The Alchemy of Your Dreams

paper without censoring them. Then keep what you've written close so that you can refer to it later. Once you've done that, come back here and carry on reading.



Dream Work and the Psyche



Dreams help us to question and alter our deep-seated beliefs and to take note of what we are creating, and manifesting, in our everyday lives. They serve to help us live a fuller and richer life while also showing us which parts of our psyches are underdeveloped, so that we can work toward greater psychological integration and emotional well-being.



From a psychological and personal-growth perspective, that means working with the collective unconscious, your personal unconscious, emotions, drives, and the equivalent symbolic representations that appear in your dream work. Something I am actively going to show you how to do throughout the course of this book. From a spiritual level that means working in tandem with spirit.



Take my Desert Dream as an example. That dream helped me to more fully discover, and then express, my feelings around death and dying. At the time I was afraid of death on a deep emotional level. More specifically, my fear was about not knowing how it would happen. Up until that dream, I had never really given myself the space or permission to really reflect on why that was the case and how it made me feel.



If someone asked me how I felt about dying, I flippantly laughed it off, saying that "we all gotta do it sometime." Or I redirected the conversation to another topic. In other words, my fears and emotions around mortality really freaked me out, and so to neutralize the anxiety that came up when I thought about it, I portrayed a breezy and light attitude-the opposite of what I was feeling internally.



My behavior in this instance is typical of a psychological defense mechanism known as reaction formation. A defense mechanism is when your mind responds in a specific way to help minimize internal conflict. All of us have defense me