Big Dreams
Every once in a while a dream comes that shakes us to the core or leaves us feeling that we have been somewhere, experienced something momentous, just as in real life something happens that shifts our reality. . . something planned or unexpected, such as a journey, an accident, a wedding, a graduation, or a death.
Big dreams are milestones in our ongoing story, causing us to pause, reconnoiter, celebrate or, as the case may be, anguish. I have found that even fairly minor events in life take on huge significance if I imagine that I dreamt them because then they become symbolic. When something is symbolic we sense that there is much more going on than meets the eye, a subtext to the literal; the smallest thing or incident waxes numinous. When a big dream comes you can’t exaggerate its significance. It doesn’t disguise itself as just another dream, rather it announces itself dramatically for a reason; the psyche has something important to say. Big dreams are crossroad dreams, archetypal dreams, threshold or initiatory dreams.
There is a vast difference between a big dream and a nightly dream: A typical dream might be quirky or full of personal material that can only be amplified by the dreamer’s associations, whereas a big dream is a fairly impersonal dream, a dream that constellates around an archetypal theme or situation. The dreamer may play a role in such a dream, but not necessarily.
The big dream may unfold as a movie or it may start out rather uneventfully and move into the domain of the numinous by degrees. For example, the dreamer may dream of attending a play which then dramatizes the archetypal content. Regardless of how the big dream manifests, the point is, there is an energetic, emotionally charged or otherwise qualitative difference between a big dream and a “normal” dream.
Jung put it this way: “A good dream, for example, that’s grace. The dream is in essence a gift. The collective unconscious, it’s not for you, or me, it’s the invisible world, it’s the great spirit. It makes little difference what I call it: God, Tao, the Great Voice, the Great Spirit.”