pen or a voice-recording device.

How to Use Our Dreams to Strengthen Our Well-Being

Once we are remembering our dreams with some regularity, we can consider how to interpret and apply those experiences to strengthen various aspects of our well-being.

Resilience: Dr. Carl Jung, indisputably one of the most significant figures in 20th-century psychology, was a prominent advocate for the value of studying dreams. One of his principles for working with a dream involves the compensatory way in which the mind operates. When we experience an extreme condition in a dream, Jung invites us to imagine what the opposite extreme would be. It’s as if the unconscious mind (that is, the source of our dreams) sometimes serves to rebalance us when we’ve gone to some extreme in daily life, such as an intense emotion or an imbalanced attitude. We could even think of this as a type of internal resilience, since the mind is inclined to re-establish balance and equilibrium. For example, suppose we are going through a period of discouragement for lack of social support, and then we dream of someone from our past who loved and encouraged us unconditionally. This could be understood as a compensatory dream that is helping us to be resilient.

Meaning: This is more than just “finding the meaning of a dream.” Instead, it’s understanding how dreams can sometimes help us make sense of our life experiences and recognize purposefulness in what’s happening. I have found this particularly practical in the context of posing a question while falling asleep, inviting a dream experience that would address a particular issue. In my Mason course INTS 355 “Mindfulness, Meaning, and Well-Being,” we conduct a personal experiment near the end of the course in which each student identifies an issue, dilemma, or problem and then works for two weeks with insights and perspectives that can arise from mindfulness practices, dreams, creative imagination, and intuition, alongside of rational analysis. For many students, dreams play a big role in formulating an answer to his or her chosen question.  This can come in many ways, but one way is a dream that reminds the student of an obstacle that stands in the way of being able to thrive or flourish in that part of his or her life. For example, it can be a dream that brings to the surface a self-doubt or a fear. Dreams can simply make us more aware of the dynamics of our feelings that reside just beneath the surface. Sometimes, those dynamics need the expertise of a counselor to help the dreamer navigate the way to a healthier state of mind. But we are dreaming every night, and we might consider that on a daily basis, the unconscious mind is trying to help us make sense of our lives and to live more meaningfully.

Recognition of our strengths: Certainly, inventories such as the CliftonStrengths assessment and the VIA Character Strengths survey are powerful tools to discover and use our personal strengths. But so are our dreams, as they remind us of capacities and gifts that we can apply in the world. One big issue in regard to strengths is the human tendency to minimize our talents and our capabilities – to push those qualities into the unconscious, so to speak. It’s my own clinical observation from decades of working with people to understand their dreams that we may have dreams in which the characters who appear in our dreams are meant to remind us of strengths and talents that reside in ourselves and not just in the people about whom we are dreaming. In a similar way, we sometimes dream about doing things that involve the application of certain talents or strengths that we may not yet trust and apply in our waking lives. A dream, then, can be a way of rehearsing or experimenting with a strength that lies dormant in us, and yet which could prove to be a significant contributor toward flourishing.

There are, of course, many resources to help us explore and learn from our dreams. It can be especially fruitful to approach dream study from the orientation of positivity – that is, to look for reminders coming from the unconscious mind that point toward the profound resources of well-being that live within us. That’s the essence of Jung’s insights about the mind: There is an impulse toward wholeness, integration, and well-being that lives within the mind of each person, and dreams are an immediately available way to access those potentials.

Additional Resources

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