The Night Life: On the Nature of Dreams in Esoteric Spiritual Practice

The very first class I took in grad school was a course on dreams. I came to the institute to study consciousness and philosophy with the intention of understanding death, but I never gave much thought to dreams. I didn’t realize how profoundly this course would change my life. From my current perspective, I consider dreams to be one of the most critical components of my personal spiritual practice.

Our modern, productivity-based world stresses external action over internal spiritual development. We are taught to dismiss dreams as the brain’s nightly defragmentation process, the nonsensical byproduct of a day's anxieties. Dreams are nothing more than neurological noise, fascinating perhaps, but ultimately irrelevant to the "real" business of waking life.

The post-Enlightenment philosophical shift toward radical empiricism and materialism severed the ancient bridge between spirit and matter. If reality is only what can be measured, weighed, and empirically verified, then the subjective, symbolic, and deeply personal world of the dream becomes an immediate problem. It cannot be quantified or replicated in a lab. It speaks in a language of metaphor and myth, not of mathematics and logic. Dreams, which were historically viewed as bridges to the spiritual realms, were exiled – pushed to the fringes of serious inquiry and relegated to the domain of "superstition."

Even the advent of psychology offered a double-edged sword. While Freud deserves credit for bringing dreams back into the therapeutic conversation, his framework often reduced them to a mechanism of wish-fulfillment and repressed libidinal drives. The dream was a cellar where we hide our secrets, not a cathedral where we might encounter the divine.

This post, the first in an ongoing series, challenges this premise. My position is that the dismissal of the dream world is a tragic casualty of our materialistic, post-Enlightenment culture. In our quest to conquer the external world, we have systematically devalued and ignored the vast landscape of the interior. We have forgotten that for nearly all of human history, across every culture, dreams were not seen as meaningless static, but were viewed as vital portals of communication – with the divine, with the soul, with other planes of existence, and with the deepest aspects of the self.

Destigmatizing the Dream and the Practice of Spiritual Science

My aim with this series on dreams (along with esoteric spirituality in general) is to help destigmatize the phenomena of inner-consciousness. People will have very different views on dreams. This is to be expected. But what I find troublesome is when cultural pressures, stigmas, and biases interfere with a person’s individual autonomy and personal choice to explore (and take seriously) their inner domains of consciousness. This is the basis of “spiritual science” – the idea that an esotericist serves as their own scientific instrument to explore the realms of the interior world(s).

Dream states are but one of the “non-ordinary” states of consciousness to which the spiritual scientist has access. Yes – it is true that there are dreams that are of relatively limited value (e.g., “day residue” dreams). There is always a possibility of error in attempting to interpret dreams. There is also the risk of becoming overly attached to such an interpretation – that is, to “know” what the symbols mean absolutely (e.g., “psychic inflation,” which is ultimately a covert manifestation of pride). This can lead to dogmatic spiritual distractions that track away from the esoteric objective of deeper truth. The potential for such errors arise when assessing any non-ordinary state of consciousness (e.g. meditation, breathwork, psychedelia, near-death experiences, etc.) and is not limited only to dreams.

But the esotericist is also aware of these potential errors and actively guards against them. The spiritual scientist is exploring, navigating, and learning the inner-terrain. Mistakes will be made – how could errors not occur when moving through such a vast, unknown landscape? It’s not about being perfect, nor it is about attaining an absolute, infallible, or immediate answer. It is about the process of development that occurs in undertaking the journey. Were the esotericist to “throw out” dreams altogether because they are “unprovable” via externally-based, reductive, and materialist scientific methods, then no exploration of the spiritual realm would ever take place.

This is effectively the difference between spiritual science and materialistic science. The materialist seeks truth in the physical world – what they can measure, weigh, and repeat through experimentation. The esotericist, on the other hand, holds that there are realms of conscious experience that actually exist beyond the physical realm, and which therefore cannot be measured by the methods of materialistic sciences.

Where, then, does the esotericist turn? The self becomes an inner-instrument of truth. Materialistic sciences are subsumed, but the esotericist seeks to understand the spiritual terrain beyond the physical plane through various practices (e.g. meditation, dreamwork, mystical breathing). The responsibility for truth is then placed on the shoulders of each esotericist. The individual must maintain their own inner-objectivity and integrity. They gain nothing from projecting inner-falsehood to themselves. Spiritual science may never be able to satisfy the demands of materialism, but neither can materialism satisfy the demands of spiritual science.

So it comes down to personal autonomy, belief, and faith. The esotericist pursues an understanding of the non-ordinary state because such states are often experienced as being undeniably real or “more real than real.” To those who have encountered such states, it can seem utterly foolish to ignore them – their reality is so blatantly obvious that it seems ridiculous and downright wrong to degrade them to the material realm alone. On a deeper level, ignoring the power of these states may feel like a spiritual assault or an offense against the divine.

In my situation, my experience with death demonstrated this to me many years ago. It’s an event that has shaped the direction of my life ever since. My subsequent experiences with mystical breathing and sustained meditation practices only reinforced this idea even further. And of course, there are also dreams.

The Dream as Gnostic Experience: A Jungian Restoration

In the West, it was Carl Jung who truly reopened the door to the dream’s sacred dimension in the 20th century. Breaking with Freud, Jung proposed that dreams were not just about hiding what we don’t want to see, but about revealing what we need to see. He argued that the psyche is a self-regulating system, and dreams are its primary tool for achieving balance, or wholeness.

From this perspective, the dream is a nightly act of compensation. If the conscious life is overly intellectual and rigid, the dreams may erupt with wild and emotional imagery. If ambitions are being repressed, dreams may present figures of immense power and agency. The dream, Jung argued, is a direct communication from the Self – the organizing center and totality of the psyche. One of the core aims of Jungian depth psychology is to facilitate an engagement between the conscious ego and the unconscious contents that break through the threshold of consciousness in dreams. The idea is to integrate those unconscious processes into conscious life, thereby gaining a deeper understanding of the self.

Dreams could be viewed as a form of gnosis: a direct, unmediated, and trans-rational knowing. The dream does not offer precise intellectual arguments, but provides a lived-experience that informs intuition. The dream allows us to feel the reality of, and to engage with, the unconscious aspects of ourselves. Some dreams are so potent that they can reorient our entire waking life. The language of the dream is the language of the soul itself: symbols, myths, and archetypes that bubble up from the collective unconscious, the shared psychic inheritance of humanity.

Dreams in the Esoteric Traditions

Jung’s work powerfully resonates with what esoteric and contemplative traditions have taught for millennia. Esoteric traditions have always treated the dream state as a significant opportunity for spiritual development. While the Jungian theory of compensation is powerful in its own right, it’s by no means the only way to view the possible function of dreams.

In Tibetan Buddhism, the practice of Milam, or Dream Yoga, trains the practitioner to achieve lucidity—to "wake up" within the dream. The ultimate goal is not a hedonistic joyride through a fantasy world, but to recognize the dream-like, illusory nature of both the dream state and waking reality. It is a profound training ground for navigating the after-death states, or bardo, which are described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

In Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, dreams are a crucial means of receiving divine guidance. The world of imagination is seen as a legitimate ontological realm, an intermediate reality where spirits and archetypal forms take shape. Dreams are a journey into and through these hierarchical realms. They are a place of true seeing and also serve as a means for spiritual development and purification.

From the Neoplatonic journeys of the soul to the alchemical symbolism that so fascinated Jung, the message is consistent: the dream state is not a shutdown or error, but a shift in consciousness. It is a liminal space where the veil between worlds thins, offering us unparalleled access to the hidden dynamics of our own psyche and the cosmos.

I don’t think we need to adhere to one theory of dreams over another. It’s possible that they all could apply at different times based on the requirements of our spiritual journey. For example, when I first started to pay attention to my dreams, I had many dreams that were clearly related to past anxieties and traumas. The dream, in this light, was extending an invitation to identify and integrate those experiences. But as my spiritual practiced deepened, the essence of the dream changed – sometimes dramatically. The dreamscape began to feel more like a “field of operation” in which I was actively participating in non-physical realms. I connect deeply with the idea that the dream is a “training ground” – not just for spiritual development and purification in waking-state, but more literally, as a preparation for the transmigration of the soul beyond physical death.

There’s obviously a lot to unpack with these comments, but I’ll reserve that for future posts. For now, I’m simply emphasizing that dreams can play a diverse role in spiritual practice, spanning across the domains of preparation, compensation, healing, purification, training, and more. It’s a vast spiritual landscape and a potentially rich source of inner-development for the esotericist.

The First Step: Becoming an Apprentice to Your Dreams

Reclaiming this lost faculty is not an academic exercise. It is a practice. Dream work requires commitment, reverence, humility, and patience. It should be practiced from a place of strength. To begin this journey, the first step is simple, yet significant: we must decide that our dreams are important. We must treat them not as disposable nightly trash, but as potential teachers.

The most powerful tool for this practice is the dream journal. Keeping a notebook and pen by the bed, or even a digital recorder (I personally use both), can help capture the elusive details of the dream before they fade from memory.. The idea is to lie still immediately after waking up and recall the details of the dream before moving. Write down everything remembered – not just the plot, but the emotions, the characters, the colors, the strange symbols, the nonsensical phrases, even the most incoherent bits and pieces. The primary act is one of recording without judgment (not interpretation). This process signals to the psyche that we are listening.

When this is done, something remarkable happens. The more attention we pay to the dream, the more we tend to remember them. The details from the other side of sleep will start to become clearer and more vibrant. It’s like reopening a channel of communication that’s been dormant. This can be a difficult process. It requires commitment, persistence, and patience.

My teacher in our dream studies course required us to keep a dream journal. This was, more or less, her only requirement throughout the course. I admit that I was a bit skeptical at first. But I’m beyond grateful that she nudged us to do this. Even throughout the course itself, my dreams became much more vivid and I was able to record them in great detail. I’ve kept a dream journal ever since. Her course opened me up to the potential of dreams. Today, dreams are one of the most significant aspects of my life.

It's hard for me to look back on my “prior self” and realize how much stigma I once had over dreams. I was downright ignorant of their presence. I’m just grateful that I was open enough to give it a try. Once I did, the vividness and potency of the dream proved itself. I could no longer view dreams as merely “day residue” or meaningless “hallucinations” but as a something intensely real. Dreams, for me, became a profound focal point of spiritual development and practice.

As I’ve said before, I offer up these reflections not to convince anyone but to convey my own experiences and insights as these things personally pertain to my life. I’m offering this up as a means to reduce the cultural stigma associated with some of these practices, like dreamwork, so that people who intuitively feel called to explore esoteric practices can do so without judgment. I’ll dive into more aspects of dreams in subsequent posts.