TOW: Dreams

A long time ago, a wise Asian philosopher has a very realistic dream that he was a butterfly.  When he awoke, he wondered, was he a butterfly that was dreaming he was a human, or a human that dreamt he was a butterfly?

Descartes continued along this line of thought, and asked, what's to stop us from assuming our version of reality is made up?  Perhaps there could be some sort of demon-like conspirator, who keeps us tangled up in what we think is reality, which is really just a dream-like state. 

More than anything, the dreams we have at night not only make us question the reality we have, but can  colour our perceptions of reality and our day-to-day tasks.  


There is nothing worse than dreaming you'll fail an exam or an important task the night before said task actually happens.  But those dreams make a difference in how we perceive our reality and how we deal with certain tasks from time to time.  Sometimes I've had feelings change towards an individual that I don't know very well simply because I had a dream where that person was one of the main characters, so to speak. Jung wrote a very interesting line about dream analysis, and said that we often take for granted the power of our subconscious mind:


The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is."  (The Practice of Psychotherapy)
 

And this is the beauty and also the danger in having dreams.  Dreams seem to us to be an alternate reality:  a place where physical laws need not be obeyed, nor regular societal standards, and dreams to us often forebode tellings of the future or reminiscences of the past.  And the few times that dreams do speak to our present, the dream is rarely a more pleasant version of the reality we have--it is often alien, and seemingly strange to the way we currently live our lives.

What really matters in life is that we take dreams to be part of us--part of those crazy and wild desires we ignore, part of our 'shadow self' that we repress, part of ourselves that sometimes we didn't even know existed.  But dreams can change the way we think about people in real life, and change the way we think about ourselves.  Dreams are not necessarily there to guide us, but often to show us something hidden that we have yet to consider or discover.