By Seth Miller
Everyone dreams, but few people find sufficient interest in their dreams to move beyond mere curiosity at their strange contents. Even many who work with dreams as a part of a transformative practice usually concentrate on their content, and only more rarely question their form, ontology, and origins. Exploring these aspects, however, can help provide a context that helps orient dreamers to some of the esoteric underpinnings of dream etiology (their meaningful origins), and can help enliven dream-based transformative practices. This article is an attempt to show how a spiritually-oriented understanding of the makeup of the human being gives a context for understanding different types of dreams, their origins, and some associated consequences for dreamwork.
The language of spiritual science, also called anthroposophy (human wisdom) will be of help in this endeavor, because it maintains its cogency across multiple phenomenal realms (such as those of sleeping and waking), and because it has as its aim the ability to make clear and coherent processes which work within the physical realm but have their source beyond it, in the spiritual worlds. Fundamental anthroposophical terminology will not be explained in this article for reasons of space, and neither will the basic anthroposophical view of dreaming in general. For a brief introduction, I highly recommend that readers peruse this article: Sleep and Dreams in Anthroposophy, which provides the context (more…)