Do all dreams, in fact, come in the service of health & wholeness? Certainly there is general agreement that most dreams are essentially benign, but is it true that all of them are ultimately helpful, trustworthy, and mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually he
alth promoting? I believe this is a key question - one that regularly stands across the path to greater understanding and appreciation of the universally shared experience of dreaming.
From a practical dream work point of view, if all dreams do not come in the service of health & wholeness, then one of the primary tasks of every dream worker must be to assess in each instance whether or not the implications of any particular dream(s) are "too much for the dreamer to handle". In my-experience, this is a tedious exercise at best, and even more importantly, one which can never be free of unconscious projection, (because none of us ever has anything to think and talk about except our own imagined versions of any particular dreamer's dreams).
Personally, I am completely convinced that all dreams do come in the service of health & wholeness, and furthermore, I believe that in the course of performing this "balancing, compensatory" function, all dreams also speak a universal language of metaphor and symbol.
Obviously, this universal language is flavored and accented by particular circumstances but in my experience, every dream also always exhibits universal levels of meaning at its deeper levels.
I also know that this is not a universally held opinion. The eminent dream researcher, Dr. Ernest Hartmann argues that if "all dreams come in the service of health & wholeness", then, because dreams are part of the "continuum" of thought and mentation, "reveries, fantasies, loose thoughts, an so forth..." must also share this health & wholeness promoting quality. From Dr. Hartmann's point of view, this is an idea which is so obviously ill-considered and foolish that it demonstrates that any and all such assertions about the fundamental quality of dream experience "...cannot be taken seriously as statements about the origin and provenance of dreams."
Those of us who study and work with dreams all know that the health and wholeness that dreams promote is most often "hidden" in the midst of the multilayered symbolic experiences of dreaming, and must be discovered through the application of various processes of secondary exploration and explanation. My experience is that this is also equally true of "reveries, fantasies, loose thoughts, and so forth..." It is the symbolic significance and implications of "reveries, fantasies,etc..." that regularly point us in the direction of increased health and wholeness, not the literal mentations themselves, (any more than dreams serve our health and wholeness at the obvious, uninterpreted surface of their confusing appearance).
In my view, the greatest recurring problem in this work of studying and understanding more about the deeper meanings and implications of dreams, (and, indeed, of all states of consciousness), is mistaken literalism.
Dr. Hartmann is one of many experts in sleep and dream research who raise these kinds of criticisms of this basic, "universalist" idea, and I have tried to address this range of arguments in a recent publication, Mastering the Art of Projective Dream Work - A Comic Book for Dreamers & Dream Workers, as follows:
"I hope that the comic book page...makes clear my reasons for maintaining this non-standard belief, even in the face of serious, sustained disparagement and rejection.
(In addition, I hope perusing this graphic novel page also makes it clearer how the simultaneous visual/verbal experience of absorbing sequential comic book panels makes even difficult and complex ideas more available and more appealing to a much wider range of "readers" than the written word alone could do. In addition, there is increasing evidence from the ongoing functional magnetic resonance imagery (FMRI) studies that perusing material presented in comic strip/graphic novel form stimulates both hemispheres of the brain, as well as the specialized visual and verbal brain areas simultaneously and measurably more strongly than either reading words or looking at pictures alone appear to do.)"
Mastering the Art of Projective Dream Work - A Comic Book for Dreamers and Dream Workers by Jeremy Taylor. Available at Blurb.com http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1719798
