As a student of dreamwork for more than 25 years and as a Christian spiritual director for 13 years, I was saddened and a bit amused at the mechanistic and reductionistic approach that prevailed in the Jan. 18 Perspective article “Perchance to dream. . . .”
Many of us in the psychotherapeutic and spiritual direction disciplines are acutely aware of the potential healing and spiritual dimensions of dreams when we work with symbols from within. But our prevailing culture and many in the scientific community seem ignorant of these gifts.
Some questions I would have for the studies by researchers Drs. Allan Braun and Thomas Balkin focus on the way actively working with dreams can change the quality and content of the dreams and the level of consciousness we can bring to a dream state.
For example, unlike their findings that the brain scans of patients while dreaming showed “a part of the frontal lobes, which control higher reasoning and planning, had shut down,” many people are capable of lucid dream states in which they are consciously aware they are dreaming and interact with the dream images in creative ways. This seems to be a learned capability that may not appear in the general population’s usual dreaming–because we live in a dominant culture that doesn’t teach us to value and develop our dream potentials.
