Your Personal Evolution Through Dreamwork
Every night after falling asleep, you dream. Yes, everyone dreams, even if you might not remember them. In fact, the average person only remembers about 5% of their dreams.
Dreams are a product of evolution that utilize our sleep state to process memories and information, help us to psychologically evolve and grow and even expand spiritually. Let’s shine some light on dreams and explore your internal conversation!
Dreams and Consciousness
Current dream research indicates that dreams are another state of consciousness and another level of awareness that is experienced during sleep.
This state of consciousness can include the feeling of emotions, reliving direct memories, experiencing visual imagery and any of the other senses. Note that not all dreams include imagery! Some individuals dream entirely with a sense of knowing and others can even taste and smell in their dreams!
From a psychological perspective, dreams are a window into your subconscious and have many functions.
The act of dreaming is currently believed to be the brain distilling and integrating everyday information and experiences into your life-story. Typically, new experiences and information from the day prior will appear in your dreams. However, it can sometimes take up to 3 days for these experiences to appear in the dreamscape. This is called the dream lag effect.
In addition to processing new information, dreams also assist in regulating your emotions, organizing thoughts, and comprehending the interactions you’ve had with other people and in daily scenarios.
Processing the World
During REM sleep, it is theorized that your brain goes through a vetting process that determines whether each new experience or piece of information should be kept and filed away into your life-story or discarded.
Once your brain determines what it will keep from the previous day, it creates new memories. Your dreams then bring together any old memories that may have a common theme with the new memories and merge these like-experiences together. This merging process is expressed by your subconscious creating and enacting scenarios and working through these mock-up moments. By bringing in an old memory, your mind is attempting to place the new information into the total context of your life.
In other words, dreams are a form of learning and retaining knowledge. You’re making sense of things!
During a dream, your subconscious may be asking questions like, “How does this new information affect my reality?” or “Does this experience change my views on anything or bring new questions into my life?”
Essentially, every time you sleep your brain is constantly enhancing your total worldview with new information and filtering it over your past experiences. Your dreams are defining the pathways between specific events, emotions, relationships, and every other facet of life. This makes dreams a fountain of information about what makes you you and how you have evolved and grown over time.
Evolving Your Reality
If you’ve ever looked back on your life and questioned why you thought a different way back then or felt a moment of regret, note that in the past your reality was different.
Reality is defined as the state of the world or things as they actually exist. But reality is subjective and each individual can have a different sense of reality based on what they personally know to be true.
For example, a child who suffers abuse at home will have a different concept of reality than a child in a non-abusive home. To one child, certain behaviors could trigger the need for self-preservation where the other child can express those same behaviors but be met with acceptance or a lesson to find resolution.
The reality for the first child is that some actions can have bad consequences where the second child does not experience those consequences for their actions.
This is where two people can go through the same exact event and actually perceive it differently based on their previous life experience.
Fortunately, reality has the ability to shift and change with new information over time.
The world of space science is a great example of a shifting reality on a global scale. One of the earliest theories of the Earth’s position in the cosmos came from the Greek philosopher Aristotle.
Aristotle successfully promoted his theory that the Earth was the center of everything because religious leaders at the time found that his theory helped them convert followers so they began doubling down on his theory for their own gain. For 1,000 years much of the world believed that Aristotle’s theory (promoted by Christianity) was correct; this was a global reality at the time.
However, through the work of Copernicus, Kepler and Isaac Newton, it was proven that the Earth was not the center of everything and that we in fact orbit around the sun like any other planet. This new information changed the reality and perspective of the entire world. Everything regarding the topic had to be rewritten and retaught. Out with the old and in with the new!
Your brain works a lot like this. You don’t know something until you know it. The memories and experiences that you hash out while dreaming are constantly updating your reality with new information.
Dreams are the awareness and internal dialogue between your subconscious and conscious selves as your brain processes and redefines your reality. This makes them an AMAZING resource for understanding yourself throughout the passage of time and for comprehending your reality.
Emotional Regulation
In conjunction with evolving your reality, dreams also help to regulate emotions.
Most of our memories are emotionally charged. Whether the experience was joyful, terrifying, hilarious, or embarrassing, a crucial piece of information that our brain stores with any given memory is the emotion that we felt while in the process of experiencing it.
When we think about emotions and dreaming, many people will gravitate towards thinking of bad dreams or nightmares. In fact, the bulk of the dreams you remember at first will likely have a negative charge to them as these dreams carry a greater impression of emotion and more personal gravity or weight.
We use dreams to help us explore and balance emotions because the waking, conscious processing of an emotion can pose a problem in situations where it is not socially or culturally acceptable. In most cases we’ve been conditioned to repress these “unwanted” emotions but just because we’ve repressed them doesn’t mean they’re gone. Over time, subdued or repressed emotions can take a toll on your physical and mental health.
It is extremely important to find a way to release repressed emotions before the energy becomes stored in the body. This is where dreams play a critical role in helping us to accept and move on from experiences that we’ve bottled up.
Dreams can lend a helping hand to provide you with a safe, completely personal space to express your emotions. If you’ve ever had a dream where you felt complete rage or sheer terror, it most likely is an expression of your body and mind in an attempt to process and release a repressed emotion.
In the safety of the dream space your brain is presented with the opportunity to act out scenarios for the repressed emotion to safely exist within. By reviewing our dreams and becoming consciously aware of the emotions that are being integrated in this space, we can better accept our reality and move through difficult moments with a greater sense of awareness and wholeness. If you acknowledge the emotions you feel in your dreams and work to consciously feel through them they tend to clear out pretty well.
But what about extremely negative dreams or nightmares?
Nightmares and PTSD Dreams
When bad dreams become nightmares and the nightmares become consistent, it can be a sign of PTSD. In fact, 70-90% of individuals struggling with PTSD have negatively-charged recurring dreams or nightmares.
I myself have struggled with PTSD rooted in both my childhood and military experience. I’ve experienced 20 years of recurring nightmares and sleep paralysis episodes that have really messed with my life.
As sleep is the second most essential thing for the body, it is important to address PTSD or recurring nightmares as soon as possible with the help of a medical or psychological professional. Once you’ve sought out help and are being assisted in addressing your PTSD or trauma, you can begin to use your dreams and nightmares as tools to support your treatment.
I personally have been using my dreams and nightmares for years to assist myself during cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) sessions. I’ve found that my nightmares and dreams paint a map of my subconscious mind and highlight what is and is not integrating for me. By analyzing my dream map and beginning to understand the unique language of my subconscious I have become more aware of how traumatic experiences have shaped me… and how to heal myself from within.
By developing a daily practice to help me with dream recall and expanding on this over time, I have opened myself up to the emotions of those memories. By accepting my dreams and following their nudges, I brought these emotions into my conscious awareness and worked through them one by one with a therapist as they presented themselves to me.
My personal dream and nightmare journey is one of the many reasons for this blog’s existence.
I believe that everyone deserves the right to know and understand their dreams as a natural tool that can assist you in living life to the fullest.
It’s Time to Acknowledge Our Dreams
The act of dreaming is crucially important to the very fabric of human existence. Without dreams, our subconscious would be extremely limited in its ability to process our experiences and we would quickly become overwhelmed by the task of consciously integrating everything that we’ve ever learned.
Think of every moment you straight up did not want to remember. Your subconscious helped you integrate that experience through your dreams whether you were aware of it or not.
There will always be work to do, lessons to learn, and experiences to process in your life. By acknowledging our dreams and what they’re telling us about ourselves, we can begin to take an active role in the process of our own internal evolution which can help us heal with greater clarity and live the life we all deserve.
With this heightened awareness we can begin to live a more authentic, healed and whole existence.
It’s time to start taking our dreams seriously and participate in our own emotional and psychological progress as a human being.
- Meg 🐝
