Compensatory Dreams

"The one who chooses the safe path is almost dead."

C G Jung

C G Jung admitted that some dreams could express wishes or fear, but most dreams express truth, philosophical  thoughts, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, premonition, irrational experiences and even telephatic visions. He also considered dreams to have a compensatory function to balance one-sided or exaggerated and strained attitudes. The latest REM-sleep studies complies with Jung's theories that the purpose of the repressed of our psyche always strive to maintain a balance between contradictionary inclinations, while at the same time also is striving for growth and development for its own sake. Too much on one side result too much on the other.

Our childhood's dreams are full of dangerous things, for instance monsters who threatens us. Much of the fear for a child depends on the darkness in the room during the night. Humans don't have a good vision in the dark, and therefore a child can fantasise about a toy or a wallpaper, and believe that it's something dangerous. It builds up a fear and then the child dreams about during the night. When a child grows older he/she understand what they saw as a small child, not was dangerous.
Jung's view was that there is an archetypal basis for our dreams of darkness, strangers or animals, which are derived from archaic remains of evolution.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we get in touch with our deepest creativity through our dreams. We are able to receive messages from the dead about our health, we can travel outside our body to the future or to the past and meet spiritual guides in other dimensions of reality. Maybe we have many questions about ourselves; who am I? Where am I going? Is there a deeper meaning with my life? What happens when I die? What if I change my job, partner or beliefs?  To be able to understand our dream world we need to work more with ourselves and go outside the box.

In Homer's Odyssey describes a created place in the dream landscape that was used in a similar way by mystery cults. When Odyssey return to ordinary reality after his long journey among gods and spirits, he is washed up naked on the Fakayan coast. The Fakayans were a people of dreams. Their wild and rocky coastline lies on the border between sleep and wakefulness, an intermediate station and meeting place for the explorers of consciousness. It is a fixed point in the dream landscape, created and sustained by the common premise of many generations of dreamer. We are all able to explore this dream world on your own, whenever you are ready or experience the calling.

When we dream, we remember who we are and who we can become. How do we catch our dreams? In my next post I shall give you some hints how you can be better to remember your dreams.