Freud used to say that dreaming is the royal road to the unconscious. That journeying into our colourful spectrum of hidden imagination can help us connect to the part of us that has the capacity to fully see our unprocessed emotions and feelings from an eagle eye perspective—something that our waking mind favours to store in concealed boxes away from our conscious view.

One could add that from a transpersonal psychological perspective, dreams are formed by the psyche/higher consciousness as a means of communicating to our ego self – a sort of end of day debriefing service or on-call inner therapist.

Like a kaleidoscopic representation of our truest selves, the many dimensions and layers of our dreams offer the possibility to engage with the multi-faceted stratums of our psyche from both a spectator and participatory capacity. The latter denotes the realm of lucid dreaming, in whereas many other lamina’s of our subconscious mind are accessible from a more conscious denotation (i.e metacognition). This is where healing and personal growth can be experienced within the dream itself as well as being extended into waking life. As psychologist Brigitte Holzinger writes “…the emotionality that can be experienced during lucid dreaming might have a healing effect, as getting to know one’s world of feelings and being able to try them out in lucid dreams seems to have a therapeutic value.”

This state of focused attention and openness can be used – with the aid of guided imagery and specific instructions— to access knowledge that is otherwise still obscure to our waking selves.

The feeling experienced in both lucid dreaming and hypnotherapy draw similar parallels to each other in that they can serve as a tool for self-actualization as well as for exploring the unexplored realm of our extended psychic phenomena.

The practice of meditation has proven to assist the ease with which lucid dreaming can be experienced, specifically for the WILD technique (Wake Induced Lucid Dream’, or WILD, is the lucid dreaming technique that allows the dreamer to move immediately from a waking state into a dream state with the direct awareness of having transitioned from one state to the other). As the emptying of one’s thoughts pave an easier way towards a blank canvas of creation, the conscious mind is also better attuned to the echo’s of the subconscious mind so that a synergistic and symbiotic conversation can occur.