A dreamer wrote me recently with a question and gave me permission to share it here:
“I actually have a question about your list of things to help remember dreams. You say that when we write down details more will start to appear. But how will I know if those details were actually from my dream and I’m not just making something up?”
It’s a fantastic question and one I’ve considered myself in the past. I’m going to attempt to answer it below, while also touching upon the larger topics of where do dreams come from and how do I know what my dream means.
One of the most mysterious elements of dreams and dreaming is our not knowing for sure where dreams come from. Dream content and experience is so subjective, which is partly why we don’t see the phenomenological experience of dreams studied so much in clinical lab settings. Clinical research studies have — for some good reasons — very rigid demands to comply with for study and reporting, as well as infrastructure requirements that don’t necessarily suit the study of recalling, experiencing, and reporting dreams.
In short, while we have some reported research findings on the neurobiology and functions of sleep and dreaming (See Patrick McNamara’s The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams for comprehensive coverage of recent findings), we don’t have much in the way of collected scientific data that examines the dreamer’s subjective experience in the dream or even the impact of the dream content on the dreamer’s waking life physical and emotional well-being, choices, and behavior.
We do have a lot of anecdotal evidence about the phenomenology of dreams, however, from professionals who have worked or played in the “field of dreams,” across the millennia. This can be useful, if not definitive.
For those of us interested in exploring our own dreams and dreaming tendencies, it’s a part of the process we eventually must accept: there is no absolute knowledgable source for concluding what is going on in your dreams, why you are having them, or from where they emerge.
It can be frustrating to realize this, but accepting the lack of formal external conclusion about your dreams can also be liberating. Whatever you remember about your dreams, whatever moves you about the experience … it’s yours to feel, reflect upon, process, and integrate.
The lack of formal research on the phenomenology of dreams does not make dream experience any less real or any more “made up” than waking life experience which is subjective, as well. Certainly in waking life we participate in a kind of shared consensus reality, and therefore can seek out external validation or confirmation for what we perceived. Walking together in a garden with a friend, we can both agree that the flower we smell is indeed a real flower, for instance.
The absence of that shared experience can cause many of us a lot of anxiety. In fact, I think this is why so many people choose not to remember their dreams or not to take their dreams too seriously. Dreams are too perplexing for them to reflect upon independently and too difficult to communicate with others in a way that feels shared or satisfactory. It can feel frustrating, even, trying to. We can’t find the words to explain the dream or we fear the other person will never truly get our experience for not having seen it, smelled it, touched it themselves, etc.
Add that to the fact that dreams can often expose our biggest fears, our most hidden shame, and our deepest desires, and you end up with a large percent of the population who willingly chooses to forget dreams rather than remember and make use of them.
This is one reason why I have found dreamwork to be such an affirming and often healing experience. It can provide a container for communicating about dreams that is much more suited to the way dreams unfold and affect us, compared to waking life perceptual events. We know the experiences we are seeking to recall and describe are often nonlinear, surreal, strange, confusing, unable to be described with words, sensory-rich, numinous, etc. Dreamwork practitioners have ways to explore the dream that meet the dreamer where they are at in their ability or inability to remember and transmit the information to us. We invite the dreamer to make use of all his senses and capacities — not just language — to access the dream. We allow for the fact that a dreamer may be confused both in the dream and after, as to what “really” happened. This does not make him less reliable, nor does it make what he remembers about the dream any less “real” or any more “made up.”
All that said, we also encourage the dreamer in a dreamwork session to consider that their first reaction to the image in the dream itself may have been heavily influenced by their waking life orientation, bias, preferences, beliefs, or ego identities. Yes, the dream is yours, and the images are from you. However, just as you can be reactive in waking life, let’s say, believing a hose in the street is a snake, only to look more closely and realize the snake is, in fact, a hose; so it goes in dreams.
Dreamwork invites the dreamer to get closer to the dream images, engage them with their senses, and ultimately feel them more deeply, rather than react to them or analyze them. (Tendencies we strongly develop in waking life in order to survive.)
In a dreamwork session, we go back into the dream and identify together the most vivid images. We also hold less tightly the information we seem to “just know” about the dream when there are no vivid images or sensory experiences to verify that knowledge. This kind of “just knowing” in a dream is often our bias or belief system running the show, rather than a deep engagement with the dream.
The more you engage through your senses with a dream you remember, the less you will wonder: did I make this up? Your senses will tell you it happened. Just like smelling the flower in the garden with a friend.
Sure, it happened inside a dream, and there are many mysteries about dream space and dream time for us still to understand. And, yes, there is cause for concern and conversation these days around the topic of “what is real” when it comes to AI, fake news, augmented reality, etc. I am not minimizing that, nor is this article a commentary on hallucinations that can come as a result of psychological illness or maladaptive conditions.
I am simply saying: begin to trust the dream images that arise from you as images that are seeking your attention and reflection. They are real enough to matter, and real enough for you to dwell upon on your own or with a trusted dreamwork practitioner. There is so much more to reality than we know or perceive with our five senses. This is a scientific fact. (Think dark matter. Think ultraviolet light.) Rather than get hung up on whether an image you remember from a dream is made up or not, consider why the image is rising up to your conscious awareness now.
(As a side note: I’m watching Severance Season 2 this month, and if you’re someone who is interested in exploring these types of questions — memory, dreams, reality, perception, identity — I recommend it!)
