THE HISTORY OF LAST NIGHT'S DREAM -- excerpt

THE HISTORY OF LAST NIGHT'S DREAM
Here's the opening passage of the book:


A whole world inside us is asleep. We wake to it but rarely.
We glimpse and barely remember. Or we don’t understand what we’ve
seen.
A third of our time on earth we’ve spent sleeping, with little to show: an
image, a face. Only rarely does a dream come that wakes us to ourselves.
Will our lives someday be forgotten as we have forgotten our dreams?
I know there is a conscious mind and an unconscious. But I don’t always
think about what that implies—that more than half of who I am and what I
am is completely unknown to me, except in fragments and glimpses, images
and dreams.
Is it possible that all we don’t know about ourselves includes also the most
important thing? That our self-knowledge is trivial by comparison, and yet
we use only our conscious awareness to guide our lives? And so we miss receiving
great gifts that have been waiting for us all along.
To receive these gifts, we must learn how to dream, which sounds easy
enough. But I mean dreaming with a purpose, learning to use dreaming as a
way to depth. That proved diffi cult, at least for me.
I had to make a wayward pilgrim’s progress to the dream because I had so
much to unlearn—and I am a slow unlearner. The progress falls into three
parts, which I’ve titled “Images,” “Interpretations,” and “Dreams.”
First I had to learn the true power of images. Then I had to unlearn the
ancient refl exes of interpretation. Only then could I explore the world of
dreams.