Dream Meaning and Therapy

The history of dreams being used in some sort of healing context did not start with Freud at the beginning of the 1900’s. It trails back into pre-history through all the various human cultures. From the immense literature on the therapeutic use of dreams, especially from the most recent writings, there is no doubt that dreams have immense meaning, and can reveal things to the dreamer who explores them, that they were not previously aware of. Hobson questions this and states that dreams do not reveal anything that wasn’t in some way already known. As this is a view held by many of the scientific community, it has some weight, and Hobson backs it up by saying that he has kept a dream journal for many years, and has exposed himself to therapeutic uses of dreams.

Unfortunately this is one of those arguments which is like saying ‘I visited the South Seas and I didn’t find any pearl oysters. Therefore there are no pearl oysters.’ It is not a good analogy however, as there are pearls about which can be looked at. With a personal experience of arriving at understanding, it is so easy for other people to ignore it, or tell you how you actually arrived at it. Of course, ANY explanation of how we arrived at radical new insights is still only a theory, as quantum mechanics suggests. At a practical level however, any therapist using dreams, can observe that the greatest insight held in dreams can only be arrived at by people who have the ability to allow deep emotional response or expression in their dream work. Simple intellectual analysis of the dream by the dreamer or someone else does not give access to the immensely powerful pockets of experience held in dreams. Without this depth of experience, the insights do not arise. Like the pearl, it isn’t simply lying around on the surface to be picked up or read like a book. It takes personal courage to feel the intensity that lies within us, the sort of total feeling response that babies have. Many intellectuals, scientists among them, have a purely rational approach to dreams, and therefore fail to discover this important area of experience. This will be dealt with more fully later.

See Dreams – Practical Techniques to explore their meaning