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How to Get the Most Out of Dreaming
“Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.” ―Sigmund Freud
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. ―Carl Jung
Dreams… lovely, terrifying, wonderful dreams. The sleeping equivalent of the dark night of the soul, while dreams can be totally mundane, quotidian, unremarkable, milquetoast―the familiar repetitive dreams of teeth crumbling, going back to school to re-take a test, being naked in public―some dreams are earth-shattering, heart-rending, gut-wrenching, soul-piercing, life-changing, portents from deep within our psyches, sometimes offering flashes of genius, epiphanies about oneself and life, or solutions to knotty and intractable problems. There famous example of dream epiphanies, for example the possibly apocryphal story of August Kekulé divining the structure of the hexagonal benzene ring upon recalling a dream of a snake swallowing its own tail, or Mary Shelley, who reportedly turned a nightmare into the story of Frankenstein, or Paul McCartney, who dreamed the song Yesterday, widely cited illustrations noted by the authors of the study discussed below.
