Whispers of Midnight: Travel With Me into Dreamscapes

3,000 miles of phantoms and countless years of silence shadow Andie until she starts listening to her nightmares and dreams. Let's talk about the language of dreams.

DREAMS

6/30/20262 min read

~ Marie Von Franz –

Alchemical Active Imagination

“The dream one gets at night is always like a letter from the same inner center, from the Self. Every dream is that, and the writer of the letter is always the same: the Self, the one thing, the quid.”

(con't...)

Why? Because dreams communicate chiefly through symbols, imagery, and emotions rather than words; the language of dreams existed before words. Just as scent is our oldest, deepest form of memory, so dream language is our earliest form of communication with the unconscious and with God.

In the mid-1990s, a barrage of nightmares and dreams upended my life and led me to an analyst who specialized in working with women and their dreams. There, I learned to listen for the messages, to understand symbolic language specific to me, to my life, and to internalize the lessons in the letters the Self was sending me. I learned to help myself through the language of dreams. I wrote my debut novel, Night Mirrors, because of my dreams and how they helped heal me.

This is only the first of what I hope will be many future blog entries about dreams. I am not an expert on dreams. I am not a psychoanalyst or any other medical practitioner trained in the language of dreams. I cannot interpret the dreams of others. I am simply a woman who’s always dreamed and who, almost 30 years ago, was saved by her dreams. Then she wrote a novel about it.

Embrace your dreams. I’ll be back to visit with you soon.

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All humans dream, whether we recall our dreams or not. Some of us dream in vivid, story-telling styles complete with multiple plotlines and characters; others dream in static images, similar to postcards or photographs strung together to whirl like a social media carousel in our sleep as our subconscious minds absorb their midnight messages. But all dreams talk to us.

I’ve never not dreamed. My mom loved to tell stories of almost two-year-old me calling out to her, night after night, insisting that there was a tiger in the crib with me. As far as I know, that was my first introduction to the language of dreams. Whatever that tiger needed to tell me remains a mystery. Maybe he was simply a recurring day remanent from a storybook tiger chasing a child, or perhaps he was helping me work out deeply disturbing events I was already experiencing when I was too young to understand. But throughout the rest of my life, across the long decades and arduous roads that led me here, I dreamed and remembered; sometimes I remembered every dream, sometimes I remembered only a few dreams a year. I’d fall into my dreams and listen as they spun their stories in a forever language. And I would remember. And I would learn.

What I've known since childhood is that there is indeed a language special to dreams. Our dreams are letters from ourselves to ourselves, those letters written in a language that is ancient—timeless, really—and is most likely the first language in human history.

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