Karvonen: What effect did this experience have on you?

Taylor: It opened my eyes to the potential of working with dreams as a tool for nonviolent political, social, and cultural change. I saw that if you can touch the unconscious directly, hearts and minds can be changed. The primary reasons for terrible race and class oppression at home and perpetual war overseas are not rational but unconscious. We have this unconscious belief that there are parts of ourselves that are not us, perhaps not even human: our aggressiveness, our murderous urges, our jealousy, and so forth. As we deny those traits in ourselves, we start to see them as the exclusive property of other people. These others are so unlike us, in our view, that we begin to question their humanity. This is what allows us to speak so casually about “collateral damage”: we don’t really believe that the people suffering are human beings like us.

The moment we set ourselves up as the moral arbiters of the world, engaged in a battle between good and evil, then projection has become public policy, and it leads to disastrous results. What heals these profoundly destructive behaviors and promotes real change in society is awakening a sense of rapport with the rejected and despised aspects of ourselves. You can tinker endlessly with the laws and level the playing field all you want, but if you don’t change the way people relate to each other face to face, the law of unintended consequences will simply recreate the problem all over again.

Karvonen: What is the “collective unconscious” that Jung spoke of, and how are dreams connected to it?

Taylor: Jung theorized that below the personal unconscious, which is connected to a certain individual, there is a vast unconscious that forms the foundation of our common humanity. From a spiritual perspective, it is a realization that we are one family. All my experience tells me that Jung’s theory is correct. Dreams give us a more immediate and direct access to that deeper level of the unconscious.

Karvonen: But we usually think of dreams as personal messages from our own unconscious. Aren’t our dreams about us?

Taylor: Dreams carry personal meanings related to our individual experience, and at the same time reach down into the collective unconscious, that vast foundation. One or the other may be of more importance to a dreamer at a particular point, but the dream is working on everything simultaneously — from personal issues like our jobs, our health, and our relationships to larger issues like nature, the cosmos, the divine, the whole psychic and spiritual evolution of human beings on this planet.

To a great degree we human beings have lost our intimate connection with nature. We grow out of nature just like anything else, and the health and harmony of the biosphere is absolutely essential to our health and harmony. But through the various barriers of language and culture — and particularly technology — we have created the illusion that we are not connected to nature anymore. The conscious mind tends to function as if this illusion were true, but the unconscious knows better. We pollute and destroy the environment because of the uneasiness and mistrust that we have toward our own unconscious. If we do not bring this unease up to the conscious level, we will continue to project it out onto nature and burn the natural world down and pave it over.

Karvonen: Jung also said that the collective unconscious is made up of “archetypes.” What are archetypes, and how are they related to dreams, myths, and folklore?

Taylor: Archetypes are recurring symbolic forms or patterns that carry essentially the same meaning for all people. For example, all human beings are predisposed to associate the direction up with light, consciousness, and goodness, and the direction down with darkness, unconsciousness, and evil. Part of achieving emotional, psychological, and spiritual maturity is recognizing that the divine resides just as much in the darkness as in the light, because the divine is everywhere. In fact, we can discover more about the divine by exploring our dark side, because we are unconscious of much more than we are conscious of. So God is proportionately more present in the darkness of the unconscious than in the light of what we already know.

Even though I am predisposed to mistrust and fear the darkness down below, it is precisely in that place that everything I don’t know about myself — and, therefore, everything I don’t know about God — resides. So if I want to become a healthy, mature human being, I must overcome my fear and explore the underworld. For that reason, characters in myths and folk tales often must descend into dark, fearful caves or labyrinths and grapple with evil forces there in order to become enlightened and whole.

A great symbol for this archetype of darkness and light and their relationship to each other is the yin-yang. If you were to wrench the symbol apart into two halves, the black half would still have a white “eye,” and the white half would still have a black “eye.” So we see that even in the midst of the light, the dark is present, and vice versa.

Another example of an archetype would be the image of blood, which is related to family and the obligations of relationship. “Are you of my blood or not?” we ask when determining family. So when blood shows up in a dream, one important question for the dreamer is “What is my relationship to my relatives?” — and not just the ones who are living, but also the ancestors. Though the particular cultural expressions surrounding family, ancestors, and obligations will differ from culture to culture, there will still be this symbolic archetype of blood.

Of course women, because they menstruate, have an experience of blood that men don’t. So archetypal symbols can have different levels of meaning. Some of those levels are gender specific.

Karvonen: You’ve said that there is no such thing as a bad dream, that the more horrific a nightmare may be, the more significant it is to the dreamer’s health and wholeness. Why is this?

Taylor: From an evolutionary survival standpoint, we are hard-wired to pay attention to threats. So when a dream has information of particular value and importance to us — especially if that information runs counter to our cherished beliefs — the dream is likely to dress that information up in an upsetting, threatening form to make us pay attention. A disturbing dream is a wake-up call that tells us some change in awareness or action needs to occur. Over and over again my work with dreams has demonstrated to me that the worse the dream appears to be on first encounter, the more important and valuable is the information it conveys — if we have the wisdom to recognize it.

All dreams, not just nightmares, are trying to guide the dreamer directly to “roadblocks” in the psyche: childhood injuries, current self-deception, repressed desires — in short, all the things that separate us from spiritual health and wholeness. One of the hallmarks of greater emotional and spiritual maturity is that the more gut-wrenching, nightmarish dreams subside. As we pay more attention to our dreams and attempt to follow their guidance, they no longer need to frighten us to get our attention. So the way to handle nightmares is to explore your dreams more, particularly the horrific ones. It’s not easy, but it is doable, particularly in the context of a caring, supportive group.

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