This book was written on a whim. It was something I’d been interested in all of my life, since seeing my first dreams as a child. I have been watching them, recording them, analyzing, interpreting, evaluating and learning from them since I first learned to write. My notebooks contain more dreams than any other material. I woke up every day with the bones of a story and puzzles to configure. The more I paid attention to them, the more intricate they became. All these years later, I am still amused and entertained.
This is not your typical dream dictionary that will tell specific examples of what each element of your dreams mean. Dreams were never meant to be one size fits all. Your dreams come from your mind, your experiences, your relationships, your thoughts, fears, activities. Your past, present and future all are contained only for you, given personally to each individual in their own unique scenario. Psychologists and psychiatrists cannot tell you what your dreams mean. They will listen, provide thought provoking questions, probe and poke with guided interest on your background and environment, but ultimately it’s you in that chair or couch or bed who will answer the question of what your dreams mean.
In Illuminate The Night, you will be led on your own journey through the dark forest of your mind with a flashlight, a pen, and a notebook, examining your path, the elements around you, the colors, animals, dwellings and characters you encounter and ultimately, work to figure out on your own where you are, where you came from, and where you are going. This journey has a billion variables, but it’s you alone who must take the steps, do the work, figure out the meanings and decide what to do with them.
Tom Typinski’s book is an introduction to dream work and his personal philosophy. Inspired by Carl Jung, it centers on the belief that dreams are messages from the unconscious, offering insights into our deepest selves. He emphasizes the importance of making personal associations with dream symbols rather than relying on generic interpretations, as Jung believed these symbols are unique to each of us. Through this approach, Typinski seeks to integrate various aspects of his personality, striving for self-realization and a deeper understanding of his psyche, in line with Jung’s concept of individuation.
David P. Stanislaw, LMSW, BCD
Dreams are brought to us in images, the language of humanity, the language of infinity, the language of universality. When we see words or writing in a dream, it will often change shape, meaning, sense, direction – so if it’s not a profound, undeniable message, “WARNING” – they are only a blinking light to have us look deeper at the symbolic images which surround it. Stories are told in metaphors and have many layers, great depth, many meanings and insinautions. Like a many-faceted jewel, a dream must be looked at from a number of angles to see all the beauty it contains.
I should begin by saying that I read Illuminate the Night as someone mostly inattentive to what always seemed to me the fleeting content of dreams in my life. But encountering Tom Typinski’s work, I was struck at once by the depth of commitment and resolve at the center of it, decades of careful reflection and disciplined inquiry into the nature, significance, and direct experience of dreaming. The book ranges over diverse perspectives on dreams as a distinctive focus of human attention, but what registers most meaningfully for me is the revealed character of Typinski’s quest to dig deeper, to sustain, enhance, and ponder the content of his dreams. There is much in the book to appeal to readers already immersed in the study of dreams, I am sure, but for a reader such as me, this work offers the gift of an awakening, the stirrings of a more acute awareness of something close at hand but too carelessly overlooked.
– Paul Farber Western Michigan University Professor
Like any story, there are characters, scenery, colors, emotions, references to the familiar, and often strange occurrences that seem to have no meaning at all. Those are often the ones with the most meaning, the unfamiliar and unexpected. They are there to get your attention. Shape-shifting characters are common, as are seeing people long passed whom you may yet need to reconcile with.
I wrote Illuminate The Night to help with my own understanding of my own dreams and how they fit in my life. After all these years, I have a better understanding, but, as stated earlier, the puzzles become more complex. As soon as you solve childhood issues, you have siblings to deal with, parents, peers, work associates, and all the relationships that presently have bearing in your life, as well as those that seemed to only have meaning so many years ago, yet still show up now as reference points to what you’ve never really gotten over, past, through. You could examine these things with a therapist/ psychiatrist/ priest/ spouse, etc., but what would be lacking are the emotions that came with the dream; and the sensations of falling, flying, drowning, running or loving that enveloped you inside the dreamscape which are hard to express in words and thoughts in wakeful life, especially to share with strangers.
You might think dreams are there for entertainment purposes only. Ok. That’s cool. Lucid dream work is definitely entertaining, but the key word here is “work.” Dream work, and specifically the higher realms of lucidity, are something earned, that you must work at, daily, nightly, consistently. But it is all ultimately a matter of working on yourself. All the answers are there, if you so choose to look for them. Like exercising your body, you can exercise your brain while sleeping. 80% of people couldn’t care less about the adventures their minds have taken them on nocturnal journeys. But like meditation, the 20% who work on it diligently reach the higher levels of knowledge, knowing beforehand what’s ailing them, how to fix their lives or even how to improve their golf game. Arnold Palmer is one such example.
This “shadow” work, the “Dark Side of The Brain” that works with you whether you pay attention to it or not, is the reason I am so enthralled with dreams after all these years of working with them. They still surprise, amaze, challenge and inform my quest for the purpose of becoming all I am possible of becoming, and helping in every way for me to be a better person, in particular, and human being, in my legacy. Find it here: ILLUMINATE THE NIGHT