Summerlin woman studying dreams

By Ashley Livingston

Friday, Oct. 17, 2008 | midnight

Do you fly at night? How about seeing aliens?

If so, you're not alone and it's nothing new.

Jungian psychotherapist Cathy Pagano, a Sun City Summerlin resident, said historical records about types of dreams and their many interpretations go back as far as 3,000 B.C.

The Sumerians believed that if you had flying dreams too often, you would lose all of your possessions, she said.

While later down the time line, she said the Bible says the Hebrews interpreted dreams as messages from God.

Slowly, dreams lost their significance.

"As a culture, we don't believe dreams have meaning," Pagano told the crowd gathered at a dream lecture at Enterprise Library Oct. 2.

People got into the Enlightenment where rationality was king and pushed away the qualities of feeling, reflection and intuition, she said.

And that's what dreams, as weird as they may sometimes be, are all about.

Dreams are the way people hear from their inner spirits, Pagano said. They allow people to get insight into their lives.

"Dreams can shift you, say, 'Get a life, see the bigger picture here,'" she said.

While there are many methods of dream interpretation purported by people such as Sigmund Freud, Fritz Pearls, and modern scientists, Pagano subcribes to the theory of Carl Jung.

Jung's method of interpretation is fuller and deeper and takes people to places where other methods of interpretation don't, she said.

Jung believed that dreams are a way of communicating and accessing a person's unconscious.

They could offer solutions to problems faced in waking life.

However, the message can take some deciphering.

Pagano explained to the group that dreams are a form of symbolic language.

They're not rational, they're poetic and metaphorical, she said. That's why they're so hard to understand.

For example, Pagano interpreted the dream of one woman in the audience who said she dreamt repeatedly of the same person.

"That person is a part of you," Pagano said. "They represent some kind of energy in you."

A person's unconscious chooses ways to represent things in dreams that will be realized when the person awakes, she said.

And when the dream is recurring, it means there is something the person is not paying attention to, she said.

The symbolism for different people can differ depending on their situation.

When it comes to interpretation, Pagano said there are a few things that are important.

"You need to know yourself, who you are, what you think, what you're feeling," she said.

It's important for people to be able to reflect on themselves, she said.

There are, however, a few basic themes that can generally represent the same meaning.

Falling dreams represent a loss of control, while dreams where someone is being chased represent anxiety, she said.

Flying dreams "give us a larger perspective that allows us to come up with ideas and think outside of the box," she said.

Dreams about aliens often represent something new coming up that is alien to who a person is, she said.

"Its a fear of 'the other,'" Pagano said.

To dream more often, Pagano recommends getting a notebook and writing down each night's dreams.

Pagano told the group that dreams explain people's lives and deepen them.

"There's something about dreaming that chills us out, resets the thermostat so to speak," she said. "We need dreams to live."

Ashley Livingston can be reached at 990-8925 or [email protected].