Dreamscapes - The Limits of our Dreams

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Our exploration of the dreamscape has come to an end, which is not to say that I won't revisit it at some time. After all these posts, it should be pretty obvious that I believe our dreams are a form of communication with our unconscious minds, which are willing to offer up information if we take the time to divine the meaning.

I used to regard this information as sacrosanct. Then, as sometimes happens, I came across something that challenged that idea. You might remember the Heaven's Gate cult - in 1997, a group of 39 people committed suicide over the course of three days, believing that they were ascending to "the level above human" and that their souls would be taken away in a spaceship. Director Sergio Myers made a film about this event, Heaven's Gate: The Day After. The entire film used to be up on YouTube; now, just the trailer is there. In the film, he interviews a surviving cult member, who says he was convinced to join the group because of a dream he had.

It's hard to think that someone's own unconscious mind would sell him out like that. How would he even know? Of course, this individual did survive the mass suicide, but still, if we can't trust information from our own dreams, where does that leave us?

I believe it leaves us in a place where we need to decide how much weight to give that deep part of ourselves. In a society where the influence of the unconscious is largely discounted, to discover that aspect of ourselves can be exciting and illuminating. But at the same time, those waves can be overwhelming, and it always comes back to finding the balance between the unconscious and conscious, contemplation and action, yin and yang.

Insufficient attention to the unconscious can keep us enslaved to old patterns we're not even aware of. Too much attention and we can find it hard to move forward. Our dreams may guide us, but in the end, our lives are ours to live.