Archetypes, nightmares and the shadow
While observing his clients, the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung noticed that although they would often dream about their daily lives, the content of their dreams and fantasies was not just limited to their everyday experiences. He saw that they’d often enter into a realm of ancient symbolism, about which they’d had no conscious pre-acquired knowledge.
Their dreams and fantasies often contained mythological themes that existed in cultures they’d never visited and in times before the birth of any of their relatives. This observation led Jung to formulate his concept of ‘archetypes’ and the collective unconscious, two of his major contributions to psychology.
Jung saw that certain dream content was transpersonal, sourced not from our own personal unconscious but from what he termed the collective unconscious: a vast storehouse of ancient human experience containing themes and images found cross-culturally throughout history. The collective unconscious has been described as ‘an attic of ancient volumes of cherished memories from the history of all humankind’,1 which is part of us all.
Jung called the themes that emerged from the timeless realms of the collective unconscious ‘archetypes’. Archetypes are symbolic representations of universally existing aspects of the unconscious mind. They are what ‘make up the contents of the collective unconscious and have a powerful effect on the individual,’ because their function is as a form of communication from the unconscious to the conscious mind.2
Theoretically, there’s an infinite number of archetypes, but there are some that show up in people’s dreams so often that they’ve become mainstays of Jungian psychology. Each archetype is ‘more of a theme than a specifically determined thing’,3 but there are certain themes that seem to appear in every mind, in every part of the world.
Some of the most frequently encountered archetypes are the wise man (representing guidance, knowledge, wisdom), the mother (nurturing, comforting, feminine), the Self or higher self4 (inner unification) and the shadow (unacceptable psychological content).5 Jung believed that archetypes ‘transcend the personal psychology of the dreamer’6 and point to something much bigger, and more universal. He said that ‘whenever a phenomenon is found to be characteristic of all human communities, it’s an expression of an archetype of the collective unconscious.’7
Carl Jung didn’t just change the world of psychology, he also had a huge but often overlooked influence on language. Commonly used terms such as introvert and extrovert, complex, and archetype are words and concepts that Jung himself either invented or popularized. He even gave a name to the times when our external environment resonates with our psychological process to such a degree that it results in a meaningful coincidence – he called this synchronicity.
One of the unique aspects of lucid dreaming is that in a lucid dream we can actually meet and interact with our internal archetypes, which will often appear in personified form. This means that we can encounter these powerful representations of our own psychology in a very real way, make friends with them and step into the powerful energy that they contain. This is one of the most amazing potentials of lucid dreaming.
We can, of course, connect with these inner archetypes in the waking state too – through visualizations, active imagination and hypnosis, for example – but however deeply we go into these practices, there will very rarely be a personified manifestation of the archetype standing in front of us, ready to converse. In a lucid dream, though, there may well be, because once lucid you can actually meet your inner child, have a conversation with your wise man, and even encounter the energy of your higher self, ‘the archetype of archetypes’.
Jung believed that meeting your higher self would allow you to ‘communicate directly with the ageless, cellular wisdom held within the hidden dimensions of your mind’,8 but my favourite archetype to work with in the lucid dream state is the shadow.
The shadow is a Jungian concept used to describe the parts of the unconscious mind made up of all the undesirable aspects of our psyche that we’ve rejected, disowned, repressed or denied. It’s what the poet Robert Bly called ‘the bag that we drag behind us’, and it’s comprised of everything within us that we don’t want to face: our traumas, our fears, taboos, perversions and much more.
It has been said that the shadow is the only archetype we’re not born with. We create our shadow, every time we repress or deny an unacceptable part of ourselves. This begins in childhood, often with the shaming of our own nakedness as we realize that being naked is frowned upon. Many of us received the message ‘my naked body is bad’ and so we disown our nakedness and force it into the shadowy ‘cellar of the unacceptable’ where it’s soon joined by other objectionable qualities such as anger and greed, both of which we’re taught are unbefitting for ‘good’ little boys and girls to display.
Your shadow is most obviously revealed in your dreams and nightmares, and one way you can integrate its content is by becoming lucid and literally embracing it. Embracing your shadow once lucid will allow you to integrate your ‘dark side’, transmute its energy and move through your limitations into a space of deep psychological balance.
Although the shadow is often thought of in negative terms, we also have a positive shadow: positive traits within us that we’re unwilling to accept as being part of us. For example, being a great dancer or having lots of charisma may have been seen as unacceptable to us when we were children, so we pushed them into the shadows. As adults we might find that these positive expressions of shadow content reveal themselves as we start psychological work.
Those of you who’ve seen my TED talk will know that I love working with the shadow. It’s often misinterpreted as some sort of evil or demonic presence that’s both separate from us and harmful, leading us to waste the valuable learning process it offers by investing our energy in ways to defeat it. But the truth is that the shadow is neither external nor harmful. It’s simply our dark side – a ‘reservoir for human darkness’ – but an aspect of our selves which, as Jung commented, forms ‘the seat of all creativity’.9
The shadow is part of us and until we accept that its darkness doesn’t come from an external ‘evil’ but from a wellspring of internal creative energy, we’ll never become fully integrated human beings. As my teacher Rob Nairn once told me: ‘The shadow is such good news!’
This process of engaging shadow aspects with the aim of integrating and assimilating them into the self is part of what Jung called ‘individuation’ – the move towards psychological wholeness. This is one of the highest aims of psychological work, so we can see how lucid dreaming offers us an arena in which to connect with such deep levels of our psyche that when we wake in the morning, we may feel very different from the day before. Through shadow integration we transform what we thought was a demon into what it was all along – our divine spirit, or what used to be known as our daemon.
A psychotherapist friend of mine heard me talk about this recently and was shocked by this potential. He told me, ‘It can take months of therapy to get to the stage where a client even acknowledges internal archetypes like the shadow and the inner child, let alone actually meet personifications of them in a lucid dream! This stuff could change everything.’
To explore your personal shadow, take a moment to think about the parts of yourself that you find unacceptable to show to others. Aspects of your sexuality that you fear may be frowned upon, perhaps. Or your anger, or your past traumas. Or maybe it’s your great singing voice, or your innate intelligence, which you dare not show for fear of seeming ‘too clever’? If there is a part of you that you don’t want to accept or show to others then you can be sure that it makes up an aspect of your shadow.
For more information on the shadow and how to work directly with it through dreams, see Dreams of Awakening.
Let’s learn how to meet that particularly misunderstood archetype now, shall we? But before we do we need to learn about its home turf: nightmares.
Have you ever had a nightmare in which you’ve thought, Wake up! I want to wake up!? If so, that nightmare was a lucid dream, because by wanting to wake yourself up you indirectly acknowledged that there was a place to wake up to. Nightmares are great for lucid dreaming, and for many people (more than a third of those surveyed) their first taste of lucid dreaming came about through nightmares or anxiety dreams.
But why should nightmares so often lead to lucidity? Imagine this: if I somehow managed to travel through the pages of this book and jump out into your lap you’d probably be so frightened that your eyes would widen, your mind would become sharpened and you’d definitely become more alert, right? (I hope you’d then start looking at your hands and ask, ‘Am I dreaming?’ too.)
Research has shown that the boost of awareness that fear brings is an evolutionary trait that helps us deal with a potential threat, so when we feel scared or threatened in our dreams our awareness is similarly boosted, which can often lead to the fully conscious awareness of lucidity.
For some people, chronic nightmares are a serious complaint that not only affects the quality of their sleep, but also the quality of their lives. The good news, though, is that if you can experience a nightmare with full lucidity, you have a powerful opportunity for trauma resolution and shadow integration.
I’ve taught lucid dreaming to numerous people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – including ex-soldiers, victims of terrorist attacks and those who experienced abuse during childhood – and I’ve seen first-hand just how powerful lucid dream training can be, not only in curing nightmares but more importantly in opening people up to a new perspective of sleep and dreams in which they see their nightmares as a call for help rather than an attack from the unconscious.
There’s hard science to back up all this stuff too. A 1997 study, which took five people suffering from chronic nightmares and taught them to lucid dream, concluded that ‘the alleviation of recurrent nightmares was effective in all five cases’ and that ‘treatments based on lucid dream induction can be of therapeutic value’.10 A follow-up study one year later showed that ‘four of the five subjects no longer had nightmares and that the other experienced a decrease in the intensity and frequency of her nightmares.’11
A 2006 study entitled ‘Lucid dreaming for treatment of nightmares’ concluded that ‘lucid dream training seems effective in reducing nightmare frequency’,12 and at the 2009 European Science Foundation meeting it was stated that lucid dreaming is such an effective remedy for nightmares that people have the potential to be ‘treated by training to dream lucidly’.13
And finally a 2013 neurobiological study from Brazil concluded that lucid dreaming could be used ‘as a therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder.’14
Sadly, there’s been no follow-up on this treatment option for recurrent nightmares. So if we have all this research indicating that lucid dreaming can cure nightmares, why isn’t it being offered by mainstream medicine? Maybe it’s because the training needed to teach people to have lucid dreams is beyond the remit of current health-care providers, or perhaps it’s because the use of a freely available method like lucid dreaming isn’t attractive to the big companies who profit from medicating the thousands of chronic nightmares suffers.
The first thing most people do when they become lucid in a nightmare is try to wake themselves up. This seems logical, but it’s actually missing a valuable opportunity, because when you do that, the mental trauma or anxiety that’s causing the nightmare, and the shadow content, remains unintegrated and so the nightmare may well recur.
My advice is this: if you’re lucky enough to become lucidly aware within a nightmare, try to stay in the nightmare for as long as you can, reminding yourself that it’s all just a projection of your own mind and that nothing in the nightmare can do you harm. Many people find that by shifting their perspective like this they can actually create a total transformation of attitude that tells the nightmare: ‘I see you, and I understand that you’re an expression of my own mind that just wants to be seen.’
The paradox is that by looking directly at the nightmare it doesn’t grow under your gaze, it actually diminishes. By shining light into the darkness and revealing the source of a shadow, we see that the source is often much smaller than the shadow it casts.
The nightmare doesn’t mean to hurt us – it means to grab our attention and show us which aspects of our mind need healing. In many cases a nightmare is just a dream that’s shouting, ‘Hey, look at this! Deal with this! This needs attention!’ and it will shout louder and louder, over and over until you turn to face it, listen to it and bear witness to its display, with compassionate acceptance.
Once the nightmare has received this message of acceptance it’ll often dissolve spontaneously and never return. Why? Because as we learned earlier ‘the seeing is the doing’ and so by simply bearing witness to the nightmare, without judgement and knowing that it’s an unintegrated expression of our own shadow (rather than some externalized demon), its energy will be accepted and integrated.
There’s another option too: once lucid, rather than just acknowledging the nightmare we can proactively embrace it. For example, if the source of our nightmare was a man in a black hood chasing us, we could actually move towards him and hug him within the dream – a hug being the ultimate symbolic expression of full acceptance. (If the source of the nightmare was a feeling rather than a thing then our acceptance and embrace would simply be engaged through our intent).
And then there’s the third option – to call forth your shadow aspects intentionally. How? By using a non-nightmarish lucid dream as a place to actually invoke your shadow in order to bear witness to it, have a dialogue with it, and of course, give it a hug.
The ancient Mesopotamians had a very down-to-earth way of dealing with nightmares. They would tell their frightening dreams to a lump of clay that had been rubbed over their body. The clay would then be thrown into water, where it would dissolve, along with the energetic residue of the nightmare.15
Isn’t all this shadow-hugging stuff a bit dangerous? No, in fact it’s far more dangerous not to move towards acceptance of the shadow, because by allowing it to fester in our denial it will grow and become more powerfully removed from the rest of the psyche. The longer things stay in the shadows the darker and denser they become, and yet, once we’re ready to shine light into the places that scare us, we can unravel decades of darkness in one lucid dream.
This was something that the subject of our next case study discovered when she finally decided to hug the source of her nightmares.
Dreamer: Kerri, South Africa
Age: 34
The lowdown from Kerri: ‘I was playing a game of avoidance with myself. I was feeling sterile and hard. I was in complete denial about the crippled little girl within me who was so desperate for love, and wanted to feel safe. I would put myself in painful, humiliating and unsafe situations to try to prove that I was strong so I wouldn’t have to look at the small child inside, crying to be seen. I did everything to avoid the truth about myself.’
Kerri’s dream report: ‘In the dream I was standing in my lounge when I noticed a frightening-looking figure, dressed in black, creeping along the window. He was trying to break in. He began violently smashing against the window. I recoiled against the wall, terrified, as I watched the intruder gain entry. He ran towards me; I believed he wanted to attack, harm and kill me. He was the sum total of my worst fears. The terror of this nightmare charged me into lucidity.
‘Once lucid I was able to recognize that this man was an aspect of my shadow. I knew that I had to go and hug him. As I held him I felt repulsion and terror; he felt oily and disgusting. It felt so wrong to be hugging a person like this but I kept hugging him and saying the Tibetan compassion mantra Om mani peme hung like a plea.
‘Suddenly he began to shrink in my arms, growing smaller and smaller until he slipped out of them. When I finally plucked up the courage to look down, I saw that he’d transformed into a small child, just a baby. He was lying in the foetal position at my feet and was sobbing. I suddenly felt such compassion for him and I bent down towards his little body and started to chant Om mani peme hung to him again. The dream dissolved and I felt a strong wind move through me, which felt like pure joy. I woke up crying with bliss.’
Life since the dream: ‘This dream helped me to see that what I cannot accept in myself gets left to mutate and grow to such an extent that it eventually becomes the most frightening and threatening “external” thing, but actually it was only ever my unresolved stuff. The attacking monster was actually the crippled little girl in me that I could never accept. The dream showed me how orphans of our consciousness – in my case the neglected child who never felt loved – could become powerful monsters over time.
‘After this dream I just felt different. I tried to begin to live more lucidly, especially in areas of conflict and fear. I began facing my difficulties instead of running away. I decided to heal estrangements in my life, to move towards them and embrace them, just as I’d done in the dream. The most significant of these estrangements that I healed concerned my father, whom I hadn’t spoken to for a few years. Today our relationship is healed and sometimes we even chant Om mani peme hung together.’
Kerri’s dream is a wonderful example of how to embrace the shadow. It shows how even the parts of ourselves that seem terrifying are often simply unintegrated aspects that are shouting to be heard. Once they’re given the attention they need, and we can bear witness to their energy with acceptance, they’ll usually reveal themselves to us fully and completely, as they’ve been waiting to do all along.
Lucid dream shadow integration is a deeply healing psycho-spiritual practice that you can do in your sleep. It sounds almost too good to be true, right? But it is true and it is doable – by each and every one of us, if we only take the time to learn how. So let’s carry on learning how with our next toolbox, which contains some of my all-time favourite techniques.
TOOLBOX 4: MOVING INTO LUCIDITYNow that you’ve begun to look closely at your dreams, and (hopefully) started to apply methods such as reality checks and the Weird technique, you might find that you’re starting to get some flashes of lucidity in the formerly unlit space of your dreamtime. So before we go any further let’s explore just what this might look like.
The dawning of lucidity is not always a light-bulb moment; in fact it’s often more of a dimmer switch that slowly fades up, gradually illuminating our minds to the possibility that we’re dreaming. There’s a whole spectrum of lucidity based on varying degrees of conscious awareness within the dream, ranging from a suspicion that we might be dreaming to absolute knowledge that everything we’re experiencing is mind.
I tend to work with four main levels of lucidity, although this is a very basic system of categorization and it’s not necessary to stick to it rigidly. Our transition through the lucidity spectrum is not always a linear one either, and although level 1 may often lead to level 2, and so on, it’s also common to find ourselves at level 3 or 4 straight away, thanks to a sudden light-bulb moment of awareness.
This is the state of mind in which we begin critically questioning the reality of the dream. In the pre-lucid state, suspicions arise that we might be dreaming, usually after we’ve become aware of some bizarre dream anomaly.
On this level we experience the ‘Aha!’ moment of lucid awareness, but then slip back and forth between lucidity and non-lucidity. We may be lucid one moment, and then become distracted by the dream and slip back into non-lucidity. We can also use this term to describe a low level of lucid awareness.
This is the state of fully conscious reflective awareness within the dream, coupled with volitional interaction with the dreamscape and dream characters. Essentially, this means that we’re fully aware that we’re dreaming and can begin to direct the dream at will: we can choose to fly, we can choose to meet our shadow and so on. Many people believe that this is the highest level of lucidity, but there’s one more to go.
This is a term borrowed from lucid dream explorers Robert Waggoner and Ed Kellogg to describe the state in which we have a level of awareness that surpasses full lucidity, due to an experience of partial non-dual awareness.
What does this mean? Well, the fundamental difference between ‘fully lucid’ and ‘super-lucid’ rests on a subtle but profound shift of perception. Most of us experiencing a fully lucid dream will interact with the dream as if it’s waking reality, using doors to leave rooms and flying though the sky to get somewhere.
While super-lucid, however, we base all our actions on the realization that everything in the dream is a creation of mind. We realize that we don’t need to fly anywhere, we can just arrive there instantly, and that walls are just as easy to walk through as doors.
This type of dream falls within the lucidity spectrum but it doesn’t quite fit into any of the four levels described above. We experience a witnessing dream from a gentle, non-preferential perspective, fully aware that we’re dreaming but without any desire to influence or interact with the dream. Instead we allow it to unfold on its own, often as though we’re watching it on a movie screen.
Don’t worry too much about the different levels of lucidity. I’ve included the lucidity spectrum here more as a way to explore the dynamics and nature of lucidity, rather than make it a cornerstone of the practice.
Now that we know just how lucid we can become, let’s learn some powerful methods for inducing it!
Now that you know what the hypnagogic state is, I’m pretty sure you can imagine how this technique works. As you fall asleep through the hypnagogic state, mentally recite a positive affirmation of your intent to gain lucidity. As we’ve learned, the hypnagogic state is very similar to the hypnotic state, so if we apply a suggestion or affirmation within it, we may find that it has the potential to work with hypnotic effect.
You can do this technique as you first fall asleep at night, but for best results practise it after an early-hours wake-up about 5 or 6 hours after you went to bed. At this time the hypnagogic will lead directly into the dream state. Whenever you practise it though, the important thing is to saturate your sleepy consciousness with the strong aspiration to have a lucid dream. Here’s how:
For an upgrade of the hypnagogic affirmation technique, check out MILD (mnemonic induction of lucid dreams), which is one of the most well-known lucidity techniques out there. The guy who formulated it, Stephen LaBerge, is an American scientist who was one of the pioneers of lucid dreaming back in the early 80s. LaBerge used this technique to give himself lucid dreams at will, almost every single night.
Mnemonic means ‘pertaining to memory’ and a mnemonic-induced lucid dream is one that works by using the function of memory. MILD is based upon three core principles:
Although visualization and autosuggestion provide the foundational power of this technique, it’s prospective memory that provides the real crux. We use prospective memory all the time in our daily life – when we say things like, ‘Next time I see a bank I’ll remember to get out some cash,’ and it’s actually a very reliable aspect of memory.
If we set a prospective memory command as we fall asleep – ‘Next time I’m dreaming I’ll remember to recognize that I’m dreaming’ – it’ll stay neurologically engaged until we ‘see the bank’ as it were and find ourselves dreaming.
This is a technique that requires us to visualize ourselves back in the dream that we were just having and so it’s best practised after waking from a vividly recalled dream. This can be done naturally, perhaps when you’ve woken up in the early hours, or intentionally, by setting an alarm to wake yourself up during a REM period some time in the last few hours of your sleep cycle.
After awakening from a period of dreaming, wake up fully and recall the dream that you were just having. Learn the basic plot and scenario off by heart. You’ll find out why in step 3.
Now get ready to go back to sleep. As you begin to fall asleep and enter the hypnagogic state, mentally recite over and over again, with determination and enthusiasm: The next time I’m dreaming, I remember to recognize that I’m dreaming. Focus on this command and if you feel your mind start to wander, or realize that it’s wandered already, just bring yourself back to the recitation.
Once you’ve created and stabilized the strong motivation to remember to recognize that you’re dreaming, the next step is to visualize yourself back in the dream that you recalled earlier. Really try to relive it in as much detail as you can, envisaging yourself back in it and experiencing it with all your senses as you drift off to sleep.
However, this time, imagine that you recognize that you’re dreaming and become fully lucid. How? By imagining yourself spotting a dream sign or doing a reality check and then having the realization, Aha! I’m dreaming!
Then imagine acting out what you might like to do once you’re lucid.
Now you can either just fall asleep or repeat steps 2 and 3 again until you feel sure that you’ve fully engaged the technique, at which point you can drop the technique and allow yourself to fall asleep.
Here’s an easy way to remember the order of the MILD technique:
M: Memorize the dream you were just having
I: set the Intent
L: visualize Lucidity
D: Drop off to sleep or Do it again.
For a full explanation of this technique, see Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Dr Stephen LaBerge.
It appears that the MILD technique, along with many other Western lucid dream methods, was not invented in the twentieth century, but rather in medieval Tibet. An almost identical technique to MILD can be found in a sixteenth-century dream yoga text by a Tibetan Lama named Lochen Dharma Shri.16
This technique can boost your chances of having a lucid dream by a whopping 2,000 per cent’17, and more than two-thirds of research participants recorded lucid dreams when engaging in this practice.18 So how do we practise this supercharged technique? It’s simple. Wake up at least two hours earlier than normal, stay awake for about an hour and then go back to sleep for another hour or two. Here’s how:
As we’ve learned, the last two hours of our sleep cycle are when we do most of our dreaming, so if we starve ourselves of this dream time, when we go back to sleep we eventually course smoothly and deeply into vivid dreaming. As dreaming sleep is the playing field for lucidity, we can see how this technique puts us well on the winning side.
Simply wake up a couple of hours earlier than usual, stay awake for an hour and then go back to sleep with a strong intent to become lucid.
Now that we’re really getting stuck into the techniques let’s have some more general tips on getting lucid from Luigi Sciambarella, representing the UK branch of the Monroe Institute.
If you’re sleep deprived, the first thing your brain/body will focus on is clawing back sleep debt. You’ll plunge into sleep too quickly to control your awareness and you’re unlikely to remember many dreams. Ideally, you should be getting at least 7½ hours of sleep per night. It’s often useful to go to bed a little earlier than normal in order to have time to set the intention to have a lucid dream.
Lucid dreams are remarkable and often life-changing experiences, but without conscious effort to remember the content, you might forget significant parts of the experience. You can start by keeping a dream diary next to your bed at night and setting the intention to write your dreams down in the morning when you wake up.
Meditation practices, such as breath awareness, can help to keep you in the present during the day. This will start to carry through into your dreaming. For lucid dreaming, it’s very important to develop your prospective memory so set yourself memory challenges throughout the day.
Apathy is lucid dreaming’s biggest killer so it’s important to keep an eye on your motivation levels. Think about why you want to lucid dream, and what you’re going to accomplish on your next exploration. The more you think about having a lucid dream, the more likely it is to occur so take time to read about and reflect upon the benefits of lucid dreaming as you go about your day.
This is your playground: a fertile soil where you can grow new patterns and weed out those that no longer serve you. It’s most productive to approach the task of self-exploration in an open, lighthearted manner. Too much intense effort is often counterproductive, and being too critical of yourself over unsuccessful attempts can quickly lead to anger, frustration and apathy, so remember to keep a sense of humour about it all.
Visit www.monroeinstituteuk.org for more info on Luigi’s lucid dream and Out of Body Exploration courses.
