“Any theory of dream formation drags along with it a theory of how dreams should be interpreted.”
— Ryan Hurd (2025)
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Meanings
In the 2012 book Integral Dreaming: A Holistic Approach to Dreams, authors Fariba Bogzaran and Daniel Deslauriers work to build a philosophy of dreaming. They refer to the emerging field of Integral Studies that draws from Eastern religion, New Age Holism, medicine, and objective science. Integration, they say, combines the theory of systems, the development of the whole person, and the reconciliation of different notions of truth.
Western thinking has an obsession with complicated theories. When we try to understand dreams according to a philosophy we confront elitist attitudes that duel for control. Attitudes are decided by politics, not by the merits of the ideas put forward.
Freud insisted dreams fulfilled repressed urges. Instead, Adler insisted dreams reveal our efforts to empower our personality (Bulkeley 1997, 40). Boss argued the dream is as real a mental experience as waking life, and we must understand it in terms of the feelings we experience (Bulkeley 1997, 42). Finally, Jung suggested the dream was an abstract work of art that reflected the struggle to organize our personality (Bulkeley 1997, 30).
In the current psychotherapeutic environment, dreams have either been abandoned or have succumbed to the efforts of symbologists wrestling them back into a science of interpretation. Today’s therapists don’t understand dreams well enough to see that all of these perspectives apply.
I reject the idea that dreams reflect any cultural philosophy, integral or otherwise. Dreams are not an expression of global ecology, the commonalities of world religion, Ken Wilbur’s Four Quadrant Model, or our psycho-spiritual evolution toward self-realization.
Dreams are part of each person’s effort to resolve anxiety and find peace. For some people this means putting things together, and for other people it means taking things apart. They can be fulfilling, empowering, artistic explorations of subjective reality, or not. Dreams are part of each person’s effort to find sanity.
For these reasons I do not refer you to Sri Aurobindo or Hegel, I refer you to your own imagination. Rather than urge you to find explanations, I encourage you to avoid them. Integration is a theory; balance is a state of body and mind. The best that any theory of dreams can do for you is put you to sleep.
Dreams
Dreams are like cars: some people collect them, others enjoy driving them, others like to take them apart, but most of us just use them to take us where we want to go. The difference is that with dreams, no one knows how to drive or where they’re going.
There are other cultures and there were times in our culture when we understood dreams. In many respects, the “renaissance” of dream science has left us knowing less about dreams and being less able to use them. This isn’t simply the result of being analytical, it’s also the result of being emotionally out of touch. This requires some explanation.
On the analytical side, our lack of understanding of dreams, as demonstrated by the above cacophony of opinions, is the result of narrow mindedness and shallow thinking. Dreams are our way of exploring alternative paths to understanding just as every other system in the universe explores all knowable paths moving forward.
This is no exaggeration: every system in nature explores all paths as they move forward in time. This is one of the few aspects of the microscopic world that smoothly grades into the large scale behavior of everything we see. There is every reason to believe that living system attempt to do the same things. Weighing alternatives is the only sure-fire way of knowing which alternative is best.
On the emotional side, Modern Man is astoundingly inept at understanding “his” emotions, and dreams are emotional thinking. We’d like to say women are better at it, but they’re swept along. As a result, I find women generally more aware but often conflicted and misled.
We continue to live in a patriarchal world where unaware people misunderstand what they see and argue about the wrong things. This is the reason why therapy is effective. Therapy, at its root, is just careful reflection.
If you’d like to meet yourself on more respectful terms, start with dreams. Pick a time on my calendar for a free call.
Therapy
We are all navigating a path through life, that’s basically all we’re doing. But no path has any meaning without the existence of boundaries. A set of driving instructions that consists of a series of left and right turns is completely useless if it fails to tell you where to turn.
The “where part” of a path description describes bench marks that are not part of the path. You have to know the territory, at least enough to identify where you are, if you want to have any hope of seeing, understanding, following, or communicating a path.
Dreams are the territory of your feelings. This isn’t obvious because people are out of touch with their feelings, especially psychologists! Those times when and cultures where feelings were esteemed had a more effective relationship with dreams. At these times, dreams played a guiding and balancing role in personal and social life.
Dreams also play a role in our physical health. This is yet another aspect of dreams we currently disregard. Science has yet to make the connection, but dreams were the foundation of medicine before they were forgotten.
Psycho-neuro-immunologists will make the case that calming our system lowers oxidative stress, which lowers inflammation, and strengthens our immune system, but few people listen to them. And even if we did listen to them, the skill of using dreams to calming our systems is a forgotten skill.
If you want to lower your stress, increase your health, and lengthen your life, all you need to do is make a lifelong project of getting in greater touch with your emotions. But notice that I’m talking about your feelings about everything, not just your obsessions around food, shelter, sex, and money.
Emotions offer you a way of thinking that is flexible, inclusive, and extends from the decisions you make at this moment, to decisions affecting the rest of your life. Emotional thinking does not mean responding emotionally, it means understanding all the emotional implications of your thoughts. It is a measure of our ignorance that we have lost the connection between reason and emotion.
Remembering
Dreams are expansive emotional thinking. They conflate immediate circumstances with life attitudes. They present the conflicts between daily situations and life-long prejudices. In dreams you actually experience the emotional conflicts generated by your opposing ideas. You don’t triangulate logical consequences into the future, you feel them in the dream’s present time.
The quickest way to get in touch with your full emotions is to engage your dreams. I I’m not implying that you should remember or analyze all your dreams, but that you should become available to engage them when your called. If you express a desire and intention to remember your dreams, then you will start to remember those parts of those dreams where your input is appreciated and where your insights are helpful.
Not all dreams are memorable, definitive, or stress reducing. It’s not helpful to struggle to remember every dream. But if you make an effort to get enough sleep, wake up naturally, and have some extra time up on waking to reflect on your thoughts and feelings, then you will remember those dreams whose scope is small enough for you to comprehend.
The larger, more complex and comprehensive dreams will wash over you and recede back into the ocean of your subconscious. If you are humble and diligent and remember to put out your nets, you can still catch a few fish.
References
Bogzaran, F. and Deslauriers, D. (2012). Integral Dreaming: A Holistic Approach to Dreams. State University of New York Press
Bulkeley, Kelly (1997). An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming. Praeger
Hurd, R. (2025). “Contemporary Dream Theories Starting with Freud.” dreamstudies.org. https://dreamstudies.org/freudian-dream-theory-explained/
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