Using Dreams for Shadow Work

[Shaun]

My ridiculously random and somewhat unsettling dreams have not stopped yet, but I have managed to mostly detach from them.

• I am vegetarian and the meat industry upsets me

Last night I dreamt of rowdy youths cooking loads of bacon and other meats on an enormous barbecue in the middle of the road. This barbecue stretched for much of the length of the street. All of them were laughing at me as I just watched.

 

• I don't like my job and often complain about having no love life

Another dream featured me riding a motorbike through the warehouse where I work with a woman on the back of it and I have no idea who she was. Much of the warehouse was all jumbled up and nothing like it is in waking life. The scene immediately switched to me hugging her outside the warehouse and it was such a beautiful feeling.

 

• I like exploring abandoned places and some of them include mines.

I often have these pretty unsettling dreams where I am inside this building with open vertical mineshafts that were a few MILES deep as another dream character informed me. We chucked stuff down them and terrifying noises came out. Another dream related to this featured another really deep hole in the middle of a field, which was an irrigation well. I saw a young girl falling down it but she somehow didn't at the same time.

 

• I often wish to go back to my life as it used to be when I was a child

One dream was this old house and it was basically a representation of my subconscious mind. I was able to pick up some VHS tapes and play old videos of our life on the farm. These tapes are fictional and were never created in the waking life.

 

So using these few examples, how can I actually use these for shadow work or even understanding what's going on in my mind? I'm very new to shadow work.

 

I would also like to suggest that we start a dreams mega thread where we can discuss dreams, get support and even share drawings of them.

Edited September 16, 2019 by Shaun

[Aggelos Doulgerakis]

From what I can tell, dreams are just a representation of the subconscious mind. So yeah I am pretty sure they would work well for shadow work.

Personally, I can't really remember my dreams all that well though, they are really fuzzy ...However, recently I had a dream about a friend I really mistreated and didn't know how much guilt I had in me about that and was repressing. It definitely helped me get in touch with that and understand my self a bit better.