Deceptive dreams

Perusing my own dream book I just now found that this sentence in my Finnish dream book had fallen inexplicably away from its English translation:

Dreams are not the most authentic manifestations about us, but distorted reflections of what we really are. Dreams appear to be most authentic only in the limited viewpoint our day consciousness is capable of.

I hesitated to include that sentence in my book because in a way it pulls the rug from under the whole book, which from the beginning to the end considers dreams to be the most authentic phenomena of our true soul state.

Yes, most authentic, but only from this narrow standpoint. Realizing that there is nothing absolute, nothing which is undeniably and unambiguously true, is a necessary antidote against any orthodoxy, among them any dream movement which promotes dreams as our most important tools for understanding ourselves and others. Yes, dreams are very important, but not most important tools for understanding ourselves. Dreams are not the true state of our soul, but filtration products, conditioned and constricted by our individual brain properties.

The second dream distortion phase takes place in our imperfect daytime memory, and the third when they are shared with other people because of limitations of spoken language and other individual and societal factors.

But fortunately, despite this multiphase dilution process during the dreams' journey from beyond our consciousness to the sharing phase with other people, they still contain a substantial amount of their original potential, which may be unveiled with dream exploration processes which help to create a safe, intensive, non-restrictive, non-interpretative (=nonviolent) atmosphere. Thus far I have found only one process which meets all these conditions; Montague Ullman's experiential dream group process. 

As much as I appreciate dreams and as much as dreams and dream groups are now the most important activities of my life, there is always something more to learn, something more what any dream can ever contain. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  Despite the fact that there are still deeper, albeit rare, insights into the nature of reality than dreams are able to afford, the main idea still holds: dreams are most authentic expressions of ourselves in our everyday life, and exploring them carefully and sincerely always brings us more near to our authentic self.