In the last issue of this ENewsletter* I wrote about the need to question the literal translation of feelings in nightmares. The frightful emotional experiences of our nightmares regularly turn out to be not just literally how I felt them in the dream, but also place holders and symbolic indicators of other deeper and often far more profoundly positive feelings.

Of course there will always be some levels of literal significance to the dreamer's emotional experience in any dream, but those literal, self-validating emotional responses simply do not cover, (let alone exhaust!) the full range of emotional meaning hidden below the surface in the dreamer's seemingly definitive "feeling narrative" of his/her dream experience. These symbolic levels of meaning are frequently overlooked because (like a nightmare) the feelings in the dream - in this case feelings of  joy, love, ecstasy, understanding, compassion, awe, "divine presence," and so forth - can overwhelm us. Questioning the emotions of this kind of dream often goes against our natural urge to bask in the glow of the dream, making the task of diving deeper into the multiple symbolic levels very difficult to do alone. Having a group or a good friend/mentor to explore with can help a great deal.    

A "Transcendent" Dream 

An older man (deeply into recovery from multiple addictive waking life behaviors) dreams that he is invited by a dignified, white-haired First Nations ritual leader into a circle of older men. The dreamer is amazed and abashed, but overcomes his habitual aloofness and self-denigration and sits down in the "first, inmost ring" of the circle, next to the native elder/leader of the ritual. Initially, he "keeps his head down." He feels too "shaky" and self-conscious to look around, but as he calms down he is confronted with a paradoxical experience - the circle includes an uncountable number of other older men, stretching as far as he can see in all directions, while at the same time, there is a strong, clear sense of the circle being comfortably small and intimate.

A drum beat starts up and the ritual leader begins to sing, and all the men in the circle join in the song/chant. The dreamer joins in, amazed that "the words just come out of him" as he sings, even though he has no conscious knowledge of them even in the dream. The dreamer is very "relieved and excited" and he "sings himself into a gentle 

awakening," experiencing the feelings and physical sensations of "forgiving and being forgiven" simultaneously. These unexpected transcendent feelings stay with him after he awakens for quite some time.  

Some Multiple Layers of Meaning 

Experience has taught me over the years that such a dream is to be honored, celebrated, and cherished. Generally my practice is not to engage in any further exploratory work with such a dream unless the dreamer requests it, and in this case he did. He specifically wanted to know what deeper implications and emotional experiences I thought might be hidden below the surface of this dream.

In my imagined version of his dream, the most important implication is the dream's symbolic reflection of my (the dreamer's) evolving self-awareness; my sense that whatever "my transgressions" were/are/may have been - they are shared with all men as we age and grow old together (as suggested by the huge circle of older men that stretched to the horizon), and this reconciliation is deepened by my conscious understanding that we must forgive ourselves as we forgive each other.

In my experience, this reconciliation of past wrongs, mistakes, and injuries must be extended in particular to our fathers, as well as all the other males with whom I, as the dreamer, "share blood" - but most particularly to and with our fathers, even if they are now dead.  

At a more subtle, but no less important layer of my imagined version of this dream, it points gently and clearly to the total absence of the feminine in the scene. When I asked more about the setting, the dreamer told me that it was "outdoors," and "at night," but with no other definite sense of the natural environment, which I took as another symbolic indication in my imagined version of the dream, of  "the absence of the feminine," of "Mother Nature." 

This suggests to me that in the task of healing and self-acceptance which my dream is spontaneously celebrating and affirming, it would be important to turn more of my conscious attention to the "feminine energy within" (what Jung called the Anima), as I continue to put my best energies into individuating further. This suggestion was greeted at the time with a deep "aha!" of recognition.

Transcendent, beautiful and emotionally uplifting dreams are so often a reflection of the dreamer's increasing awareness of the deeper, non-material sources of meaning and value in waking life, (which is one way of defining "individuation") that it is not at all unusual to find that these increasingly conscious understandings lead to less interest in "small talk" and "cocktail conversation" - that which lubricates the wheels of social acceptance, and is the human version of "ritual mutual grooming" among other primates.

This can look like loneliness and separation from those we are close to in waking life. It is a seemingly paradoxical truth that hidden beneath the beautiful dreams of togetherness is a kind of archetypal separation which is very often one of the inevitable, (because it is unconscious, and not subject to conscious consideration and choice) consequences of increasingly successful individuation. At the same time that these transcendent dreams celebrate the achievements and joys of deeper spiritual awareness, they can also remind the dreamer of a price that such developments so often require - a loss, or at least a lessening of the "barn warmth" of the "puppy pile."

Hard as it may be to look for the levels beneath the obvious feelings in both nightmares and transcendent, joyful dreams, our lives are far richer for at least attempting to look at "the whole" of who we are. Our dreams all come in the service of health and wholeness, and the wholeness of the archetypal experience of individuation often folds both joy and sorrow into a paradoxical emotional awareness of these seemingly "mutually exclusive" states of feeling.

*June/July 2013. Go to jeremytaylor.com and click on "View the Email Archive" at the bottom of the home page