Episode Transcript
Debra:
Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Jung on Purpose. I am Deborah Maldonado with Creative Mind, and we have a wonderful new series that we’re going to begin this week. We’re going to talk about dreams and dream interpretation, and our new dream app that is really fantastic and will blow your mind to help you with your dream interpretation.Dr. Rob:
And I’m Dr. Rob.Debra:
Later in the show. But before we begin, I do want you to take the time to subscribe to our channel if you’re listening on one of our podcast services or on YouTube. It really helps us get more people listening to this information and changing more lives. We really appreciate it. So dreams, what’s so great about dreams, Rob?Dr. Rob:
Nice, I love this topic. You know, for me, it’s very personal. It feels like from the time I was born or a small kid, dreams were always part of my life. And they continue to be so. The more work we do, the more important dreams become for us. For me, it’s a lifelong obsession and focus on dreams.Debra:
And I had dreams too, but I didn’t know what they meant. I just sort of wrote them down in a journal, but I never examined them really until I met you. I just took them literally. We’ll talk about some of the missteps we make in dream interpretation that stop us from really getting the message today. But yeah, I think there’s people that naturally dream. And then there’s some people that say, I never dream.Dr. Rob:
Yeah, so it’s a conversation we wanted to have. And obviously, this is not a class or anything like that. So it’s not comprehensive. We’re not going to give you everything we know about dreams, but some important ideas to help you with your dream life. One of the most important ones is that the language of dreams is symbolic. Now, this is an important principle. Because most people give up trying to understand their dreams because they’re trying to interpret them in a literal way. And so if you try to interpret a dream in a literal way, it’s going to appear as nonsense.Debra:
Well, you can get superstitious too about it, right? This person, you know, is mad at me. I had a dream they were mad. They must be mad. Or that person said they’re going to leave me. So I need, you know, it’s my dream is telling me I have to be prepared for this forecasting of my future. And there are some precognitive dreams, but not every dream is literal and precognitive.Dr. Rob:
Yeah, yeah. And so the unconscious where dreams are formed and like where they come from, has a symbolic function. In other words, it doesn’t think in the way we think in our waking experience. It thinks in metaphor, it thinks in emotion, it thinks in puns, even in humorous ways of thinking. Very humorous if you pay attention, right? So it’s speaking a different language.Debra:
But also what is the purpose of dreams anyway? Like just backing up from like, why do we need to even look at them? Like, it’s interesting. Wow, that’s cool that that meant this symbolizes this, but what is the purpose? And Jung saw their dreams as a way for us to understand our unconscious mind and our collective unconscious mind and that beneath the surface so that we can use it toward growth too.Dr. Rob:
I’d say, yeah, I’d say there’s three levels to it. So one is the neurophysiological level and dreams what they do is they help maintain our sanity and our cognitive function. And this is by research. If you disturb people and don’t let them get their REM, their dream time in, their cognition will start to deteriorate.Debra:
Okay.Dr. Rob:
In other words, they won’t be able to solve math problems. They won’t be able to solve complicated equations or logical kind of thinking questions or problems. They’ll start to suffer and eventually kind of lose their mind, I imagine, if they continue, right? So it’s got a physiological function that’s really about maintaining your brain and good optimal working function. The second one is psychological, meaning that dreams connect us to deeper source in us, what Jung will call the collective unconscious that appears to feed our mind in a creative way. It gives us visions, intuition, perhaps like you say, precognitive hits that it gives us a sense of what’s going to happen in our lives. So really important stuff. And we can go into deeper into that one, right. And then thirdly, it has spiritual, spiritual element to it, because we all know from the scriptures from all around the world. This is the way the God spoke to people through dreams.Debra:
So can I add a fourth one? I don’t know if it fits into any of those three, but for me, understanding my dreams, it’s more of a spiritual thing, but it helped me understand that there’s something in me, like an awareness in me that knows me more than I know myself and is like intimately involved in my own growth because it goes through the effort of like showing me symbols and showing me information that I feel would if I didn’t have that information, I wouldn’t have been able to get it on a conscious level. And it just reaffirms and some things I believed or about myself or things I’ve been working out on a conscious level. And I feel though, this gives me like a it just feels connected like a real tangible connection. Like when people think about connecting with God or connecting with the divine, like you can go to church or you can go to your temples and pray and like have like kind of euphoric experiences. But this is gives you like a real tangible every night. You’re really connecting to deeper wisdom within you. And I just find it so magical for me. That was the biggest, the content itself is great too, but just the, the knowing that there’s another presence within me, that’s not my ego that is wanting me to like have the things I want. That’s like helping me through life. It’s just so beautiful.Dr. Rob:
It is the deepest or the deeper intelligence in us. In the Jungian model, of course, the one we really gravitate towards and that we teach and practice ourselves in our life, dreams are very much a conversation with a living psyche. In other words, we are in conversation because it’s listening to our thoughts. It’s like our iPhone, essentially, it’s listening to us. Yeah, it’s like meta. It knows all our passwords and everything we think and do. And therefore, it speaks to us in the way that we need to hear it. That’s an important piece to understand that your dreams are very unique to you. They’re tailor made for you. And so they’re so important. Like somebody said, not paying attention to dreams is like leaving your mail unopened. You’re getting these messages, but not opening the mail. So anyway.Debra:
And I love that what you said about it being unique because this is why another misstep people make is dream dictionaries. Like I’m just going to look up dreams. I have the book of symbols. They’re really great to like stimulate like what these symbols can mean. There’s some universal symbols, but for every person, there’s many layers to even the symbol itself. There’s a personal layer, there’s archetypal layer, there’s an emotional layer. So there’s a lot of different layers to even the same symbol.Dr. Rob:
Absolutely. So it is a strange phenomena because we’re forced to dream every night. In other words, if we look at the physiology, when we go into sleep, when we fall asleep, and we were entering what’s called REM rapid eye movement, which is the dreaming phase of sleep. And we do this every night and 90 minutes or so. So it’s like a like a wave or cycle that every 90 minutes we’re about to wake up, but right before we wake up, we go into REM, rapid eye movement, which simply means this, that if you look at somebody sleeping and dreaming, their eyes will be darting all over the place behind their closed eyelids.Debra:
And they’ll be fluttering too. They usually they have a little flutter to them.Dr. Rob:
It might be fluttering. Yeah. Like as if they’re looking at a scene, right? At things happening right in front of their eyes. Now the interesting thing about this is that the body is actually paralyzed during REM. In other words, unless the person has some kind of sleep disorder or some kind of problem, usually our bodies will be very still while we’re dreaming. It’s only our eyeballs that will be darting around and moving. It, it sleeps, it puts to sleep every muscle in your body, except the eye muscles, which is weird.Debra:
Well, you know, it’s interesting. I did hypnotherapy for years before I got into coaching and I still do incorporate that in our work. When I would do them in person, people would, if they go to a deeper trance, they would, I’d see their eyes darting and they basically will not move. They will, they can’t lift their arms. They can’t do anything. And we even do tests where you lift the arm and drop it. It’s called the arm drop. And it’s like that body is just so limp and relaxed. And a lot of times they get really stiff or they can’t even move and they’re just, and it’s not, it’s very relaxing. And then when they come out, it’s very refreshing. They feel like there’s a high, it the hypnoglow. They get this high afterwards. So I think that is interesting that you can actually create it too, when you do a deep visualization.Dr. Rob:
Yeah, are a couple other phenomena that we know from research is that the dream sequences will get longer as the night goes by. In other words, as you’re moving towards the morning, the dreams you’re having become longer and more intense. That’s why we tend to remember the last dream before we wake up or the last two dreams before we wake up. But we have a sense, right, that we dreamed even more before those dreams. We do. Typically, within the first 90 minutes of sleep, we’ll have an REM period, meaning we’ll have a dream. But we might forget it by the moment.Debra:
Unless you wake up because it could be very intense sometimes you wake up in the middle of night like, my God. And then you go back to sleep. Okay, I don’t want to go back there.Dr. Rob:
And now, so, so let’s consider just the phenomena of this. We’re falling into a coma, a type of coma where our body isn’t even able to move. And then the mind is forcing us to experience these simulations of reality. Because when we’re dreaming, we think we’re awake and that we’re experiencing life somehow right so it’s a state of consciousness but it’s very different than our waking state where all kinds of fantastical things can happen so that we can be in two places at once we can walk through walls we can fly sometimes you breathe underwater see dead people that people you know have gone passed on and they’re there and we’re conversing with them. And all of this doesn’t wake us up for some reason. It’s like we’re, we’re okay with it. Now, why would nature have us do that? Why would it force us to sleep because it paralyzes, happy from moving and acting it out, but then forces to experience a simulation of life in a fantastical way. In other words, it’s not regular life, things are happening that are, you know, extraordinary. So that phenomena is not well understood, like why what is the purpose evolutionarily? Why does nature consider that so important for us?Debra:
But the unconscious is irrational and fantastical. And that’s why we kind of lock it down during the day, because it really is can be. And so when people do like drugs to like release their unconscious, know, have visions and stuff like that, that’s what they’re seeing this unstructured, unfiltered consciousness.Dr. Rob:
That’s it. mean, Jung Freud said it initially, right? The the royal road to the unconscious mind. In other words, if you want to know what’s going on in in the deeper layers of the psyche, in in dreams, you you see it directly. It’s a very emotional, symbolic language that’s happening. And it’s it’s always going on. In other words, it’s going on right now as you’re awake. but you’re not paying attention to it because your mind is being flooded by sensory experience. So that subtle mind with which you dream is operating right now. It’s simply being put to use in constructing your external reality.Debra:
which is, this is a dream.Dr. Rob:
It’s dreamlike.Debra:
It’s a waking dream, yeah, dreamlike. So it’s the same quality of a dream, but this is more organized. And it has space and time in it and other rules that…Dr. Rob:
Yeah. Because you’re more organized because you’re, yeah, and you’re inputting sensory experience. You know, there was the color, the texture, the temperature of the room, all that input stabilizes the imagination. And so you’re able to function as if everything was solid and real.Debra:
Wouldn’t it be true too that the waking life, since it’s so repetitive, that we’re in like wake up in the same home every day and we have the same people in our lives and the same routines, that it’s the habit of the ego that keeps this waking life a little more structured. And then when you go into the dream, it just opens up all the other possibilities for us.Dr. Rob:
There is something to that. We know in waking life, our brain is really focused on predictability. It’s always trying to predict what is going to happen. So what if I get up and go get a glass of water? What’s what will happen? And if I can predict things, I feel peaceful, calm, secure, safe. When unpredictability comes in, right? When I can’t predict what’s going to happen, I feel anxious, nervous, uptight, or at least alert and vigilant.Debra:
Is that why in dreams when things are unorganized or things don’t work the way it does in the waking life, like you have that dream where you can’t operate your phone or you lost something or you’re trying to get somewhere, the car doesn’t work, you lost your car, it creates anxiety because the mind wants that control. And then the dream is telling you like you’re, you gotta let go a little bit. This is happening underneath.Dr. Rob:
That’s part of it, yes. Yeah. Yeah, those anxiety dreams are some of the most common ones. Precisely because of that in the dream world. It’s difficult to predict what’s going to happen next. And therefore, we’re kind of always anxious in those situations. You know, butDebra:
So there’s a secret code in dreams that is, this is one of the things that people leave out because they’re looking so much on the symbols in a very rational way. Your ego mind is like interpreting. So you don’t want to interpret from the ego. You want to interpret from the witness and there’s ways to do that. We could talk about that later in another episode. But the secret code, do you know what it is Rob?Dr. Rob:
I can guess, but, yes.Debra:
emotions. So this emotional energy that shows up in the dream. And for a lot of people, they don’t remember the dream, the full dream, but they do remember how they felt in the dream. And when people try to do dream interpretations for others, that’s the one question sometimes they forget to ask, what was the emotional tone of the dream? And so what is the emotional tone of the dream? Like say you have anxiety, show you about your mind or yourself.Dr. Rob:
Yeah, Jung writes a lot about this because the emotion we can say is the direct connection to the unconscious. For one, emotions appear to happen to us, which means we are experiencing elements of our psyche that are unconscious to our waking mind. That’s why the emotion arises or appears to come in from somebody triggered me. Right. But that’s not the right perception because if the emotion wasn’t in you, you would not be able to experience that powerful emotion. if it appears as if the other person made you react that way. you say someone made me angry and no one could make us angry. If we don’t have anger within us. It’s not going to happen, right? So the misperception is important to understand what we’re experiencing when we experience emotions is we’re experiencing our unconscious, our personal unconscious.Debra:
So would you say that it like compensatory, like if you’ve been ignoring or stuffing anxiety, for example, and you feel like you have everything together, or you have feel a little bit of it, like it’s kind of in the peripheral, but you’re not really paying attention, you’re kind of pushing it away, you’d have a dream that’s like trying to balance out the psyche.Dr. Rob:
That’s one of the functions, yes. Yes, that the dreams often are trying to balance out our conscious attitude by presenting situations in which the opposite arises. So that if we’re, you know, we’ve often experienced this when very kind of tightly wound people do our work, they often have theseDebra:
Like me.Dr. Rob:
fantastic, no, a lot more than you. have fantastic psychedelic dreams almost like, like their mind is telling them you need a little bit of color and chaos and creativity in your life. And therefore in the dreams, you’re experiencing those things. And it’s, it’s probably that they were always experiencing them, but they weren’t paying attention.Debra:
really? Okay.Dr. Rob:
So that’s another phenomenon is that they, as they enter this program and they start to focus on their mind, then they start to understand and experience their dream world in a much more vivid form.Debra:
And like for me, you always say that I have a very creative, imaginative, conscious mind. So when I have dreams, you always say, your dreams are so like obvious, like more left brain, you know, more like this is what you need to do. Very, very direct where I’m not that way in conscious life. So it could be that way too, if you’re like highly creative or imaginative, your dreams may come in the form of more.Dr. Rob:
Yes. And also that if you’re not paying attention to dreams, the unconscious understands that too, that you’re not even opening your mail. Why should I bother to give you important messages? Unless it’s really important.Debra:
Mm-hmm. Or yeah, you’re not examining them. You can have them and then you stop, like you just ignore them. Is that what you’re saying?Dr. Rob:
Yeah, you know what I notice when I meditate and I use visualization often, my dreams diminish or they’re they’re not as powerful or as frequent.Debra:
Hmm.Dr. Rob:
When I don’t, then I tend to have more vivid dreams. Because, like I say, your subtle mind is always with you. So if you use it in visualization, you’re kind of doing the work of the dream world or the REM. You’re putting yourself into an REM state by visualizing. So you can compensate for that. So in other words, If you’re not getting enough sleep or you’re not really remembering your dreams, try meditation and visualization to compensate for those things so that your mind is able to catch up and do those, those cleanup tasks that it needs to do. We know, for example, during REM, memories are consolidated so that the things you experienced during the day, During REM sleep, the brain is kind of putting things where they need to be so that you can recall them later on.Debra:
And so if something, let’s say someone has a recurring dream and they keep having dreams of like anxiety or something stressful happening or a fear. I’m not talking about phobias and things like that or like really intense stuff, but just kind of like, there’s a theme here. The dream will keep, or the consciousness will keep giving you the same dream or similar dreams until you really get it. And so sometimes you can say, I can interpret that dream, I know what it is, and then you go on your life and you have the same dream again. The consciousness is like, no, you didn’t get it, I’m going to send you this again. Let’s try this again, start it from the top. Those recurring dreams are sort of unexamined, you’re not really examining it, and the unconscious is trying to get you to look at this. but the emotion is really the key. And I think, if, so if you don’t know any symbols and you don’t understand anything, just notice how you’re waking up, notice the feeling tone. If you start there and just start examining, like, what is this feeling telling me? And, you could start in a very basic way. Now, before we go, I want to add, I want to give some suggestions to people who say I don’t dream or I don’t remember my dreams. This is something that is, you know, we’ve used for years with students who say, I don’t recall my dreams. And so a really great way to start is you set the intention, obviously, that you want to start recalling your dreams so you can work with your dreams. You’re setting that intention, powerful intention. And then before you go to bed at night, you place a paper and pen or your phone with a recorder to record your dream in the morning, to record in the morning. And you wake up. You go to bed and you say, I want to remember my dream or you have an intention. Like I would love a dream to tell me about my love life, or I’d love a dream to tell me about my work. What’s stopping me from being successful or finding love or being healthy, know, send me a dream. And then you do that every night and in the morning you wake up and if you still don’t recall the dream, you write something down, whatever the first thought is. And so you’re getting into like almost like the habit of examining something like you’re like telling your psyche, I’m ready, I’m priming myself up for this. And usually within a week, you should start remembering your dreams. If you do that every day. It really is very, very powerful. And I want to talk a little bit too about our dream app, the Jung and dream interpret, Jung and dream Oracle. It’s our new app that we Rob created. Do you want to talk about it a little bit, Rob?Dr. Rob:
Yes, so we wanted to create an app that would approximate the kind of work that we do in our program with dreams. And this app pretty much fills that role, right? It allows students to continue to work with their dreams in between sessions andDebra:
clients to, not just students, clients in our coaching programs.Dr. Rob:
Anybody that has the app can use it to interpret their dreams, but in a particular way. this is yeah, because we wanted again to approximate what we actually do in the coaching program. And we’re very focused on the individuation. So the interpretation is made by the app.Debra:
that you personally programmed to create.Dr. Rob:
but it’s seen as this is somebody undergoing individuation, meaning they’re on a journey on a process of becoming themselves. What does this dream mean in that context? And then it gives them a prompt as to how to work with the symbols that appear in the dreams. So it’s really useful beyond just a simple interpretation.Debra:
And I, you know, I love it. I’ve been interpreting my own dreams for 20 years, but this is really like, it takes it to the next level. And we’ve had a beta version with our students in our life coach training program and they’re blown away by it. I gave it to one of my long-term clients. She was like, my God, this is so incredible. I actually, two of my long-term clients told me they couldn’t believe how cool it was and they’ve been working with me for a year. So very, very, powerful. And the cool thing is it’s free. So we’re giving it away. You get one free interpretation a day. If you want to upgrade to premium, you can have as many as you want. It’s $59 a year for that, but that means $5 a month. It’s the value you get is so outweighing it. But it helps us invest in more releases and stuff like that. So a way to give back and make it even better. But it’s really, really incredible. And so we’re going to give you a link in the show notes to get your copy and how to download it either on Apple or Google phone, whatever you have. And we’re really excited for it. And it’s called Young and Dream.Dr. Rob:
Yeah, and it’s a good introduction if you are not paying attention to your dreams. It’s a good introduction into the dream world and the way we do dream interpretation. And for those of you that are advanced, it will match you in your advanced work and it will give you something, let’s say that is equal to the kinds of thoughts and dreams that you’re having because it will also interpret your synchronicities. So that you’re having synchronicities in your waking life. You can input those things and read in the dream. Oracle will interpret them as in a symbolic way. So Young calls that the entering the symbolic life.Debra:
Also, also. And then active imagination. If you’re using active imagination and you’re getting symbols, we use them, you know, with our active imagination protocols, symbols appear all the time. So great to find out what that means. And then you can type in your, what’s going through your life and have it match that versus you just getting a blanket. this snake means spiritual life. you really get to, and then it gets to know you. And then also I love about it is that there’s a dream journal that keeps track of previous dreams. So can go back and record and you can record them via audio. You just click the record button so you don’t have to write them all down or you can type them up to you. But we’re really excited about it we hope you take advantage of it and explore your dreams and we’ll have more sessions on dreams. So if you do start get started on your dreams, maybe this is the first time you’ve ever. Worked with your dreams. Pay attention because we have a couple more episodes on dreams. go deeper.Dr. Rob:
Yeah, it’s like having Carl Jung in your pocket.Debra:
It’s like, that’s kind of nice. The dream oracle. And another thing about it, it’s not a therapy model. It’s based on analysis. It’s really based on Jungian coaching, which is an R unique blend, includes Eastern philosophy, not just the psychology of Jung, but the Eastern philosophy, which sees the self and the ego in just a slightly different way, a more empowering way and a more expansive way. So very excited to share it with you. And again, thank you for joining us for Young On Purpose. We will see you next week with another episode. Take care.Dr. Rob:
See you soon.
