God's Forgotten Language

God’s Own Language

“I began with the premise that dreams are facts. They exist, just as trees and rocks and birds exist.  True, one cannot put them under the microscope, for they have only a faint memory trace in our brain; they remain subjective, the personal business of the dreamer.  Nevertheless, as events that take place in our world, they have as much right to careful study as any other event in nature.  So far we haven’t found anything in nature that doesn’t have its function.  So why should we say that of all created things the dream alone makes no sense?”

                                  John A. Sanford

                          (Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language)

         In his book, Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language, Episcopal priest and Jungian Analyst, John Sanford, uses dreams recorded in the Bible, as well as dreams brought to him by his analysands, to demonstrate how God-within has always spoken to us in dreams.  He makes a good case that “at the basis of our dreams there is a religious process.”  I have found this to be true in my own life.

         Almost everyone has had a dream that they remember for their entire lives.  They may have had the dream in childhood, but even as adults they can recall every detail as though it had happened today.  And nearly everyone has a recurring dream—one that comes periodically and may change in detail, but is essentially the same.  One common recurring dream is that of being in a house that we know to be ours, but discovering rooms that we didn’t know were there.  We go from room to room, sometimes from floor to floor, opening doors and making discoveries.  Sometimes the house is old and sometimes it is futuristic, sometimes it is a house that we have actually lived in, but always we recognize that it belongs to us.  I had a recurring house dream for many years in which I was searching for a bedroom to call my own—a place of rest.

         Carl Jung also had the recurring ‘house dream’ and it provided a gateway to the development of his theory of dream interpretation, and his understanding of the human psyche as layered.  He described the psyche as having at least three layers—consciousness, i.e. what is in our minds at any given moment, our awareness of our environment both internal and external; the personal unconscious, which includes the events of our lives, both those remembered and those just out of reach, perhaps formed before we were of age to have language; and the collective unconscious, that is part of our genetic inheritance and also contains the archetypes that are common to all of human kind.  Dreams come from all three strata. 

         Typically, dreams speak to us in symbolic language, drawing symbols from our vast storehouse of experience—people we know, animals, places.  Sometimes dreams are much more straight forward, not symbolic at all, and point to some aspect of life that needs attention.  Always, they are ours, even when people we recognize are in them.  I hope you are tapping into this source of insight and healing.  If you knew that God is speaking to you in God’s own language, would you listen?

                                  In the spirit,

                                  Jane