Carl Jung said dreams come from the Self – the core of the psyche that knows your potential. As dreams unfold in a series night after night, they offer information tailored to help you live life to its fullest depth and achieve your greatest potential. For instance, a woman in her forties had the following dream:

I’m floating in a tunnel that is a time portal in a desert. The walls of the tunnel are circular, and the inside of the tunnel is a misty blue . . . Part-way into the tunnel I see five objects resting on the tunnel floor in a line. Each one is about two feet tall. The first four are three-dimensional geometric shapes – maybe a sphere, a cube, a three-dimensional rectangle, and a cylinder. All of these are the same misty blue color so I can barley see them against the floor. The fifth, on the far end, is a pyramid of gold that curves inward at the sides. I’m awestruck. I sense that the objects are here to help travelers in reaching beyond time.

When this woman began working with her dreams, her life was dull and flat. She felt numb and lacked access to all of her feelings, even anger. Her life was full of the completion of tasks but no personal connection to the work, and a lack of perseverance. Also, her life was full of daydreams, but she sensed little connection between her fantasies and her everyday life.

The above dream came after she’d done significant work to gain access to feelings and develop perseverance. The dream encourages her to continue by showing her a model of progress (the first of which are the four blue shapes) that culminates in a stunning union of opposites (the curved pyramid of gold). The opposite elements are the triangle pointing upwards (masculine) and the curved lines at the edges (feminine).

A pyramid symbolizes a threshold between heaven and earth, a transition place between the unconscious mind and the everyday world. Ancient Egyptians felt that pyramids helped deceased kings find their way to a good place in the afterlife. The pyramid in the above dream is comprised of triangles that are both masculine and feminine. With the apex pointed up, a triangle represents masculine potency, goal orientation, and acquisition of awareness. The curves in the triangles emphasize the importance for the dreamer of integrating femininity into her personality continuously during her healing process.

As she continued to develop both access to feelings and perseverance, she became increasingly strong and flexible, enduring and yielding, stable and uplifted – all at the same time – like the curved gold pyramid. Her life became personal to her again with deeply felt joys, disappointments and wishes. She found the courage to hope again for a lasting relationship. In addition, pursuing her inner goals connected her to the richly meaningful timeless realm of the unconscious that sustained her day by day.