Dreaming

Sigmund Freud was on the right track. Dreams and sex are inextricably linked. Sex, in humans, is a complex and unique behavior that can allow us, through the harness of enormous emotional and physical energy, to touch God.

But Freud was wrong about some things. He believed that dreams represented a form of sexual repression. He would have been more accurate if he’d said that dreams represent parts of your own psyche that are trying to reach you to give you information about yourself that you desperately need.

In Freud’s Victorian, repressed world, this was very often sex. Probably, the dreams his patients had were more sex-heavy than dreams today because it was that part of themselves that so desperately needed expression. Today, you can learn to understand yourself through dreams and learning about what they mean.

To tell you everything about dreaming would take many, many books. So start with these basic pieces:

1. Dreams do you no good unless you remember them. Maintain a dream journal, keep it next to your bed, and jot down your dreams immediately upon awakening. You’ll soon find that you remember more and more of your dreams even without the writing; keep writing them down, but allow this new awareness to grow.

2. Some components of dream are universal to humans (for instance, dreaming you’re naked in public means you believe some secret part of yourself will be exposed in the near future), while others are unique to individuals and mean things that only those individuals can understand. For this reason, your dream notebook in conjunction with notes about your life at the time you had your dream can help you unlock your own personal symbolism.

3. Some dreams do foretell the future. Most do not. Never mistake one type for the other.

A few of the universal human motifs (the elements that make up dreams) you may find in yourself in dreaming include these sex-related ones:

• Bedrooms indicate sexual partnerships, intimacies, and relationships. Watch what happens in your own dreams inside bedrooms for clues to problems or wonderful things in your own intimate relationships.

• Sex may indicate a conscious desire for someone, or it may just mean you have a very close relationship with someone who you love platonically. When you have sex in your dream with someone you dislike, it could mean you need to examine the strength of your negative feelings toward them and evaluate whether they are fair, or whether they are damaging you. And if you have sex with a partner of your sex but you are not homosexual, you may actually be trying to make contact with a hidden, secret part of yourself; it does not mean you are gay!

• Public nudity, as described above, means you fear or simply anticipate exposure for some reason.

• Marriage means you are embracing some new thing, committing to it, and anticipating a great change in your life. Look to the rest of the dream for hints of how you feel about that thing.

There are many, many other common motifs that recur in all human dreaming, but you are best off looking at your own mythology of dreaming. What do your metaphors mean? What things keep repeating, and how do you feel about them in your dreams? Slowly, an examination of your own dreaming will give you a better understanding of yourself, which is critical in your search for personal enlightenment.