The things you can think, even when asleep

When I was in college, I had a life-changing class taught by Professor Jean Bradford, Jungian Archetypes and Dreaming. Or something like that. We learned about the Jungian concepts of the anima and the animus, the male and female archetypes that are in our subconscious mind. We learned about the various cross-cultural symbology that represent these archetypes. Symbology we could then look for in our own dreams. That same year, my stepmother gave me The Dictionary of Dream Symbolism, an anthology of various images and symbols from every imaginable culture and what they mean in the context of that culture.

Professor Bradford gave me the basic framework: my dreams are an organized manifestation of my non-conscious mind that I can navigate. My stepmother gave me the vocabulary: what the symbols and images mean to me. I put them together, along with a nifty trick my grandmother taught me to deal with night terrors: lucid dreaming. And this is where my journey into dreamwork really began.

I started having regular and reliable communication with my sub/unconscious mind. The language of dreams is not the same as the language of the waking mind. Information comes in words, sometimes, but also in dream knowledge, dreamscape setting, and symbols. More on those another time. The real point of this post is that I've taught these skills to my daughter. I didn't begin to develop a communication path with my sub/unconscious mind until I was in my twenties. Patience has been doing it every since we could talk about her dreams, which was pretty darn early.

Various times along this journey, I've asked my sub/unconscious mind to help me with things from finding my keys to dealing with difficult relations. Sometimes, a figure in my dreams will teach me things I didn't ask for, but are still interesting, like how to tie up fresh herbs to dry. A few days before her Bat Mitzvah, Patience had a similar experience: her dreamself showed her how to put her hair up with a chopstick.

She came into the kitchen, still rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, and informed me that she learned this skill in the night. She pulled out a chop stick and whipped her hair up into perfect swirl bun. Since then, she's also had more substantive dream interactions. And I find her pouring through the dream dictionary many a morning.