Paying attention to what we dream can reveal information about who we are and what we need to take care of
It is night in the windowless room. All the doors are closed and the lack of air clogs my throat. In the midst of pitch darkness, an exit in the form of a voice announces: “Sheyla, tell a story and the key will appear.” “So I make up a story about the appearance of a key and it actually appears in my pocket,” recalls writer Sheyla Smanioto, about a dream that visited her as a teenager.
“This key was capable of opening all doors,” she observes… Honoring the prophecy, Sheyla continues to use dreams as inspiration for her narratives. “It’s about looking for a portal in the dream and, while awake, inhabiting it. If you take the time to understand them, entire universes reveal themselves through dreams. I use them as portals to write my books,” says the author of Unearthed ( Record) and My Body Is Still Hot (Nos).
Dreams are connections with the unconscious
Combining dreams and creation brings your work closer to readers, believes Sheyla Smanioto. “AS a dreama book must also have the ability to transport us to different internal and external places”, compares the author. “Creating from dreams is sewing a public dream, made so that humanity can dream”. Because it creates new ways of seeing ourselves and what surrounds us is the great key to access the mysterious images that pass through us every night.
This sort of portal opens in us a path towards the unconscious, a hidden part, but which influences our attitudes. “The dream asks you to look again at your childhood, at your friend, at an animal or at a place. It can make you fly to see yourself from another perspective. And it gives you other images, alleys, exits”, says Jungian psychologist Eliane Berenice Luconi.
Dream role
According to the Swiss psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung, dreams have a compensatory function, to complement what we think we are. People, objects, scenes and feelings they would be representations of what we lack or what we do not recognize within ourselves. “If the dream shows a haunted house, a dark room, I have to look for that place inside myself. And ask myself, for example, which place inside me is abandoned or that I don’t want to see,” says the psychologist.
Investigating the main subject of the dream and wondering how it is inserted (or absent) in waking life is one way to approach it. Illuminating our hidden places increases our awareness of who we really are. And it helps us imagine how to return to the essence.
That’s why, sometimes, a dream repeats itself so often. “Recurring themes continue to arise until the dreamer approaches the topic and is willing to carry out the required task,” says the psychologist. Dreams can also indicate very practical proposals, such as a change in attitude, home, work and relationship. “You have to live your life towards this dream, which in itself does not come true, but indicates possible paths”, observes the specialist.
Dreams indicate the need for change
In the audiobook BBeginner’s Guide to Interpreting Dreams (“Guide to the interpretation of dreams for beginners”, in Portuguese), the American psychologist and writer Clarissa Pinkola Estés cites the case of a patient who dreamed of a voice asking her to open a door, but the dreamer refused. Awake, the woman kept her dream of going to college locked inside her. She thought she was too old for this and thought it was bad that she had to be away from her family. The dream persisted until she gave in own destiny.
Clarissa sees the dream as a “letter from home”. If we don’t read it, the correspondence goes back and the sender resends it until it is received and understood. Reading it allows us to get closer and closer to our power, like a root that expands deep into the earth and lifts trunk and branches, making its fruits swing in the air.
Dreams are capable of guiding society
The function of dreams to transmit messages and change routes has accompanied humanity for millennia. It spanned the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods to antiquity and the Middle Ages. But our society, where production is the law and sleep is a waste of time, has closed the doors to dreaming. Making collective decisions in night visions, despite being common in other times and peoples, seems to border on madness in the rationalist and mercantilist vision that dominates the West today.
“Since the Great Navigations, in the last 500 years, the dream as a beacon for the future has been exchanged with a technical, rationalist and scientific instance – which is also a beacon for the future, but less integrative and intuitive”, explains the neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro, author of The Oracle of the Night: History and Science of Dreams, a reference work on the subject. “This means that we are very capable of transforming reality, but we have little ability to imagine the future and the consequences of our actions.”
Consequences of abandoning dreams
The abandonment of the dream would be one of the causes of the great contradiction we experience in the contemporary world. At the same time that we have achieved great technological capacity, protecting ourselves from natural dangers and producing abundant food, we are walking in a world of scarcity and crisis. “If you don’t talk about your dreams with your family, with friendsat work or school; If they are not used to making decisions, people stop remembering that they dream,” says Sidarta. And they stop dreaming of new ways out.
Intertwining science and the symbolic world in his book, Siddhartha argues that we must reconcile dreams and waking hours. Only then will we be more complete as people and as a community. “Dreams deal with what is not seen, and science is the opposite: it measures and studies what is there. They are complementary perspectives,” he says.
Evidence of this powerful union is the periodic table, which came in a dream to the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. “We’ve already done the hardest part, which is developing the science to have abundance. Now, what we need is the expansion of consciousness,” Sidarta argues. “This will only happen through dreams and concern for the collective.”
Strategies for dreaming
Many people think they don’t dream, but this is neurologically unlikely, Sidarta says. What happens is that sleeping while looking at screens, waking up with the sound of the alarm clock, among other factors of a busy life, makes us forget what we dreamed. But the dream is accessible to everyone and is the simplest way to access the unconscious.
“It’s as natural as eating and breathing. But it takes permission and availability,” recommends the neuroscientist. So sleep at a reasonable time: between 8pm and midnight. “Melatonin is high at night, then it drops and cortisol rises. If you want to sleep when melatonin drops and cortisol rises, you’re sleeping at the wrong time.”
The next step is to put away electronic devices such as cell phones, TVs and computers at least an hour before going to bed. Also avoid exercising, eating and drinking too much alcohol before going to sleep. Try to create a quiet, dark environment with a pleasant temperature to relax comfortably oracle of the night. But first, set your intention: I will dream, I will remember, and I will record.
When you wake up, stay quiet and try not to move too much. Only in this way is it possible to delay the arrival of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that the brain uses to pay attention to things, and which is practically absent in “REM sleep”, a period in which dreams are abundant. If you wake up already doing something, your brain starts to fill with norepinephrine, burying the dream images.
Writing down your dreams is essential to discover them
After saving some elements of the dream, take out a notebook and pen left next to the bed and write. Even if you only remember a word or a feeling. A single item can recall dreamlike memories, revealing one scene after another. If you don’t remember anything or miss an important detail, follow Sheyla Smanioto’s advice: summarize the night before. A detailed reenactment distracts from the anxiety of grabbing the dream by the arm and makes it jump into your lap of its own accord.
By writing down your dreams every morning, you tend to remember more and more and in more detail. During the day, the advice is to make the dream your subject. Talk about it with people close to you and in psychotherapy. And explain what you wrote by drawing a picture or humming something that reminds you of it. Reread a series of dreams (from the last week, for example) and write down separately what repeats.
Let’s leave dream dictionaries aside. Only you can say what a tower or a dog represents in your story. Even if you don’t come to a conclusion, this thoughtful work brings connection and self-knowledge.
“Dreams should be seen as a friend. A person you open the door to and sit down to talk to,” says Eliane. In addition to this, it is also recommended to pay attention to feelings, cultivating good doses of introspection and emptiness in everyday life. Being close to its interior, to how it expresses itself and having space inside to imagine opens places within us where dreams can live.
By Martina Medina – Vita Semplice magazine
Source: Terra
Ben Stock is a lifestyle journalist and author at Gossipify. He writes about topics such as health, wellness, travel, food and home decor. He provides practical advice and inspiration to improve well-being, keeps readers up to date with latest lifestyle news and trends, known for his engaging writing style, in-depth analysis and unique perspectives.
