by John Cargile

Created on: May 10, 2008

How many times have you heard someone tell you, "I had the weirdest dream last night?" Or, maybe you have even told someone the same thing.

I am not an expert when it comes to dreaming; I have no theories. I do not know how dreams arise. But, if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly something almost always comes of it.

The late Carl Jung, noted psychologist, says dreams are seldom rational, of a scientific nature, but rather "a practical and important hint which shows the patient in what direction the unconscious is leading him." Jung observed that dreams perform restorative, corrective, compensatory, prophetic and developmental roles in the psyche and he believed that we must be ready at any moment to construct an entirely new theory of dreams.

The closest time I felt a dream being real came several years ago when I was in a meditative dream state, and I was walking upstairs to see a figure resembling Jesus. He was standing at the top of the stairs. He touched me on the head, and pointed me into a room. In the room was a baby crib, and by the side of the crib was my mother. When I looked down into the crib, I saw a baby. The baby was me. My father was not in the room at the time which, I reasoned later, he was not there at my birth because it was 1945, and he could not take leave from his services in the Army Air Corps.

Waking, dreaming and sleeping are assured to all of us who are living in the cosmos at the present moment. They are like death and taxes.

Rather than putting much importance on analysis or having to figure "out" what a dream might mean, it helps to see dreams as experiences valid on their own. Experiences which can be cultivated organically whose roots delve into the rich depths of the psyche as they stem outward into the light of conscious awareness and begin forming their leaves of thought. Truly, they are an art form of the soul for creative self-expression, self-discovery and self-healing, and much benefit and fulfillment comes simply by remembering, writing, tape-recording, sharing, painting, enacting or otherwise birthing them into the physical world. It can be greatly worthwhile to harvest the dream fruits of personal insight and practical guidance, yet every dream affects us physiologically, emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually, and becomes part of our being, changing us regardless of whether we make any logical waking connections or not.

Dreams generally speak in a multi-dimensional language of feelings, images

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