Dream Magic

There is a strange and wonderful world in which your most secret wishes can be fully lived. In this world the things you fear take on physical form and do battle with you – yet remain ultimately harmless unless you believe them to be real. It is a world in which magic is everyday occurrence, for you can experience death and yet live on. Here the possibilities of your future are an open door for you to explore. You have many lifetimes in this domain, and are capable of living each one with vigour. Here too, with a thought or desire, you can create a living environment in which you move and play – to act out love, anger, success or failure until you grasp their essence and master them.

This living laboratory enables thoughts and emotions to take on their own physical reality as people, objects or places outside of you. Meeting them you live in a universe, a community of beings with which you have an ongoing relationship. Yet it is an apparently exterior world that is but a reflection of your own inner life. Because of this, if you are wise, you may discover in it the sources of your own obstacles in life, and transform them into opportunities. The magical variety of the things met in this world reveal your own impressive creativity. For you are the Grand Creator of all that exists in this special universe of experience. Yet – and here is the jewel of this – you are not imprisoned by all you have made in this world, whether noble or evil, cherished or feared. Not trapped that is, unless you choose to be.

Dreams Express The Full Spectrum Of Human Experience

It is of course the world of your sleep and dreams. A world which encompasses the total range of human experience from the egoless void of dreamless sleep, to the sharply felt pangs of personal fear and identity.

Although dreams and sleep have always fascinated human beings, it is only toward the middle of this century that real scientific breakthroughs were made in understanding them. More recently still, with the development of greatly increased sensitivity in scientific measuring of the brain and cells, dreams have been shown to be an essential part of our learning and creative process. Also, the tremendous area of experiment undertaken by individuals in the Human Growth Movement, not only defined non clinical ways of exploring dreams, but also showed them to be a wealth of information and creative experience. Freud described dreams as being more than the supernatural events or random imagery previously supposed. But his presentation left them as expressions of unconscious repression and symbolism. Today dreams are seen to represent the whole spectrum of human experience.

Dream Consciousness Transforms Your Life

If you drive a car you cannot afford to lack skill. Your life and other people’s life depend on it. However, even if you do not drive a car you are nevertheless the driver or operator of one of the most complex vehicles ever created. It is a vehicle with many functions. It can be one of the most destructive or creative implements, and so needs enormous skill to understand and handle well. The vehicle is your own body and mind.

The essential you – the naked, decision making, responsive spark of consciousness – stands in the middle of myriad flows of energy and influence. Everything from internal urges to eat, mate, be angry, to external influences such as social pressure, music or opportunity, call you to decide or respond. To respond or decide in ways which actually satisfy you takes great skill – the lack of which leads to internal tensions, ill health, frustration, social rejection or lack of recognition and so on.

Because dreams portray the various aspects of your life as external objects, and play out your relationship with them as the dream drama, they are excellent maps to guide decision making.

The following dream, told by Mo, is an example of this.

She says, “I gave birth to a little girl – Charlotte. I had mixed feelings about this. There was both uncertainty and excitement. I had a strong desire to tell someone about the birth, so telephoned my friend in Australia. She listened to my excitement in silence. I felt uneasy at this, then she said to me “I’ve lost Luke” (her son). He had died a week before. Then I woke with muddled feelings.”

On considering her dream Mo felt the baby didn’t have any obvious connection with a male figure. It was beautiful, healthy and sure of being loved and cherished by Mo. When asked who or what she had lost and mourned for she immediately felt strong emotions because she had ended a ten year long relationship with a male friend and lover. It was then clear the dream depicted what was happening in regard to this. Her love life and sexuality – the baby – were alive and born anew, even without her ex-lover. But her pleasure in this was dulled because a part of herself – the female friend – was still mourning the death of the relationship. This lessened her enjoyment and excitement about the new things emerging in her life. Nevertheless, having such a clear picture of herself helped her steer a more decisive course through her feelings of loss toward her sense of new birth.

Mo arrived at her understanding of the dream by taking each figure or part of the dream and looking at what feelings, memories or information it held for her. Her new baby was obviously an expression of her pleasure and sense of well being.

The friend depicted a sense of loss. When she asked herself where pleasure and a sense of loss could be found in her life, the dream was clear. Therefore, asking yourself straightforward questions about your dream will uncover much of its information.

Not Imprisoned By All The World You Made

We are all born victims of circumstance. But we need not remain a victim.

Your natural response to your environment is to be influenced by it. A disturbing event would stimulate you to feel fear, a calming event to feel pleasure. Your moods are usually influenced by what happens to you. So being in prison would be more depressing than being free. Being rejected would cause more pain than being admired or loved.

Our emotions and feelings about ourselves are like a keyboard that is played upon by people and events. If we are praised or rewarded our self confidence and therefore performance will usually be enhanced. That is fine except it means we will usually depend upon the world to create our moods and our sense of our own value. This makes us victims. We may not be dependent on a drug, but on praise, success, being admired or wanted. Without them we may experience the lows the drug user does on withdrawal.

As a human being though, you have an extraordinary possibility. This dream of Ed’s explains it.

I was in a prison with several others – all in one cell. It felt as if I had been in the prison for years. I was standing near the bars angry and shouting about the injustice of my incarceration.

As I stood raging I suddenly realised that all my anger was having no affect on the world. I was the only one suffering it. I saw that the peace and freedom I wanted from release I could have now by letting go of my anger. I would then be in peace, and would be free of my own negative emotions. I forgave my judges and gaolers, and a change came over me. In the following years I learnt to drop the other ideas and emotions I tortured myself with. I was filled with joy until my bliss filled the cell. In this way all had a changed relationship. In a strange way I was now utterly free.

The greatest prison of all, the greatest of torturers, is our own emotions and our concepts or ideas. While Ed felt angry and held the idea he had been wrongly accused, he was tormented and trapped – imprisoned in his own ideas and emotions. To have received a public apology and released would have changed his feelings, but he would still have remained a passive victim of events. Instead he found in his dream the greatest freedom of all – a blissful freedom – the release from his mind and emotions.

Almost every dream you have shows you what world of experience you are creating out of your memories, your habitual attitudes, your fears and hopes. Because of this, each dream can be another step toward blissful freedom. The following dream shows clearly how Emma is imprisoned in difficult feelings.

I’ve had this dream for years. I’m trapped in a long passageway or corridor. I can’t get out. I’m feeling my way along the wall – there is a small light at the end of the tunnel, I can’t get to it. I’m very frightened. I wake up before I get to the end. Then I feel afraid to go back to sleep.

Emma cannot escape by struggling. Her trap is one of the emotions and mind. No matter what helped her create the trap, she can be free by standing out of the particular web of ideas and feelings which weave together to create her trap.

You can gather from each dream how you weave a view of the world which creates either suffering or pleasure. This can be done by adding to the questions already given for gaining information from your dreams, this last one.