The Forgotten Importance of Dreams
How dreams can heal old trauma, and occasionally even predict the future
I have always been fascinated by the world of dreams, those fantastical psychodramas into which we are plunged every night, and in which we will on average spend a total of around six years over the course of our lives. Sigmund Freud called dreams the “royal road to the unconscious”, and many indigenous cultures revere them as a vital portal for messages from the spirit world, and yet they have slipped almost entirely off the radar of modern psychology.
The currently most fashionable scientific understanding of dreams is entirely reductionistic and dismissive. According to the “activation-synthesis hypothesis” favoured by neuroscientists, dreams occur when random electrical firings at the base of the brain propagate up to the higher levels, and the brain attempts to weave sense out of this meaningless neural activity.
Yet nobody who has paid attention to a large number of people’s dreams in a psychotherapeutic context, as I have, could possibly conclude that they are nothing but worthless mental drivel, as this neuropsychological model would suggest. Dreams can reveal the anatomy of our complexes with extraordinary elegance and precision. Occasionally, they can even carry information that seems to come from a transpersonal source.
