As a child and on into my thirties, I suffered deeply with night terrors and nightmares, but I was also blessed with a love of the invisible world and a natural ability to relate and interact with the life and energies I encountered there. Thus for me, dreams are not things but living entities. They live in a world with their own culture, customs, languages, art and science. They come to us, I believe, in the spirit of relationship, as true anam cara, soul friends, and invite us into an ever wider, deeper, more meaningful relationship—with ourselves, with our natural world and with Mystery/God/The Beloved. They bring many gifts, if we are willing to receive them. They are, as Lionel Corbett says, "signs of grace." And so the dialogue I have with them is just that: a living dialogue.
For these reasons, I am in accord with my friend Jerry Wright, a Jungian analyst who paradoxically says that he believes dreams do not like to be analyzed. I don't blame them. Analyzing anything or anyone has the tendency to neutralize it and turn it into an object, and nobody likes that. We cannot have a living relationship with someone or something we perceive to be merely an object, devoid of spirit/soul. However, we can do whatever we please to it, devoid of empathic engagement. Looking at a dream as an object, adopting the attitude that it is something which is there only to serve us, allows us to do what I call 'dream autopsy' to it. And as Jung wrote: "One ought not to go to cadavers to study life."
Sadly, however, there are many people who work this way, and much contemporary dreamwork focuses on looking at a dream only in terms of what it can do for us. This attitude is both arrogant and narcissistic, and it can blind us, feed our power demons, and turn even the most insightful and gifted into dream addicts who exploit a dream in order to satisfy a craving or a personal need. The 16th century Jewish scholar, physician and mystic, Solomon Almoli, wrote that this was the way sorcerers and false prophets operated. (Almoli's ancient text, with the same title as Freud's, The Interpretation of Dreams, was translated by the Jungian analyst and rabbi Joel Covitz' in Visions in the Night.) According to Almoli, a true dream "does not begin in the will of the dreamer, for true dreams are the result not of one's choice but of the will of God." One might also conclude then, that true(r) interpretations do not begin in the will, or in the ego, of the interpreter or of the dreamer. Rather, they come from that which is "beyond" the ego. The place, or energy, or consciousness, or realm or place of ultimate Wisdom which, psychologically, Jung called the Self and which theologically is usually named God, who works through the interpreter, and presumably has little interest in the personal "use" we wish to make of them.
Further, it seems to often be the case that the more we look at dreams in a limited way, the more clever we get, and the easier it is to become set in our ways. The easier it is to become certain. The easier it is to hear a dream image, our own or another's, and say, "Oh, yes, I know that, and it means such-and-such." (Or the easier it is to say that dreams mean nothing, have no purpose or function.) The 'Aha'—for a client, a friend or for ourselves—becomes the goal. The Awe is dismissed. Certainty has a way of absorbing the light and space and air around it. The more certainty there is in a room, the less space there is for Mystery and the possibilities it brings with it. Another way to image this is to say that the more certainty there is, the less likely we are to notice and appreciate synchronicity, subtlety, ambiguity, chaos and the creativity which is potential in it. Dreams are frequently subtle, often ambiguous, and can feel very chaotic, in every sense of the word. And chaotic systems, John Briggs and F. David Peat tell us in Seven Life Lessons of Chaos, "lie beyond all our attempts to predict, manipulate, and control them. ... The metaphor of chaos theory ... shows that beyond and between our attempts to control and define reality lies the rich, perhaps even infinite, realm of subtlety and ambiguity where real life is lived."