Paying attention to what we dream can reveal information about who we are and what we need to take care of
It’s night in the windowless room. All the doors are locked and the lack of air clogs the throat. In the middle of the pitch black, 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 the doors”, he observes… Honoring the prophecy, Sheyla continues to make dreams as food 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 Desenterro (Record) and Meu Corpo Still Warm (Us).
Uniting 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 for humanity to dream”. Because creating new ways of seeing ourselves and what surrounds us is the great key to the mysterious images that cross us every night.
This kind of portal opens a path in us towards the unconscious, a hidden part, but which influences our attitudes. “The dream asks you to look again at your childhood, your friend, an animal or a place. It can make you fly to see yourself from another perspective. And it gives other images, alleys, exits”, says Jungian psychologist Eliane Berenice Luconi.
Dream role
In the view of Swiss psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung, dreams have a compensatory function, of complementing 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 must look for that place within myself. And question, 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 questioning how it is inserted (or absent) in waking life is a way of getting closer to it. Illuminating our hidden points increases our awareness of who we really are. And it helps us imagine how to walk back to the essence.
This is why, sometimes, a dream repeats itself so much. “Recurring themes continue to occur until the dreamer approaches the subject and is willing to carry out the requested task”, says the psychologist. Dreams can even indicate very practical proposals, such as a change of attitude, home, work and relationship. “It is necessary to live our lives towards this dream, which, in itself, does not fulfill, but shows possible paths”, observes the specialist.
Dreams indicate the need for change
No audiobook Beginner’s Guide to Dream Interpretation (“Guide to Dream Interpretation 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 that and thought it was bad to have to move away from her family. The dream persisted until she gave in to the own destiny.
Clarissa sees the dream as a “letter from home”. If we don’t read it, the correspondence bounces 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 in the earth and raises trunk and branches, swinging its fruits in the air.
Imagem: sondem | ShutterstockDreams are capable of guiding society
The dream function of delivering messages and changing routes has been with humanity for millennia. It spanned the Paleolithic and Neolithic to the Ancient and Middle Ages. But our society, where production is the law and sleeping 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 insanity in the rationalist and mercantilist vision that dominates the West today.
“From the Great Navigations, in the last 500 years, the dream as a beacon for the future is exchanged for 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: The 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 capacity 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 that 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 crises. “If you don’t talk about your dreams with your family, with the friendsat work or school; if they are not used to make any decisions, people stop remembering that they dream”, says Sidarta. And they stop dreaming of new exits.
Weaving together 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 collective. “Dreams are about what is not being seen, and science is the opposite: it measures and studies what is there. They are complementary perspectives”, he says.
Proof of this powerful union is the periodic table, which came to Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in a dream. “We have already done the hardest part, which is developing the science to have abundance. Now, what we need is an expansion of consciousness”, argues Sidarta. “This will only come through dreams and concern for the collective.”
Strategies for dreaming
Many people think they don’t dream, but this is neurologically unlikely, says Sidarta. What happens is that sleeping looking at screens, waking up to the alarm clock beeping, among other factors of a busy life, makes us forget what we dreamed of. But the dream is accessible to everyone and is the easiest way to access the unconscious.
“It’s as natural as eating and breathing. But there needs to be permission and availability”, recommends the neuroscientist. Therefore, 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 is falling and cortisol is rising, you are sleeping at the wrong time.”
The next step is to put away electronic devices such as cell phones, TV and computers at least one hour before going to bed. Also avoid exercising, eating and drinking too much alcohol close to bedtime. Try to create a quiet, dark environment with a pleasant temperature to comfortably indulge in the oracle of the night. But before that, set your intention: I will dream, remember and record.
When you wake up, stay silent and try not to move too much. This is the only way 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 get up already doing something, your brain starts to fill with norepinephrine, burying the dream images.
Image: simona pilolla 2 | ShutterstockWriting down your dreams is essential to unwrap them
After rescuing some elements of the dream, pull out a notebook and pen left next to the bed and write. Even if you remember just one word or sensation. A single element can pull dream memories, revealing one scene after another. If you don’t remember anything or an important detail slips out, follow a tip from Sheyla Smanioto: recap 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 free will.
By writing down your dreams every morning, you tend to remember more and more and in more detail. During the day, the tip is to make your dream your subject. Talk about it with people close to you and in psychotherapy. And unfold what you wrote by drawing a picture or humming something that reminds you of it. Reread a set of dreams (from the last week, for example) and write down separately what is repeated.
Leave the 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, how it expresses itself, and having space inside to imagine opens up places within us where dreams can inhabit.
By Martina Medina – Simple Life magazine
