In the rush of work, families, busyness, errands, many of us have lost our paths through what Robert Bosnak calls "the wilderness" of our lives.

But our dreams offer us a clear track to healing and transformation, he writes in his new book, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming.

A renowned Jungian analyst, Bosnak believes that dreams can lead us from depression, disorientation and ennui to a feeling of aliveness and vitality—if we take the time to work with them. Dreams are "the purest form of creativity that I know of," says Bosnak. They're our closest connection to the creative force of the universe. "By being strongly connected to your dreaming, I think you can get much closer to the creative force that is driving you." Dream work can give us deeper connections in our lives, more direction in our lives and more control over our lives, he believes.

Bosnak wrote his first book more than 10 years ago, Little Course in Dreams. He also is the author of Dreaming with an AIDs Patient, which was produced as a play. He has a private practice specializing in dreamwork in Cambridge, MA, and he trains analysts at the C.G. Jung Institute in Boston and in seminars abroad.

He spoke with Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema from our offices in Boulder.

Nexus: You say in your book that we live in our imaginations, but many people would argue with that. What do you mean?

RB: It’s difficult to explain. But let’s assume that you remember your dreams. Then you would realize that while you’re dreaming, you’re in a real environment, and that in this real environment, events take place. This entire real environment is created by some kind of human faculty which exists as pure creativity. It’s a non-material reality, but phenomenologically speaking it is just as real as material reality. It has space, it has time, it has motion. Whatever experiences you have in your dreams are entirely real. The problem is usually that most people forget most of their dreams and when they remember their dreams, they remember them just as stories. They don’t remember that while they were dreaming, this environment was real.

If you’re able to re-enter a dream, if you’re able to get back into the state of dreaming while being awake, you find that there are all kinds of physical things happening to you while you’re there. If you’re able to feel those again very deeply, then it is possible to access parts of your body that have memories and pent-up emotions which you can release. Once you start doing that in combination with working with dreams, you move back and forth between going into the dream image, feeling what happens with your body, and moving back into the dream image. You begin to create a great intensity of sensations. If you can do that for a certain period of time, a transformation process begins to take place.

I probably should give an example. When, for instance, you dream that you are in a room with somebody who is very angry with you, first you try to lower your consciousness to a point as close as possible to sleep and dreaming, without falling asleep. Then you begin to concentrate on the space as it was, the environment. By doing that you begin to become aware of moods in the room, or feelings that you have towards the person you’re sitting with. That person becomes a real person again in the sense of a real environment. Then you begin to observe that person very carefully, and you begin to empathize with that person. Through very careful observation and empathy, suddenly you can find yourself identified with that person. You begin to experience something entirely different. You begin to experience anger, and the mood is very different in that other person than it is in yourself in the dreaming. You get totally different body sensations and a different experience of the dream. You start to move back and forth between that person and the "I" in the dream, and when you start doing that, moving back and forth between these two different people, you get two different physical sensations and emotional sensations. The tension between those two will start to increase and you become aware of all kinds of feelings that you previously were unaware of, angers that are very deeply seated in your body, feelings of being attacked, all kinds of experiences that are distributed between both these people in the dreaming. Slowly you’ll find that you get very deep insights that are visceral, not just mental. Your whole body knows that something is going on.

NEXUS: Do you mean you'll understand what implications it has, or meaning, for your waking life?

RB: Not just that. It is more of a sense of who you are, what your whole entire emotional life is like. We usually live in just a small section of the entirety of our emotional life. Once you start working with dreams, you can become aware of a much wider emotional reality than you were before, and that is very helpful because, for instance, in the case of this angry person that you meet in a room, if you’re not aware of that anger, then your relationships are going to suffer, because you will be projecting this anger onto people whom you’re with and then you’ll get angry with them, or you will make them angry with you.

NEXUS: Are you supposing that the anger you encounter in your dream is likely a recurring theme in your life?

RB: Yes, because the strange thing is that there’s a paradox going on. The people in the dream that you meet are entirely real people. You experience them as somebody else, not as a part of yourself. It is somebody else. That’s why I’ve developed this method of looking at the person as other, not as self, and of using your whole aesthetic mind to observe, to get into the interiority of the other. The paradox is that when you get into the interiority of the other, you begin to encounter elements of your self. From the point of view of waking, all the elements of the dream are part of the dreamer.

NEXUS: They’re all created by you. Nobody else is entering the deal.

RB: They are all created by the dreamer, but the question of course is who is the dreamer? When I’m sitting in a room with someone else, it is not likely that I have created the dream because I’m inside the room. This man there has his own point of view that presents itself as an interior perspective of that man. This man has his own consciousness, so there are already two carriers of consciousness here. I didn’t make that person, I didn’t make this room. Now I don’t know who the dreamer is. I call it the dreaming genius, but I don’t know who it is. It is just a faculty of whatever it is that creates whole worlds that we find ourselves in 20 years of our lives.

NEXUS: If you add up all of your dreaming time, it’s 20 years of your life?

RB: The latest research indicates that it is very likely that we dream six hours of every night if we have an eight-hour sleep. And that would be about 20 years of our lives.

NEXUS: Tell us a few stories about societies that consider dreaming as real, or at least vitally important?

RB: My book is very much about my trip to the outback in Australia and conversations I had with an Aboriginal medicine man. In his tribe, when they dream of a song or of a dance, they immediately have to teach it to the tribe. The dreaming, according to aboriginal consciousness, has to do with the fact that in the beginning, the world had no features. It was completely amorphous. The ancestors from the dream time brought landscape into being from their dreaming events. So all landscape is part of dreaming. When you have a dream with a song and a dance in it, it has to be added to the dreaming to revitalize the world. So they see dreaming as very important.

NEXUS: Can you think of a contrast between our world and this aboriginal dream world, about how a person might view a marital problem, the death of someone, a car breakdown, decisions, whatever?

RB: I told a dream of mine to an aboriginal woman who’s one of the leaders of that community. It was a dream that had my father in it although he had died previously. She said "Well, maybe you have not fulfilled the funeral rites. Maybe there’s still something you have to do for the dead." The notion is that if there were something left undone for the dead, it would make the relationship between the living and the dead askew, which is a very dangerous thing. There has to be harmony between the living and the dead, otherwise the dead will start influencing the life of the living in a dangerous manner. The way I took it was in a Western way, that there was still something that I had to work out in my relationship to my father. I am a Westerner and I take dreams as being related to me, whereas she takes dreams as she would take anything, as related to the tribe or as related to the environment. If you take dreams as environments, as many traditional peoples do, then your attitude toward the environment is the same attitude you have to dreams. Our attitude towards environment is that it’s real estate: I "own" this piece of land. We have the same attitude towards dreams: "This is my dream. It relates directly to me." So my interpretation of the dream was very different from hers, although we came to the same conclusion, namely that something still had to be done for the dead. She felt that it was important that I still do funeral rites. Well, this book was the funeral rites for my father.

NEXUS: In other cultures, are there techniques like concentration exercises or breathing techniques or rituals that are used to aid in retention of a dream?

RB: I have heard, for instance, of the techniques of dream incubation.

NEXUS: What are those techniques?

RB: Well, in the olden days, especially in Greece, you would sleep inside the temple and you would have a dream that would pertain to your illness. The priest would help you work with it, and healing would come out of that. From that we have developed techniques of dream incubation. If you want to incubate a dream about a certain issue, then you visualize the most representative element of that issue. For instance, if you want to incubate a dream about a problem that you have in your marriage, then you take a very paradigmatic moment between you and your spouse and visualize it very carefully. Feel it in your body, feel what you’re feeling, try and maybe enter the point of view of the spouse and feel it from his or her perspective, and do what I’ve just described about dreaming. In my experience maybe one in every 10 times you get a very clear response. It doesn't always work, but it works a few times. As to breathing techniques, I know that, for instance, Tibetans, in their lucid dreaming work, use a lot of breathing techniques. But I don’t know enough about it. I’ve never seen it directly.

NEXUS: Can you give us some recommendations about how we might remember our dreams? Any techniques?

RB: In the first place, if you want to begin to remember your dreams, it is very important to realize that a dream may not necessarily be a narrative. A dream can be any kind of image, and the narrative is usually much less important than the images themselves. Value any image that comes to the surface. Many people think that if they just had this little, little snippet, it is not worth remembering, but everything is worth remembering if you’re trying to start remembering your dreams.

NEXUS: So you’re saying value the material in your dreams at the outset?

RB: Yes, value it and see to it that you don’t have preconceived ideas about what it should be. A dream does not necessarily have to be an epic. Most dreams aren’t, in fact. Put a pencil and paper next to your bed, or a tape recorder, and before you go to sleep, have the strong intention that you’re not going to remember any dreams. It’s a kind of paradoxical intention. Try to not remember any dreams for a week. Then, if any dreams slip through, you don’t write it down. You don’t want to remember dreams. Be very adamant about that to yourself. After that, if a dream pops through, begin to write it down in the following manner. Try to not change your position upon waking. Stay as much in that position as possible. Try to catch immediately one or two images, and really repeat them to yourself so that they become language, so that you have it clear. Then write or speak into the tape recorder. If you have a dream that you are sure you will remember, don’t be sure that you will remember it. Usually dreams that you think you’ll remember for the rest of your life are gone within a half a minute. The best thing is to write it down after you have learned it more or less by heart. Pay attention to the slivers that you have remembered during the day. Tell it to yourself, or maybe tell it to somebody else and ask that person to absolutely not interpret, but just to listen to the dream. You’ll find that the more attention you pay to dreams, the more dreams that you will remember. Now some people, and there are many different theories why, have a hard time remembering dreams. These exercises may not help, because for some reason some people remember very few dreams, and it is not abnormal. It’s just as normal to remember dreams as to forget them. But if you really want to remember dreams, just keep on going and at a certain point you will remember, at least a sliver. Then you can start remembering more. But one shouldn’t get one’s hopes up too high.

NEXUS: What do we make of the dreams that we do remember for weeks and months and years? Are they of some different type?

RB: Very often those dreams are of central importance. You feel that they are essential to your life, that they somehow portray something in your existence that is a crux of your existence.

NEXUS: So they’re even richer ones to look into.

RB: Yes, definitely.

NEXUS: What about when I read my own diary of a dream and have no memory of it?

RB: We all have stale dreams and fresh dreams. And you can do different things with fresh dreams than you can do with stale dreams, because if a dream is fresh then you can re-enter it and re-experience it. You can move into other people in the dream. With stale dreams, you can’t do that. The best way to work with that, I find, is to work with series of dreams. Put a whole series of those stale dreams next to each other, a chronological series, and read through them, and see if there are themes that are similar. Begin to connect those themes. By working that way, a lot of insights will begin to emerge. You will find essential themes in your life coming back again and again in the dreaming. But don’t try to do that immediately. First, type them up and put all the pages next to each other. Read it through and as you begin to become more and more conversant with the material, you’ll begin to see "Ah, there’s a table there and there’s a table there. Oh, and those people are sitting around the table here and these people are sitting around the table there and these people coming back here." You begin to draw connections. After you’ve drawn a lot of connections, you begin to look at them and you’ll find that they form themes.

NEXUS: Where does this lead?

RB: You begin to inhabit a much larger part of your being, and changes begin to take place, ways that you’re stuck become unstuck, and self-images begin to change. Your relationship to other people can change because you have become aware that all these elements are part of your being. You no longer have to project out so much. You can get in touch with people more easily because projection puts up an invisible mirror between you and another, and you keep on looking in the mirror instead of seeing other people. It can work very positively on relationships. Since dreaming is the purest form of creativity that I know of, by being more strongly connected to your dreaming, I think you can get much closer to the creative force that is driving you.

NEXUS: And getting closer to the creative force that’s driving you would change you how?

RB: I think it makes you realize that life has a significance beyond your own creation. Life has a significance beyond what you make of it. There is a larger force that we are part of that creates a world in which we live in our dreaming. You begin to realize that the same thing is going on in our waking existence, that there’s a super-ordinate being that you can call the Self, or God or whatever. There is a larger faculty than just your conscious faculty that is steering your life. You can become more a part of what is steering your life and you can get a much better sense of direction.

I think much of the problem that people have is that they feel very disoriented in their lives. And working with dreams can give you a very strong sense of direction, to stay close to what matters in your life. I wouldn’t want to be living on the periphery of my life. I would want to be living as much to the center of my life as I can. And I think working with dreams has helped me with that.