(Medium) 

Dream interpretation often gets lumped into the same kind of pop mysticism as tarot cards and astrology, deemed a useless attempt to assign meaning to what is widely believed to be nothing more than the random firing of neurons in the brain. . .

Tarot and Astrology are forms of “divination” not “mysticism.”

“As soon as we start paying attention to our dreams, we begin to understand that there is an intelligence there,” says Rubin Naiman, PhD, a psychologist and sleep and dream expert with the the University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine. “There’s a wisdom. There’s a compassion. There’s depth, and it can open our hearts to seeing life in a whole different way.”

Naiman is one of a burgeoning group of psychologists around the world modernizing the work of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud by incorporating dream therapy into his practice. But Naiman is more than just a dream therapist — he’s a dream crusader on a mission to fix the “epidemic of dream loss” he believes we’ve found ourselves in that has left us, well, psychically constipated.

“Dreaming digests. It metaphorically chews on, swallows, assimilates, filters through, and it decides what it’s going to excrete,” Naiman says. “We’re nourished by daily experiences, and if we’re no longer digesting new experiences, we become psychologically malnourished. People who don’t dream well are not receiving nourishment on a daily basis from new experiences.”