Dream analysis cannot help you to become enlightened, but dream witnessing can certainly help you. That is the difference between psychology and religion: psychology analyses dreams; religion watches them and helps you to become aware of them. And the moment you become aware of your dreams, they disappear; they can’t exist for a single moment longer. They exist only when you are utterly unaware.
Art of Interpretation
There are many systems of analysis. If you go to the Freudians, they will analyse your dreams in one way: they will interpret everything as sexuality. Imaginable things, unimaginable things, everything has to be reduced to sexuality. If you go to the Adlerians with the same dreams, they will interpret them according to their ideology. Then, every dream is reduced to Adler’s idea: will to power. Then everything is nothing but will to power; each dream has to fit with his philosophy. And so is the case with the Jungians and others.
One thing has been observed again and again – a strange phenomenon happens. If you go into psychoanalysis of any kind, you start dreaming in the way your psychoanalyst expects you to dream. If you go to the Freudian, sooner or later, you start dreaming according to his idea. People are very obliging; they feel sorry for the poor analyst. And he is makingsuch hard effort to analyse your dreams. First, he starts giving you interpretations and then you start dreaming according to his interpretations. Soon you fit with each other – you are as if made for each other. Then he is happy and you are happy. He is happy because his theories are confirmed and you are happy that you are a good boy, dreaming according to the great expert.
When you see your psychoanalyst happy, you feel happy. Seeing you feel happy, he feels happy. It is such a mutual arrangement! And nobody is really helped…dreaming continues.
I have never come across a fully psychoanalysed person, because according to Freud, a fully psychoanalysed person is one whose dreaming has disappeared.
Strange Phenomenon
That was not true even about Sigmund Freud himself; he continued to dream to his very last. And he was very afraid of psychoanalysis, because he knew his disciples would only prove that all his dreams were sexual.
Unless dreams disappear your mind will remain in a turmoil. Dreams simply say you don’t know how to put your mind off; you don’t know where the switch exists so that you can put it on and off according to your needs. When you are going to sleep, you can’t put if off; it goes on chattering.