Symbols Are Important Factors in Understanding the Altered State Experience

As I continue in my studies I have found that symbols are much more important to not only my waking life but more importantly to my dream life than ever. I know from my past my perspective of symbols has been that they are worthless, errors in thinking, or false (focusing on the imagination) Though in waking reality they are imaginative, the symbols that we experience in sleep are anything but errors or unimportant and should be understood.

From a depth psychology perspective which is generally what we are focused on when we focus on our dreams, symbols are the way for the unconscious to communicate. Symbols are connections to something that is impossible to fully grasp for our consciousness as they generate something that is beyond language which our egos operate on. A symbol can manifest emotion and many different meanings as a word can also do this but with a less broad approach, and often of the result of using the language as something more than just a word (a symbol). That is why (as Jason head earlier asked why our dreams talk in symbols rather than just telling us what it wants) our dreams operate in symbols.

According to depth psychology, our egos come from the unconscious and we originally lived our lives playing out symbolic actions much like an animal does today. Due to language which solidifies reality into the qualities that we perceive (right and wrong, dog and chair) we are removed from the symbolic world and naturally oppress it through the rejection of their symbolic power. Dreams, however, are this desire for the unconscious to communicate desires that are meant to complement our egos. This doesn't mean that the unconscious can't hurt us, or have "negative" intentions in the dream experience of the symbols that we experience through waking life, but these experiences are meant to improve our situation in some way that is what our mind knows as being the best person, though we may be confused as to what the best version of ourselves is.

I know that many of you may reject this notion of the unconscious and the power behind symbols in dreams. Many of us including myself get locked into the idea that when I am lucid or having an Out of Body Experience the experience is "real". Through analyzing my own dreams and those experiences that I have had including OOBEs and psychedelic experiences I can clearly see both sides. The reason for this is that I was wrong about the concept behind symbols being "unreal" or less powerful than something physically outside of myself in another dimension. Symbols are outside of ourselves, they are beyond understanding and that is why they are used as a tether to that unknown world so that we can relate. When I see an alien in an OOBE or a psychedelic experience, what I am experiencing is a symbol of my own psyche, but it is also an experience that is beyond comprehension and my minds only way to express the underlying desire that that figure is trying to express. It is both real, and imagination.

I think that as the lucid dreaming community continues to grow and we continue to struggle with the experience, more and more people will realize that the experiences they are having are not only external but also internal and that that one affects the other.