Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream

Jeremy Taylor On Dreams As A Tool For Social Change

Jeremy Taylor was in his seventh year studying culture and myth at the State University of New York at Buffalo when he got his draft notice. It was 1969, and U.S. troop levels in Vietnam were at their peak. An active opponent of the war, Taylor obtained conscientious-objector status and was allowed to perform community service in place of military duty. He went to work with the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, and was given the job of retraining white volunteers who had encountered problems serving in a black neighborhood: well-meaning volunteers who had offended African Americans, Taylor says, with their “extra-nice, deferential, and unconsciously condescending attitudes and behaviors.” To unearth their subconscious racism, Taylor tried an unorthodox method: bringing volunteers together to discuss their dreams. Though the participants were initially skeptical, the idea proved highly effective, and Taylor realized that he had stumbled upon his life’s work.

Inspired by the work of pioneering psychologist Carl Jung, Taylor believes that our dreams can not only connect us to our authentic selves, but also foster healing in society. After completing a master’s degree in American studies at SUNY Buffalo, he worked for ten years with schizophrenic teens at the Saint George Homes, a residential treatment facility in Berkeley, California. He led dream discussion groups for patients and found that, even for psychotics, talking about dreams fostered emotional and psychological growth.

After his ordination as a Unitarian minister in 1980, Taylor continued to meld dream exploration and social action. He also taught at universities and went on tours to promote his brand of “dream work” with his wife, Kathryn. He delved further into theology, obtaining his doctorate from the University of Creation Spirituality (now Wisdom University), which was founded by renegade Catholic priest Matthew Fox.

Now sixty-three, Taylor estimates that he has helped people work with more than a hundred thousand dreams in his thirty-five-year career. A founding member and past president of the Association for the Study of Dreams, he has written three books on dream interpretation and mythology, including Dream Work (Paulist Press) and Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill (Warner Books). He has appeared as a guest expert on such television programs as The Power of Dreams (Discovery Channel) and The Secret World of Dreams (NBC). In the midnineties, Taylor pioneered Internet dream work as host of America Online’s innovative Dream Show.

Not everyone who has heard Taylor’s message agrees with it. In fact, some of his more vocal opponents are Jungian analysts. (Taylor is a self-taught student of Jung’s ideas, and not an accredited analyst himself.) “There is always a little flurry of controversy when I show up to speak at a Jungian society,” Taylor says, “in part because Jung said some pretty scornful things about doing intimate psychological and spiritual work in groups.”

Taylor has a website (jeremytaylor.com) and recently founded the Marin Institute for Projective Dream Work, which trains people to practice dream work in their communities. He still considers himself a social reformer, only instead of organizing around specific issues, he says, “I am organizing around the evolutionary strategy of becoming more conscious and more responsible for ourselves and our society.”

I first heard of Taylor in the eighties when a friend attended one of his workshops. That friend and I subsequently started our own dream group, and eighteen years later, we are still sharing dreams using Taylor’s principles. I finally met Taylor in person in 2004, at a three-day dream-work retreat in Loveland, Colorado. A large man with kind eyes and a full white beard, he wore a T-shirt printed with a map of the galaxy. I began to interview him over breakfast, and the conversation carried through into lunch.

I caught up with him again more recently by phone at his home in Fairfield, California, and I questioned him on how his early interest in myth, the unconscious, and social change had grown into a dream ministry.

Karvonen: Why did you initially turn to dream work to heal racism?

Taylor: It was out of desperation. I was training a group of Unitarian Universalist volunteers who’d been rejected by the black community they were trying to assist. I’d held some traditional discussion groups with the volunteers, and it had seemed like a success, because people felt better after telling their stories. But all the talk did little to address the underlying problems. Here we were, strong believers in civil rights and equality, and we had failed to overcome our own unconscious racism.

As I tried to think of another approach, I recalled what my wife, Kathy, and I were going through in our relationship. Though we were both committed to ridding ourselves of society’s sexist conditioning, we still drove each other crazy, even dreaming about the fights we’d had. Every time dreams entered the conversation, the discussion got deeper and more interesting, and it became possible to imagine what a relationship free of sexism might actually be like.

It occurred to me that the volunteer group was having the same problem with regard to racism: we were absolutely convinced it was wrong, but we were so subject to the unconscious patterning we’d been raised with that all our efforts failed. I thought maybe discussing our dreams about racism would help in the same way that sharing dreams about sexism had helped heal my relationship with my wife.

When I first proposed the idea to the group, there was surprise and a certain amount of consternation. But, being liberals and Unitarians, they were willing to try anything once. At the next meeting the group began talking about dreams that, on the surface, were filled with racial sentiments. Not surprisingly, virtually all of them were nightmares in which the dreamer was menaced by figures of other races. At another level, everything in the dream is a reflection of the dreamer’s own psyche: these menacing characters are in fact representations of repressed aspects of the dreamer’s own self. While the dream is occurring, I might be absolutely convinced that these unpleasant figures are “not me.” But the fact that I am creating the dream means that it is all me. The more I think of figures in the dream as “not me,” the more likely I am to be projecting my own problems on others in my waking life.

When I consciously accept the possibility that these figures in the dream are me, it allows me to begin withdrawing the projections I make in my waking life as well. Specifically, when I can acknowledge that this gang of dark-skinned youths who are threatening me in the dream are the disowned, despised, and often dangerous parts of my own being, I am then less likely to project my fears onto the next group of dark-skinned youths I encounter on a real street. Instead I can see them for who they are: kids coming home from school, laughing and talking.

That’s what happened with the Unitarian group. With the release of our neurotic self-deceptions came increased mutual respect in our interactions with people in the African American community. The volunteers were able to relate to these people based on who they really were, rather than as representations of unconscious projections. Authentic likes and dislikes began to replace ritual “politeness,” patronizing blunders, and repressed fears. And we were finally able to do something of value for the community.

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