Are Dreams Real?

“How can I trust that this is really real?” asked a student in one of my dreamwork classes.

A few days later, a private client said to me, “I don’t believe in my own reality."

Do either of these sound familiar?

If they do, you’re far from alone, but before we unpack the origins of these questions we must confront the obvious problem inherent within them: What is reality?

Can you answer that question right now?
Is it an easy question to answer?
Do you really know?
How do you know?
How do any of us know what is REAL?

Science will tell you that only what science can prove is “real,” but science disproves its own theories all the time. Light is a particle. No wait, it’s a wave. No wait, it’s both. Well, it really depends on the observer. All of these are true and real at the same time, but how you experience them depends on the context.

New age gurus, on the other hand, will tell you that you are creating your own reality all the time. The universe is just a big box of gifts waiting for you to get out of your own way and manifest your greatest desire. Want a million dollar home? Paste it on a vision board and it will be yours! But wait, if that’s true, why can’t I make that true for everyone? Why is there still houselessness if I can create reality with my mind? Why can’t I go against the scientific laws of gravity and make something go up instead of down? We do influence "reality" with our minds (note, above, the observer's influence on the behavior of light) but it's obviously not that simple or we would all live in our own version of a magic wonderland already.

What about your own feelings? If you feel hurt, but someone tells you that they didn’t meant to hurt you and you shouldn’t feel so bad, whose reality is the “real” one? Are you too sensitive, or are they not sensitive enough, or are you both wrong and both right at the same time?

WHAT IS REAL?

Merriam Webster’s defines “real” as “having objective, independent existence.”

Well, great, except objectivity is a highly suspect invention of modern, industrialized society. Is objectivity real? Sometimes, but not really.

Let’s return to my dreamwork student. The student was right to question this work. Everything in modern, westernized, industrialized society (which I’ll refer to as “modernity” for shorthand) says that dreams are silly. Modernity says that dreams are merely the mind cleaning house and taking out the trash for the night. They’re not “real” because life is only “real” when you’re “awake” (awake--another questionable term). Dreams aren’t “real” because it’s not possible to get information in any way that’s not scientific and objectively observable.

This is where we encounter colonialism, which invalidated all Indigenous healers and Shamanic practitioners by claiming that their methods weren't "real." This worldview makes sense if you have forgotten about the dreamworld, if you have forgotten that animals and plants and rivers and stones have consciousness, if you have stopped tending to the well-being of your ancestors. It makes sense, then, to see healing practices based in dreamwork, based in connecting to The Dreaming, as dangerous and non-sensical. This is the voice of erasure.

Most people raised in modernity encountered this voice of erasure from a young age. It's the voice of every first grade teacher who said your artwork had no potential and you should focus on arithmetic (never mind that math is totally magic and even contains “imaginary numbers” which are, in fact, real). It’s the voice of every misogynist who said your feelings weren’t real and that business and academia should be the realm of the rational so take your tears home thank-you-very-much. It's the voice of the racist, the anti-Semite, the homophobe, the militant, the industrialist saying: you’re not real. Your experiences are not real. I will erase you and it won’t matter. It's the voice of the dream-killer.

It’s also the voice of the individual abuser. If you grew up in an environment where your physical, sexual, mental, or emotional safety was often in question, you likely had to live in two worlds: in one world, you felt afraid, overwhelmed, or hurt, and in another world you had to be friendly, relational, subservient, passive, or combative to survive, have a place to live, get fed, maybe get some moments of love. This dynamic says that your experience isn’t real. Even the observable isn’t what you think it is. This is very confusing. It makes it hard to know what’s real even when you get to a place of safety in the future. This is the experience that shows up in my client’s musing about being unsure of their own reality, easily swayed into someonbody else’s.

But, wait, you might say, isn’t this also the voice of reason? Shouldn’t we question whether something is real until proven otherwise? What about “innocent until proven guilty”? What about UFO’s???

Yes! Reasoning is wonderful. Because of my ability to reason, I understand that it’s likely a rabbit that bit the new leaves off of my bean plants even though I wasn’t there when the plants were attacked, but because I've seen that dang rabbit on my porch before, my powers of deductive reasoning make a strong case for the bunny-as-culprit. Reason and logic are wonderful capacities which protect us and help us solve problems and keep us from getting lost in dreamland.

The key, the missing bit of information that bridges "real" and "not-real" is what we call Sensory Grounded Information. Sensory Grounded Information is directly observable with your senses. You can notice that your heart is beating quickly, that your palms are sweaty, that your mouth feels dry. You can notice that a fly landed on the wall across the room, that someone keeps talking over you when you start to speak, that the air just turned cold. Sometimes, someone else can observe these things as well. A doctor might hear your heartbeat with a stethoscope, or your partner might hear your heartbeat with their head upon your chest. I might see the same fly you see, or feel the chill in the air. But sometimes, the observation is personal, noticeable only to you, and that's okay. You might feel a chill in the air while I feel warm, and that's okay. It's all information. And the trick to working with dreams is to follow the Sensory Grounded Information and get curious about the information itself before you get too caught up in meaning-making.

For example, if someone brings me a dream, I will ask questions like:

• What was the emotional atmosphere of the dream? How about when you woke up?
• Was the dream in color or black-and-white? What did you see?
• Were there sounds? Songs? Spoken words in your dream?
• What were the relationships like? What characters were present and how did they engage with one another?
• What do you feel in your body as you are telling the dream?

All of these questions point to Sensory Grounded Information. I want to know the lived experience of the dream before I even touch an interpretation.

There's a lot more to say about that, but let's get back to the original question: are dreams real?

Every single answer to every single question above is real. And we know, in fact, that the body and mind have very real physically measurable experiences during dreams. So based on that alone, I will give that question a resounding "yes!!!", dreams are absolutely real. Dreams don't always cross over into physical reality, which is what leads people strongly attached to the mores of modernity to question their reality, but when you start to explore the realms of dreambody work, synchronicity, and worldwork, which I'll address in other articles, you see that dreams are also "real" in the physical realm as well. Additionally:

• Dreams are the real messages from deeper parts of your awareness that you don't contact directly during waking life.
• Dreams are the real exploration of parts of yourself you keep in the shadows.
• Dreams are the real solutions to problems you've been chewing on (countless intractable math problems or scientific challenges have been solved in a nighttime dream).
• Dreams are the real warnings, signposts, and precognitions you might tend to otherwise ignore.
• Dreams are the real landscape of visitations from ancestors, friends long gone, and forms of consciousness beyond the human.

And you can absolutely choose to ignore them.

You can absolutely decide this is all a bunch of hooey.

And dreams will continue to be real anyway.

Just like the river will continue to have consciousness even if you don't "believe" in it, if you dam it up and pour toxins into its veins, the spirit of the river will still be "real."

Just like light will continue to behave as both a particle and a wave, even if you don't understand the science behind that at all.

Just like your heart will continue to beat even if you've never seen it, told it what to do or how to work, and even if you don't "believe" that your heart is in fact an electromagnetic oscillator influencing, and influenced by, your surrounding environment.

The reality of these things, just like the reality of dreams, does not hinge upon your belief system.

What you can trust, what will consistently guide you through, what will help you discern which parts of your dreams are filghts of fancy and which are profound personal messages not to be ignored, is Sensory Grounded Information; trust what you observe, even if it doesn't yet make sense to you, and the answers will come.

If you want to learn more about working with your dreams, this workshop is a great place to start.