A homicidal ruler and a last-minute escape from the jaws of death are featured in today’s scripture - but it is in the realm of dreams, beneath those surface events, that we wander for inspiration. Could that landscape feature on your Lenten journey?
Dream On by Cassandra Miller, under Creative Commons.
Daniel was recruited as interpreter because the tyrannical King Nebuchadnezzar had confusing dreams.
If you read the whole of Daniel Chapter 2, you will see that in this awe-inspiring Babylonian kingdom, being a good translator of dreams was a matter of life and death. And Daniel relied exclusively on the Lord to help him.
His gratitude to his God is the inspiration for this song or psalm:
Daniel remained calm in the most testing of circumstances and, for him, it is God who gives knowledge and reveals deep, hidden things to the discerning.
How much attention do we pay to our own world of ‘darkness’ - to our dreams? Do we even remember them?
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Another Hebrew song, in Psalm 127, says God ‘pours gifts on his beloved while they slumber.’ Perhaps we spend a third of our lives ignoring Divine gifts…
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Carl Jung was, many argue, the Einstein of the psychological and mythological world. He paid deep attention to his own dreams and the thousands he heard about. In recently published journals, he said:
“I must carry them in my heart and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me. Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?”
He thought people had ‘forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.’ What do you think about this?
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Taking riddling images and deciphering them is an art to be practiced; as they were communications from the soul, that animating centre of our being most intimately connected to the Divine. But once a person begins to pay attention to the dream world, they often report an uptick in the number of dreams they remember. Attention merits communication.
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The unconscious is like a prolific movie director. Each night, it takes images and characters from waking life, creating new pictures crammed with messages or hints about daytime existence. Jung also thought that we inherit a store of characters - or archetypes - that is shared by all humans. These are the Kings, Godmothers, Ogres and Goddesses of our dreams and our fairy stories. They are human potentialities writ large. We might spot some of them on the pages of scripture, too!
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If these ideas are inspiring to you, a Lenten practice could be to pray, as Daniel did, for the wisdom to understand dreams. To approach them as potentially guiding words of the soul; the very voice of God in our deepest being.
You might like to read:
Inner Work: Using Dreams & Active Imagination for Personal Growth - Robert A Johnson
The Art of Dream Interpretation – Lona Eversden