Dream On!

I've always been a vivid dreamer. I still remember dreams I had as a young child -- fighting monster spiders crawling up from the basement, and watching their innards burst into vegetable soup when I hit them with a wooden spoon; watching with horror as a vampire convention boiled Frankenstein's monster in a vat of acid; seeing a little girl in a pink frilly dress skipping down the sidewalk holding her parents' hands, but being puzzled by the sight of a penis underneath when her dress flew up; being Robin, the Boy Wonder, having to be rescued by Batman from the Joker's clutches. In seventh grade, one of my teachers bought me a dream journal after hearing me recount numerous unusual dreams. Over the years, from young adulthood on, I would periodically write down the most vivid dreams, the ones that somehow "felt" more significant to me than others. Every once in a while as I'm going through old papers I still find one of these dreams hastily scribbled down or typed out on a piece of paper, which I'm now collecting all in one place. In January 2006, I finally began in earnest a dream journal where I make a disciplined effort to write down every dream that I can remember. Since then, I have recorded almost 1200 dreams.

Whether dreams actually "mean anything" is something dream analysts have debated for millennia. Whether they do or not, they are fascinating. And anybody who pays attention to them can't help but view them as some kind of a window into the soul, or even as an oracle of the gods. Freud saw them as a reflection of our psychology. Jung saw them tapping into a collective subconscious. I am fascinated by James Hillman's thesis that dreams are our our way of communing with death, or rather, are death's way of communing with us.

I will lay my biases out on the table now. I believe in God, not just as some kind of metaphor, nor as some kind of extension of our super egos. I believe that God is real in some objective sense, that he is a person we can come to know. I am a Christian of the Latter-day Saint variety. I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in the world of spirit. I believe that some part of us is eternal, and will survive the death of our physical bodies. I believe in the resurrection. I believe in life eternal.

I grew up in a family where it was taken for granted that God could communicate with us, through the Scriptures, through living modern-day prophets, through the Holy Spirit, and through visions and dreams. Growing up I remember hearing my parents talk about dreams had by other family members, and telling stories of dreams that had been received by ancestors of mine that had given significant instruction in spiritual matters that had become part of our family lore.

For a time, during a period of personal exploration, I took the liberty of questioning everything that I had ever been raised to believe. Even though, from the time I was a child, I had had numerous, very compelling personal spiritual experiences, I allowed myself to question where those experiences might have come from. I explored the question of whether spiritual experience is just a manifestation of our psyche, of our subconscious.

It was a very compelling personal spiritual experience I had in the summer of 2005 that jolted me back to an awareness that at some very deep level I could not deny the objective existence of God and of a transcendent world of spirit. My (nearly 20) years of personal exploration and questioning had allowed me to sift through everything that I was raised to believe, and claim for myself what I had tested through my own personal experience and intellectual wrestling. And I found myself returning to the church and the religion of my upbringing.

Having laid my biases out on the table, however, I will say that this blog is not just for people who have a particular set of beliefs -- about God, dreams or anything. The purpose of this blog is the objective -- perhaps even scientific -- exploration of dreams and dream symbolism. 

If dreams have anything to teach us, we must take them on their own terms, without any preconceived agenda. A good place to start if you're interested in dreams is with a dream journal. And the only way to record dreams in a dream journal is as accurately as one possibly can, in as much detail as one possibly can. In other words, as much as possible, as a scientific observer of them. Dreams often shock us or startle us with symbolism that we find jarring, immoral, or embarrassing. But our approach to dreams must be fearless. It is often the jarring, immoral and embarrassing in dreams that has the most to teach us.

On this blog I will share dreams in all their gruesome, hilarious, unexpurgated detail, and I will share some insights I've acquired from recording some 1200 of them. I don't always analyze my dreams. Sometimes I just record them. But I always find dream analysis interesting and profitable, and dream analysis is a major interest of this blog.

I also invite all you dreamers out there to submit dreams of your own, which I will gladly publish, and which we can unpack together if you wish.

So... Dream on!