Dreams, Part 1: Waking Up To Unread Messages

What I've learned from a recent effort to pay more attention to my dreams

In some ways, the topic of this post contrasts pretty sharply with last week’s post on walking as a spiritual practice. Walking is an active, embodied practice. Dreaming is a passive mental experience. Walking is something I have long held in high regard as a cherished activity. Dreams are something that I’ve almost entirely neglected for most of my life.

That said, there are two main reasons I’ve chosen to tackle this topic so early on in my ongoing series of posts on religiously decontextualized spiritual practices—what I’ve described as the “nuts and bolts” of my own personal style of spirituality or religiosity.

Reason 1: I came across something recently that made me completely rethink my engagement (or lack thereof) with dreams, which I will explain in a moment.

Reason 2: This emerging interest in dreams has made me realize that there actually have been some periods during which dreams consciously occupied a much more prominent role in the life of my developing psyche and spirit (which I will explain next week in part 2 of this topic—I’m realizing now I have more to say on dreams than I can reasonably tackle in one post).

Prophetic Dreaming

If you’ve been keeping up with my recent posts, you’ll know that Native American spirituality has been an area of great interest for me lately, for much the same reason East Asian religions were so interesting to me in college and graduate school: sometimes you just need to shake things up with a totally different way of viewing consciousness, the world around you, and your place in it.

I’m far from an expert on Native American spirituality. Sadly, it’s become increasingly difficult for anyone to claim such expertise, with the streams of cultural transmission, both internally and externally, drying up with each successive generation.

However, I think it’s fair to say that one need not be an expert in Native American spirituality to recognize how important dreams are for such communities. That’s become increasingly clear to me as I’ve been slowly digging my way through a book on the spirituality of tribes native to the Northeast coastal areas of the United States and Canada.

Among these tribes, dreams are considered so important that their core cosmogony myth (story of how the world was created) begins with a dream.

Basically, the king of the Sky Realm dreams that the huge tree at the center of his domain has been uprooted, leaving behind a gaping hole through which his queen ends up taking a spill.

Us white folk in the post-Freudian hegemonically Christian West might be tempted to assume that we know very well where this story is going: a group of expert dream interpreters will be called in the next day to interpret what the king’s dream actually means.

And indeed, that is the way things work in the Bible. As a child, when I was first taught the story of Joseph in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), I remember thinking, “how the hell did he correctly predict that he would become a king and rule over his brothers just from a dream he had about wheat?” (Genesis 37:5-10)

And I imagine the Egyptian Pharaoh who eventually passed on the throne to Joseph had something similar in mind when assessing this colorfully robed man’s abilities.

Fast-forward a few millennia, and our good friend Sigmund surely would have seen something quite different in those drooping bundles of wheat surrounding the one fully erect bundle of wheat in the middle, if you get what I mean.

But still, the idea would be the same: the dream is not really about harvesting grain. What’s the deeper meaning?

The Northeast woodland Native Americans had a different view of things. In some cases, yes, I’m sure symbolic interpretation of dreams was deemed to be valuable and appropriate. But one of the prevailing ideas seems to have been that when an important person has a dream of some significance, the community comes together to see to it that the dream is not “interpreted,” but, rather, fulfilled.

So, the next day, everyone gathers around and says, “Sure, let’s do it,” including the Sky King’s wife. They get some strapping young men to go uproot the gigantic tree, leaving a gaping hole that has no discernible bottom.

Sky Wifey calmly sits on the edge and gets the boot, crashing down in an unfamiliar land. She has a daughter, who becomes Mother Earth, creating the world as we know it, and so begins the story of our plane of existence.

Again, Freud would’ve had a field day with the uprooting of the giant vertical wood structure and the gaping hole that becomes a vehicle for the birth of a new world.

C’mon, man, does everything have to be sexual? Can’t a tree just be a tree without us making a whole thing out of it?

Anyway, it’s interesting, isn’t it—eschewing symbolic dream interpretation in favor of extremely literal dream implementation?

“Like A Letter That Has Not Been Read”

Interpretive differences notwithstanding, there are tons of examples I can point to across religious traditions of dreams being understood as sources of great prophetic wisdom and guidance.

Some accounts of the Buddha’s birth involve his mother dreaming of a white elephant poking her side with its tusks. The famous mythologist Joseph Campbell has written about Huang Ti, the ‘Yellow Emperor’ (r. 2697-2597 B.C.), a hugely significant figure in Chinese history renowned for his ability to “visit the remotest regions and consort with immortals in the supernatural realm” in his sleep.¹ And, as one Hadith (a reported saying of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad) states, “The Prophet said, ‘Whoever sees me (in a dream) then he indeed has seen the truth, as Satan cannot appear in my shape.’”²

Then there’s the New Testament Joseph, who was told by an angel in a dream to take his wife and child and get out of dodge because King Herod was looking to curb-stomp baby Jesus right out of our timeline of Western civilization (Matthew 2:12).

[Did I put that too crassly? Sorry—it’s true though]

Let me circle back to…well, me. After reading about the Native American attitude toward dreams, and reflecting on all these other cultural and religious understandings of dreams from across time and place in human history, it strikes me as bat shit bonkers that I’ve spent my entire adult life paying basically no attention to my dreams.

I’m not Joseph. Either Joseph. I’m not a Native American sky realm king. And I’m not a psychoanalyst. But there is a massive middle ground between being a royal advisor, an uprooter of mythologically large trees, or a wearer of penis-colored glasses (looking at you, Papa Freud) and giving even a single shit about one’s own dreams.

For years, I’ve been one of those people who “doesn’t dream.” I put that in quotations because I know, of course, that that’s not how that works. “Doesn’t dream” just means “doesn’t remember dreams.” And “doesn’t remember dreams” really just means “doesn’t pay attention to dreams.”

Here’s a nice little poetic line from a collection of Jewish theological texts that I own:

“As long as a dream is not interpreted, it is like a letter that has not been read.”³

Metaphorically speaking, I’ve just been letting a nice little mound of mail collect on my coffee table—not to mention that much larger mound that goes straight into the garbage can.

And yeah, most mail is junk. It can be tossed. But you should still pay attention to each letter just in case there’s something important in the mix, no? Furthermore, to paraphrase an idea from my book on Native American spirituality, the more you listen to your dreams, the more your dreams reveal to you.

Show your mail some respect and you’ll start getting better quality mail.

So, I decided about six weeks ago that I would start keeping a dream journal. When I reach for my phone in the morning to turn off my alarm, the next thing I do, instead of checking my email or texts (or any of the dozens of far less productive apps I’m otherwise tempted to mess around with before getting out of bed), is open the dream journal in my “Notes” app and jot down as much as I can remember.

This early on in that process, I don’t have many expectations about where that will lead. But at least I’ll start gaining more familiarity with the third of my consciousness with which I’ve been completely out of touch for years.

A Glimpse Into My Dream Journal

You’re dying to hear about what I’ve found so far, aren’t you? Aren’t you?

Okay, I’ll share a few.

Some have been hazy, strange, and hard to decipher.

December 23, 2024:

I find myself in some kind of futuristic building and I’m trying to get to a particular floor. But before I can enter the elevator and head up to that floor, I’m told I must first undergo “phase testing.”

Phase testing—yes, of course, how could I be so foolish and bold as to try stepping into the elevator before getting phase tested?

?

Others have been, well, just kind of creepy and weird.

January 2, 2025:

I’m in the front seat of an Uber, getting a ride to somewhere. The driver is starting to make me uncomfortable, saying things like, “Next time, when you come home with me to my place…” Then I notice he has a dog collar wrapped around his ankle. I ask him if he owns a dog, to which he nervously replies, “No,” before quickly removing and hiding the collar.

Very relieved to have woken up from that dream before turning into some guy’s kinky four-legged plaything.

But there have been a small handful of dreams that seem to have carried more clear and straightforward messages.

January 19, 2025:

I have a severed head in my hand and am trying to break into someone’s room by swinging the head against the door and bashing a hole in it.

Nice one, dream spirits—I see what you did there. Trying to solve a problem by literally banging my head against the wall? Time to take account of challenges or questions in my life I’ve been trying to solve through the same ineffectual methods over and over again. Disembodied head? Yup, I definitely have the tendency to overthink and underfeel when confronted with difficult questions and choices in my life—trying to solve everything with my head without listening to my gut or heart or anything else below the neck.

Well played. I got the message.

Interestingly, when I think back to the time in my life when I started becoming an overthinker/underfeeler, it coincides with all sorts of significant turning points in my life: puberty, a departure from religion, and—Part 2 spoiler alert—a prolonged period of very intense and physically visceral nightmares, which were also probably the most spiritually significant dreams I ever had.

Thank you for reading/listening! You are the chillest!
Please consider subscribing and/or sharing with a friend who’s as chill as you 😎

1. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Volume 17 of Bollingen Series, 3^rd edition, The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell Series edition (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008), 272-73.

2. Sahih al-Bukhari 6997.

3. The Book of Legends: Sefer Ha-Aggadah, Ed. Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Hạna Rawnitzki, Trans. William Gordon Braude (New York: Schocken Books, 1992), 791.