Ghost

Memories, feelings, guilt, which haunt us, or parts of the wider awareness of the unconscious which attempt to communicate. What communicates can sometimes be the husks or influences from past traumas or events, which have been emptied of hurt and real influence, but still affect us as habit patterns. They can also be fantasies, hopes, longings we have given time to, and so filled with our life and sexual energy, and which now influence us.

But also they can indicate people we feel close to but have left us, like a son or daughter that has gone off to college or married. Their ghost then represents the feelings that are still alive in us as memories.

Ghost of a living person: A sense of their thoughts or presence influencing us. Many people communicate with the so called dead. We can also be haunted by desire for them, or a resentment or feeling about them.

Some people believe that in dreams the living haunt a place. This is possible because a living person may experience an OBE and be seen as a ghost by someone in the area of the experience. Seeing a ghost while awake can still be considered as connected with the dream process.

Robert Van de Castle points out that in his work with people, whenever he has helped them investigate a ghost dream, it has always led back to the childhood experience of a parent coming to the bedroom and lifting them or moving them to prevent bed wetting. He says the ghost is invariably the mother, and the robber figure is the father.

But some dreams suggest that ghost can be any appearance in your awareness of someone experience an out of body experience, or even as the next example says, contact from another level or reality.A ghost which feels solid: The dreamer is ‘touching’ aspects of their own mind or awareness existing beyond preconceived ideas and beliefs.

Example: Last night I had a strange nightmare. I was in an ancient room. It had the feeling of being an old church. Then my wife and I were in bed in the room. A middle-aged woman was in the room. She was a ghost. I felt afraid of her, but to meet the fear needed to confront her. I reached out my hand to her. I was crying out in my sleep from fear. As she took my hand I was amazed and shocked to feel it as physically real. I cried out, “I can feel you!” She also was surprised and said, “He is from the other level,” or some named level or dimension. I had the impression that this level or dimension was recognised by “them”. I then said I wanted to speak to her, as I needed to understand. I then woke up.

Example: There was an eerie atmosphere about the place. Then we heard footsteps upstairs, and knew it was a ghost. The eerie atmosphere increased and increased, and the footsteps could be heard coming down the steps of the stairs. We decided to go and have a look at the ghost, despite the fact we were somewhat scared. But when we looked up the stairs we saw it was a youngish woman who was dwarfed in stature, and very unhappy. This was why she haunted the place, and had materialised. I put my arm around her shoulder, and made her feel loved, and led her into the kitchen, where we talked to see if we could help her. The whole eeriness had disappeared.

Example: While I was engaged to be married I had a dream in which I was looking at thick velvet curtains, very rich in texture. The curtains parted and my dead mother walked through. She came to me with such a look of love and said, ‘My darling I am so sorry, but this marriage is not to be’. The dream then ended.

 I was due to meet my fiancé at a hotel, as he was working, travelling around the country, and this would be our last meeting before our wedding. I travelled to the hotel, and when I got there the manager took me to one side and told me my fiancé had been killed in a car accident. My mother’s warning had saved me from a terrible shock.

Example: J. A. Hadfield in his book Dreams And Nightmares tells the story of a young woman who was happily engaged but who suddenly became depressed. It was discovered that her depression started when her fiancé had greatly aroused her sexually. That night she had a nightmare in which she saw the ghost of a man to whom she had been previously engaged but had been killed in a war. He was looking at her reprovingly. She felt terribly ashamed and disloyal because of her passionate love for her present fiancé. The reason for such depth of feeling was that when her previous fiancé had died she swore to herself she would not marry again, although he had not asked this of her. So the ghost here represents not only the past relationship, but the woman’s deeply implanted decision not to marry again, raised from the dead as it were by her passionate love for her present man. See Dead Husband or Ex

Example: I was in an ancient room. It had the feeling of being an old church. Then my wife and I were in bed in the room. A middle aged woman was in the room. She was a ghost. I felt afraid of her, but to meet the fear needed to confront her. I reached out my hand to her. I was crying out in my sleep from fear. As she took my hand I was amazed and shocked to feel it as physically real. I cried out ‘I can feel you – I can feel you!’ She also was surprised and said, ‘He is from the other level,’ or some named level or dimension. I had the impression the level or dimension was recognised by ‘them’. I then said I wanted to understand.

Example: I always thought ghosts were the expression of fear as we meet the unknown; the anxiety of glimpses into realities so different to what we assume they should be, that we fall back. But today I am meeting ghosts that have been working silent fingers into my history. They are archaeologists of my heart, leading into the sacred burial grounds where my past love died and was buried. They are ghosts that so subtly lift up old bone’s, enter dried out skins, to make them parade across the theatre of my feelings. In their charade they pose as my lover to affright me. They act out old dramas as if enlightening me of today. And so silently and with craft have they done this, it takes me unawares. Time passes till I catch them at their awful game. I banish them as I banished their living form in the past, by remembering that the flower that grew and died last year, is not this year’s flower.

Example: I was in bed with Tony, my husband, but we weren’t close. I was awake and looking at him, our heads were quite close together. Then we were both looking at a candle alight and a big cork, one for a jar, was being lifted in the heat of the candle. The cork was moving in directions that I didn’t think the heat was but it still kept up, and moving. We both watched this for quite some time, then the cork suddenly shot across the room and I knew Pat, woman who worked with us, was sleeping on the floor next to us, the cork caught some thin material, then went thud onto the wall and fell into an armchair. Pat awoke, thought it was a ghost coming to get her, she rushed out of bed, in the dark, went wildly into the wall trying to find a door to escape. I thought it very funny and laughed to myself as I got up to go after Pat to tell her not to be afraid, it wasn’t after her at all.

Useful questions:

Does this represent a particular old memory, fear, or piece of the past that ‘haunts’, or keeps coming back to me?

Does it indicate dread of the unknown? If so what is it you dread?

Do I have doings from the past that I have tried to bury or forget about?

See: Spirits; Hallucination; Processing Dreams; Dreaming of Death