Perchance to Dream

Sleep is an essential part of our human life, our human experience. We know we spend approximately one-third of our lives in sleep, and that to do so is essential to our physical, emotional and mental health. And we know that when we get a good night’s sleep we feel better; again, physically, emotionally and mentally.

Since the advent of tools that measure the subtle activity of the brain, we have learned that sleep is an active and fertile time for our consciousness. Dreams are an essential part of the sleep experience. Measurements of time in dreams through the tracking of REM (rapid eye movement) cycles helps scientists and doctors track and examine when in the sleep cycle we dream. And, psychologists will attest to the importance of dreams in the process of communicating to the conscious mind, often in a symbolic language in subtle ways that we sometimes can understand and sometimes find confusing. Indeed there are psychologists who devote the main focus of their practice to interpreting dreams.

Even among those therapists who do not focus their practice on dreams, most psychotherapists would agree that the process of dreaming is important and through the experience of dreams people are put in touch with a part of their consciousness that Carl Jung called supra-personal consciousness. Realizing this, understanding this fact of the dreaming experience, leads us to examine both sleep and dreams from the perspective of consciousness.

Here, in the realm of consciousness, no machines, no matter how scientific or advanced can answer our inquiries. How we dream, and why we dream what we dream, are mysteries. At times our dreams may be a jumbled reflection of a book we were reading before sleep, or a movie or television program we saw, or a conversation we had in the course of our day. I even recall dreams of solitaire- layouts on a night when obviously too much of my day had been spent playing computer games. At other times our dreams present deep insights, revealing greater understanding and wisdom about our life.

Dreams and their symbols remain in the realm of our consciousness, and therefore to my way of thinking, are spiritual, by which I mean pertaining to the spirit or soul contact. – Genevieve Gerard

Old biblical stories resound with prophets or characters being directed in dreams. Recall the story of Jacob who dreamed of an angel telling him to return from where he was staying, to his family’s land. (Genesis 31: 13) “ Likewise Pilate’s’ wife was reported to have been warned in a dream that he should have nothing to do with Jesus, “that just man.” (Matthew 27: 19) Recall that the Wise Men who traveled to the manger, following a star, were told in a dream to return home by a different route when leaving Jerusalem, after they had found the baby Jesus. (Matthew 2: 12)

So throughout over 4,000 years of spiritual stories, the importance of dreams have been considered and recorded. Dreams have been a part of the human experience and our human expression both spiritually and psychologically, as reflected in the words of Shakespeare as Hamlet records in his famous soliloquy of “To be or not to be,” in which he extols the blessings of sleep but fears dreams when he notes “to dream, ah there’s the rub.” So the importance of our dreams has long been known to humanity.

Unfortunately our science, our pursuit of medicine and instant solutions for life problems, have resulted in a in a disruption of our dreams. Those who use sleeping medication on a regular basis are said to dream less. Sleeping medication represses the REM cycle. Those who become habitual users of these medications are removed from both the blessing and the curse of this natural and essential human experience. This is the most unfortunate result of using medication to sleep.

In the years since I first released my “Sleep in Heavenly Peace” visualization, the only people who have told me they tried to use the visualization but it didn’t help them sleep, were those who were the habitual users of sleep medications, and unfortunately that is a large part of our population. So as I examine the experience of sleeping and dreaming from the perspective of consciousness I wish to encourage the use of meditative and relaxing techniques as solutions to sleep problems. These natural solutions leave the portal to dreams open for the insights and awareness that dreams may bring. To disrupt this natural part of our consciousness’s ability to communicate through the sleep experience seems unwise.

And I wish you sweet dreams.

 

Namaste

 

© Genevieve Gerard 3-3-13

 

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