Empirical studies demonstrate that most people dream regularly, but only a small number of individuals pay attention to their dreams. Those who do pay attention usually do not try to interpret them or record them for insight or future reference.

Before we go further, we need to understand why, in our culture, most people don’t consider their dreams a significant part of their lives.

One reason many Americans overlook their dreams is cultural conditioning. In a society that prizes productivity, logic, results, and measurable output, dreams often seem too vague or impractical to be worth our time. After all, if success means mastering a craft, making an impact, or “getting ahead,” then ambiguity and inner wandering don’t cut it. Another issue is our society’s obsession with the scientific method as the primary way to determine what is true or real.

The scientific method is built around forming hypotheses, testing them through controlled observations, and drawing conclusions from repeatable, measurable results. By design, this method struggles to account for deeply personal or subjective experiences produced by the dream process. As a result, many adopt the mindset: “If you can’t measure it or quantify it, it doesn’t exist.”

There’s also a built-in cultural bias toward the purpose of why we sleep. It’s viewed as a biological necessity, as the way to recharge the tired physical body and allow the physical brain to unwind from the busyness of a demanding workday. Sleep is seen as a means to an end, namely, that of supporting productivity and output during one’s waking hours. This is a utilitarian view of the sleep process that excludes dreams from having any meaningful value in one’s life.

This approach to sleep is like viewing one’s physical body, including its shape, size, and skin color, and assuming that’s all there is to a human being. It’s like judging a car by its paint job, without ever looking under the hood to see what makes it run.

In recent decades, dream science has revealed a great deal about what happens in the brain during sleep. Working with the most advanced tools available, scientists still cannot explain how we experience space, time, color, sound, emotion, and even unexpected insights while dreaming.

If you believe only physical matter is real and everything is explainable by physical processes, don’t worry, I’m not here to argue with you. You’re welcome to read this essay and take from it whatever you like. Or, if it strikes you as nothing more than a fart in the wind, that’s fine too. I’ll happily refund the money you didn’t pay to read it.

In all seriousness, is it possible our waking reality is only one slice of something broader and deeper we’ve not considered up until now? If so, what can one do to begin a process related to one’s dream world?

One can begin with a broad review of the literature on this subject, and also investigate individual anecdotal stories related to dreaming and its impact on one’s life. In one of my early essays on Substack, I share a significant dream I experienced about my favorite uncle, who unexpectedly passed away from brain cancer when I was in high school.

In the dream, I’m walking down a long, dimly lit hallway in an old office building. About one hundred feet in front of me, I see the outline of someone standing in an office doorway. As I draw nearer, I realize it’s a man dressed in a white T-shirt and baggy blue jeans. I suddenly recall this is how my dead uncle used to dress all the time. Getting closer, I can see that the man is indeed my dead uncle! I’m confused and startled.

Suddenly, our eyes lock. In silence, we stand there, staring at one another. I’m drawn to the contours of his mouth. His lips appear to be pressed firmly together, and I get the feeling he is struggling mightily to say something to me, but he can’t open his mouth. What are you trying to tell me, Uncle? I hear myself cry out in my mind. The dream ends there. This dream had a profound impact on the trajectory of my life, from this moment forward. You can learn more details by clicking HERE to read the full essay.

Numerous books have been published on dreams, dreaming, and how to experience a dream life, from both secular and sacred perspectives. Matthew Walker’s 2017 book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, is a neuroscientific, evidence-based account of sleep. The 2024 book, Dreamwise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams, authored by three Jungian analysts, looks at the dream world through the lens of inner exploration, personal growth, and symbolic meaning.

If there is something to the idea of a dream world that wants to interact with us, making an effort to understand this dimension of our life might lead to unexpected or surprising outcomes.

💬 Have You Had a Dream That Won’t Let You Go?

We’d love to hear about it.

• Share your dream in the Comment Section below.

• Or, if it feels personal, message Jack privately through the One-on-One Conversations portal at everydayspiritualhealth.com

To get started immediately, here’s a simple guide to help you.

1. INTENTION: Create a specific intention for this practice that you can refer to often, like: I intend to consciously enter the dreamworld with openness, humility, and readiness to receive what the deeper wisdom of life is offering.

2. SHIFT TO RELAX MODE: Give yourself a few minutes to slow down. Put away your phone. Use silence or soft music to help make the shift.

3. GROUNDING ACTIVITY: Use a grounding activity such as washing your face and hands, or gently breathing, and repeat: I cleanse the day from me. I release all I carry that is not mine to bear.

4. PHYSICAL RELEASE: Lightly stretch or breathe deeply into your belly and repeat: I soften into rest. My body is no longer needed for striving.

5. Write down a grounding ritual phrase you can slowly repeat to yourself. Here’s an example: I now cross the threshold from waking to dreaming, leaving behind the noise, the effort, the burdens of daylight. Tonight I enter the dreamworld with reverence, asking nothing but to be shown what wants to speak. I offer my sleeping self to the greater wisdom of life.

6. Here’s an Amazon link to look at a DREAM REMEMBRANCE JOURNAL. You will need a way to record your dream impressions, and this kind of journal helps by providing specific prompts you can use. Keep the journal nearby, or use your phone for a digital voice recording you can later transcribe, if you like.

Start tonight. If nothing comes through, no worries. You can record this fact and consider it part of the process.

What if your dreams aren’t just random noise or misfiring neurons, but instead, messages from a deeper part of you, or from something greater than you?

You don’t need to solve the mystery of your dreamworld all at once. Just begin by paying attention. Keep a journal, notice patterns, or lie down at night with a little more wonder before you lazily drift off to sleep.

You might be surprised at what you encounter while you sleep.

Good luck, and I’d love to hear about any progress you make.

Whether in the workplace, family relations, a romantic relationship, a competitive sport, or inside a casket at your future wake, how do you envision you will be seen—for who you are, for what you did, or a combination of both…?

Naturally, at times, it is more important to be seen for doing, right?

Suppose I need a brain operation to survive. Do I pick a brain surgeon who has operated only on cats in my local neighborhood, or one who has successfully performed hundreds of brain surgeries on human beings with a 98% success rate?

So yes, there are times when what we do is more important than being fully seen. But those actions are most meaningful when they are rooted in the deep, inner essence of ‘I know who I am on the inside,’ identity, not when used to prove one’s identity.

Being accepted for who you are, in essence, not for your image, role, or resume, is likely a key ingredient to emotional resilience, deep connection, and an overall sense of inner well-being.

While cultures differ in their consideration of the importance of doing and being, the core human need to be seen for who we are, beyond our roles and results, remains constant.

Modern-day Western societies, such as America, England, Germany, and France, tend to condition us to earn worth through action and performance, each finds its way to create space to see oneself as “being enough,” beyond the noise, striving, pushing, and overcoming.

Societies may condition us to see our worth through the lens of accomplishments, output, and productivity. Spiritual health invites us to reclaim our worth by reminding ourselves that we are already enough and always have been, even before we were born.

Everyday Spiritual Health grows through conversation. What insight or questions did this essay stir in you? Share your voice below.

“Ugh,” you might be thinking, “What the hell are you talking about!”

Fair enough. I'll try to explain to you.

For readers old enough to remember manual transmission cars, with a clutch and stick shift on the floor, the engine was designed to move through four gears. Each one built on the last, transferring ever-increasing power from the engine to the wheels with increasing efficiency and speed.

But imagine a new driver never learns about 4th gear!

They’d be stuck between the torque-heavy low gears (1st and 2nd) and the high-speed cruising gear (4th), shifting back and forth without ever completing the proper sequence. They’d hear the constant strain and vibration of the engine. They might sense that something’s off, but unaware that fourth gear exists, they’d keep pressing on, never realizing or experiencing that there’s a smoother way to travel.

When you shift into 4th gear at the right moment, the engine is no longer climbing or struggling, but now moving more efficiently, more quietly, and with a natural rhythm.

The quiet within I’m referring to may be the missing “gear” you’ve sensed all your life, like the driver pressing along in third gear, faintly aware there should be another shift to smooth out the ride, with no idea how to access it.

When you allow this 4th gear to integrate into your life, there’s now a way of being in the world without force, urgency, or reaction. You listen differently. You hear differently. There’s no rushing about. Even when you move fast, something in you stays unhurried. You no longer live in performance, but presence.

How much money, or years of your life, would you be willing to give to operate from this quiet within…?

But what if it’s something altogether different, something that doesn’t need to be demonstrated, practiced, or performed?

On my website, everydayspiritual.com, we clarify what spiritual health is not.

It’s not therapy.

It’s not self-help.

It’s not a belief system.

So what is it, then?

This is where things start to get tricky—when we try to name or define spiritual health (or God, for that matter). Still, let’s take a stab.

Two weeks ago, I accidentally scraped my elbow. The top layer of skin was rubbed off, and there was some bleeding. I didn’t even notice it until my wife pointed it out a few hours later. The skin around it had turned reddish-yellow and was sensitive to the touch. She helped me clean the wound, apply antiseptic, and cover it with a bandage.

Over the next several days, I watched as the raw skin formed a scab. The surrounding redness faded. Within a week, the scab fell off. The new skin looked almost untouched, like nothing had happened.

I marveled at how my body restored itself, seemingly on its own, without any conscious effort from me.

What allowed this to happen?

We might be tempted to name it. Maybe call it a self-organizing directive. Or an intelligence in the body. But if we say intelligence, what do we mean?

Science can describe the mechanisms of healing that took place at my elbow, cellular response, chemical signaling, inflammation, immune activity, tissue regeneration. It can explain what happens, but not fully why it happens. It doesn’t account for why this self-organizing directive exists in the first place.

Where does the body’s capacity to heal come from? And why should it know what to do?

Science is an extraordinary tool for measuring, observing, and modeling phenomena. But it’s not built to assign meaning. It’s not designed to ask the deeper question of being.

What if this same intelligence that healed my elbow is silently waiting to be in relationship with you?

Not as a belief system.

Not as a therapy model.

Not as a self-help, create-the-best-version-of-yourself plan.

But as a quiet collaboration.

You can speak to it.

You can listen.

And when you do, something shifts.

Spiritual health is not a thing with qualities we can name or characteristics we can identify it with. No.

Maybe the most important thing is simply to pause and listen.

Not for answers, but for presence.

Not to fix something, but to remember you’re already in relationship with what heals.

John Locke, the 17th-century English philosopher, Enlightenment thinker, and theological dissenter, promoted one of the most influential ideas in the West about the nature of human beings. He argued the human mind is a “blank slate,” that all knowledge, morality, and behavior arise exclusively from experience and sense perception. According to Locke, we are not born with innate tendencies such as love, morality, imagination, or any inclination to believe in a “higher power.”

But experiencing my grandson’s smile makes it hard for me to swallow this explanation whole.

To stay true to his claim, Locke would likely deem my grandson’s smile a learned behavior, mimicked through repeated interactions with smiling caregivers. And yet, I could not help but see the smile on my grandson’s face as an indication of something more, something mysterious, something pointing beyond the idea that we are born empty and shaped entirely by our interactions with the outside world.

In 1964, psychologist D.G. Freedman conducted a groundbreaking study in which he observed that blind infants smiled and laughed just like infants with normal sight, despite never having seen a face or learned to mirror joy. Decades later, Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist and former philosopher, affirmed in her book The Philosophical Baby (2009) that babies come not as blank slates, but as minds already alive with moral intuition, wonder, and the seeds for connective relationships.

In contrast to Locke’s claim that all comes from experience, these findings sing another tune: we do not arrive empty, totally dependent on the outside world to mold us into this or that kind of individual. Rather, we enter this world hardwired with curiosity, moral intuition, and a capacity to infer meaning and intention from the environment.

And yet, Locke’s ideas are still quietly alive in the assumptions of many of our institutions. Public education, secular higher education, various therapy modalities, and even some spiritual coaching programs often assume we are formed from scratch by our environments and the personal choices we make. The prevailing narrative says that the everyday phenomena we observe are explainable solely through the natural sciences of chemistry, biology, and physics. Any suggestion of agency beyond what these sciences can measure is often dismissed as irrational or even naïve.

Developmental psychology has learned that infants typically don’t experience self-reflective awareness until around 18 to 24 months of age. My grandson, at seven weeks old, is not self-aware in that technical sense. But he’s smiling at me. And I’m staring back, wondering what knows how to smile in him before he knows who he is. Maybe the smile is coming from a pre-self—a kind of presence, a relational field, deeply aware without yet being self-reflective.

What else might we be missing when we take a purely natural science orientation to explain all of life, all of being, in the world and throughout the cosmos?

After all, do you know what you were and where you were before your appearance as a human being on earth? Do you know who you are, beyond your name and personality? And do you know where you will be when you one day stop breathing and all brain activity in the body you now reside in goes silent?

Note to the reader: This essay also appears on my new website EverydaySpiritualHealth.com, where all future content will eventually live.”