From one perspective, it's clear that change is the sine qua non of life and development. In its journey from seed to seedling to leafy bush to flower, a rose plant obviously undergoes much necessary change, all of which moves it toward the full expression of its potential. As participants in the natural world, this is our process, too.

From another perspective, change may seem to us to be anti-evolutionary, thwarting rather than developing our potential. Like periods of sudden flooding or drought for the rosebush, all of us experience changes and crises in our lives which can seem to throw us off course and weaken us somehow.

Dreams can be tremendously helpful for understanding and working with both kinds of change in our lives.

We know that dreams must serve a crucial evolutionary function in mammals because dreaming entered the evolutionary stream as a change about 125 million years ago, with all "new" mammalian species emerging since that time and still in existence giving evidence of dreaming. Furthermore, it's been demonstrated repeatedly that human beings show signs of severe pychological dysfunction (hallucinations and a tendency to violence) when dream time - not just sleep - is chronically interrupted. So, dreams are clearly important, but how? And why?

As we saw with the rose, there is a tendency in living matter to perfect itself, to become most fully what it is capable of becoming. Yet, as human beings, we seem to possess free will and the capacity for making choices which may inhibit our full becoming. It is in this arena of tension between our fundamental tendency toward completeness or wholeness and our free will that our dreams function.

Dreams serve us by reminding us of our essential wholeness night after night after night, and by revealing to us the ways in which we may be unconsciously denying or fleeing from our integrity (= wholeness) in waking life. Dreamwork prevents us from disclaiming what we already sense: that our inner life and outer life reflect each other. The following dream reveals this well. It came to a woman experiencing a recent onset of severe headaches:

I am walking past my friend's house at night. The gate to her house is a huge, heavy steel one painted bright red. I'm aware that I feel nothing, no emotions. I have a can of gray spray paint which I use to spray squiggly lines all over the gate. Then I turn and leave. I am carried along a few inches off the ground, wearing a hospital gown.

What the dreamer realized in speaking about the dream was that she was keeping herself and her friend in the dark ("walking at night") about the anger that she was feeling toward her ("the huge, red gate"), which was preventing her from relating to her honestly. She was instead making a weak attempt to cover it up ("gray, squiggly lines"), but she was not in touch with the reality of the situation (she feels nothing; her feet aren't touching the ground), and the denial was making her sick (the hospital gown -- and the headaches in waking.) The dream allowed her to acknowledge the feelings that she had been blind to in waking, thus clearing the way for her to make a genuinely informed choice about the action she wanted to take.

So, a major function of dreams is to bring to light aspects of our character and behavior of which our waking selves may be largely unaware. When the energy that has been sucked into the black hole of self-deception is released, it becomes available to us as fuel for creative action, for intentional change.

© Anita Doyle, 1987 [Originally published in Life Scribes, Fall 1987. Slightly edited here.]

Other articles in the "Awakening Through Dreams" Series:
Part Two: Common Elements of Dreams
Part Three: The Persona
Part Four: The Shadow

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