For thousands of years people have found dreams significant. They inscribed cuneiform tablets with dreams, interpreted dreams for pharaohs, and sought healing knowledge in dream incubation sanatoriums. Dreams were a source of mysterious wisdom from without until the late 19th century, when psychology understood that dreams arose from within, obeying laws of inner realities. Carl Jung extended and deepened the work of predecessors to map essential features and dynamics of the unconscious. Late in life Jung estimated he had analyzed about 80,000 dreams, and his well-honed understanding and approach remain the standard for dream interpretation.

Everyone everywhere dreams. No matter the circumstances of birth or life situation, or whether we are ill, uneducated, or destitute, we have access to the same inner riches as a queen, a priest—or a psychoanalyst. Our dreams are ours and ours alone, the inviolate dominion of soul. No one can stop our dreams or take them from us. Each of us has an inner companion, the dream maker. Your dream maker, the other within who creates your dreams, faithfully crafts messages and sends them to you every night.

Dreams help us understand ourselves

Working with dreams is a call to adventure. We can open the doors to our dreams and let them move, change, and amaze us. Dreams make us bigger and provide us with experiences that are unavailable in waking life, from doing somersaults in the air to encountering a huge turquoise toad. Dreams delight and surprise us. They also correct, comfort, and confront us, offering a fresh perspective or an uncomfortable truth. Dreams connect us with the grand transpersonal themes that undergird and guide our becoming and being. They have direction and purpose and are in service to our growth even if they sometimes scare us into paying attention. Dreams inform and enrich conscious life. Dreams help us feel more alive and attain a sturdier stance because we know our egos are supported from below

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A new world opens. Dreams usually do not direct our lives in explicit ways but help us understand more of why we are doing and feeling. While our waking hours may concern themselves with the mundane, the practical, and the specific, our dreams attest to a way of being that is beyond the limits of consciousness and speaks another language. Dreams are nightly proof that there is something big, deep, powerful, and mysterious always at work beneath the ordinary surface of everyday life.

Something loves you—sometimes fiercely–and speaks to you every night.