I work with my dreams in a few different ways. I write them down as much as I can. When I have the time and inspiration, I look for patterns and try to make meaning with the symbols. I meet with my dream teacher/analyst Marc Bregman once a month, tho I used to talk with him once a week. I have attended two dream retreats in New Mexico with Marc and his partner, Christa Lancaster. I also read books from the Jungian tradition to try to understand more about how to work with dreams. I think dreams are personalized [[suggestions]] from the unconscious about how I could be a more whole person. I think the dreams characterize, in symbolic ways, the parts of me that I think of as NOT me. And all the parts of me are presented in stories and situations that suggest how I could become more myself by relating to these others in me. My goal with the dream practice is something like wholeness. Becoming the circle of my life. Individuation. "To sound like myself," as Miles Davis put it. The relationship between dreams and spirituality, for me, is that dreams give me a very personal way to relate to spiritual traditions. I didn't grow up with any kind of religious practice, but working with dreams has gotten me thinking about some of the big questions like Soul, essence, and some other, immaterial dimension that seems to have its own purposes. I think religions are collective processes around the kinds of insights that come through dreams to individuals. For me, there are some definite benefits to working with a dream teacher/analyst. My monthly meeting with Marc is a reason to go back and read my dreams. I have to put together my dream email so I have to read through my dreams and select which ones seem important Then in the meeting itself, Marc has a lot more experience than I do, and he can help me see into blind spots. I really like this comment that Marie Louis Von Franz made about why sometimes dream interpretation by an expert is necessary: “the most amazing and beautiful dream messages do not get over. Then the dreamer is like somebody who has an enormous bank balance and does not know about it, or who has lost the safe key or deposit number. And what is the use of that? It is certainly true that one should be tactful, hoping and waiting to see whether the dream will not build its own bridge toward the dreamer’s consciousness and whether that process cannot take place by itself, because it is certainly more genuine and people are much more impressed by what they find out about their dreams than if one presents them with even a good interpretation. But very often those millions in the bank are not made use of and people are impoverished.” I think the most important part of dreams is that every night they offer me a fresh, up-to-date snapshot of my internal, unconscious feeling life, in terms that hopefully bridge to my consciousness and suggest something about my ongoing development.