Jen Sonstein Maidenberg

There are so many different kinds of dreamers. There are the dreamers who hardly remember their dreams, and even believe they don’t dream. (They do.) There are the ones who dream all the time, every night, many dreams. Some dreamers dream dreams that seem to stay close to waking life — the characters are people they know or knew; the settings are somewhat familiar. While other dreamers dream often of strange people or strange creatures doing strange things in strange settings.

The dreamers who usually end up sharing their dreams with me tend to bring me the perplexing dreams, at first: the ones that don’t line up with their understanding of reality or the world; the dreams that don’t make sense or provoke them in an unsettling way. Sometimes they arrive seeking some kind of explanation from me, the “expert”; other times they just want someone to listen to the dream, because it has moved them or frightened them, and they don’t want to be alone with it. 

Then there are the dreamers who bring dreams that so profoundly dislodge them from their waking life orientation they find themselves forced to reevaluate their assumptions and beliefs about life and death. Yes, there are some dreams that provoke existential crisis. 

Because I have written and spoken a lot about my own exceptional experiences with dreams, particularly precognitive dreams and past-life dreams, I am a landing spot for dreamers of extraordinary dreams. (To be clear, I welcome this and encourage it. I want to hear those dreams.) Individuals who have an extraordinary dream experience may not realize it at first, but their worldview is about to change.

Even if you were previously open-minded and even curious about psi phenomena, reincarnation or non-human intelligence, for instance; you are not prepared for the actual lived experience of it. It shakes you when it happens to you. If you choose to engage with the experience, you will soon find that the psychological effects are deep and long-lasting. Reality/the world is not what you thought it was.

However, what most dreamers don’t realize (and I didn’t until I really started working with my dreams), is that it doesn’t take an exceptional dream for your worldview to change. In fact, a regular old dream may be the cause of a significant shift in you…if you allow it.

Many of us have woken up from one kind of dream that has this effect on us: specifically, a dream in which we are physically intimate or romantic with someone we don’t find attractive in waking life or wouldn’t ever consider being intimate with. I hear this dream a lot, so it’s common and I know it’s likely you’ve had a dream like this at least once in your life.

In the morning, you might wake up from such a dream baffled, amused, or even disgusted. Sometimes, the dream encounter is surprisingly arousing. You might lay in bed and ask yourself, “what was THAT?” Let’s say it was a good friend or a colleague you got spicy with in the dream. It may be hard to meet up with them the next time you see them without remembering the dream version of them or the kiss/flirtation /sex you shared. Suddenly, they look a little different to you. You may feel it in your body even. The dream has changed your perception of this person.

Most likely, you’ll shake all this off. Eventually, you’ll even forget the dream. (You may forget it faster, on purpose.) But for just a moment or a day, how you see and respond to that person in waking life is a little different than how you saw and responded to them before. Something in your worldview — however seemingly insignificant–has shifted as a result of a dream. 

Dreams, I believe, are designed to change our perceptions; of people, yes, but also of our environment. The more you work with your dreams — especially with Natural Dreamwork, which encourages a slowing down of the dream in order to more deeply feel the dream’s images  — the more you start to pay attention to what you perceive and how. Your senses wake up! People who have never had a dream with any smell or tastes will one day bring me a dream in which they do. Dreamers who work their dreams in this way also begin to notice in waking life how many stories are constantly running in the background of their daily activities.  

For instance, when you work your dreams you start to realize how much you assume about people or yourself, without there being any factual evidence to back that assumption up. You begin to realize just how much bias you have in even the most mundane situations — looking for your car in the parking lot, meeting a stranger at the door of your house, or riding the train to work. Who and how you are in waking life shows up pretty evidently in your dreams. It’s a little more obscured in waking life. Most of us operate on auto-pilot in waking life, at a pretty quick pace, and we don’t stop to pay attention to how we are perceiving people or our environment. 

When we work with dreams, we intentionally slow down the action, so to speak. We reenter a dream and tune in more to our sensory experience: what we concretely see, what we actually hear. We question what we “just seem to know” about the dream or dream characters. How do we know? What makes us so certain? What evidence backs up our assertion? Is it possible we are wrong? And if we are wrong, how does that change the dream encounter? What have we possibly missed by bringing so many of our unfounded stories into the dream?

If possible, when working a dream, we also tune into our bodies because how our bodies feel in a dream or reentering a dream tells us a lot about how open we are or not to meeting newness or strangeness. Noticing our body sensations also alerts us to whether or not we might be making an assumption about a dream character based on past hurts or traumas.

When we ask questions about our dream encounters, we often realize that our way of being in the dream is very familiar to us. Basically, we act and react this way in waking life, too. “Yeah, that resonates,” is what my dream clients will often say. Or, “yeah, that sounds like me.”

We bring our fixed ideas and fixed ways of interacting with the world into the dream and never get the chance to experience the dream space as it is. We only experience it as more of what we already think or know about the world, people, and ourselves. You could be having a past-life dream or a precognitive dream, for instance, and you would never know it. You could be receiving an answer from a wise dream character to your most burning question, but you’d be too rushed or too judgmental of their appearance to stop and listen. You could hug a loved one who has passed, but are too concerned about them in the dream to notice the opportunity.

Don’t worry, though. This is not a permanent condition. As I wrote above, dreams are designed to change our perceptions. Dreams give us a respite from ourselves. Dreams enable us to see the world through different eyes. Dreams challenge us to question our fixed beliefs and biases. Dreams enable us to experience a reality that’s different from the every-day and notice how it feels when we do.

If we allow it.

What we learn as a result of these dream experiences becomes ours. Forever. If we choose to remember it. We can use the memory, the lesson, or the feeling from the dream in waking life. This is why I don’t call waking life “real life” in contrast to the dream. The dream is real. It affects us. That’s what makes it real. It’s not intrinsically truth or fact. But it’s real. 

So be prepared to have your worldview changed once you start remembering and working with your dreams. It’s not for everyone — many people are content to pass through life holding tightly to their viewpoints and positions. But everyone could benefit from it; especially in today’s world in which many of our crises seem to stem from or be exacerbated by lack of empathy, rigidity, and ignorance.