There are many people who feel content living on the surface of life. They aren’t necessarily shallow, or strictly materialistic, but their daily life experiences simply provide them with all the sense of meaning that they desire and they feel no need to seek deeper answers. Perhaps they are the fortunate ones. Those of us who feel that there must be something more, a deeper reality beneath the world of appearances, will feel obliged to search for that Truth in the depths of our own souls. Fortunately, the gateway to the inner world is not so far away. It opens for us every time we fall asleep and enter into the fount of wisdom and insight that is our dreams.

Though dreams have been revered by various peoples in different eras since antiquity, they’ve carried a certain stigma in our own culture until relatively recently. Sigmund Freud viewed the Unconscious as little more than a repository for the garbage of the psyche. Matters improved greatly, though, with the advent of Swedish psychologist Carl Jung’s pioneering work. In treating the Unconscious as an aware and responsive phenomenon, Jung provided modern psychology with a true spiritual basis for the first time.

Once Jung’s work became more accepted in psychological circles, and was expanded upon by James Hillman and others, the doors were open for Archetypal psychology and dream analysis to emerge. Where once psychology could do naught but help patients to adapt to society at large - a society which, perceptive minds noted, had a lot mental dysfunction and spiritual malaise at its heart - it could not provide them with the means to journey inward and tap into the wellspring of guidance within their own souls.

The language of dreams is typically obscure to the uninitiated, which is why a facilitator, an experienced dreamworker, is so necessary. Part of the reason why dream symbols can seem so confusing is because people are oftentimes not living in accord with their inner truth. To a client who’s identified with his or her false self, the allies from the Unconscious can appear dark and threatening; and indeed they are threatening, because they come to challenge one’s ego when it insists on living contrary to the will of the soul.

Once a client begins to heed the messages from the inner self rather than resisting them, however, the Unconscious begins to behave more like the helpful friend that it truly is. Our own psyches contain everything that we need to experience wholeness, inner peace, and a sense of our true direction in life. The answers are there if we’re open to receiving them. Most people never undertake the journey of self-discovery that is the dreamwork. Those who have will, more often than not, wonder how they ever tried to live without the bounty of spiritual support that can only be found within.