What are Dreams and Where do They Come From?

What are Dreams and Where do They Come From?

In trying to answer the question “Who Am I?” a prime source for information is the dreams that we have every night. Our dreams can tell us much about our inner self. But what are dreams, and where do they come from?

Which center do dreams come from? Are they thoughts from the thinking center, feelings from the emotional center, or a combination of both? Many writers, including Castaneda, Ouspensky, and Nicoll, say that the moving center has much control over dreams.

From my studies of the Gurdjieff School, I find that all three centers are active in most dreams. The more centers that are involved, the better the dream. Some dreams come from the moving center. Ouspensky describes a recurring dream that he had about being caught in a quick sand like bog. Upon examining the dream he discovered that it was caused by his legs and feet being wrapped around the sheets and blankets. Nightmares seem to come mostly from the emotional center. They come from hidden fears that we experience during the day. Wish fulfillment dreams are often from the emotional center also. Wish fulfillment dreams can also come from the thinking center, fulfilling the wishes that we have been thinking about. Lucid dreams and dreams that come from the collective unconscious need all three centers.

Castaneda is especially informative on dreams. He gives a lot of information about dreaming up your double, which connects with the Grudjieff School’s assertion that we are made up of two main parts, Essence and Personality. I believe that the Double that Castaneda describes is closer to Essence than Personality. Castaneda also writes about finding your hands in your dreams, which opens up the possibility of a conscious interaction with the dream world. For Castaneda dreams are the gateway to a separate reality, a gateway to the unknown. He maintains that we do not understand how much we lose when we ignore our dreams.

What are dreams, then? Dreams are messages from our unconscious mind. These messages come from the personal unconscious and also from the collective unconscious, and they take many different forms. In their simplest form, dreams are wish fulfillment. Very often dreams fulfill wishes that are either conscious or unconscious. If you wish that you could take a mountain climbing trip, you may dream of taking that trip. If you secretly wish that you could murder your younger brother, you may dream that a lion attacks and kills him. Your wish is fulfilled.

In a more complex form, dreams are sent from our unconscious to help us compensate or off set some unbalance in our lives. If you are devoting too much time to studying, working, and worrying about your life, a dream may take you on a vacation to some beautiful island. On the other hand, if you are spending too much time “kicking it,” a dream may take you to a college classroom where you are assigned a twenty-page paper on the economic theory of evolution.

Different psychologists have different interpretations of what dreams are. Carl Jung talks about dreams from the personal unconscious, which help a person to fulfill his individual destiny. Other dreams come from what Jung calls the collective unconscious. The collective contains everything that ever happened in human history, and everything that will ever happen in the future. Jung states that if we work on our dreams we can reach the collective unconscious.

Sigmund Freud, the father of dream interpretation, feels that most dreams are wish fulfillment dreams. He taught the many dreams are about unfulfilled sexual desires. He kind of looked at the dream base as a garbage can for discarded thoughts and wishes.

Fritz Perls, who works with Gestalt psychology, maintains that every thing in your dream is you. If you dream that you are walking down a railroad track and get hit by a train, you are the train, the railroad track, and the person who got hit. People and objects in your dreams are psychological forces in yourself. Perls doesn’t believe that dreams are concerned with the past. He believes that you should stay in the present when you work with your dreams.

Native Americans held that dreams were very important. They believed that at certain times in our lives we have power dreams. Power dreams help an individual find those unique qualities that make him who he is. In some Native American tribes, young men went through initiation rites where they had to dream a power dream. The interpretation of their power dream would determine what they would be as adults, a warrior, a planter, or maybe even a medicine man.

The following dream will give you some information about how we can interpret a dream. I'm walking down a strange city street. It's an early fall afternoon. The sun is shinning brightly. I look up at the row houses with not a lot of interest. Everything is sort of gray and vague. As a couple young blacks come toward me. I catch a flash of fear as we pass each other, and they eye me up and down.

I come to an open grassy area and take off in a trot toward a patch of forest about fifty yards away. As I race through the trees, I'm bending under branches, sliding through tangles of under brush, bending myself in half to crawl through intertwined branches. Wow, I'm really in good shape. I move through the brush like a warrior, I 'm telling myself with a burst of pride. I feel like I'm a Superman.

At the edge of the forest, I spot several military barracks. Four our five squads of young blacks in back shorts and t- shirts are breaking rank and scattering in different directions. I'm scared out of my wits. Certain that the young troops are scattering out to hunt down their victims, I'm telling myself I'll either have to retrace my tracks or cut around them to the right. When I look in that direction, I see a large concrete wall just on the other side of the trees. It runs as far as I can see in both directions. I look back towards the camp as see two seventh grade boys duck back behind a pile of lumber. They spotted me. I'm trapped in here with no way out, I tell myself and imagine dozens of teenage hoods ganging up on me.

When I interpret this dream, I realize that the back troops are not black teenagers. They are psychological forces within my unconscious. They are the unknown parts of my self, the evil within. The dream is telling me that I am not really superman. I have lots of ‘I’s in myself that need to be examined and eliminated. The dream is telling me that there are psychological forces in my personal unconscious that are harmful to growth of being.

Having some idea of what your dreams are and where they come from may help you to interpret your most vivid dreams. You can get much more information on the source of your dreams by reading books from some of the authors that I have quoted.