Tools

Self expression, capabilities, practicality, skills. Your attitudes that enable you to make changes, and your skill to do so. But there are excellent tools you can use in unfolding your own latent potential. 

Practical abilities you have; suggestion of things we might need to do in our life – hammer out a situation with someone, cut away old attitudes, drill through resistances to discover our real feelings, etc.; male sexuality in different aspects.

A researcher at the University of Pennsylvania found that cats with damage to a particular part of their brains would live out in their dreams movement practicing what they lacked through the brain dmage. These cats would stalk, crouch and spring at imaginary prey. He concluded from this that one of the functions of dreaming is to practice life skills.

Thoughts and thinking are tools to be used in problem solving but are only part of the necessary toolkit. It is important to clearly understand what a thought is, and not confuse it with any sort of final truth. Any thought or image is only a mental photo of something or someone. It is never the person or thing and must not be seen as such. As with a photo, thought is also only a tiny fragmented copy of what we are considering. Nevertheless, we need to use thoughts in considering and clarifying what it is we seek an answer to especially in dream work.

Another tool that is very useful is shifting your mood in a dream or in everyday life. When you do this your whole surroundings change. Actors and actresses do this all the time, but maybe only on the surface not realising the enormity of it.

Example: When I arrived home, M. was out. Up rose the loneliness and pain. I stood looking out of the window in the end bedroom, not knowing what to do, where to go, how, what, when, where?

M arrived home. I could feel my pain cutting me off from any flow to her. She came into the room. I could see on her face the effect of weeks of living with my uncertainty, my misery and her own. Her whole body sagged as she saw me still in a desperate state of mind. I was already in the groove to spread yet more gloom. To make her feel as fearful of being in her own home as I had grown to be because of the misery it caused me. With an effort I acted out as much warmth of meeting as I could. I walked up to her smiling and kissed her and hugged her. I backed this up by the certainty that there was no way out. I saw her whole body and face change as she relaxed. I could see her drop the anxiety of being hit yet again by my remarks my feelings my condition. It worked. From that day on I have known more peace than I have in the last two years. I have to act out the good feelings, but it is working. If it goes on – it will be more peacefulness than ever before in my life. By acting I was learning to build new habits. I was learning how to build a new life. I realised from all this that there was no cure for the pain I had felt as it was habits I had inherited or developed, and the only way was to develop new habits. Hard but it has worked. See Habits and Eight Step Meth

Drill: Working through the emotions and fears which resist our insight; sex when there is little feeling contact or there are fears preventing intimacy.

Hammer: Aggression; desire to hammer home one’s point; energy to break through resistances or break old patterns of behaviour.

Saw: Energy to reshape old attitudes; wordplay on SEE: sex as the relationship meets hesitations; masturbation; criticism, cynicism, a questioning state of mind. Enquiry by looking at the problem. Cutting remarks or experiences.

Screwdriver: Using energy to make secure connections or to mend human situations of separateness.

Plane: Smoothing out the rough patches of your life by shaving away parts of what you feel. It may be at times uncomfortable

See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Peer Dream Work