Dreams are important to the soul—not for the messages the ego takes from them, not for the recovered memories or the revelations; what does seem to matter to the soul is the nightly encounter with a plurality of shades in an underworld, as if dreams prepared for death, the freeing of the soul from its identity with the ego and the waking state.
It has often been said that in dreams the soul “wanders,” which means not literal walking through the world, but leaving the confines of the ego’s concerns. In dreams the fragmentation into parts is held together by scenes and woven into stories.
What we learn from dreams is what psychic nature really is—the nature of psychic reality: not I, but we; not one, but many. Not monotheistic consciousness looking down from its mountain, but polytheistic consciousness wandering all over the place, in the vales and along rivers, in the woods, the sky, and under the earth.
— Re-Visioning Psychology, ch 1