1. Door to the unconscious.
Human imagination knows no boundaries, every night when we lie down to sleep our mind surprises us with some amazing dream. Any given night, anything may happen. We could be fighting a polar bear in the hot Sahara desert or, we could be taking a nice and hot bubble bath, on the North Pole… with our history teacher. All these crazy scenarios can differ at extreme but have one thing in common, they come from the same source; the same individual. Every night our subconsciousness opens the door into our inner world of fairy tales and myths and we enter a completely different world, which we know as the world of our mind. But where is our mind exactly when we sleep? On the one hand, as one could imagine it's in our bed, but on the other hand it reaches a lot deeper than one could imagine when we awake. Dreams may take us beyond the edges of our consciousness and open the space of our mind that reaches far to the borders of the Self and the Universe. Because these are the unconscious fields, therefore we have no idea what is going on there. Nevertheless that is the part of our mind that determines almost all our thoughts and behaviours. So what exactly is going on there? The truth is, so far there is no universal definition. It can be described as a huge part of the iceberg hidden beneath the ocean's surface. Such a comparison shows its real influence on our behaviour. The subconscious mind works 90% of the time during the day, and the conscious one, which in example reflects the tip of the iceberg, only 10%. We are under the control of our subconsciousness for a large part of our lives. Our consciousness is only active for such a short time, because even during the day, when we have a sense of full awareness, our thoughts drift away into the past or the future. In this way, we pull the strings of our subconsciousness to resonate with the vast space of other people's recordings, their opinions about us and the world, as well as about what we should and should not do. In that space, there is no self-image thereofore there is no dissonance between good and evil. There, too, what we know to be true mixes with the deception, to leave us only with the emotions that we internalise in our personality. Our subconscious mind absorbs everything physically and metaphysically within our reach and creates a set of patterns that arise from early childhood as a result of upbringing, education, and our interactions with parents, other adults and peers. The mind automatically reaches for these patterns whenever it encounters similar circumstances. Today, when we have access to social media, and insight into the lives of celebrities and idols like never before. We live in a cult of perfection. We have access to a whole range of tools that should make problems or malaise disappear on the spot. But at the same time, depression takes its toll like never before. No one in their right mind signs up for apathy, hopelessness, or loneliness yet these feelings become mark signs of today's reality. How is it that we can't just decide to be happy and just start a new life? Of course it is natural that we all go through different stages in life and there are also tough moments. Yet, the tragedy is that somewhere along the way we may get lost and not really find ourselves. The American psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott once wrote about depression,"It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found". And often, all we leave behind, is just the profile picture on social media.
2. Self help books ≠ your Self help books
When we are "trying" to do something different. For example, inspired by a friend, we decide to start regular yoga sessions. It's hard for us to persevere. "No, it's not me," we then say, mistakenly convinced that we really know who we are .The change sounds promising until it begins to take the shape of things that we are not used to and therefore we are unable to control. The reason why most self-help books are rather lousy help in the long run is because there is a fundamental difference between the conscious part of us which is calling out for change, and its unconscious parallel part that would actually have to change to make this conversion happen. The trouble is, that we cannot control the latter part because it's who we essentially are. We can't see it, we can't touch it, and we can't work on it in order to change it. Because we are "it" thus what we want to change is a part of the whole that we cannot grasp with our senses, because it gives us our existence. We intend to change our fortune and we read the book about wealth or happiness, yet we are so blinded that we do not notice that in such an order it is the tail that is trying to wave the dog. Not the other way around. Our intentions fizzle out confronted with fear that paradoxically along with the change, we would simply disappear. In consequence, we feel that we are not living as we should and according to our potential. We shut down access to our own strengths by compensating it with pursuit of material things that could improve our status, such as a new phone, a new car. Or we desperately seek our own balance in others. Assuming that if we get love from a partner, respect from colleagues, everything will be OK. What we are actually doing is somehow trying to fill this inner void and thus repair or replace all broken and empty items that we carry inside. Nevertheless, these kinds of attempts boil down to Sisyphean work. The desire for appreciation and the need to be loved is natural and makes life colorful. But if we reduce these features to black and white, resulting in either hatred or blind self-love on the grace of what we receive from the outside . We first lose touch with reality, and therefore also with ourselves.
3. Back door to the change.
We personify our entire history by every little gesture and such weight may be a heavy burden at times. While we treat our perception of reality in absolute terms, the image that appears in our head may differ significantly from the truth. We consist of the energy that we bring into the room through our entrance. This emotional energy captures the semantic framework of our personality. At the same time, what we are carrying along with us, is being intuitively grasped by the people that we come into contact with. What is this something, this energy? Let's use our imagination to answer this question. Suppose we just fell asleep. After about an hour from this point, our brain enters the REM phase, in which we should start dreaming ...
"I find myself in the centre of the apocalypse. Me and a group of men are looking for shelter in a large empty warehouse. I walk around the huge hall, I feel anxious about the cracking concrete surface, and with cautious steps avoid black spots of gluey liquid that lead me to the place beyond wooden stairs, where I see the railway
tracks that cross the hall...
When we are dreaming, we almost physically enter the sphere of our Psyche which generates the same energy that we carry around us all the time when we are awake. In an almost tangible way, we are then able to touch certain features of our personality. Like in this dream the apocalypse expresses an end, and may symbolise an inner change. That way inside a dream we are able to observe “with our own eyes'' the changes unfolding at the depth of unconsciousness.
...While everyone else is getting ready to go to sleep, I am looking for a place among others where I could make my bed. Finally, I put my sleeping bag on the railroad tracks that pass across the warehouse. The strange thing is, I chose this place even though it looked rather uncomfortable...
The dreamer may feel mentally tired, but let's put the analytic approach aside for a moment and just try to find ourselves in his shoes. Have a look around, take a breath in and feel its way down your throat. How big is this warehouse, how does the air smell? Where do the rail tracks lead? The dreams are not just a bunch of random stories but the whole world consists of everything we have ever felt, touched, seen, smelled, or tasted. Presented as the play directed by the sixth sense; an intuition. To free us from the illusion and the ideas about ourselves and open the space to everything we truly are.
...another man advises me not to sleep there, he suggests that if the train comes, it will crush me. Only then do I realise how bad this idea was. I decided to move elsewhere. Eventually I managed to find the right spot. As I get my bed ready, a big brawl starts between the two men. One beats the other very violently, to the point when his nose is completely crushed and his whole face is covered with blood and to the point when it
becomes painful to even watch this...
Lets not get fooled to be preparing for the joyride. In dreams, we enter a world stripped of the rationality that we know every day. There, a stream of consciousness penetrating our mind may appear very vividly as a racing train that wakes us up in the middle of the night and leaves us dwelling on our thoughts until dawn. We are deprived of all the defence mechanisms that help us cope with reality. At the same time we enter the world where we are exposed to our inner hatred, aggression and sexuality. Our subconscious is like a cosmos without a map, a space of complete abstraction where practically anything can happen. And by entering this space, we risk letting go of our illusions.
...Then, while we are debating on the next steps in our situation, a huge earthquake starts and breaks everything apart. It may sound strange, but we are all floating on a rising wall made of a huge amount of empty bottles. As the wall rises
higher and higher, we try to hold on, but
eventually we all fall."
The symbolic wall of empty bottles that lifts the dreamer up high at the end of his dream, it's like a growing void which he experiences on the subconscious level. We live in a time when we have access to all the knowledge we wish to find in our pockets and now more than ever the slogan "create yourself" is popular. There isn't anything wrong with it, but to recreate yourself, you first need to get to know and accept who you are. Otherwise, it remains just an empty phrase like an illusion which drives us running on empty from one day to another. So, how we want to create ourselves is of secondary importance. For as long as we swim in the ocean of unawareness we will be soaking up the same energy. Once we realise this, only then will we be able to take the first step towards some real change
4. A few words on dream interpretation.
Our subconscious mind sets the tone for the narrative in our mind. Remember the comparison with the iceberg? That's right, even in our state of consciousness, this happens continuously at the depths of our subconsciousness. So when we get to the point when we had enough and state to ourselves, "I can't take this anymore," or in acts of desperation, we turn to God, "God, why has this happened to me again?" This is because we feel we have no control over what happens to us. Perhaps it is so. However, we often too easily come to the conclusion that our frustration bounces unnoticed and our prayers go unanswered. I don't think these are just acts of desperation and rhetorical questions that we throw into thin air. Like everything else also this, does not escape our subconscious. And the strong emotional charge that we send at such moments does not go into emptiness. The answers to these questions and our prayers come back to us in the form of intuition and dreams. Sleep has many physiological functions that contribute to improving the quality of life and our well-being; it discharges the energy and tensions accumulated on the subconscious level and refreshes our minds. However, the dreaming aspect of this process is more spiritual. A dream is a form of communication. By interpreting dreams, we can find clues that can serve as guides to inner balance and fulfilment. Discovering the hidden meaning of our dreams takes a lot of attention when interpreting each part of them. Our psyche collects images that embody real emotions in their pure form, that is, not distorted by our conscious ideas. The analysis requires looking at individual fragments of sleep from several dimensions. On the one hand, we can approach the dream objectively and interpret what we experienced quite literally, as shown by the dream thread, e.g. if a dream reveals that our neighbour is aggressive towards us. This may illustrate the subconscious signals we picked up at a garden party a week ago, and the dream now brings this subconscious insight into our consciousness as a guide to deciding if we should invite him on a vacation together. The same dream can be interpreted on a subjective level and then one should look at the aggression of a neighbour introspectively assuming that his person appeared in the dream as the embodiment of a part of our personality. In this way, each part of content in a dream is linked to a memory that becomes relevant to our lives. Such an interpretation requires viewing dream images as facts from an unconscious being brought down to our attention on a conscious level. And help us to understand ourselves better. At the same time, it is important to understand why we are experiencing these events and delve into the emotions that different parts of the dream awaken within us. Often, in the context of our interpretation, a fragment that at first glance does not attract attention and is even somewhat repulsive, is the answer to a bothering question. And what in the receptive sense seems interesting and colourful, hence remains in the memory after waking up, is less relevant. In that case, it is easy to get on the wrong track with the interpretation. Imagine that in the middle of Manhattan you are being chased by a primal tribe and in order to escape, you need to climb the tallest building and fall on your head. Such a surreal plot can mask the essence of a dream and distract us from the fact that perhaps our subconscious suggests to us in a quite extreme way that in order to free yourselves from some burden in life, you simply need to do something crazy. According to a colloquial saying, you need to "fall on your head".
5. Dialogue with humankind (collective unconsciousness)?
Some traumatic emotions can be so difficult to swallow that if the message was delivered to us directly, it could be so shocking that our consciousness would suppress it and close the vicious circle where when after we would wake up, we wouldn't remember a thing. And there we are, often screaming and waking up in a cold sweat from our own dreams. At the same time, despite the severity associated with such narration that dreams propose, there is also something of a delicate and caring nature in our psyche that, in a sense, looks after us. Essentially one of the most important roles of our subconscious mind is to take care of us and guide us to make sure that we won't go in the wrong direction. Sometimes when we get ourselves into something that doesn't serve us, and let's say we keep agreeing on taking extra shifts as we cant say no to our boss, we may experience what we call somatic symptoms such as, migrene, pain in the neck, frequent colds etc. The emotions repressed in the subconscious, as well as the memories withdrawn from consciousness, are related to our bodily sensations. Some traumatic emotions may be so hard to swallow that if the message were delivered to us bluntly and directly, it could be so shocking that our consciousness would suppress it, and close the vicious circle in such a way that upon waking we would not remember anything. According to Freud's theory of censorship, dreams often reveal absurd plots because of our consciousness which is only willing to adopt a pattern that can be accepted from a moral point of view. Memories and desires appear in altered form as random events in everyday life. Therefore, our subconscious mind often codes dreams into its seemingly surreal conspiracy to convey important messages to us. Packed and hidden because we fear or are ashamed of them so much. Thus, we can hypothesise that when in a dream a young and attractive woman is forced to give away her jewellery under the threat of using a gun. This may, in fact, reveal her sexual fantasies. Although it seems quite controversial, sexuality is a fundamental part of human development and at the same time still a taboo subject even nowadays. Especially, if the man would happen to remind the lady of her much older boss whom, in addition, she seems to hate in reality. Of course, we must not forget that each analysis requires an individual approach and insight into the dreamer's personality. Dreams take us to a fantastic world that sets the tone for how we perceive reality. In fact, we perceive the world not exactly as it is, but through the prism of our fantasies (including subconscious ones). Therefore, reality is not unambiguous, but it is as we perceive. A very important element of psychotherapy is understanding these fantasies. To understand why we perceive the world in a certain way. The brain's job is to anticipate and control what might happen, and in dreams we free ourselves from this hard, full-time work. In this way, we can observe something that is happening simultaneously in our lives, but is invisible to the eye on a daily basis. While it is undoubtedly equally real.
