"It can be tempting to see dreams as purely something happening in the mind, or equally to hive them off as spiritual experiences totally separate from our waking lives. My understanding is that dreams can also be deeply rooted in our biology. The more pressing our physical issues are, the more likely they are to inform our dreams. In dreaming, body and soul remain intertwined.
For those who see dreams as innately irrational, the strange, reality defying illogic of them can seem to be little more than foolish and whimsical distractions from the important business of life. This is not my experience at all. Having worked with dreams for many years, I find them to be very much involved with our waking lives. Often dreams are (admittedly distorted) mirrors we hold up to reflect on our waking experiences, fears and desires. We use our dreams to make sense of life. Thus how
we sleep and how we dream has a direct relationship with how we experience waking life, both reflecting and informing it, even if we aren’t conscious of that process. It is part of our life experience, and as valid as any other. At the same time I do not believe in getting over-enthusiastic about pulling out mystical messages from dreaming, although I think these too are present.
This is a quote from the introduction of my Pagan Dreaming book, I think it gives something of a flavour of where I've been going with this work, and why. It's not a dream interpretation book - the interpretation of dreams is a very small part of what I think dreams are about, and there's far more to explore in terms of how we might engage with our own dreaming.
