“None of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow.”                    —Carl G. Jung

It has been a long time since I remembered a nightmare. Suddenly, I have had two related nightmares in the span of five days. A notable number of my clients have also reported nightmares during this time.

As you may know, I have been observing and recording collective dream themes, symbols, elements in the form of collective dreamscapes and their messages for the last four years. From my observation and experience, I have come to the conclusion that (a) while we work individually we are also working collectively, (b) whatever transformation we are able to effect in ourselves is also reflected in the collective, and (c) our individual work is necessarily influenced by our collective evolutionary process.

What strikes me about this current emergence of nightmares in the collective is that everyone who talks with me about them is, as I am, going through a conscious and intentional thorough revision of beliefs, attitudes, habits, and unconscious patterns with the intention of transforming them toward what best supports our current, more evolved states and circumstances, and our overall wellbeing.

Is it possible then that in the same way we collectively go through concurrent dream themes that support our individual progress we also go through collective nightmare seasons of acknowledging, honoring, integrating shunned shadow aspects along with necessary purging and release of associated feelings and emotions? It sure seems that way to me.

It has been said that nightmares bring us in touch with and force us to face our personal and collective shadow. The shadow represents everything that is considered bad or negative, dark, unacceptable, threatening to conventions of consensual reality and the status quo.

Deemed deleterious, these outcast aspects of human experience cause unwanted and perceived-as-intolerable feelings of guilt, shame, embarrassment, disgust, and regret, to name a few. Our personal and collective shadow aspects are thus hidden, suppressed, repressed, denied in ourselves, in our communities, our culture, and our societies, and they inevitably continue to operate and manifest in unconscious yet blatant ways.

No one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for
any kind of self-knowledge.
—Carl G. Jung

Dreams do us this favor of becoming conscious of the shadow in the form of our nightmares, as a generous invitation toward self-knowledge and applied moral effort through our dreamwork.

Most notable about our experience with nightmares is the fact that the discomfort caused by them provokes our waking ourselves up from the dream, most likely in our efforts to escape what they face us with. Nevertheless, the disturbing images, feelings and sensations stimulated by our nightmares stay with us while awake and invite us to awaken to something as of yet unattended in ourselves.

Let us consider for a moment the potential value of the residual unsettling and uncomfortable sensations of overwhelm, guilt, shame, hopelessness, confusion, anxiety, panic, fear, terror, dread, and so on. These are, in fact, the undesirable, perceived-as-intolerable feelings and sensations we have been trying to avoid in repressing the shadow, individually and collectively, feelings and sensations that have chosen to be cleared through our conscious attention and acknowledgement of them.

Our nightmares are telling us we are actually capable not only of tolerating them, but also of transforming, transmuting, and transcending them through the mere act of recognizing and honoring them. We do this by (a) noticing them, (b) experiencing them, and (c) allowing them to move through our sensations and awareness.

If all dreams come in the service of our greater health and wholeness—and it has long been established that they do—what service do these “dark” images, feelings, sensations, and emotions bring to our conscious awareness; what service do they offer our personal and collective growth and evolution?

As with all dreams, it is our task to make sense in waking life of what does not appear to make sense in our dream life. Our dreams and nightmares also invite the inquiry about what may still not make sense in our waking life that our dream life is insisting we pay attention to, figure out, and bring healing and resolution to.

Nightmares, as all dreams do, tap into the collective; they reiterate themes and offer variations in their attempts to make those things more accessible to us at the individual level so that we can do the work for both the individual and collective.

Let us, then, do the work, for the highest good and the benefit of all.