While you seek to get to know yourself in your waking life, ‘the dreamer’ sits in a watchtower overlooking the endless landscape of your psyche, with a perfect view of of who you’ve been, who you are, and who you could be.

One of the great paradoxes of the human condition is our inability to truly know ourselves. Why do friends sometimes have a more accurate sense of me than I do? Why is my experience of myself so different to their experience of me?

Psychoanalysts suggest that that within the psyche there is
not one ‘self ’, but many distinct ‘selves’, often in conflict with each other. When we’re awake, we select ‘selves’ that get the best responses from our environment. But when we dream, there is no
longer a need for these filters.

All the contents of our emotional and psychological lives become instantly available, and we come face to face with our full complexity as human beings. It is for this reason that the insight and direction that we crave is more accessible in our dreams than in our waking lives.

Of all your ‘selves’, it is the dreamer that knows the most about you. Your other selves tend to hide things from each other, but it’s impossible to hide anything from ‘the dreamer’. So if you are on a journey of self-knowledge, start making a nightly pilgrimage to the dreamer’s watchtower. The view from there may be the perspective you seek.

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