• home
• about
• new
• essays
• AI
• book

Dr. Joseph Dillard is a psychotherapist with over forty year's clinical experience treating individual, couple, and family issues. Dr. Dillard also has extensive experience with pain management and meditation training. The creator of Integral Deep Listening (IDL), Dr. Dillard is the author of over ten books on IDL, dreaming, nightmares, and meditation. He lives in Berlin, Germany. See: integraldeeplistening.com and his YouTube channel.

SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY JOSEPH DILLARD

Integral and Dreaming

Joseph Dillard

We spend approximately two and a half hours dreaming over the course of a typical eight hours of sleep, every day. That comes to approximately five years spent in the dream state over the course of an average lifetime. That is a lot of time to ignore or discount, as if it had no, or minimal influence on our waking mood, thinking, preferences, problem solving, or behavior.

Indeed, research has shown that dreaming has significant influence on our lives in all of these domains. What is the Integral AQAL understanding of that? What does it get right? Where can its understandings be improved? How can it go about doing so?

Before I proceed, I want to explain the structure of what follows. I find that consulting chatbots, in this case Chat GPT regarding content, accesses relevant information that I would otherwise leave out due to ignorance or misunderstanding. Therefore, a great deal of what follows is informed by Chat GPT.

However, having said that, I emphasize readability by weaving together its input and my comments and text revisions in one piece. This is not rigidly objective and does clearly disclose what is input from Chat GPT and what is mine. I have chosen to forego such standards in favor of readability. In general, those references to Integral Deep Listening reflect my additions to text provided by Chat GPT. It should also be noted that how questions are framed to chatbots greatly influences how its answers are skewed. Therefore, that reality needs to always be kept in mind in assessing the viability of its information, and indeed the validity of this essay as a whole.

How our dreams influence our lives in significant ways

In terms of our waking mood, dreams often evoke strong emotions, which can linger into our waking life. Nightmares can leave feelings of fear, anxiety, or unease throughout the day. Positive or euphoric dreams can elevate our mood and create a sense of well-being. Dreams may help process and regulate emotions, especially those tied to unresolved conflicts or stress. This can improve emotional stability over time. This is called the “Dream Rehearsal Hypothesis.”

Your dreams also affect your mood though the generation of residual stress. Repeated distressing dreams or nightmares, such as those in PTSD, can create chronic mood disturbances like irritability or depression.

Regarding your thinking, many artists, scientists, and writers have credited dreams for breakthroughs. For instance Mendeleev's periodic table and Kekule's model of molecular relationships were attributed to dreams. In addition, dreams are thought to play a role in processing, organizing, and consolidating memories. This can influence your waking cognition by strengthening connections between concepts, highlighting emotionally significant memories for conscious reflection, and generating distorted, delusional, or irrational thoughts and beliefs. For example, dream attacks by others can translate into waking vigilance, defensiveness, and pre-emptive attacks on others.

Regarding your waking preferences, your dreams subtly shape your preferences and perception. While a dream about a pleasant encounter with someone might increase your positive feelings toward them, an unpleasant dream encounter may produce the opposite waking relationship. Your dreams, whether recalled or not, can cause you to feel drawn to places or objects seen in dreams. At least some Deja vu experiences are probably accounted for in this way.

Regarding problem solving, dreams often present problems in a non-linear or metaphorical way, allowing your mind to explore solutions outside typical constraints. This is one reason why my work, Integral Deep Listening, a form of dream yoga, teaches pre-sleep dream incubation as a process of setting intent and influencing dream content. The phenomenon of “sleeping on a problem” often leads to clarity or breakthroughs upon waking. Indeed, this process is occurring every night in your dreams, whether you are aware of it or not. Your dreams can also act as a rehearsal space for real-life challenges, helping to prepare emotionally and cognitively for future scenarios. It is not unusual for dreams to integrate disparate pieces of information, allowing for novel insights that emerge in waking life.

Regarding behavior, your dreams can motivate you to pursue a creative project inspired by a dream and to make decisions based on dream-related feelings or intuitions. Regarding how you behave toward others, your dreams can influence how you interact with others. A dream about conflict might make you more cautious or defensive in waking interactions. In those cultures and groups that actively relate to their dreams, they can directly guide behaviors, such as rituals, decisions, or even career choices. In lucid dreaming, you may consciously shape the dream, which can lead to greater intentional influence on waking behavior or decisions.

The degree to which dreams affect your waking life often depends on how vividly they are remembered. If you have high dream recall, you are more likely to report significant influences from your dreams.

How does Wilber's integral AQAL view dreaming?

Given the many ways that our dreams play a significant role in our waking lives, whether or not we remember them, how does Integral AQAL view dreaming?

AQAL takes a four-quadrant approach to understanding and integrating dreaming through multiple perspectives, represented by the four quadrants of holons. In addition, Wilber approaches dream interpretation symbolically, in terms of an inclusive and transcending hierarchy of meanings. I have written about that approach to dream interpretation in Assumptions of Integral Dream Analysis: A Critique of Wilber's Understanding of the Dream State and Dreamwork.

In the Upper Left (UL), subjective, Interior-Individual quadrant, AQAL views dreams as subjective experiences that reflect personal unconscious processes, psychological development, and inner states. They can reveal insights into your personal growth and spiritual development. Wilber often links dreaming to stages of consciousness, such as pre-personal (instinctual), personal (psychological), and transpersonal (spiritual).

In the Lower Left (LL), Intersubjective, Interior-Collective quadrant, AQAL emphasizes how cultural contexts shape the meaning and interpretation of dreams. It assumes dreams are symbolic and that these symbols can be culturally shared or archetypal. Jungian archetypes provide an example.

In the Upper Right (UR), objective, Exterior-Individual quadrant, dreams are associated with measurable brain activity, such as REM sleep, and neurobiological processes. Wilber integrates scientific findings into the framework to account for the physiological basis of dreaming.

In the Lower Right (LR) interobjective, Exterior-Collective quadrant, dreams can be examined through systems-level interactions, such as how societal norms, collective practices, or environmental factors influence dreaming patterns or their interpretation.

What AQAL overlooks, ignores, or misunderstands about dreaming

AQAL's hierarchical model sometimes oversimplifies dreaming by categorizing it into rigid stages of consciousness. For example, it may neglect the full range of dream types, including lucid dreams, precognitive dreams, and shared dreams and their unique phenomenological qualities.

The AQAL framework may underestimate the deeply personal and idiosyncratic nature of dreams, focusing too much on universal patterns, such as archetypes and stages, at the expense of individual nuance.

While AQAL includes cultural perspectives, its emphasis on developmental hierarchies can impose a Western-centric view of dreaming, potentially overlooking indigenous and non-Western understandings of the dream world as a separate reality or spiritual dimension.

AQAL might not fully capture the dynamism of dreaming as a process of ongoing meaning-making that resists fixed categorization. Dreams often blur boundaries between Wilber's quadrants, such as the subjective and the objective.

AQAL pays limited attention to the transformative potential of lucid dreaming, where dreamers can consciously interact with and shape their dream environment. This aspect reflects AQAL's tendency to frame dreaming as a largely passive or reflective state.

Corrective Understandings for a Balanced Portrayal

AQAL can broaden and balance its understanding of dreaming by recognizing it as an emergent process. This means recognizing dreams as dynamic, evolving phenomena that defy strict categorization. Dreams are not just reflections of developmental stages but can be creative, spontaneous, and deeply integrative experiences. Integral Deep Listening does this by approaching dreams and dream elements as “emerging potentials,” processes and perspectives rather than as “things” or ontological entities, as verbs, rather than as nouns. If dream elements themselves, when interviewed, choose to identify themselves as things or ontological entities, then that is accepted. Integral Deep Listening takes a phenomenological approach, meaning that it surfaces and tables any assumptions about the reality or lack of reality, the symbolic or non-symbolic nature of dreams and dream elements, in favor of listening, in a deep and integral way, to what the interviewed elements have to say themselves about their own nature.

AQAL can also benefit in its approach to dreamwork by integrating non-western perspectives that treat dreams as portals to other realities, sources of spiritual guidance, or communal experiences, offering a more pluralistic understanding. This is essentially a shamanic approach that is concrete and assumes that dreaming is a “real” encounter with experiences and beings in different dimensions. Integral Deep Listening surfaces and tables this assumption in favor of allowing each interviewed element to define itself. If it does so in shamanic terms, that is accepted at face value. The reason why is that Integral Deep Listening does not focus on the “reality” or “truth” of a dream or on its communication of realizations and insights. Instead, it looks for realistic and applicable reframings of the dream and waking life while asking for recommendations regarding significant waking life issues. These can then be operationalized and the validity of the perspectives of dream elements tested empirically in one's waking life.

AQAL's approach to dreaming can also be improved by highlighting the role of lucid dreaming. It can acknowledge the active, participatory role of the dreamer in lucid dreaming and explore how this challenges distinctions between subjective and objective experiences. Integral Deep Listening shares AQAL's tendency to pay limited attention to lucid dreaming, as commonly understood, as realizing one is dreaming while dreaming and then to use that recognition to either change the dream or wake up in one's waking life. Integral Deep Listening is primarily concerned with individual and collective lucid living, that means, outgrowing toxic scripting, drama, and cognitions in both waking and dream states, as well as in other, alternate states of consciousness, such as near death, mystical, trance, and drug-induced experiences. Therefore, the quality of interaction in the dream state, including the ability to empathize with the perspectives of other dream elements and to take their perspectives and speak as them while dreaming, is emphasized more than simply becoming aware that we are dreaming.

That definition and practice of lucid dreaming is what Integral Deep Listening calls a “psychologically geocentric” approach, in which the priorities of our waking identity, carried over into altered states, in this case dreaming, generate colonization, as a form of waking imperialism, rather than respectful listening in a deep and integral way. The basic issue is a moral one, regarding not only respect but reciprocity: “How do we want other dream elements to treat us in our dreams? Might we begin by treating them in a similar fashion?”

AQAL can also generate a more balanced approach to its understanding of dreaming by expanding a neurophenomenological approach to dreaming. It can do so by dropping its assumption that dreaming elements are “self-aspects,” “parts,” or “sub-personalities.” While this may indeed be the case, it may not be. Better to suspend that assumption and query this or that dream element first.

It can also do so by deepening the integration of neuroscience with phenomenology to explore how brain activity correlates with the subjective richness of dreams, without reducing dreams solely to their biological basis. Integral Deep Listening prioritizes a phenomenological approach because that not only determines how we perceive dreaming and dreams, both awake and while dreaming, but also how we perceive the importance and influence of biological factors. Integral Deep Listening avoids the cul-de-sac of the partial conclusions of our waking perspectives, even when we take a phenomenological approach, by interviewing multiple dream elements. What this does is deepen, broaden, and thin our waking assumptions and our identification with them. Identity moves from psychological geocentrism toward polycentrism, based on empathetic multi-perspectivalism.

Chat GPT also recommends that Integral do more to appreciate the role of dreaming in creativity and healing. It can do so by focusing more on the transformative potential of dreams for creativity, problem-solving, and psychological healing, areas “where AQAL has only touched the surface.”

Conclusion

In summary, my basic recommendation would be for Integral to adopt a thoroughly phenomenalistic approach toward dreaming, both while awake and dreaming. What this means is to focus on surfacing and tabling assumptions regarding the reality or falsity, spirituality or mundaneness, relevance or inaneness, transformative potential or irrelevance, symbolic and archetypal or day residue, nature of dreaming and any particular dream. Instead, why not simply interview various dream elements first, get the benefit of their perspectives and interpretations of their role and the meaning of the dream and its relevance for your waking life? Then you can add your interpretation and any coach, friend, or therapist can then add theirs. This moves from both a therapist/interpreter/expert-centered approach and a client-centered approach, to a dream element centered approach. Then that information needs to be applied, in an integral life practice and dream yoga, to three fundamental aspects of life: healing, balancing, and transformation.

Three important aspects of healing, as mentioned above, are neutralization of toxic scripting, drama, and thinking. Three important aspects of balancing are goal setting, assertiveness, and problem solving. Three important aspects of transformation are meditation, pranayama, and pre-sleep dream incubation. Integral Deep Listening provides a curricula in three steps, Coaching, Practitioner, and Trainer, mediated and directed by the interviewing of dream elements and the personifications of life issues, both called “emerging potentials” or “perspectives” rather than “self-aspects,” “sub-personalities” or “parts,” for reasons mentioned above.

That curricula can be found at IntegralDeepListening.Com. I provide that as merely one resource among others in support of the multi-perspectivalism that is fundamental to AQAL and to any integral approach to dreaming and life in general.

Dreaming is a condition when we remain aware but many of our waking cognitive faculties are in abeyance. What this does is open us to the possibilities that relative chaos provides. What we generally tend to do is 1) experience that chaos from our waking perspective and therefore draw experiential, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral conclusions that either validate our waking world view and scripting, or else threaten it; and 2) later, when we are awake, we tend to do the same: interpret the Dream in terms of our waking assumptions, biases, preferences, and world views. The result is that we do not disidentify with our waking perspective, with the result that we reinforce it and remain stuck in it, both while dreaming, even during lucid dreaming, and then later when we are awake. In addition, because we do not disidentify with our waking perspective, we do not identify with alternative perspectives in the dream. That is, we do not practice empathetic multi-perspectivalism. Instead, we stay stuck in psychological geocentrism, imagining that cognitive multi-perspectivalism, map reading, is the same as empathetic multi-perspectivalism, or walking the dream territory from alternative perspectives embedded in the dream.

The result is that we do not integrate the figure of waking perspective and world view with the ground of emerging potentials bubbling up out of chaos from within us in the dream or other altered state. The further consequence is that what we call “integral” is the integration of our waking and cognitive four quadrants while ignoring and not integrating the four quadrants of emerging potentials in our alternate states of consciousness. This conclusion holds as true for near death and mystical experiences as for dreams. We come away from all either with our waking assumptions confirmed or blown out of the water in ways that are extremely difficult to integrate into our daily lives. The result is generally regression, depression at the loss, or attempts at ideological fervor in an attempt to keep transformational experiences alive. I submit to you that none of those common consequences have much if anything to do with the integration of waking and alternative states of consciousness.

Dreaming holds a unique position between waking and the non-dual realms By analogy, it has a great deal in common with nature and subtle level forms of mysticism. However, to access those, apart from the relatively rare transpersonal dream, we have to practice a phenomenological approach to dreamwork. If we do, the payoff will be a far greater awareness of how natural, subtle, formless, and non-dual varieties of mysticism exist not only in every dream, regardless of how mundane it may appear to us, and beyond that, in every waking drama and challenge, regardless of how real and non-dreamlike we may be convinced that it is.