Amos, I can't read Dossey's books right now and have to guess from a tiny amount of information that he takes a somewhat Jungian approach to dreams and a version of collective consciousness, and combines that with a nod to god, with which views you somewhat agree. Bill D is more pragmatic/materialist, and likely thinks any perceived predictive power of dreams comes down to selective interpretation.

I could hazard a germ of truth in both views, but likely not the essential ingredient either of you favour. I suspect we share, more than most people like to think, the same neural processes as all other animals. We all evolved together, our basic drives are the same. Our ability to think and dream is as physical as anything else about us. We are of the world in the most literal sense, and our bodies and brains, on some level, can't help but naturally know it. I think most of the time we humans function pretty much the same as a deer, or a rabbit - we coast on our mammal layer, and depend on our reptile hindbrain to keep us out of trouble.

Only in our efforts to communicate with others (and talk to ourselves) do we rise to the pinnacle of a mammalian ability. Like all such extreme specializations, while making us phenomenally successful in our niche (there's billions of us), there are probable drawbacks. I think one of these might be a diminished integration in our brains, so that we may perceive messages as coming from without, or as 'other', that are actually signals from within, which any other mammal might smoothly recognize as 'self' and act upon without any feeling of disconnection.

I think we interpret this disconnection in various ways, one of which is to devise explanations for it which are either non-physical, like gods or collective consciousness, or materialistic, where we explain it with references to symbols or memories or deduction.

I think that collective consciousness is real, but not as usually imagined, as some great amorphous spiritual cloud of being, but much more simply in the similar evolved structure of each individual human brain. It is within, and not shared except as we share any other biological attribute.

Or I may be talking entirely through my hat.