Dreamwork as a Spiritual Practice

Many of my most powerful spiritual experiences have happened in my dreams. I have looked up into the sky on a rainy night and heard the stars sing. I have gotten writing advice from a favorite author who died before I was born, and I have explored caves with an ancient hunter-gatherer. Dreams allow us to do things that are impossible in waking life, to hear voices that would otherwise be silent and go places that are inaccessible or don’t exist in the physical world. An active dream-life can be awe inspiring and terrifying, but dreams can also help us find meaning in our lives. They can help us grow and change if we take them seriously and use them as a tool for meditation and introspection. 

In my experience, there are four types of dreams: processing dreams, shadow dreams, divinatory dreams, and spirit work dreams. Each of these types responds best to different types of examination. Though, individual dreams can have elements of more than one type. 

In this article, I examine the four types of dreams, show you how to recognize them, and share how I work with them in my spiritual practice.

Processing Dreams

Processing dreams are a mashup of things that have happened over last day or two. 

Example: Characters from Outlander (TV) were contestants on the Great British Baking Show. Dougal was angry because his cake collapsed after Jamie stomped around the tent.

I had this dream when I was reading the Outlander books before bed and binging the Great British Baking Show. Usually, dreams of this kind are funny and not deeply meaningful. They can be helpful on a practical level. Recent scientific studies suggest that we learn skills by practicing things we do when we’re awake in our dreams. As a focus for meditation, though, processing dreams aren’t very useful.

When I have a dream like this, I ask myself if things represented in the dream are taking up more space in my life than I’d like. After having the dream about Outlander and the Great British Baking Show, I decided to watch less TV but keep my reading schedule the same. 

Shadow Dreams

In shadow dreams, I encounter needs, hopes, and fears that I haven’t been looking at closely enough in waking life. 

Example: I was a teacher in a one-room school house filled with students who are talking over me, won’t listen, and don’t want to do their work.

Dreams are this type respond particularly well to Jungian-style analysis. In this way of looking at dreams, each character in the dream corresponds to a part of yourself, not just the point of view character. The plot tells you something about the way these parts of yourself feel about each other and how you live your life.

When I figure out that I’ve had a shadow dream, I journal from the perspective of each character in the story. Allowing each side a chance to speak helps me to learn what their needs are and how their needs aren’t getting met. This is an important step because I often think that I understand the issues at play in the dream, but journaling reveals the places where my assumptions aren’t correct.

When journaling about the dream about the one-room school house from the perspective of the teacher, I learned that my inner teacher was frustrated because my schedule was disorganized. Like a one-room school house, my day had a definite beginning and end, but my work and interests had no set place in my life, like students at different levels being lumped together under the care of one teacher. As a writer, I don’t have a boss imposing a schedule, so I didn’t have one. My inner teacher pointed out that without order, I spent my time on the things that “yelled” the loudest instead of on the things that were most important to me.

When I switched sides and journaled from the perspective of the students, I expected my inner student to whine about needing freedom. This was the story that I’d been telling myself, that there was a conflict between my need for order and my need for freedom and the best way to resolve the conflict was to give myself as much freedom in my routine as possible. Instead, I discovered that my inner student didn’t fight for its freedom. It only asked for kindness. 

I realized that when I’ve tried to create a structured schedule for myself in the past, I was overly strict. I set unreasonable expectations, planning every minute of the day and refusing to change my routine when my mind and body needed it. I’ve learned a lot about self-care since then, and I discovered that when I tried to create a routine again I approached things with a more mature awareness of my own limits. As a bonus, I found that I had more freedom in the end because I knew when I’d met my obligations and my work day was over.

There are some who say that every dream is a shadow dream. In my experience, when a dream is a shadow dream, it is always obvious from the beginning that there’s something for me to learn from the dream, even if I don’t know immediately what it is. I’ve found that if I work too hard to find the hidden motivations in a dream, the interpretation ends up being trite or doesn’t stick. The shadow reveals itself when it’s ready. It can’t be forced by ruminating. 

Divinatory Dreams

Divinatory dreams seem to predict the future or tell us things that are going on in the world around us that we would have had no way of knowing otherwise. These dreams are often dramatic, as if the universe is trying to wake us up to an awareness of our power.

Example: There was a war in a park in my city. When I woke up, I learned that, while I was asleep, there had been a shootout between police and a man having a breakdown not far from the park. 

I have heard stories about people for whom divinatory dreams are an important part of their practice. Their dreams give them useful information that they can use in waking life. Scientists and artists sometimes seed dreams like this to help them solve problems. By musing on problems before they go to sleep, they often find that they dream about the answers to their questions. Depending on the source of the information (and the beliefs of the person having the dream), these might be thought of as either processing dreams or divinatory dreams.

Personally, I have not had much success seeding dreams like this, and I find that there is little I can do with divinatory dreams when I have them. The dream about the war in the park gave me a creepy anecdote to tell, but it didn’t tell me anything I really needed to know or wouldn’t have found out when I woke up. Worse, I had a spike in dreams about intruders in my home for a week after the shooting.

In my experience, divination dreams come when I’m not doing enough divination in my waking life. They’re a nudge to make it more of a priority. 

Spirit Work Dreams

When I’m doing a lot of work with a spirit I particularly trust, I give them permission to work with me in dreams. I don’t have the ability to lucid dream, so for me, giving a spirit permission to work with me in dreams is a big deal. I’ve had spirits abuse this privilege in the past. Like Lady Poole from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I’ve woken up exhausted after a night of spirit work dreams, as if I’d been working all night. Right now, only one spirit, my guide, has permission to give me dreams, and I ward my dreams against everyone else.

Example: I was in a school cafeteria getting food, and I was told by a faculty member to fill my plate with vegetables first. By the time I filled my plate with vegetables, all of the protein and grain dishes were being taken away because lunch was over. My guide appeared and told me that if I followed that advice to the letter, I would never have enough time to get my needs met. 

In this case, I was given this dream because my guide wanted to have a conversation with me about the difference between rules and guidelines, a subject that was unlikely to come up in our conversations in waking life. I was embarking on the quest to schedule my life more strictly, and he wanted me to beware of meeting some needs completely at the expense of other needs. It’s better, he said, to meet a few needs imperfectly than to meet one need completely and the rest not at all.

At other times, my trusted spirits will give me dreams about experiences they want me to have that I can’t have in waking life. 

Example: I was camping without a tent in the rain. While I was waiting to fall asleep in the dream, I had a mystical experience of oneness with nature.

My guide is very old and closely connected with the wild. I am limited in the ways that I can commune with nature, so he gives me wild dreams about sleeping under the stars and making homes in caves. This helps me to feel closer to him, and it helps me to understand his values and examine my own.

Sometimes, my guide uses dreams to give me direct, practical advice.

Example: A voice said, “It will be hard. Take this.” A disembodied hand gave me an apple.

In this case, with the help of Lee, I was able to figure out that I was on the edge of getting a cold, and I needed to take care of myself. Because of my guide’s warning, I rested and was careful with my diet, and I was able to avoid getting sick.

The best way to know if you’ve had a spirit work dream is to ask the spirits you work with. If you aren’t actively working with spirits, I suggest warding your dreams for the reasons I gave above.

This post was originally published on Aquarius Moon Journal on 7 February 2020.