Author Archive
The Beast in Dreams
The beast is usually an animal of extraordinary power or a creature causing great terror is a feature of many dreams or nightmares. The figure may be partly human, or an animal which has strange characteristics, or perhaps it is a figure which never quite declares itself, remaining unseen but causing or projecting great fear. In some dreams the beast takes the form of a prehistoric creature.
When explored in any depth such dream images are realised to be an expression of powerful internal emotions, responses and drives which have in most cases previously remained unconscious or repressed. The reason for this lack of expression in conscious life is varied. It may be that painful childhood experiences created a block, or fear surrounding some basic drives such as anger, sexuality or self expression. Therefore major areas of one’s potential are withheld and become symbolised by the beast. That such a beast appears threatening and aggressive, or even bent on one’s destruction, is a simple statement of the way we relate to the forces of our psyche that are bound up with it. For instance if we have been made terrified that our parents will desert us, the expression of our need for love may create this terror. So the beast, in itself, is usually not a thing of terror. The awful feelings are what we experience in connection with what it signifies.
As this terror originally occurred in early childhood at a time when our developing identity was very fragile, or during later traumatic events, the force of such feelings are often life threatening as far as our growing identity was concerned. But similar repression may surround the strength of our own sexuality or basic driving forces.
As many of us are not at ease with our emotions and irrational urges, to meet this ‘beast’ may not be easy even as an adult. This would mean feeling the intensity of our childhood emotions and fears, reappraising them, and integrating the information gathered from such an experience. The information might well include insights into why we avoided certain life situations, or why strong feelings were evoked by seemingly simple events. The example below gives some small insight into this. The information is told by a woman who helped Margaret work on her dream.
Margaret dreamt there was a whole lot of downy little feathers falling from the sky and covering her, like snow. The sky was full of them. She had been watching a baby eagle very high up in tree tops flying from tree to tree. She felt it was looking for it’s mother/ parents. Then a man had caught the baby eagle by a string around it’s leg and Margaret was appalled and said to him, ‘You can’t do that. You must let it go.’ Then the feathers started to fall and Margaret felt that any moment now the irate parent eagles would arrive. They didn’t but she was with her back to a wall sheltering as best she could.
While we explored Margaret’s feelings and memories connected with the dream symbols, she told me that her man friend prodded an old childhood pain which he didn’t know about. Margaret and her son had been with him and his mother for a good weekend camping. She told her son he could go play in the park while they packed the car and they would pick him up on the way out. They were all in the car and drove to where the son was and called him, he saw them and started to run towards them and then the man friend drove the car forward as if to make out they were leaving him behind. Margaret burst with pain and anger.
The underlying cause of this was that her own parents had split up and neither of them wanted Margaret to live with them. She had therefore been looked after by her grandparents. The event that crystallised her feelings occurred one day when her Grandfather had, on the Grandmother’s instructions, driven Margaret, who was 7 years old, to the edge of the town, told her to get out and started to drive away. This was because she wouldn’t eat her breakfast. She still carries the pain of that day. She told her father many years later and he was very angry with his own father for doing that to Margaret. She says – ‘Anyway, it came out again when we were looking at the dream. The male friend grew up with an alcoholic father who has just died, but he says he hasn’t any trauma to deal with?’
The theme of the beast is very important in women’s dreams, but may hold a slightly different theme than in men’s. This difference is illustrated by the story of Beauty and the Beast, in which a young girl meets and lives with a powerful beast. The story emphasises the girl’s relationship with her father as a counterpoint to that with the beast. It suggests that a young woman meets a different kind of love when she leaves the affection from and for her father. To become fully a woman and mother, she must discover the deeply animal urges which underlie the personality and social traits she has developed so far. These urges are not at all uncouth, but are certainly primitive. They open her to experience deep sexual longing, and the power to give herself with passion to her children and to her man. Thus she allows in herself something forbidden in her relationship with her father – an erotic and procreational love.
Overall the beast represents the forces in our personality out of which we emerge into social and intellectual life. Unless we make friends with our beast there may always be conflict in us between the rational and non-rational. We existed as a beast for millions of years before the sort of consciousness which led to personal awareness emerged. Self-awareness is still very new and vulnerable. It needs the greater depth and innate wisdom of the beast to survive. See: under animals.
Here is an extract from the dreamwork of a man exploring a dream about snakes which he feared would attack him.
As I imagine myself to be the snakes I have a distinct feeling that for millions of years I have existed as an animal. As human beings we often reject the animal in us. I see the meaning of the snakes. The snakes are so powerful. They are urges in all of us, to be felt if we are not afraid of them. The urges they depict can become a part of our everyday life. A man is somebody who has all that power there but it is under control. I have been brought up to feel one is supposed to be meek and mild or something. It was not socially acceptable to growl a bit.
I am a mixture of a beast and this awareness of self. WHY? WHY? (I feel like a wordless animal which has just got awareness). Intellect is developing and can ask these questions but there is still the powerful beast here. Why has this happened to me? Why have I woken up from being an unconscious animal and become conscious? What is this all about? It feels like it ought to be a swamp outside the window now – or a jungle.
I am a man! What is a man? What is it to be a man? I really feel this isn’t a way to be. It is too strange to be a man. I am really something odd. It is odd being a man. It is frightening. I am not like the other beasts. The other beasts haven’t got this difficulty of self awareness. The don’t carry this difficult thing – self awareness. They don’t carry the difficulty all the time. Why should I be different? I don’t like it. DON’T like it.
There is something I am looking at which is to do with how human beings got to be in the situation they are in today. Part of it is this feeling of wanting to turn back – wanting to go back to being unconscious – to being asleep. A lot of them did it. They turned back. Hundreds and hundreds turned back. That was the story of Noah. Hundreds turned back because they didn’t want to bear consciousness. Huge numbers of people attempt it today with drugs or suicide because being aware is so difficult.
The Ancient Mystery of Baptism
The act of baptism long pre-dated the Christian community. One can find water for purification outside very ancient temples. Therefore the tradition of baptism is older than the historical Christian church. It had its ascendance in the love a mother felt for her children, and beyond that the love she felt and gave to other children. Beyond that still, a loving woman might suckle a creature and extend her love beyond the normal boundaries. She might hold that other child, or that creature, with the same tenderness that she held her own baby. In such a moment she would know something that was beyond herself. It is something that flows through all of us. We symbolise it as the water, the milk, the wine, or the blood. It is the flow of love that comes from beyond our own small personality.
The urge that enables us to reach out to another person who is not our own kin, or to another creature, is a small awareness of that universal life and consciousness that pervades all things. It is an expression of the Mystery that we can perhaps never understand, that is Life.
Baptism represents a conscious opening or an introduction to that Life. It is an experience of that life flowing into and through us. It is also an entrance into the recognition of the wider family; of that mysterious body we call Christ. We become brothers and sisters in a wider community. It takes some skill to recognise who these brothers and sisters are, and what part they might play in our life. Calling yourself a Christian does not necessarily mean you have been truly baptised in that spirit of life and love. In fact you might still be imprisoned by attitudes of class, creed, skin colour or gender.
Fundamentally baptism means a change in the stance or condition of your inner attitudes. It means relinquishing fixed opinions and having an open mind. It means opening the doors of your being to new experiences, to new possibilities, pleasurable and painful. It means learning to love without bending others to your will, without grasping them for your own needs. It also means becoming a channel for that river of Life to flow through. This path does not dangle a carrot of eternal bliss, or the resolution of all human problems. “I come”, that flow of Life in us says, “not to bring peace, but a sword…. take up your cross and follow me.” What is offered is participation in everyday life and death in a new way. We can become workers in the vineyard – that is, co-workers with the processes of growth and evolution in the worlds of nature.
From a scientific view we are all of the same kin. We all started our journey toward humanity as a single celled creature. We go back to that beginning when we reproduce and start our growth for the sexual ovum. Also it is now known that virtually everyone had the same mother – this has been shown through the analysis of our genes. Countless generations ago a woman gave birth to children that became our present race. Some us changed skin colour as we moved into darker climates because vitamin D was essential to our health, and with dark skins we could not absorb enough of it. Unfortunately we also inherited the tribal tendency to look at a slightly different sister and brother as alien and enemies. See archetype of baptism.
Background and Foreground of Dreams
A dream or vision presents a view of life in which inner feelings and states are personified – for instance a feeling of fear depicts itself as a dark and scary place in your dream or a threatening person. So a general human or historical situation, such as the many people in history who have given their lives to help or heal others, can become a single exterior symbol in a dream, such as Christ, Mohammed, Buddha or a great guru would be. A dream image could therefore integrate all our thoughts and feelings about our forebears whose life and death was the foundation of our own existence into a single image. But of course a more common representation is of the personal inner feelings and fears we exist in during our waking life.
What we do with language illustrates this in large degree. For instance, how we learn language illustrates how we learn many other things. There are certainly many words for which you know the precise meaning, and yet you have never looked them up in the dictionary. Your understanding has arisen from seeing them in context with other words. You have arrived at understanding by frequently meeting the word in a variety of contexts.
This connects with the cultural symbols and figures which or who we meet displayed in cultural contexts. For instance Buddhism in Europe and probably in the US, is displayed in the context of a non-dominant religion. Christianity – Christ – is displayed in a dominant cultural role in the USA. All of this is information which although it might never have been spelled out to us we take in through being in the midst of it. Also the symbols of these religions portray enormous information. The crucified figure for Christianity, and the seated, reposed figure with eyes half closed for Buddhism. These portray a huge difference, and without anything else ARE information.
Such things never become conscious unless we pointedly examine them. We learn about them almost without conscious thought, and often they remain as part of the ‘background’ of our perceptions. We can make what was unconscious knowledge conscious by exploring our dream. You can do this by using Talking As or Processing Dreams.
We are therefore faced with what is a foreground, and what is background in our life.
Part of our background, for instance, is that we are each an historical event, with particular family, national and cultural background and tendencies. It is what used to be called blood.
Our background is what is often called the unconscious. It is the complex and varied influences and the interactions, that underlie our existence. These spread from the deeply subatomic, atomic, molecular, cellular, organic and inter-organ activities of our body and environment, to social processes on as many levels. It includes personal but forgotten memory, personality structure, response and experience. But this background is also all the things mentioned above in regard to cultural information, all the lives that have preceded ours and left their mark in one way or another, along with the time we are born and therefore the circumstances we are born into.
The Foreground is what we sense as the reality of our isolated, independent integrity or identity. It is the world of our present experience gathered through our senses and thoughts. It is connected with our conscious waking self, and the sense or image we have of ourselves. This self image is often tied up with our body and what we feel and think about it.
Integration between the two is actually a working relationship between self and reality. But as ‘reality’ is generally so hard to grasp in any encompassing way, when it is felt in anything more than tiny parcels of information – i.e. when it is sensed in anything like its entirety – it is experienced as a relationship with the mystical or numinous – enlightenment.
Things such as childhood trauma may stand in the way of a ‘working’ relationship between background and foreground. Remember that background includes all of the workings of the cosmos in its most intricate ways. For without that you would have no body. And events in our family, in the cosmos, in social history, and our own actions and behaviour, have preceded our emergence as an individual in this moment now. We inherit the effects of these and have to meet them in our daily life, in this moment now. In past cultures these were recognised and given various names or described in various ways – sin – as you sow, so shall you reap – karma – kismet.
Different ways of thinking about and dealing with such causes of dysfunction were used in different ages and cultures. In the west, we mostly see events in our life as accidents, or as having psychological causes, such as childhood traumas or lack of care. Western culture seems somewhat blind to cultural, historical and family causes which flow into the individual from prior to his or her birth. This is starting to be defined though from the genetic point of view. See Individuation – Collective Unconscious – Identity and Dreams.
Babylonian Dream Beliefs
Babylonian civilisation lasted from 1800 till 600 BC. It was an urban society with twelve or so cities in the nation, resting upon the agricultural land surrounding the cities. The social structure was headed by the king as absolute monarch. Under him were a group of appointed governors and administrators. Beneath this were freemen and then slaves. The culture lasted for about 1200 years.
The world ancient people’s lived in was one filled with spirits and demons, gods and goddesses, good and evil forces. This is understandable when we realise our forebears had no clear conception of how natural forces, illness, the mind, worked. The many intangibles they were surrounded by, the immense uncertainties they faced, were quite usefully called spirits – invisible/mysterious yet potent powers that could act upon one for good or ill. Their beliefs and observations regarding dreams were therefore deeply coloured by their world view.
The peoples of Assyria and Mesopotamia were animists-that is, they saw themselves surrounded by natural forces that represented gods to be propitiated and spirits and devils to be feared. Anxious in the present, fearful for the future, feeling themselves the prey of powerful forces beyond their comprehension or control, they turned to a whole armoury of devices for protection and reassurance-amulets and magic spells, prophecy, divination, and dream interpretation.
But this view should not be seen a superstitious or from ignorance. The words devil and spirit simply meant an unseen and powerful force. Before the invention of the microscope disease was in fact an ‘unseen force’ that could kill you. The devil was a destructive force and spirits could be helpful or destructive. They discovered that people could be helped or even healed by what today we call placebos. The magic rituals and amulets were just that.
There seems to be little doubt that in Assyria, as in Egypt, dreams were used in therapeutic processes. There are many rituals for dispelling the effect of evil dreams: about 1700 BC., a poem from Babylon describes how a noble has been made ill by demons coming from the nether world, and how three dreams lead to his recovery. This is why the interpretation of bad dreams was more important than the deciphering of pleasant or obvious dreams-some thing had to be done about them. Anticipating contemporary psycho-analysis, the Assyrians believed that once the enigma presented by the dreams had been worked out the disturbing symptoms or the affliction would pass. But whereas modern psychoanalysis uses the dream to illuminate the hidden conflicts and repressed anxieties of the patient, the Assyrians believed either that a demon must be exorcised, or that the appropriate deity would reveal the means by which the sufferer could be treated.
The Assyrians certainly depended on dream books for help. This much we know from clay tablets found at Nineveh, in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who reigned between 669 and 626 BC. This library, the oldest directly known to us, was a repository of learning reaching back to the dawn of civilisation-possibly to 5000 BC. The Nineveh tablets, in fact, provide the link in a chain of dream theory that stretches from the most remote past to our own time. It is believed that Ashurbanipal’s dream book was used by the Roman soothsayer Artemidorus (about AD 140), whose work has in turn inspired almost every subsequent compiler of dream books.
The Ashurbanipal tablets tell us, for example, that if a man flies repeatedly in his dreams, whatever he owns will be lost. In Zolar’s Encyclopaedia and Dictionary of Dreams, published in New York in 1963, we read, “Flying at a low altitude: ruin is ahead for you.” Another idea that persisted is that dreams go by contraries. If an Assyrian dreamed that he was blessed by a god, he expected to experience that god’s wrath; but “if the god utters a curse against the man, his prayer will be accepted.” If you are cursed in a dream, Zolar tells us in 1963, “Ambitions will be realised.” That is of course the use of placebo or suggestion.
Death was a certainty, illness, physical or mental was a possibility, love and reproduction were drives to be satisfied, and so many dreams or myths centred on the way they met these. It must also be remembered that such cultures had, according to recent theories, only recently developed personal self-awreness; only just lost direct perception of subjective gods. See: The Origins of Consciousness by Julian Jaynes.
In the Babylonian culture the attempt to find certainty amid uncertainty, to control or direct the threatening forces of nature, to find ones way through the events of life, led to a wide array of techniques concerned with prophecy, magical control or propitiation, and trying to know the will of the gods. The kings hoped that a god would be on their side in battle, or would give them confidence by telling them in a dream that they would overcome their enemies. In fact the influence of these early Babylonian beliefs is still present in modern religion where each side of an opposing army, even with belief in the same God, prays for support and victory.
The Babylonians believed that an event in one part of the world or cosmos, would cause an occurrence in another part. A comet appearing in the sky for instance, would be seen as presaging great social or personal changes. This link between the cosmos and the individual also suggested to the Babylonians that the cosmos could be influenced by human action – thus the rituals of appeasement or magic.
These beliefs led to an examination of any mysterious event in an attempt to understand its personal or wider significance. Dreams were one of the possible sources of such prophecy or enlightening information. Over a long period of time strange events such as the birth of a two headed calf, or a strange dream, were noted and following events watched. If a barren woman had a child after such an event, then it was thought that the next time the event occurred, a barren woman would again be made fertile. Of course this led to deliberate attempts to obtain or perform the first, to bring about the latter – thus magic. There were in fact magic rituals to prevent bad or evil dreams.
Dreams were classified into several types. Those of rulers and leaders such as priests were seen as one type, and those of common people of another. There was also a division between good dreams and bad dreams. If one goes into any large book-store and looks at dream dictionaries written before the advent of modern psychotherapy, it can easily be seen that most definitions are still written in the same style – that the dream will bring good or bad luck regarding money, romance or health.
In fact they are derivations of the ancient Babylonian dream books. These speculations, observations and collection of folk beliefs were put into book form by the Babylonians, and are thought to have contained texts on dreams dating back to 5000 BC. These ancient Babylonian dream dictionaries were copied and taken to the library at Nineveh by king Assurbanipal. The great dream encyclopaedist Artemidorus later drew on these records for his own learning. The part of the Jewish/Hebrew Talmud which was written during the Babylonian captivity is also full of dream interpretations and ways of dealing with dreams, and undoubtedly drew on the Babylonian library.
These dream dictionaries contained beliefs and observations took note of any belief however bizarre. As an example of some of the ideas presented in this collection of works, we can read – ‘If a date appears on a man’s head, it means woe. If a fish appears on his head, that man will be strong. If a mountain appears on his head, it means that he will have no rival. If salt appears on his head, it means that he will apply himself to bald his house….If a man dreams that he goes to a pleasure garden, it means that he will gain his freedom. If he goes to a market garden, his dwelling will be uncomfortable. If he goes to kindle a firebrand he will see woe during his days. If he goes to sow a field, he will escape from a ruined place. If he goes to hunt in the country, he will be eminent. If he goes to an oxstall, (he will have) safety. If he goes to the sheepfold, he will rise to the first rank.’
Babylonian culture also produced one of the great, and certainly the oldest literary work which included a series of dreams. This is the Epic Of Gilgamesh which dates from about 2000 BC, and is the oldest hero account. It is the story of how the king, Gilgamesh, searches for immortality having lost his friend Enkidu. See: The mention of Gilgamesh in analysis of dreams.
If one had a dream, the practice in Babylonia was to have it interpreted by a priest. From descriptions of such interpretations, such as we find in the Epic of Gilgamesh, this may have been principally a form of social psychology to help reduce anxiety in people who lived in a world peopled by demons and spirits. If the dream was seen as evil, or sent by a demon, some form of cleansing ritual was often used. But dream interpretation had other aspects as can been seen in Daniel’s dream interpretations for king Nebuchadnezzar. In his interpretation there are elements showing a drive for personal survival, political insight, and psychological knowledge of what would be relevant to the king and his concerns. The priesthood and dream interpreters such as Daniel, were therefore most likely skilled in a level of counselling relevant to their times and social environment. They were healers in allaying anxiety. They were shrewd assessors and perhaps manipulators. They performed the function of helping people to deal with their concerns and fears.
Because Daniel’s interpretation is such an interesting statement in regard to dreams and how they were used in the past, the biblical verses are given here in full.
As for thee, O king, thy thoughts came into thy mind upon thy bed, what should come to pass hereafter: and he that revealeth secrets maketh known to thee what shall come to pass. 002:030 But as for me, this secret is not revealed to me for any wisdom that I have more than any living, but for their sakes that shall make known the interpretation to the king, and that thou mightest know the thoughts of thy heart. 002:031 Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. 002:032 This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, 002:033 His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. 002:034 Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces.
002:035 Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth. 002:036 This is the dream; and we will tell the interpretation thereof before the king. 002:037 Thou, O king, art a king of kings: for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory. 002:038 And wheresoever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven hath he given into thine hand, and hath made thee ruler over them all. Thou art this head of gold. 002:039 And after thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth.
002:040 And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise. 002:041 And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay. 002:042 And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken. 002:043 And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay. 002:044 And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.
002:045 Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure. 002:046 Then the king Nebuchadnezzar fell upon his face, and worshipped Daniel, and commanded that they should offer an oblation and sweet odours unto him. 002:047 The king answered unto Daniel, and said, Of a truth it is, that your God is a God of gods, and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets, seeing thou couldest reveal this secret. 002:048 Then the king made Daniel a great man, and gave him many great gifts, and made him ruler over the whole province of Babylon, and chief of the governors over all the wise men of Babylon.
Considering that all present societies and the practices we find in them have emerged and evolved from previous societies and practices, we can be sure that Daniel’s method of dream interpretation was a tradition passed on from long previous ages. So it is likely he used what today we associate with ancient shamans. If this is so, Daniel would not have consciously thought about the dream, but in his terms would have prayed for insight into it. This means that he would have entered a state of mind in which his thinking was quietened and he allowed his unconscious intuitions, guided by his image of his God and his knowledge of the times and the people he lived amongst, to emerge and throw light on Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. See: LSD Hypnosis and dreams; history of dream beliefs.
Baby Dreams
What do babies dream about?
From your baby’s perspective, birth and the experience of life outside the womb is probably like waking from a long and unbroken dream into an entirely new world.
The science of modern dream and sleep research really leapt forward when Eugene Aserinsky, working as a researcher in a sleep laboratory, noticed that his eight year old son’s eyes moved while he slept. Later it was found this was due to the eyes following activities taking place in a dream, and that these rapid eye movements (REM) were a sign of dreaming.
From this it was seen that even newborn babies dream. In fact, although adults only spend about a third of their sleep period dreaming, babies spend 50 to 80 percent of sleep in dreams. Some researchers, carrying their investigation into the womb, state that at 24-30 weeks gestational age the unborn baby dreams a 100 percent.
Because most researchers investigate dreaming from a physiological or neurological standpoint, they are not very good at telling us why babies, or we adults, spend so much time dreaming. This is because dreams are more connected with the passionate drive to survive, to relate, to learn and grow. When we see a child go into a frenzy when they are lost, we can understand just how passionate the emotional level of dreams are. It is this level of feeling that dreams deal with. But an interesting study done by Nathaniel Kleitman showed that he observed a regular breathing cycle in infants which lasted 50 minutes. He felt that this was probably to wake the baby at these intervals to see if it was in need of feeding. It would signal this by waking up and crying. The child would therefore get adequate nutrition.
Likening a dream to one of the monitors we see at the side of a patient in a hospital is perhaps the easiest way to understand what a dream is. Just as the monitor presents a visual image of the patients heartbeat, their blood pressure and temperature, a dream puts into drama and images the processes, feelings and fears that lie behind our personal awareness. In a baby, an unimaginable amount of learning, adjustment, development of responses and body skills is taking place. We usually take this for granted. But like a television show or film, it is only when we see the credits at the end of such a film that we realise just how much behind the scenes work has taken place to produce the film. And this is precisely what dreams show – the behind the scenes activities and dramas.
Understanding this, and realising that a baby and young child lives in a completely different world than we do as an adult, helps us support them toward a healthy and happy adulthood. For instance a baby and child who have not learned to speak cannot think. We think with words. So during pre-speech there are only feeling responses or instinctive urges and fears to guide the child. The development of thinking only phases in gradually, and prior to that we learn from events and relationships, not ideas. See Animal Children to understand the part speech plays in a child’s life.
For instance, a woman I met, Tina, as a child was told she was being taken to a party, but in fact she was being taken to an orphanage. She was given a bar of chocolate. She never ate it. Since then she has never been able to eat sweets, and she still has an eating problem while with other people. When she got to the orphanage she immediately went to the toilets and hid there, feeling she couldn’t speak. She still has difficulty speaking to groups of people. Tina had experienced massive feeling responses to what had been done to her. Those feelings are still active ‘behind the scenes’ of her life.
Dreams depict all the aspects of what is taking place within the child. Sometimes, just for the child to tell or draw a dream helps them integrate the underlying feelings and processes. Another thing they can do is to model their dream. In this way the awful dream event or creature can be put outside them and they can manipulate the frightening things – for instance they can put the creature in a cage where it cannot hurt them.
If you yourself can understand that whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen, so that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so, all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind. And if you can therefore understand that dream fears are all about fears, hurts and threats that threaten the person or child’s confidence in their on coping strategies and aid them towards confidence and coping, you will do wonders.
Remember that a child’s greatest fears are to be abandoned or threatened by what they see or hear – television and films for a child are almost the same as the real world.
While small, my youngest son told me he dreamt his pet baby mice had opened their eyes. When I asked him what it means for a baby mouse to open its eyes, he told me that it showed they were ready to become independent. I then asked him what it might be like to be a pet, and he said a pet couldn’t do anything for itself, not even get its own water or food. He went on to say that because he was small, he sometimes felt like a pet. So we talked this over and he decided he could start getting his own glass of water by putting a chair near the sink. He was moving toward independence.
Although you cannot have a conversation with your baby in the same way I did with my young son, if you see your baby is having disturbing dreams you can still talk to her or him, even while they are asleep. Your baby is incredibly sensitive to the sound of your voice, and your own state of calm or agitation lying behind the way your voice sounds. Therefore you can sit with your baby and imagine a situation in which you feel calm and loving. When you feel calm and strong, gently talk to your baby telling it you are holding it close in your love, and you are with it while it meets whatever is disturbing it. Tell it your love is the strength it can use, and imagine wrapping your baby in your calm and love.
Most nightmares are an expression of a healing process. They are attempts to meet and discharge the feelings in difficult events we have faced. Because your child is so dependent upon you and is vulnerable, it is more prone to nightmares than adults are. A common nightmare for children is that a lion or some other scary creature is chasing it. There is good evidence to show that the lion might represent the child’s anger, which it has been told is wrong or bad, so the child is scared of it and tries to run away from its own feelings
Whether this theory is right or not, an easy way to help your child deal with its nightmare is to encourage him or her to draw or model the dream. In this way the child gets the frightening thing out in front of it where the scary thing can be seen and controlled. Once it has done this, ask it what it wants to do with the scary creature or thing. For instance it might wish to put it in a cage, or to make friends with it. In either case the child begins to feel more in control. Allowing your child to talk about such disturbing dreams also is very healing. It allows the child to voice its fears, and to know you will listen without criticism or judgement. But nightmares are exceptions. Most dreams are about your child’s personal growth, what it is learning, what it is feeling about the world around it, and the ways it is expressing or denying its own creative centre. So drawing, modelling and talking about these everyday dreams is tremendously creative and growth promoting for your child.
Here is an example of what a child faces and learns. True it is from an adults dream, but we carry the child in us.
I worked on the dream with my wife. The whole centre of the dream seemed to be the little girl. As I came in to land, because I had been gliding high above, she saw me and ran away very frightened. I was gliding in the same direction she was running and called out to her not be frightened. She stopped and I landed. In amazement she looked at me and said, “How did you get to be up there?”
As the young girl I had walked from the back door of my house, along the garden path, across a footpath behind the houses, into the field. As I looked through her eyes and feelings, I realised what a long journey it was for me to get into the field. Not a long journey physically in distance, but an enormous journey within myself. To be able to go from the door to the field, I had gone through the long process of learning to walk; I had learned the confidence to be alone; through language and understanding what my parents had passed to me, I had found out how to avoid stinging nettles, and how not to be overcome by my fears of them and of the huge creatures that I knew as cows. This had all taken ages, and so walking into the field was an enormous achievement, especially as I was doing it by myself. Learning to walk itself had taken an tremendous practice and perseverance. Learning to be independent of my mother was also something I had had to learn. I had made the inner journey of acquiring an immense stock of information and conditioning regarding the external environment I was facing too. I had slowly learned survival responses to nettles, walking alone, nests, birds, the sun, trees, spiders, stones, the wind, children, adults, worms, leaves on the trees, cars, etc, etc, etc, etc, and so on. See: Pregnancy; individuation.
Although it is difficult to theorise about the subject of babies dreams without their ability to report their experiences, evidence gained from the study of animal dreams probably applies to infants too. Michel Jouvet, while observing dreaming in cats, devised a way to avoid the usual paralysis of voluntary muscles during dreaming. This allowed the cat to actually make full movements while dreaming instead of the usual jerks or subdued movements. The cat would then live out its dream through the movements it made. Jouvet then noted the cats dreams were largely centred around crouching and stalking prey or play fighting. Adrian Morrison of the University of Pennsylvania noted the same behaviour in cats while investigating narcolepsy in animals. Because the area of the brain which usually stopped the dream movements from being expressed fully was injured, the cats Morrison was observing lived out their dreams in the same way Jouvet observed.
Jouvet, and later Nicholas Humphries, reasoned from this evidence that at the beginning of a mammal’s life, an enormous amount of time is spent in practising necessary survival skills in dreams. With cats the survival skill is defence and hunting. With a human infant it has more to do with socialisation, easily expressing its feeling and anger. Estimates have been made of what period of time the baby dreams in the womb, and the figures are that it dreams at 24-30 gestational age weeks a100%.
Taking this further, Christopher Evans, in his book Landscapes of The Night, says that this need to dream about social interactions and adapting to the social rules of their culture and thereby practice them, explains why children who have just started school need a lot of sleep.
The work of Stanislav Grof, which dealt a great deal with the remembrance of the birth experience in adults, and the recovery of memories and fantasies connected with it, also suggests that the dreaming baby is not only practising social skills and preparing for action in the external world, but also trying to balance and perhaps heal the internal memories it already carries from its uterine life, trauma of birth, and post-natal relationships. This type of dreaming may account for the nightmares suffered by some babies and young children. The function of such dreams or the process behind them appears to be that of attempted integration of experience, or means of finding an adaptation to its containment. See: children’s dreams; individuation.
Autonomous Complex
Many of the characters or elements of our dreams act quite contrary to what we consciously wish. This is why we often find it so difficult to believe all aspects of a dream are part of our own psyche. Some drives or areas of self act or express despite what we would want. These are named autonomous complexes. Recent research into brain activity shows that in fact the brain has different layers or strata of activity. These strata often act independently of each other or of conscious will. Sensing them, as one might in a dream, might feel like meeting an opposing will or being possessed by an alien force. Integration with these aspects of self can of course be gained. See Levels of the Brain; The Two Powers.
A modern view of the personality says that our mind is made up of many modules which are quite distinct. These modules, such as the sexual drive and the ability to speak, usually function in a way which is reasonably integrated. But many areas of dissimilarity are evident if we closely observe the workings of our own responses to life experiences. Because we each hold certain ideas about ourselves – our self image – things we do which do not express this self image may shock or even frighten us. Actions arising from a module of oneself which does not express our accepted self image, may give rise not only to fear, but also a sense of evil, or being possessed by evil.
An autonomous complex may be recognised by any one of four major signs. Firstly we may project enormous feelings of love, repulsion, hate or even fear upon another person we know or meet. The power of these feelings or convictions is so great they create a bond between oneself and the other person. Often these feelings lead us to feel there is a fault in the other person that is repulsive or immoral, and which we find very difficult to accept. For instance a man might see another man he knows committing adultery, and feel so repulsed by the act that he goes around criticising the man, only to find years later that he had been repressing the trait in himself. The very strength of the energy with which we criticise it in others may be equal to the strength with which we repress the urge or characteristic in ourselves.
Another way the autonomous complex may announce itself its to take over or invade the conscious personality. It may be an idealistic vision that possesses the person, a mission such as preaching or improving the lot of other people, or something that re-directs the life of the person in a manner that is not rational. This may lead to extraordinary deeds, done in the possessing influence of the vision or urge – or it may lead to foolishness or disillusionment. The apparent change, however, is that the person is under the influence of urges that were not natural, or the person was not capable of, before the invasion. The life of Joan of Arc is an example of being led to great deeds which were beyond the person prior to the invasion.
But of course the complex may express as something evil, the devil or something or someone possessing one. This can be very frightening to many people because they believe that an actual devil or evil is possessing them, rather than a repressed part of them, or the results of a traumatic experience showing itself in frightening images
The third relationship with an autonomous complex is where something happens to destroy or stop all expression or action of these inner characteristics. As much of our uniqueness and facility for variety arises out of the interaction with these various aspects of self, their disappearance leaves a person empty and without any creativeness – a dried husk without any spark of life.
The fourth possibility is that in which the person consciously attempts to find a working relationship with these disparate aspects of their personality and unconscious.
Example: “We spoke to our “primary selves” which were very well developed. They ran our lives or, as we liked to put it, they drove our psychological cars. They were the ones that made up our personalities; the selves that “knew all the answers” when we first met. Then we went on to learn about our “disowned selves.” For each primary self there were opposite disowned selves that were buried or repressed so that the primaries could keep control of our lives. The primary selves were familiar and we were comfortable with them. It was easy to get them to talk and to tell us how cleverly and successfully they ran our lives. The disowned selves were unfamiliar and threatening to our primary selves. Each primary self felt that the disowned self on the other side was a potential destroyer of our wellbeing. For instance: “What happens if you really let go and learned to ‘be’ instead of to ‘do?’ You might never want to work again!” would be the Pusher’s concern.”
As the autonomous complexes hold in them such varied and spontaneous responses to life, they have enormous creative potential if they can be met and expressed in a way that does not dominate or destroy the central personality. The characters we meet in dreams, their variety and difference to how we know and think of ourselves, present us very clearly with the enormous variety of talents, sensitivities, possible approaches to a situation, and personality types that we hold within us. If we can tap them they are an enormous resource. Although it can be very disorienting and even frightening to meet ones internal infant, and feel its explosive moods and deep instinctive longings, it can enlarge our perspective of life enormously, as well as our ability to relate more widely.
Apart from the infant there are many beings we touch in our dreams. Everything from the deeply animal such as the dog in our dreams, or the wolf, to the sadist, the lover, the monk and the business tycoon. If we do not meet these characters and manage them in our life, they will certainly manage us, and lead us into relationship tangles, emotional responses and actions that are not what we ourselves choose to be or feel. See: examples under compensation; sub-personalities; Integrating a Parent or an ex; Unconscious; Alien
Australian Aborigine Dream Beliefs
The Australian native peoples are divided into more than 500 tribal groups. These tribes are also of two major types – those who live inland, and those who live along the coastline. The separation of tribes and the division provided by the environment led to differences in views about the nature of human life and death, and the part dreams played. But some beliefs, such as reincarnation and the ‘Dreamtime’, were universally held.
Dreamtime refers to an experience and to beliefs that are largely peculiar to the Australian native people. There are at least four aspects to Dreamtime – The beginning of all things; the life and influence of the ancestors; the way of life and death; and sources of power in life.
Dreamtime includes all of these four facets at the same time, being a condition beyond time and space as known in everyday life. The aborigines call it the ‘all-at-once’ time instead of the ‘one-thing-after-another’ time. This is because they experience Dreamtime as the past present and future coexisting. This condition – See: altered states of consciousness – is met when the tribal member lives according to tribal rules, and then is initiated through rituals and hearing the myths of the tribe.
Although Dreamtime may sound rather mystical or mysterious to the Western mind, the experience is based on understandable and observable facts of social and mental life which are unfortunately little valued in Western society. For instance the present is observably the result of past actions or events. Present society is particularly the result of past great men and women and their – heroic – deeds. For the Australian native peoples, as with many other ancient races, the heroic deeds of past ancestors were remembered with great veneration. It was seen that all present life, and even the personal skills and character of tribal members, arose out of the life of the ancestors. The ancestors, their deeds, and what arise from them into the life of the tribe in the present, are all held in the Dreamtime beyond the shifting events of things happening one-after-the-other.
The aborigine people believed that each person had a part of their nature that was eternal. This eternal being pre-existed the life of the individual, and only became a living person through being born to a mother. The person then lived a life in time, and at death melted back into the eternal life. See Archetype of the Big Bang
In writing about the state of mind – the mental world – of early races, J. B. Priestley – in Man and Time – says that if we are to properly understand the ancient peoples we must never project onto them our own state of mind and rational thought. Studies have shown that ancient people experienced what is called an undifferentiated state of mind. Their sense of being a separate and independent person was much less than is commonly experienced in modern life. They did not separate their religious life, their social life, their economic life, their artistic life and their sexual life from each other. This is obvious to even a casual observation of such societies, or even third world cultures, where religion and eating, and work are all very much connected. To be banished from the tribe was tantamount to death for primitive individuals, so deeply were they identified in psychological and practical ways to the rest of the tribe. But it is not an unusual thing for a modern man or woman to leave their place of birth, their family or their country, and live abroad. Such simple facts illustrate the deep divide between the modern and ancient state of mind.
If we remember our early childhood, with the absence of an awareness of passing time, the fullness of each day, the eternity of a week or a month, the enormous and unquestioned – if still untraumatised – sense of connection with our family, then we will have an idea of the mental world of the older races. For the aborigine these facts of their life were tangible realities, known through their inner experience in dreams and waking visions. Prior to the development of the reasoning and questioning mind, people did not consider things by thinking about them in neat ideas and definitions. Like the parables in the Bible or Aesop’s fables, which say so much, but do so with images and through the relationship of one thing or person with another, early human beings thought in pictures or dream like images. So the aborigine would meet the influence of the ancestors in their life as an actual visionary person, rather than thoughts about tribal history. With the visionary meeting would come deep feelings and insights, making it a real educational experience. This is exactly how dreams express, and in this manner most creative or problem solving ‘thinking’ was done by ancient peoples. Therefore the entrance into dreams, or into a condition in which the imagery of dreaming could function while awake, as in visions or altered states of consciousness, was important for the aborigine. Common ways of accessing this state of mind were through ritual or initiation rites. In this way enormous learning experiences could be met, a sense of complete identification with ancestors and tribal history achieved, and personal change or growth accomplished.
This condition of mind or being in which time is ‘all-at-once’ and the past is felt as intensely close as the present, is a natural and fundamental state. It is what the baby experiences in the womb prior to the separation at birth and the development of concepts through the learning of language. So the rituals which enable the aborigine to return to the womb of all time and existence enables them to feel connected once more to all nature, to all their ancestors, and to their own personal meaning and place within the scheme of things. The Dreamtime is a return to the real existence for the aborigine. Life in time is simply a passing phase – a gap in eternity. It has a beginning and it has an end. The life in Dreamtime has no beginning and no end.
The experience of Dreamtime, whether through ritual or from dreams, flowed through into the life in time in practical ways. The individual who enters the Dreamtime feels no separation between themselves and their ancestors. The strengths and resources of the timeless enter into what is needed in the life of the present. The future is less uncertain because the individual feels their life as a continuum linking past and future in unbroken connection. Through Dreamtime the limiatations of time and space are overcome. It is a much observed feature of aboriginal life that knowledge of distant relatives and their condition is frequently displayed. Therefore if a relative is ill, a distant family member knows this and hurries to them. Often the intuitive knowledge of herbal medicine is gained also.
For the aborigine tribes, there is no ending of life at ‘death’. Dead relatives are very much a part of continuing life. It is believed that in dreams dead relatives communicate their presence. At times they may bring healing if the dreamer is in pain. Death is seen as part of a cycle of life in which one emerges from Dreamtime through birth, and eventually returns to the timeless, only to emerge again. It is also a common belief that a person leaves their body during sleep, and temporarily enters the Dreamtime.
The aboriginal tribes are connected with their local landscape in a way that perhaps no other race of recent times is. The landscape is almost an externalisation of the individual’s inner world. Each tribe had a traditional area of the land which was theirs alone, and it was believed that in the Dreamtime the ancestors shaped the flat landscape into its present features. Each feature was in some way an act of the ancestors, and therefore the tribe. Like many tribal peoples, the Australian native people were deeply dependent upon their beliefs, the landscape and their inner life for their identity and strength. This makes them vulnerable to anything which disrupts their beliefs, although, apart from such vulnerability, they have a greater psychic sense of wholeness and identity with their tribe and environment than is common in Western individuals.
See the feature Spirit-Child: The Aboriginal Experience of Pre-Birth Communication.
The Astral Body, Astral Travel and the Dream Body
The term ‘astral’, ‘etheric’, or even ‘dream’ body, refers to the theory that human consciousness can become completely separate from the body, and in this form be free of the limitations the body has. The astral body is said to appear very much like the physical body, with all the features and limbs, but be made of subtler material, or even of thought and emotion. This concept of a finer body most likely arose out of two basic human experiences in the earliest period of human thought. Because while dreaming it is common to be in places far distant from where one is asleep, it was thought that the dreamer actually visited that place while they slept, or that a finer spiritual body had travelled away from the corporeal self and gone to a heavenly or spirit world. Also early human beings, just as occurs today, experienced impressive out-of-body events which at face value again show a distinct self moving at a distance from, and having a life completely independent of, the physical body.
This concept and the experiences it arose from, have led to the development of whole belief systems, such as that of spiritualism and occultism. If you have a good grounding in what is understood about dreaming these are fascinating areas of human thought and experience to explore, as they illustrate the variety of ways human experience can be described and theorised about. See What we need to remember about dreams.
In spiritualism for instance a whole heaven world, or life after death state, is said to exist around the concept of the subtler bodies. With these subtler bodies, it is said we can exist after the death of the physical body, and have total and fascinating involvement in the different dimensional worlds these bodies exist in.
In occultism there is an attempt to define the function of the astral body in the overall process of human existence. Rudolph Steiner, stating his doctrine of occultism, says of the astral body that as long as a person has no organs of perception that can sense the subtler aspects of human nature, the only apparent world is that of the physical body. He goes on to say that during sleep ‘the soul is fully active’… ‘but a man can know nothing of this … as long as he has no spiritual organs of perception through which he can observe what is going on around him and see what he himself is doing during sleep as easily as he can observe his daily physical environment with his ordinary senses.’ In this supersensible world, Steiner says, the astral body is that which brings consciousness to the otherwise vegetative existence of our body. Without the process that the astral body produces, we would exist in a similar way to a plant, in a sort of sleep without traces of self-awareness. To quote Steiner more extensively, he says –
Man has his physical body in common with the minerals and his etheric body with the plants. In the same sense he is of like nature with the animals in respect of the astral body. The plant is in a perpetual state of sleep. Anyone who does not judge accurately in these matters may easily fall into the error of attributing to plants too a kind of consciousness such as the animals and man have in their waking state. But this mistake is only possible when one’s idea of consciousness is inexact. One may then aver that a plant too, when subjected to an outer stimulus, will perform movements, just as an animal will do. One will refer to the ‘sensitiveness’ of many plants, which for example contract their leaves when certain outer things affect them. But the criterion of consciousness does not lie in the fact that to a given action a being shows a definite reaction. It lies in this, that the being has an inner experience, and this is a new factor, over and above the mere reaction. Otherwise we might as well speak of consciousness when a piece of iron expands under the influence of heat. Consciousness is only there when for example, through the effect of heat, the being inwardly experiences pain.
Quoted from Occult Science – An Outline by Rudolph Steiner, Translated by George and Mary Adams, published by Rudolf Steiner Press, London. See Rudolph Steiner’s Philosophy of Life and Death.
This is not, however, the general view of the astral body in popular spiritualism and alternative thinking. In these the astral body is a vehicle through which one can experience awareness separated from the physical body. Through this one can travel anywhere in the world and beyond in moments, and witness what is happening at a distance. One can meet and commune with other individuals who are also projected from their body, as well as meet people who are dead and therefore have no physical existence at all.
The reasons or causes for this projection from the body may be due to an induced trance, an anaesthetic or other drugs, or an illness or the approach of death. A fascinating account of the experience of astral projection and the world one exists in is give by William Lilley, a renowned spiritual healer working within the belief system of Spiritualism. He says he was able to consciously ‘leave his body’ and visit the ‘Beautiful Place’, where he meets the dead. His description of this is typical of many other peoples, even to the ‘going through the mists’.
When I am going into trance, I breathe in the Yoga method shown me by Dr. Letari. Immediately I get a sensation as though I am falling, or being pulled backwards. As this sensation comes to a climax, I seem to be travelling through space at terrific speed.
I have opened my eyes many times but the only vision I had was of passing through a dense fog; then, quite suddenly, the fog clears and I am at a stile. I climb over this stile and immediately there is a voice speaking to me over my shoulder. This voice is always with me, explaining everything I see and everyone I meet. The stile seems to be on the edge of a large field, which rises gradually to the form of a hill. I walk up the hill, and beyond it I visit many places.
I have been to the Children’s Land many times and have spoken to children with whom I used to go to school, many of whom I did not know had died until I met them. I have paid visits too, to the Halls of Learning, which seem to me more like the Acropolis at Athens.
It is always the same stile, the same hill, the same voice, and it just seems like a large country with so many different towns to visit.
The most interesting and remarkable experience I ever had during these visits into the Spirit, happened before I went into trance. Several sitters had been speaking of consciousness. They had asked me to describe the Spirit. Was it solid? Did I appear solid? I promised the Sitters that if I could, I would find out.
I arrived at my stile, the voice came to me and it evidently knew my desire because it said ‘Feel the earth!’ I did. It was solid. ‘Feel the grass beneath your feet!’ I did. That was solid too, and even had dew on it. ‘Smell these flowers!’ They were perfectly natural and had the usual perfume. In fact, everything around was natural. Then I was told, ‘Feel your body’. I did so. It was as solid as I am materially.
The voice then said, ‘Close your eyes; make your consciousness passive’, or as one would do when preparing for a trance state. ‘Now feel the earth beneath your feet!’ There was nothing. ‘Open your eyes’. It wasn’t dark, it wasn’t light. ‘Feel at your body’. It wasn’t there. ‘Such is Spirit’ said the voice. ‘Just a consciousness holding within it all experiences of your lifetime, all the joys and sorrows, your desires, achievements and failures, whence comes spiritual evolution. In your world of the material, you are able to examine matter; everything is matter. When you think of the spiritual, naturally you build in your consciousness another material world.’
Here is an experience of an out of body experience. Sir Auckland Geddes, an eminent British Anatomist, describes his own OBE, which contains many of these features.
Example: Becoming suddenly and violently ill with gastro-enteritis I quickly became unable to move or phone for help. As this was occurring I noticed I had an ‘A’ and a ‘B’ consciousness. The ‘A’ was my normal awareness, and the ‘B’ was external to my body watching. From the ‘B’ self I could see not only my body, but also the house, garden and surrounds. I need only think of a friend or place and immediately I was there and was later able to find confirmation for my observations. In looking at my body, I noticed that the brain was only an end organ, like a condensing plate, upon which memory and awareness played. The mind, I saw, was not in the brain, the brain was in the mind, like a radio in the play of signals. I then observed my daughter come in and discover my condition, I saw her telephone a doctor friend, and saw the doctor also at the same time.
The extraordinary experiences we can meet are here so clearly describe. Geddes is not only aware of his physical body but observes it in a way he had never before perceived. His brain was only an end organ, not the originator or thoughts; he could see his whole surroundings, garden as well without moving; he witnessed his daughter and the doctor without travelling anywhere; here and there were the same place for him.
Spiritualism, through the experience of people like Lilley and Geddes, tells us the ‘dead’ have a subtle body and live in worlds in many ways similar to physical life, except in their beauty, colour, lack of sickness and pain, and without war and in its possibilities. In these worlds we can fly like birds, swim underwater like fish, communicate with others heart to heart, mind to mind, soul to soul, without the use of clumsy words. We have a body, but it is a body at its prime, without weight or tiredness. We have clothes, but they are creations of our thoughts, and we are clothed by our own love and wisdom. We experience heaven or hell, not as punishment or reward, but because we create our own environment by our own thoughts and emotions. Here we explore music, the arts, creativity, knowledge, relationships, without the limitations the body imposes, and with the added wonder of a new dimension of experience. Our senses are extended so that when we look at someone, we see not only a body shape and their posture and expression, but also we perceive their quality as a person, perhaps through a surrounding field of colour or emanation from within. When we consider a painting in this world, we not only appreciate the colours and forms, but we commune with the artist through the work, and experience for ourselves the artist’s vision and feelings, their unique quality and spirit.
With the development of the theory attached to Quantum Mechanics – The New Physics – a very different view is emerging of time, space and human consciousness. This vastly subtler view of the cosmos and our place in it brings a shift also to the way we can look at experiences such as the projection of the astral body, or the concept of the astral body itself. These shifts appear to offer an open door to greater freedom of experience within these areas, and an entirely new way of explaining them. Well, perhaps not entirely new, as many of the subtlest of thinkers of East and West have already written much about these subtlest aspects of ‘Reality’.
As Lilley’s inner voice had said, ‘Close your eyes; make your consciousness passive’, or as one would do when pre-paring for a trance state. ‘Now feel the earth beneath your feet!’ There was nothing. ‘Open your eyes’. It wasn’t dark, it wasn’t light. ‘Feel at your body’. It wasn’t there. ‘Such is Spirit’ said the voice. ‘Just a consciousness holding within it all experiences of your lifetime, all the joys and sorrows, your desires, achievements and failures, whence comes spiritual evolution. In your world of the material, you are able to examine matter; everything is matter. When you think of the spiritual, naturally you build in your consciousness another material world.’
In other words we create in those subtler dimensions of experience replicas of what we have known in the body. But as we accept the growth beyond limitations we can drop those physical forms and operate as formless and genderless beings. This does away with the need to feel that we travel anywhere and have moved away from the physical. My own experience tells me that our consciousness is all pervading and so called astral travel is not travelling, but tuning into a particular tiny area of the cosmos, and becuase of our physical experience of travel needing to move our body, we create the dream of travelling..
See Levels of Awareness in Waking and Sleeping; consciousness – the body mind split; esp in dreams; out of body experiences; paralysis while asleep; http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/what-we-need-to-remember-about-dreaming/#Paralyzed.
Assisted Passage
Assisted Passage
Working with a partner or a group in exploring your dreams or yourself is a very wonderful process. The thrill of discovering depth after depth within yourself is enormous. The immense feeling of contact between yourself and another person is also hard to find in most other human relationships. Even in many marriages the level of intimacy does not match that occurring when you move into another person’s deepest feelings and longings.
I have experienced this pleasure over and over again. I can see from it there are certain skills, certain standpoints, and a few ideas that are extremely helpful in finding this for oneself.
For a start the setting deeply influences possible results people achieve. Although it may at first seem rather abstract, it is in fact of great importance to create a mental emotional setting with as few limitations as possible. For instance quite a number or people come to dream work or the process of self exploration with already fixed ideas or of a goal or a result. It might be that they believe by returning to childhood ordeals, or going once again through the experience of birth they will find greater psychological wellbeing. Or perhaps they see dream work as a sort of quiz game where you think up the right answers and have a feeling of success when giving the correct response. These, and many other similar ready made views are extremely limiting.
But I am not in any way suggesting such things should be avoided. What I am stressing is the importance of being as open to directly experiencing yourself as possible, rather than seeking particular goals in the hope they will fulfil you. You are the central reality. Other people’s ideas of what may be appropriate for you are simply that – other people’s ideas.
The Three Basics of Assisted Passage
1 – The open condition.
2 – Being given and giving attention.
3 – Space to play or experiment.
The Open Condition
The Open Condition Consists Of
a) Not holding ones attention in a fixed mode, such as limiting awareness to ones thoughts or body sensations. It means being in a state of poised responsiveness to a wide range of possible experience. this means a readiness to experience emotions, thoughts, memories, fantasy, body movements, and even feelings that might be disturbing.
b) Not holding to already conceived views or conceptions. Being ready to experience the new in thought, emotion and movement.
The open condition needs to be practised and learned.
Things To Do –
The open approach is an access to your whole self. Because much of yourself still awaits discovery, is still unknown to you, it is impossible to know just where to look to find your own wholeness and health. You are unique. You have a different background in family or cultural traditions than many others. You have personal and particular life experiences and different personal qualities of mind and body which make your needs distinctive or unique. Allowing your being freedom of expression empowers your ability to work at and express your own special needs.
Your voice, your body and your emotions are linked. Restraint in one restrains the others. So working with the voice can help free and mobilise the body and emotions. Tense or rigid emotions are just as difficult to live with as a tense and rigid body. Just as physical pain and restriction arises from muscular tension, emotional pain and limitation derives from emotional blocks.
If there are changes in pace during the period of practice, allow them. The range of possible movements and forms of expression are so enormous it would be boring to list them. They include all tones of feeling from angry to loving and exalted – all vocal expressions from deep crying to imitation of the sound and feeling of foreign languages – all types of movement from the most exquisite stillness to frantic tribal dancing. These are some of the spectrum of inner qualities you are healthily capable of as a whole human being. Sometimes people say ‘I have never expressed myself like this before, I wonder if I am bizarre’. The answer is that only whole human beings are capable of a wide range of expression which they can choose to end at any moment. It is the unhealthy person who is locked into compulsive and limited patterns of behaviour. Liberation is a sign of health.
1 – Prepare your environment of space, clothing, mood and music.
2 – Put on some music which has energy but does not grab your attention too much. Use a couple of warm up movements to get your circulation more active and your body loosened.
3 – Stand in the middle of your space with feet about shoulder width apart. For a few moments hold the thought and feeling that for the next half hour you are giving up your own conscious efforts. You are allowing your being to express its own needs in its own way by opening to the WHOLE you.
4 – Get the ‘keyboard’ feeling in yourself. In other words give yourself permission to allow spontaneous or unexpected movements of body and mind – don’t forget to leave yourself open to vocal expression too.
5 – Allow spontaneous movements to develop. Take an open, observing state of mind.
6 – If movements are tardy in emerging, start by slowly circling the arms. Make the circles cross the front of the body. This will mean the right hand will cross in front of your pelvis as it moves left and upwards above your head.
7 – When you have the arms moving with ease, become aware of the shapes your finger tips are carving in space. Stay with this observation for a few moments, then notice whether your hands and fingers have any urge to create their own shapes in space. It may feel as if delicate magnetic pulls are directing your hands. If so, follow these delicate urges by letting your arms be moved by them. Let your hands and arms discover any movements or speed which satisfies you. Permit your whole body and voice to become involved if there is a tendency toward this.
8 – When you are ready to finish the session, stop the movements and relax on the floor or in an easy chair for a few minutes. There is often a natural sense of an end of the theme that has arisen.
Being Given Attention
Being given someone’s undivided attention is a great privilege, especially if that attention allows you to be yourself in a wide variety or in explorative ways.
Listening Skills –
There are a wide variety of ways in which a person can be given attention in the open condition or in play space. These are like tools or skills we can learnt to use. These will be explained and practised as we use Assisted Passage.
Space To Play And Experiment
This means the mutual creation of a reasonably safe environment that allows you to explore your own potentials and possibilities. Because of the often necessary restrictions existing within general social roles such as work or family life, there may not be opportunity to try out varieties of behaviour with different people in order to discover the spectrum of your own experience and responses. Play space allows this, and affords you the means of establishing new aspects of yourself that are useful or enjoyable in everyday life.
Wholeness Is the Aim Of Assisted Passagee
The aim is not psychotherapy. That is a rather one-sided goal. The aim is personal wholeness rather than seeking one particular goal such as therapy or spirituality. I believe each aspects of ourselves has something of great value. Without reasonable acquaintance with the major aspects of ourselves we feel in some measure unsatisfied or incapable – maybe weak.
Becoming Oneself – The result we can achieve is discovery of who or what we are. Although apparently an oversimplification, the realisation of what we are includes complexity. It includes any complications we may have in our nature, involving meeting past experience, uncovering personal conflicts or problems, as well as the perception of different dimensions of our being if they exist.
Results – Possibilities – These can be described in the light of what one might experience rather than what the results might be.
Space – Awareness – Growth – Practice
When we hold an open and aware state of mind, it is something like having time off without external pressing issues to take care of. At such a time we might cut our toe nails, or do some of the jobs around the house we have been putting off for ages, but perhaps enjoy doing. The open state allows your internal processes to:
a) Catch up on its home-work. This means things like emotions, decisions, habits, gathered expereice, that have arisen in the past can now be evaluated or re-evaluated.
b) Space to explore and develop aspects of yourself that may have been unheeded in the hurry or concentration of everyday life.
c) The setting to practice new skills or refine old ones. By practice is not meant an attempt to get something right, but to achieve greater satisfaction.
DON’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY – Two people alive and aware together create a totally different relationship than not being aware, or one being aware.
To take this further see Life’s Little Secrets; The LifeStream; Peer Dream.
Artemidorus and the First Dream Dictionary
To Artemidorus of Daldis we owe one of the first and most famous books on dream interpretation – Oneirocritica – ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’. Artemidorus lived in Greece about 140 AD, and almost certainly drew on older works, such as Assurbanipal’s dream book, and also the mystery schools in Egypt. Clay tablets found at Nineveh, part of the library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal – 669 and 626 BC – tell of the importance of dreams in the life of kings and commoners. The Assurbanipal dream book is itself only a link in a chain of tradition, as the library possibly held records starting about 5000 BC or earlier.
If this is correct, the Oneirocritica links the remote past with present day theories of dream interpretation. This is made clear by MacKenzie in Dreams and Dreaming. He points out that in the Assurbanipal tablets it says that if a man flies frequently in his dreams he will lose his possessions. In Zolar’s Encyclopaedia and Dictionary of Dreams printed in 1963 in USA it says ‘Flying at a low altitude: ruin is ahead for you.’ Other obvious similarities suggest that the most recent of popular dream books is largely a copy of the most ancient.
However, Artemidorus added many personal observations to what he had learned from the ancient books which preceded him. In fact he and his followers believed that dreams could be understood best, not from divine inspiration, but by observing the details of ordinary everyday life. One can see in his writings, which included methods of interpreting ones own dreams, signs of connecting popular association between object and dream image. Therefore Artemidorus was probably one of the first to see the connection between dream imagery and the way we associate particular feelings or ideas to objects. His observations led him to say that ‘dreams and visions are infused into men for their advantage and instruction’ and ‘the rules of dreaming are not general, and therefore cannot satisfy all persons, but often, according to times and persons, they admit of varied interpretations.’
This subtlety of thinking is obvious in what he says about the meaning of shaving in ones dreams – ‘To dream of having one’s whole head shaved, except in the case of priests of the Egyptian gods, and those who study how to raise a laugh, and those whose custom it is to shave, for whom it is good, is in general a bad dream, because it signifies the same thing that nudity does, and indeed foretells sudden and dire misfortune. To sailors it clearly portends shipwreck, and to the sick a most critical collapse, but not death. For the shipwrecked, and men preserved from a serious illness are shaved; the dead not at all. As to the former, it is a good dream because of their custom of shaving. To have one’s hair cut by a barber, however, presages good to everyone equally.’
As can be seen, there is no difference here between what Artemidorus advises and how we arrive at insight into our dreams today. The situation of the dreamer, and the common associations prevalent socially, are all a part of the insight. Artemidorus therefore advised dreamers to consider such points as whether what they dream is a lawful action, whether it is usual for the dreamer to do or be engaged in, what puns or association exist in the dream, and even what language the dreamer speaks – for each language has different puns, associations and idioms.
Although his main preoccupation was to present dreams as omens of the future, or of the outcome of present actions, Artemidorus also speculated upon many other aspects of dreaming. He considered the importance of recurring dreams. He was interested in the question of why some dreams produced such intense emotions. He wondered how and why a dream might show clear signs of physical illness long before it became evident externally. In attempting to understand these various phenomena of dreams, he classified them into two types – the Somnium, and the Insomnium. Dreams of the Insomnium type Artemidorus related to the feelings and concerns evoked by everyday life – ‘The lover occupies himself with his sweetheart, the fearful man sees what he fears, the hungry man eats, the thirsty one drinks.’ Dreams of the Somnium type he saw as presenting a wider awareness of the dreamer’s life, perhaps forecasting their future, divining outcomes of actions. MacKenzie sees these as similar to Jung’s ‘great dreams’ which are rich in symbols and full of powerful deeper associations.
Some examples taken from the Oneirocriticus are as follows –
Bathing. In clean, clear water, a dream of great good fortune; in muddy water, the reverse.
Blossoming Tree. An invariable dream of gladness and of prosperity.
Bridge. To see one, successful undertakings, probably a change; a broken bridge, fear and trouble and a warning to take no steps on the unknown road: to fall from a bridge denotes brain trouble.
Candle. To see one being lighted forecasts a birth; to exhibit a lighted candle augurs contentment and prosperity; a dimly burning candle shows sickness, sadness and delay.
Cupid. A dream of love and happiness.
Geese. The cackling of geese means good luck and speedy success in business. Some interpretations correspond to those of animal behaviour.
Porpoise. A dream of joy and happiness.
Rice. To dream of eating rice denotes abundance of instruction.
See: Aesculapius; Greece (ancient) dream beliefs; interpretation of dreams; Babylonian dream beliefs; Mesopotamiam dream beliefs.