TRANSCRIPT
Over the years, I have written quite a few times and also talked about in video how dreams come from a brilliant part of us, from a genius within us, from the dream genius. And that dreams, our dreams, are created by this unconscious, deeply buried part of us when we’re sleeping to help us, to give us information, to give us knowledge about our lives, to help us grow and heal and resolve our unresolved traumas, to figure out our conflicts, to make sense of our lives, to become better people, to know ourselves better.
Well, recently, a few months ago, someone wrote me and said that yes, he’d heard that message of mine, but he felt confused by it because, and I’m paraphrasing, but he said sometimes it seemed when he looked at his dreams that they didn’t come from the healthiest place. And maybe his dreams didn’t have that much perspective that could really help him, and even they were coming from a place within him that were sending him unhealthy messages about himself. And what did I make of this?
Well, I’ve been sitting on that question now for a few months, and just today I was like, I think I finally formulated my answer. And I think it’s that I didn’t say it totally correctly before. And I think to be most accurate, our dreams come from all sorts of different parts of us. They come from the parts of us that are unhealthy and the parts of us that fundamental core part that is healthy. And in a way, our dreams can come out all mixed up.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been recording a lot of videos about all sorts of topics, many of these topics very taboo, like breaking from the family system and how unhealthy parents can be and how unconscious parents can be, my parents, parents in general. A lot of topics you don’t hear people say very much. Certainly, the psychology field doesn’t say it that much or go remotely to the extreme that I’m going to—a true extreme, I believe.
Well, the result of that is I’ve been going through a lot of anxiety, and I’ve been having a lot of very stressful dreams and nightmares. And I can kind of agree that a lot of these dreams don’t seem to be coming from a very self-loving place. And what are they telling me about myself? I’ve been analyzing them a lot. But what I came to realize, and this is an answer to the question that was posed to me about where did dreams really come from and what is the story, is there a dream genius, and is the dream genius always reflected in our dreams?
And what I think is that it is actually, it’s always there. But the key—and this is probably what I left out—I’ll have to go back at some point and read what I’ve written and watch old videos I’ve said. But I think what I left out is the key in doing effective dream analysis and making sense of dreams for our own individual benefit is that we need to have some fundamental root, even a thread of a connection with our deep true self. We have to have some part of us that can step out of ourselves, that loves ourselves even just a little bit, some little true glimmer of a mirror where we can see the best of ourselves. And from that perspective, we can analyze our dreams.
From that perspective, we can connect with the dream genius within us. And the reason I say this is that I think of my time as a psychotherapist when many, many times clients of mine brought in dreams that they were having. They could feel at some intuitive level that their dreams were very important, but they had no clue how to make sense of their dreams, or they only could interpret their dreams in negative ways about themselves. And what I provided to them was the rudiments of a connection with their true self. In a way, I was a surrogate mirror for them, a surrogate true self who they could use to learn more about their true self.
In a way, I was the mirror that shined on their true self, and I helped them begin to learn how to have the strength, how to have the courage, how to have the ability at all to connect with their true self. And they were able to use me in that role, and that I was able to have that perspective on their dream to say, yes, this part of your dream, I believe, because it was always, it’s always a question of perspective. You can analyze dreams lots of different ways, and sometimes all these different ways can be correct simultaneously. One of the amazing things about dreams, they can have all sorts of different, simultaneously contradictory, internally contradictory meanings and interpretations.
Well, I could be the person who reflected on the part that was the most core, self-loving, true part of this dream. And often what I found is that when I reflected on that part of the dream that was coming from their dream genius, they would say, yes, yes, I feel it, you’re right, that’s what I was missing. And in time, as they resolved more of their traumas, as they grew more self-loving, as they developed more of a reflex of a healthy lifestyle and a healthy self-reflective relationship, they could take over the process of analyzing their dreams from the perspective of being a true self-loving mature self, or at least some part of them was that, that could connect with that dream genius.
Now, does that mean that if a person, perhaps like this person who wrote me about not necessarily being able to sort out where the core of truth and self-love is in his dreams, does that mean that this person doesn’t have any connection with a core of truth inside himself? I don’t think so, actually. I know not because I know for myself sometimes when I’m having a really hard day or a really hard night of sleep, and I wake up and I’m like, oh, and I write down a dream, sometimes it can just feel kind of hopeless. Maybe at that moment, I just don’t have a strong connection with my core of truth, and I can’t reflect on the part of me that is creating the dream out of self-love. I can’t connect with my dream genius.
But in time, as I calm down, as I relax, as I get away from the horror and drama sometimes of my external life, of my terror of how the external world is feeling about my growth, and I relax, I unplug a little bit from the stress, I can return more to being centered and self-loving. And that’s where I can yet again find my dream genius. And my dream genius is a beautiful thing. I’ve seen that again and again, how brilliant and self-loving is this unconscious part of me who is fighting for me from within, who is using dreams to create a fictional metaphor about my life that I can learn from.
I can see my past. I can see where I came from. Often, I can see how unloved I was by my parents, by other people in my life, how misguided I was by the people who I thought were my role models, who were my role models. They role modeled unhealthy behavior, and I can see how much conflict there was. I can see how my dream genius sets up the theater of my life in these dreams to show me, oh God, that’s where you came from, that’s how sick those people were, that’s how sick they still are, and that’s how healthy you are, that’s how self-loving you are, that you can see this, that I can present this to you, and you can have the gift of being able to remember it.
I know many, many, many people who say, I can’t remember my dreams at all, I remember nothing. I think that’s often because they’re in a place where remembering would just be too painful. They’re not ready to remember. And it’s an old saying in psychotherapy: when people first remember a dream, the first dream they bring to psychotherapy, the first one that they can consciously remember, is inevitably a vitally important dream. And I have seen that to be true. I’ve also seen it to be true that pretty much any dream that anyone remembers holds a huge amount of meaning, is a template for the story of our history, the traumas and our strength, how screwed up we were, how screwed up our history was, how screwed up parts of us are still.
Within and also how strong we are, how much self-love we have. We just have to unpack it. We have to be able to find some way to be able to have that strong side of ourself. We have to fight for our ability to connect with that strong side of ourself, to be able to reflect on our dreams, to be able to put them in perspective, to be able to make sense of them. So we can learn from ourselves about ourselves, so that we can grow and heal and become better, stronger people.
[Music]
You.