When Sigmund Freud wrote Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, the world was a diff erent place, and the collective consciousness of the humans on Earth was different. Cultures had yet to migrate from their homelands. Intercontinental travel was limited to steamships. Art had barely succeeded in breaking out of its church-influenced moorings. And, you would have had a hard time filling the Rose Bowl with the number of people on the planet who had experienced altered states of consciousness at that time.
There had yet to be a 1960’s movement into “expanded consciousness,” nor the computer revolution of the 1980’s and 90’s. Humankind knew itself by the doctrines laid out by the church and governments. Science was limited. Technology was virtually nonexistent.
The dreams that Sigmund Freud studied in order to produce Interpretations were dreams of Europeans isolated by thought and culture. The world was isolated. The humans who had consciously explored “other realms” were primarily those within shamanic cultures. And thanks to the church, dreams had been pathologized, left behind in the rubble of the Greek and Roman civilizations.
So, when Freud unearthed the importance of dreams for the Western culture, he was exploring a realm that had yet to be mined, as far as we are concerned. When Carl Gustav Jung left academics in 1913 to enter a four year “plunge” into the unconscious, our relationship with dreams was still infantile. When he came out of that shamanic-like initiation, he had penetrated a realm that had not been seriously by “Westerners” for centuries.
In only the last 50 years, the number of humans who have immersed themselves in dreamwork and the exploration of altered states of consciousness would fill at least a hundred Rose Bowls. From psychotherapy to meditation practices and yoga, experiential psychologies to tantra, dreamwork to exploration with psychointegrator plants, humans have not only dredged the unconscious in unprecedented levels, but they have found the “Holy Grail.” We are an awakening species, closer each day to finding ourselves in a perpetually altered state that will transform humanity into a new and God-like Being.
Because of this huge technological breakthrough in our ability to transcend waking consciousness, our dreams are not what they were in 1899. Yet, our psychologies still work with dreams based on technology over a hundred years old. We are using outdated manuals! Our dreams are no longer simply infantile wishes of pleasure-seeking fulfillment meant to overcome sexual frustration and Oedipal fantasies. They are nightly instructions on how to transcend the limitations imprisoning us in this life, plainly and organically injecting our bodies with the elixir of immortality—that is, if we choose to pay attention. You see, that’s the catch with dreams: we must be receptive.
On top of this, our dreams are no longer the individualized portraits of our daily struggles and frustrations, but are collective messages for the entirety of our planet. Like the blind men touching the elephant, we are each given access to different aspects of our collective body, bringing back different sensations and images from the dreaming world. Yet as a whole, we are each carrying different pieces of the puzzle, awaiting that magic moment when we can lock in and solve the puzzle. We are coming closer to a collective “Aha!”
At no other time in our modern history have we been given access to such deep layers of the world’s psyche and universal psyche as well. Dreamers from all across the world are waking with visions of Gods and Goddesses, strange beings from other planets, and distinct messages from Gaia asking for our assistance. These are not the dreams of Freud and Jung. These are messages from our Higher Selves, from our collective human body.
To look at a dream in 2007 as simply being “wish-fulfillment” is not only naive, but it is morally incomprehensible. We can spend all day talking about global warming, but if we’re not tending to the dream in the deepest way possible, our political maneuverings and ecological work will be for naught. Our dreams are passageways to the Source, and closely listening and honoring those nightly messages bring us closer to actually healing the planet and ourselves. Roundtable talks won’t do that.
Like teenagers still adhering to outdated commandments, it is time we shed our naive ideas about dreams and dreaming. It is time we consciously take part in these nightly journeys and not only bring the dreaming energies into our dayworlds, but begin to reflect on our individual dream messages as being part of the collective. Not only are we receiving the same messages as a global body of humanity, but we are receiving very individually-tailored pieces of a global puzzle waiting to be solved. Is it an elephant? How large is it? And what can we do to help?
Our dreaming is collective. We help each other by paying attention to our own dreams, and then not only sharing them with others, but working together as a community to understand them together. In these times of impending global catastrophe, this is the most cost-effective, timely, and moral way to save Planet Earth—and ourselves. Do we have a choice not to listen to our dreams?
I think not.
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