Susan Gately
Fr Mark Patrick Hederman OSB 
Dreams are crucially important as indicators of what’s being left out of our lives, or not being given due attention, and must be carefully decoded, Benedictine Mark Patrick Hederman, former Abbot of Glenstal Abbey, has said.
It is essential for people to “get in touch with their subconscious”, Dom Hederman said in an RTÉ interview about his new book, Living the Mystery.
“We live in a tiny circle of light that we call consciousness, where we think we have absolute certainty” but outside that is a “massive dark place where we have absolutely no idea what’s going on”, he said.
Most of our lives we try to avoid that place, he continued, but when an accident, an illness, a death occurs, suddenly we’re into that area ‘of the mysterious’ so we have to get in touch with that.
According to the Benedictine monk, it has taken 20 centuries to establish how essential it is to be in touch with the unconscious. “The 20th Century produced so many people who weren’t in touch with that and they caused such havoc,” he said. Aside from ‘poster boys’ like Hitler and Stalin, every person “in charge of a school or any institution” becomes “out of control if they’re not in touch with their unconscious”.
Living the Mystery is published by Columba Books.
