By Mark Argent
The Bible is peppered with references to people having profound experiences of God through their dreams. The readings from around Christmas include two classic examples, namely, Joseph being assured that it was right to take Mary as his wife, and the Magi being encouraged not to go back to Herod on their return trip from Bethlehem. Down the centuries, many mystics have laid great store by the content of dreams and visions.
Yet today, people are sometimes wary of letting the language of dreams spirituality sit too closely together. Perhaps that’s because dreams have become a major part of the psychoanalyst’s toolkit, and so there can be a lingering fear that talking about dreams reveals more than one realises.
But there’s no simple rule to explain what dreams mean. In analysis, dream work offers a route to engage with things in the unconscious. There’s an immediate link with spirituality because the unconscious is also a key place of spiritual experience, which is to say that many religious experiences go outside people’s conscious control.
One of the lessons of psychoanalysis is that the most important thing about dream work is not what it says about the unconscious, but rather the choice to cooperate with the unconscious healing process going on within us. Indeed, there is a striking parallel between this and choosing to co-operate with where God is active in one’s life!
At times, spoken prayers aren’t what people need, not least as they can enforce the perception that God can only be encountered in ways that fit in with this form of prayer. An alternative is to talk of ‘being’ prayer rather than ‘doing’ prayer. Within this, encountering and examining more out our stray thoughts and feelings can be important in helping us think about what God is saying to us and calling us to be and do. Dreams and visions allow us a fascinating opportunity to do this. because they are outside conscious thought. If one lets them, they can gently challenge assumptions and open a person to a new space. In the background is the idea that God is at work in us, through all of these things.
Most people have far more dreams than they actually remember, so the first part of dream work is to make the choice to note dreams down, which usually means keeping a notepad by the bed as it’s normal to forget even the fact of a dream having happened within a few minutes of getting up.
As far as working with a dream goes, one approach is just to ask the question ‘What does this dream hold for me?’ and see what intuition offers, trusting that the simple process of asking the question is enough.
It can be helpful, in the evening, to think back over the day asking the question ‘Where was God in the experience?’. If there are memories of a dream, let them be part of that question. The answer may not be obvious, but it’s quite common for things associated with the dream to connect with stray thoughts in the day which become part of the sense of what was going on at the deep level where God is encountered.
When a dream needs more probing, a useful trick can be to write down a list of all the elements in the dream, all the people, objects, actions, colours… in one column, and then in the next column write the first thing that comes to mind associated with each of those things to see what emerges. If nothing’s obvious, try another column, free-associating one step further with each item. Things don’t have to become clear, there is always scope for more to happen in future dreams.
‘Being’, rather than ‘doing’ prayer is about entering into a process of deepening, with enough generosity to to live out of the assumption that God has something of value going on throughout our lives, even the mysterious parts, and choosing not rush our prayer or spiritual experiences to get fast results. Spiritual experiences don’t have to happen in one go!
