How to Cultivate Archetypal Dreams

While many of our dreams are mundane portrayals of our day-to-day lives, or are cloudy and easily-forgotten fragments, some dreams can be extremely vivid, impactful, and life-changing. These powerful dreams have been called by a number of terms: archetypal dreams, type dreams, big dreams, culture-pattern dreams, extraordinary dreams, epic dreams, apex dreams, prototypical dreams, great dreams, peak experience dreams, etc.

Typically, archetypal dreams are vivid, evocative, numinous, and appear as cohesive imagistic visions rather than as patchwork reorganizations of memory. They are highly emotional and highly memorable and can take years to understand. They have a universal or collective nature, containing mythological, legendary, historical, or spiritual symbolism. These type of dreams are also most associated with mantic or magical dreaming practices, including spiritual epiphanies, divination, astral or soul projection, healing, transcendent visions, incubation, and shamanic forms of dreaming.

Archetypal dreams are also very rare, occurring most frequently at critical life transitions when we need to be able to perceive the events in our lives in relation to a greater temporal or spiritual whole. Studies suggests that archetypal elements occur in less than 5% of regular dreams, with the majority of dreams remembered from childhood being archetypal (although this percentage can be higher in people with active spiritual belief systems or who are undergoing Jungian psychotherapy). While some dream researchers like Harry T. Hunt suggest that these powerful dreams are what makes the subject of dreams worth studying, they are so difficult to study or induce in a laboratory setting that other researchers believe that they may not actually exist, or are the exception that proves that most dreams are quotidian.

Given that they are rare but central to magical approaches to dreaming, is it possible to incubate archetypal dreams or cultivate them to make them more frequent? In the ancient world, magical dreams were incubated through traditional ritual forms, often within a temple setting. However, beyond using the standard types of dream incubation methods, we can also extrapolate from the conditions in which archetypal dreams most often occur.

First is to pay more attention to the dreams that occur during significant moments in your life, whether upcoming transitions from weddings to starting a new job or school. Any kind of initiatory or new situation carries a tremendous amount of energy and uncertainty that can be encapsulated in a dream. Recurring events such as birthdays or holidays, or even finishing a dream journal, also provide excellent moments to reflect back on the last ‘chapter’ in your life, and if you approach these type of events as significant and transformative, they are more likely to be accompanied by highly significant dreams.

Second, because childhood dreams are predominately archetypal and often feel more objectively real, recalling and re-dreaming emotional experiences from childhood can reactivate the deep dreaming processes that speak to our lifelong trajectory or sense of destiny, and the ways these are vividly embodied in our sleep.

Third, we can also pay attention to and foster an attitude of significance around more transitory but highly intense experiences, whether crises that our dreams may help resolve or more positive peak experiences. Any event in our lives can become critical and significant if approached through an intense emotional investment and suspense of believing to convince ourselves of its importance, thus raising the import of the more normative dreams around it.

Fourth, in explaining the fact that people with active spiritual practices such as shamans or people undergoing Jungian therapy have more archetypal dreams, studies show that experiencing altered states of consciousness including visionary components lead to more archetypal dreams. On the one hand, the engagement with spiritual concerns and mythic imagery will naturally lead to dreams about these topics. But also, visualization practices such as active imagination, fantasizing, or inner journeys effectively “prime the pump” of the imagination, leading to more vivid and objective dreams.

Lastly, meditation not only helps with developing meditation skills, but helps foster attitudes of self-awareness, energetic balance, and psycho-spiritual growth, which can lead to archetypal dreams. In Milam or Tibetan dream yoga, meditation was one of the central practices for increasing lucid reflectivity in dreams. Meditation also helps reduce anxieties, allowing us to shift from cloudy dreams about our immediate stressors to more clear visions about our long-term lives and the larger world.