Dreams are real as long as they last. But that can be said of life itself.
Dreams are often forgotten as soon as we wake up. But when they are happening they do have a psychological reality. The ancient Greeks believed that dreams were an entrance to another world where we were given access to the world of the gods. There, we encounter the living and the dead; the world of today, and the ancient one; the world of heaven and the one of earth. There, we can defy the laws of this world. We can fly, raise the dead, move mountains, heal the sick, and foretell the future. There too we can find out the real motives of the people of our daily lives, and there too we can come face to face with our desires. But the most remarkable thing as we enter the world of dreams is to realize that in them we all are artists, for the creators of our dreams are us. Some individuals, who claim not to be artists, become one when they narrate their dreams: they become superb storytellers. Unfortunately the artist within them is only allowed to come out and play when they themselves are not there, when they close their eyes. We can say that our artists are individuals who can dream with their eyes open, who create even when they are awake. And what a joy it is to create with our eyes open!
In our dreams we also have access to experience the world from another perspective, including the perspective of other creatures. Basho, a Japanese poet once wrote:
"Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly.
When I woke up I asked myself
Am I a butterfly that dreamed I was a man?
Or am I a man who dreamed he was a butterfly?"
Dreams indeed have their own language. We all use the same language when we dream, but our tragedy is that we don't know it when we wake up.
Here we are going to spend a third of our lives in a world that for the most part remains unconscious. If we only knew that it is through our dreams that we give ourselves the best advise. That is why in the Jewish tradition it is said that a dream is a letter that we send ourselves. Just like we have two brains (one for science and one for art), we have two basic modes of thinking: One of them that works through knowledge and one of them that works through wisdom. The first one uses information; the second one inspiration. They are not meant to work against each other -just like our two brains- but to complement each other. Our dreaming self brings to us pearls of wisdom from the depths of our minds, and it clothes them and gives them life in the stage of our dreams. Our dreaming self uses metaphors just like our poets do, and for the same reason. It evokes rather than tell, for what you evoke is meant to reach the heart, while what you tell stops at the level of the mind.
We are all bi-lingual: we speak "head-language" and "heart-language." But with good reason we have been told that the longest distance for a human being is the one between his head and his heart. Dreams can help us bridge this distance: they provide us with a blend of elements of the heart and the mind.
In a world that has become one-sided, the language of the heart has become a forgotten language. The loss of our dreaming self has caused much turmoil in the world. To get a sense of its proportion just imagine a bird trying to fly with one wing. Its flight is erratic, painful, and ultimately fatal.
Now see the same bird using both of its wings. The flight is peaceful, harmonious, and joyful. That is what our life is meant to be. That is why we have a heart and a mind. The dreaming self is the missing wing of our world.
Become whole. Befriend yourself. All you have is two wings but with them you can conquer the entire world.