Conclusions
I find it to be more personal value to reflect back on the changing nature of my dreams over the past eighty years. The varying challenges I have faced and the diverse opportunities that have appeared in my life have been documented in my dreams. Am I alone in gaining rich insights when comparing my dreams over a lifetime? Can other people similarly gain insights regarding their own developmental history by examining their dreams over time? Even more specifically, can they gain insights regarding the changing nature of competency and the drive toward self-efficacy in their life by looking at their dreams?
I propose that these insights are available to those people “who take their dreams seriously.” It is a bit like spending time looking at the rings of a large cut tree. It appears that the challenging life led by trees are recorded in their rings. Fires they have withstood, droughts they have weathered, and infestations they have repelled are all evident in their rings. The tree’s growth and protection are also documented in these rings. We can even find out about the environment in which the tree has resided by examining its rings. There is a whole field of environmental studies called dendrochronology that focuses on the analysis of tree rings. Sadly, the only way we can study the rings is by cutting down the tree and examining the rings that appear when a slice of the tree’s trunk is examined. When alive, the tree “hides” its rings behind a protective shield of wood and bark.
A parallel case might be made for the rich information that be gained from examining an aspect of human life that is also hidden from view. Our dreams portray our own personal battle with challenging forces in our environment. As in the case of tree rings, I propose that our dreams also document our growth and protection. Furthermore, like a tree’s rings, the dreams that occur at night are usually hidden from view. We protect them not with bark but with neurological blocking and assignment of dream content to areas of the brain that do not contain memory-retaining neurotransmitters and neurons. Psychoanalysts would say that we also engage psychological defense mechanism.
While our dreams are protected by the blockage of memory as well as muscular movement (except our eyes and throat muscles), there is occasional or (for some of us) frequent “linkage” of dream content into our waking life. It is in the recall of our dreams that we can potentially analyze our own “rings”—the content of our dreams.
I believe that there is an important message embedded in this analysis of dreams that potentially are portraying something about competence. The changing content of our dreams might be providing us with an insightful record of our ongoing personal development as a human being.
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