Resources
Books
The following books are very helpful for anyone who is seeking to learn from dreams about the inner life and how it speaks to a relationship with God.
- Inner Work, by Robert Johnson, published by Harper Collins in 1986.
- Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language, by John Sanford, published by HarperSanFrancisco in 1968.
- The Symbolic Quest, by Edward C. Whitmont, published by Princeton University Press in 1978
- Urgings of the Heart, by Wilkie Au and Noreen Cannon published by Paulist Press in 1995.
About Symbols
The people, animals and things that appear in a dream are often symbols pointing to an inner quality or dynamic. For example, if an owl shows up in a dream, it may symbolize a personal need for night vision or wisdom. If a doctor plays a role in a dream, he or she might signify a need to pay attention to physical needs. A dream about a spider’s web could relay the importance of connections in the dreamer’s life.
Dream work requires focused attention on symbols. The dreamer investigates what a particular symbol means from their life experience.
A dream about a bee might indicate business and industry to some dreamers and stinging terror to others. The significance of the symbol needs to be grounded in life experience. For this reason, dream dictionaries are not always helpful imparting meaning to a symbol.
There are, however, some symbols that are universal. These symbols are called archetypal symbols. Robert Johnson, the author of an instructive dream book, Inner Work, defines archetypes as “pre-existing ‘first patterns’ that form the basic blueprint for the major dynamic components of the human personality.”(29) Johnson writes that Carl Jung began to notice the presence of archetypes in dreams when he correlated the symbols with characters from ancient myths. (28)
Some good questions to ask when working with a symbol are:
- What is my life experience with the symbol?
- What feelings does the symbol evoke?
- How does the symbol work in the context of the dream?
- What is currently happening in my life that would bring forth this symbol in my dream?
- Can I relate this symbol with a scriptural figure or mythological character?
It may seem tedious or silly to spend so much time on a single item in a dream, but I believe the efforts are worth it. Carl Jung maintained that a great deal of psychic energy is carried through symbols in dreams. The following quote comes from one of Jung’s books titled, Man and His Symbols (4):
“Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider unconscious aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. Nor can one hope to define or explain it. As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason….Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend. This is one reason why all religions employ symbolic language or images. (4)”
For this reason, faith can enhance the exploration of symbols. I urge fellow dreamers to engage their heart and soul when working with a symbol. With faith at work, the dreamer can be carried to a new place of understanding. Edward Whitmont, in his book, The Symbolic Quest, writes that a symbol “points beyond itself to a meaning not conveyed by a rational term, owing to the latter’s intrinsic limitation.” (18) That is the challenge of working with symbols: to get beyond the range of the symbol itself to the deeper reality it proclaims.