Author Archive

Follow Your Dream

How many times have you heard that advice given?

Recently on television I watched a famous dance instructor, with glowing confidence, and the smile of someone who had made it in life, saying to all her viewers, “Follow your dreams”. There was also a hint of, don’t give up, press on through early difficulties.

I believe it wasn’t actual dreams she was talking about, but the urgent sense of doing something with their life, and following a great interest and inner urging that was being recommended.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what people who seek out children to sexually molest them feel – an urgent and pressing inner urging. Also, those who are urgently following their inner sense of their destiny to bomb or shoot the public because of their religious beliefs. Or even those who are capable of doing outrageous thing with a gun, because of a long planned attack, following their dream.

There are other drives too

Like those who dream of grabbing as much of the world’s riches without any care for others, and with no desire to give any of it back. We see this at work so often as happened during the last great financial crash, and when bosses of companies run it into ground and knock the pension funds to bits because they pocketed all the money. That is at work in our society and individuals in incredible numbers. Amazing dreamers.

Years ago, I worked as a therapist with a young Jewish doctor. All his life he had dreamt of being a doctor, and had worked hard to achieve it. But as we dug deeper into him he uncovered with shock his motivation. His mother and father were the only survivors of both families of Hitler’s massive destruction, and the doctor realised that the motive behind his work and dream to become a doctor was that because he was a doctor, he would be the last one thrown of the boat.

He felt so shocked he wanted to give up his work as a doctor, but when he realised that he had the skill of a good doctor, he carried on.

You too

Most of us who give a great deal of effort to reach a goal have such strange motives. As I was undergoing personal therapy I saw, also with shock, that the reason I wanted to become an acknowledged therapist was because I suffered low self-esteem, and felt I would be seen as someone of importance. I too felt I wanted to stop the work I was doing, but also realised I had developed useful skills.

So, take thought when someone tells you enthusiastically to follow your dreams.

Dreams Can Help

But dreams, from my experience, are grea truth tellers. Not dreams such as those mentioned above that arise out of personal desire, traumas and misshandled parenting, but dreams we have during the night. If you want to find what is your real destined or chosen path, start a dream journal an take the time and spent your energy exploring your many dream.

Example: a few years ago and kept a journal religiously, but lost interest and stopped noting my dreams. During a major cleanup this weekend found my dream diary and was stunned to see many dreams were signs of what followed in my life years after. Most of them at that time didn’t make any sense but now I’m quite curious.

See Dream Journal Diary

Dream Counsellor

Introduction

Dream Counselor is a massive and easily accessible resource for understanding your dreams and yourself. It is far more useful than a dream dictionary because it can draw out of you what your dream means, rather than giving ready made answers.

It does need you to partake in the action by writing down your responses, feelings and thoughts when you consider the questions. Such responses will build into wonderful and helpful information that will help you find a completely new way of dealing with life.

If you are not happy with typing down what you feel and realise in response to the questions asked, you can always use Voice Recognition. It is now a part of the tools offered in the latest operating systems such as Vista and Windows 7. You can simple speak your thoughts and it is immediately typed for you.

Apart from a few individuals – few have ever been taught anything about Life and how it operates in us. Dreams are not about outer reality; they are reflections of our inner life; and our inner life has very different rules. It is a world that is very different to the waking world in the body. In the dream world in a sense you do not have a body. The point is that whatever we believe we are; whatever we believe the world is; in our dreams it becomes that because we create it out of our mind stuff.

In the film Matrix, the hero is at one point was put into a lucid virtual reality called ‘the construct’. He cannot understand what is happening to him, and his guide says, “What you see now is what we call ‘residual self image’. It is a mental projection….” Your dream is exactly that, an amazing moving and living projection in which you act and interact with YOURSELF. There is, in the widest or cosmic sense, nothing else. The dream process transforms your emotions, your beliefs and hopes, your fears and traumas, your intuitions and creative visions, into people, environments, animals and events. Understanding that is vital.

CONTENTS

Easy ways

Being the Dream

Man In Your Dreams

Father Dad

Baby in my Dream

The Ex

Hints about how to approach new dream images

The Counselor

Horse in My Dream

The House in My Dream

Secrets of Transformation

Exploring your dream symbols

Examples

Identity and Who You Really Are

 

 Easy ways 

Key Words

The most immediate way to gain insight into your dream is to take the keywords and fill in the gaps.

To illustrate this we can use the following dream:

I meet an acquaintance who tells me she is sick. I suggest ways that might help her. As I speak I become aware that others are listening and coming nearer. I apologise and say that I appear to be preaching, but they say, ‘Please go on we want to listen.’ As I continue I find that a rostrum has formed and lifted me two steps higher.

To use the technique of ‘keywords’ on this dream you would need to write down the most important words in the dream. Doing this you might arrive at the words – meet – acquaintance – sick – help – speak – listening – apologise – preaching – rostrum.

For the next step you ask yourself what you have recently met with in yourself or in life? It is something you are acquainted with, and that has to do with not feeling well, whole or satisfied with your life. So you would ask yourself what you are acquainted with to do with not feeling at your best?

The word ‘help’ suggests you have information that will be useful. What is it?

You apologise for yourself, suggesting degrading what you know. How are you doing that in your life?

Preaching comes next. Have you been giving advice? If so, what is it, and is it relevant to you too?

And lastly, can you listen to your own advice given from a rostrum – higher level of viewpoint?

Having arrived at some associations with the major words in the dream, you next put them together in a way that explains some of the insights or ideas you arrived at. Filling in the gaps between the words you might therefore arrive at something like this:

I have lately become aware of the feeling that I am ill at ease with myself. This connects with my lack of confidence about how I feel when talking with other people. The strange thing is that I know how to help myself with this. I was talking with a friend the other day, and the advice I gave them about something similar really applies to me. What I need to do is to stop apologising for myself and positively use what I know will help. I can see from the dream that I have a lot to share with other people, so I don’t need to feel I am preaching.

What you arrive at using this keyword method will give you an excellent overview of your dream. It will take some practice, but persist and you will get very useful results.

  Being the Dream

Tony taught me a process in which a dream could be interpreted and understood by assuming that everything, people and objects alike, in a dream represented aspects of the Self.

Sitting cross-legged on the squishy, old-fashioned sofa in the living room of my sadhu’s cave opposite Tony, I’d close my eyes and mentally return to a dream I had the previous night. He would ask me questions about the dream, which I’d answer in the first person. So if I dreamt about a tree, I would ‘become’ the tree, assume its personality and respond from its viewpoint. He’d ask ‘So what kind of tree are you? Are you big or small, old or young? What do you look like? Where are you growing? Why are you in Tiziana’s dream?’

This sounded like a silly exercise at first, but I was soon enough convinced of its validity. It was fascinating to discover a wealth of insight and emotion emerging from my responses, and understand how they related to my current situation. They also pinpointed exactly where I was in my growth process. Sometimes, the dreams would uncover unconscious fears and intuitions. Often, they also held important clues and offered solutions to my problems. It was like doing detective’s work – arduous at times, but rewarding beyond belief.

One of the most important things about actually understanding your dream rather that interpreting it is to become the dream person or object – to actually completely identify with it. This needs to be practiced as most people feel the dream person or object is something other than themselves and are often hesitant to become it. For instance the Devil in a dream is simply your own emotions and fears given an exterior image. And also Christ in a dream is the same thing. In doing this you can step beyond the imagery of the dream into direct experience of yourself in all its variety and wonder. The Christ for instance becomes an actual experience of the highest in you or any anti feelings in regard to Christianity.

So to do this the dreamer next chooses one of the characters or images in the dream to explore. The character can be themselves as they appear in the dream, or any of the other people or things. It is important to realise that it does not matter if the character is someone known or not, or whether they are young or old. The character needs to be treated as an aspect of their dream, and not as if they were the living person exterior to the dream. So do not attempt to describe them an outside person, but the dream character.

In choosing an image to work with, such as a person, a tree, cat, place, or an environment like the street in the example dream below, it must again be treated as it appears in the dream, not as it may appear in real life. One can take any image from the dream to work with. So describe yourself as the image in the dream. Remember what was said – So say “I am a little puppy and the person thinks I am adorable”. So do not say “This little dog” for that does not connect with your feelings, but distances you from the dream image.

The dreamer then stands in the role of the character or image they are using. So if they chose to be the car in the example dream below, they would close their eyes, enter into the feeling sense and imagery of the dream, and describe him or herself as the car.

Literally you can imagine yourself as that physical shape, as if your awareness has merged with the thing or person. Then let your immediate feelings and associations arise and be described.

It is important to step into the image by getting into their body if it is a person, or take on the shape if  it is an object. As I explained to a friend recently you do not even have to have a clear image of the thing or person, simply think of it as seen in your dream and then watch any thoughts or feeling that might arise – as if listening for a quiet voice or fantasy arising – but give it a minute or so.

 Example – I am a car. Joel has recently purchased me, and he is driving me, largely because he feels I will help him gain respect from other people. I am quite a large car, and have a lot of power. But even with all this energy I do not make my own decisions. I am directed by Joel’s desires and wishes, and enable him to fulfil them more readily.

As can be see, it is important to speak as if you are the chosen thing as Joel did. If it was a person Joel worked on, He should not say, “I am a woman”, or “I am the woman who turned away” but, “I am Mary. I like Joel , but I can see he isn’t really interested in me – except as a trophy in his new car.”

From this short description it can already be seen there is a suggestion the car represents Joel’s emotional and physical energy, directed by his desires and decisions.

 

Stand in the Role of Character or Object

The dreamer stands in the role of the character or image they are using. So if they chose to be a person they would close their eyes, imagine themselves as stepping into the body of the dream character and describe him or herself as the person they now are.

To do this it usually changes the way your body or feelings feel. As this is done notice any changes in how you feel as that person – or object – speak as them in the first person. Do not say, “I feel as if this person is …” but say, “I feel I am and am doing ..” As this happens watch any realisations or insights that arise and explore the person. Ask question of this dream character until you feel you have realised what is is of you that is being revealed.

I know it is difficult for some people to say ‘I’ instead of talking as if the dream character is someone else. But if you start claiming the dream image as your own in this way by saying such things as, “I am a tree” you will quickly realise you are talking about yourself.

Here is an example. The dream was of a railway station that was an old castle keep/tower. In using the magic word I, this is what he described himself as. “I am an old castle keep. I used to be for defense and repelling people, but now I can let people in and out easily.” The dreamer realised this was a really excellent insight into his character and the change taking place in him.

 

What is the main action in the dream?

There is often an overall activity such as walking, looking, worrying, building something, or trying to escape. Define what the action or theme is and give it a name, such as those listed or something like ‘waiting’ – ’searching’ – ‘following’.

To understand what your definition means, activities such as walking or building a house represent just what they show – going somewhere and building something new, or repairing something in your life. Walking can simply represent taking a direction in life or going somewhere, and building can be seen as creating something new or developing what already exists in your life. When you have defined the action, look for further information in the entries in the on-site Dream Dictionary, such as swimming, sitting, climbing, or working. Having considered the general meaning of whatever your dream action is, consider if it is expressive of something you are doing in waking life, and what the dream plot and characters comment on this.

A simple example of this is as follows:

Dreamt I was involved in having a prostitute work for me. Terry.

On looking at my dream and wondering why the prostitute was working for me it was obviously to do with love and sex. What it showed me was that I always try to use love and sex for personal gain. It always has to be on my terms instead of loving a person for their own sake.

What is your Role or Theme in the dream?

Are you a friend, lover, soldier, dictator, watcher or participant in the dream? Consider this in relationship with your everyday life, especially in connection with how the dream presents it.

The different roles or themes you play in your dreams, such as actor, lawyer, soldier or cook, usually represent the different abilities, weaknesses or interests you have. We all have different roles in everyday life. So a woman can be cook, lover, mother, counsellor, businesswoman, accountant, etc. A man can be a worker, father, a gardener, a handyman or builder, a chauffeur, artist, and so on. What is important is to see if you can get at is why the dream is showing you in that role and how it is relevant to your life at the moment. Therefore define what skills the role has, and see what the dream is commenting on them in regard to yourself. Where possible, look for the entry on the role in.

Other characters in your dream will also suggest other roles that are worth defining in relationship with yourself. Using the approach suggested in Be a different character can help define these roles. Below is an example:

 Example: Feeling tired – exhausted – just lying drained of energy. I am conscious of people talking, saying I was ill. I thought I was just tired. Then asked what the matter was. I was told it was my heart, ‘dry and hard like a boiled egg’ they said. Found I couldn’t talk. Tried to write, wanted A. to know that I loved him, but the pen kept drying up. Finger and feet began to get cold. An icy coldness slowly spread all over my body. A liquid warmth was then all around me. I thought I was hemorrhaging. A needle was stuck in my left arm and my chest was being cut open – it didn’t hurt. There was a lot of activity. They said I had gone. I was trying desperately to let them know I was still there. Then I was in a bag and sliding off a table. The bag was tied above my head. Then from the confined darkness I was free. There was a brilliant light all around. I could still see the sack with a body still in it far behind me. I was incredibly happy and full of energy. Trish L.

Well, what do you make of the dream? What is suggested by Trish’s hard-boiled heart? What does it imply that Trish is ‘gone’ but I’m still there?

There are several themes here that are worth noting. The first is the theme of tiredness. Then there is the theme surrounding her heart and the inability to express her feelings. Perhaps we can contain those two by saying it is about ‘emotional dryness’ or coldness. Then there is the theme of death/life, neatly packaged together. And something that we might miss is that overall an enormous change is going on. Trish changes from feeling exhausted and dying, to being ‘incredibly happy and full of energy’.

This gentle relationship with your dream is so important, let’s look at another dream just for practice. It is a dream told to me while I was the dream therapist with London Broadcasting Company.

I grew up in Barbados and lived with my mother in a shack. While I was there I started having a dream that I have had occasionally ever since. In the dream I was getting married and was at home dressing for the marriage, looking in a brown, peeling old mirror. The dream always ends here. Pam.

This dream is not quite as obvious as the previous one. I use it because it will help you see how dreams use certain means to depict a theme or attitude. Don’t get confused by details. Ask yourself what Pam is doing, what are the overall actions or situations?

Well, Pam is thinking/feeling things about marriage. So that is one of the themes. When Pam told me the dream I asked her if she had ever got married. She said no. So that is a further clue.

Sometimes it is helpful to consider how the word ‘I’ is used. For instance Pam says ‘I was getting married’. The ‘I’ word is used to denote something we connect with strongly. If I take some examples from other dreams, we have, ‘I could hardly breathe’ – ‘I was in a room with my brother’ – ‘I was really terrified’.

What Pam says apart from the marriage is, ‘I was …… looking in a brown peeling old mirror.’

What might be missed here can be grasped if you think of the dream as a piece of drama, like a television film. What Pam is enacting is looking at herself with thoughts of marriage. What sort of image does she have of herself? It is of a country girl who can only afford a peeling brown old mirror. So the theme here is self-image. It is about how Pam may be seeing or judging herself.

Looking at them in this way, take some time with your own dreams. Even this simple step can be very revealing, especially when used with a series of your dreams. Often great insights arise from this alone.

For further information about exploring your dreams, see:

Dreams – Practical Techniques to explore their meaning

Dreams – The best is a group using Peer Dreamwork

Man In Your Dreams

The man you dreamt of last night, more than likely represents the male you have the most important emotional bond with, or a male you either associates with love or else a man you would like to be a partner.

Many people do not realise that they have an inner male equally as powerful as an external male.  A woman or man may have taken in millions of bit of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with your a male, a boyfriend, a husband or son, and they are what makes you the person you are. This is true even if your male was never there for you – you still have all the memories of him not being there for you filed under ‘male’. The memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. Such an inner male can appear in dreams because you are still deeply influenced by what you hold within you.

So, because all the people, animals, places you see in your dreams, are simply your own feelings, fears, ask yourself what does it mean that the man yo dream about is making love to you, hurting you, having sex,  or teaching you?

I Don’t Wish to See That!

Sometimes dreams about the man in your life may be attempting to express something you are trying not to see. Sarah repeatedly dreamt that her boy friend, Ron, had died, and she was attending his funeral. The dreams disturbed her and she wondered if they might be a prediction. Then she met another man whom she liked, and realised she had been trying to get away from Ron for ages, but didn’t know how to do it.

In fact many women have dreams or fantasies about their partner dying, sometimes out of worry, but frequently because it offers an easy way out of feeling trapped. In this way they are secretly hoping that no effort of will and confrontation will be demanded of them.

Of course an older woman dreaming her man is dead or dying will probably have a very different underlying cause for the dream. This may straightforwardly be an anxiety dream about their man dying – men die before women on average. The dream may be a way of looking at this and exploring or dealing with feelings in connection with the possibility that your partner’s life will end before yours.

Wider View

Ninety nine percent of the time, dreams are not prophesying what is going to happen to the man in your life. What they do pictorialise or dramatise is what you are feeling or fearing about him. A number of women have told me they frequently dream their man leaves them for another woman. I haven’t observed those particular men leaving yet, or even being unfaithful. What is obvious though is that the women who have these dreams experience a lot of unnecessary anxiety about being left. Therefore they dream about it, partly because that is what they are feeling, and partly as a safety valve for unexpressed emotions.

But many women, when you think about a friend or a person you know, you are only taking in your thoughts, impressions and feelings about them. So many people do not realise that they have an inner person equally as powerful as the external person you know. You have taken in millions of bits of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by meeting or living with them, and they change you and make you the person you are. The memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. Such an inner person can appear in dreams because you still carry the memories or impressions of them, and so they influenced what you hold within you. See  Inner World

Father Dad

General positive: Your father is often the authority figure in your early life, and may represent this influence or power in you as an adult.  Your dream father is a link with the patterns of survival behaviour passed on for generations. It was the attitudes of how to cope with social activity or work – the external world. But he is part of your creation.

Many people do not realise that they have an inner father equally as powerful as an external father. You have taken in millions of bits of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with your father, and they are what makes you the person you are. This is true even if your father was never there for you – you still have all the memories of him not being there for you filed under ‘Father’. The memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. Such an inner father can appear in dreams because you are still deeply influenced by what you hold within you.

Because we learn enormous amounts of behavioural and survival srategies from fahter, he therefore also depicts the ability to be productive in the external workaday world. Depending upon what level of relationship you have developed with him, your dream father is the power of creative life in you, the power to do, to create, to transform; the power in you to grow and unfold your potential. It has to be remembered that the dream father is not an image of your external father, but of what you carry of him inside you; what you have managed to develop of a working relationship with the power he represents. So you may, because of difficulties with your external father, be in conflict with your internal father, and so be lacking your full power to transform and create. See Conjuring Trick – Integrating Parent of Ex; Power Dreaming; Family.

The dream father may depict family or social conventions along with physical strength and protectiveness; the will to be and to do, and so your outgoing energies. As such he represent your confidence as you go out the door of your home into the arena of public life. A poor relationship with your external or internal father leaves you somewhat crippled in that area. But by working with your dreams on your relationship with your internal father this can be changed. See: Using Symbols to Change Life Problems; working with dreams.

General negative: Introverted aggression; dominance by fear of other people’s authority; uncaring sexual drive; feelings of not being loved, inability to be creative in the world, in your outer activity; inability to relate well to men. See: archetype of the father; man.

If there are feelings of abandonment then it can feel very emotional. Please see abandoned

Either represents the feelings you have about your father, or the characteristics in your nature that have arisen from this relationship; or can represent an authority figure. Can also stand for a teacher, or person by whom you are much influenced. Or else your own positive, protective qualities. How you relate to the ‘doer’ in you; physical strength and protectiveness; the will to be.

Example: Began to go into the back pain again. Words came about carrying feelings about on my back all these years. Get of my back. It’s my father. I wanted my father to be perfect like God. I wanted a strong, perfect father, not a human being.

Then I saw how I was trying to be the perfect father with my own children, instead of the human me. “It’s too much of a bloody burden being a perfect father.” I could see how this idea of drive to be the perfect father has directed a lot of my relationship with my children. In the early days I hated them at times because they showed me so often how human I was. Recently I still planned things out of that desire instead of letting what I want. Although lately there has been a swing to the human me. Yesterday I took them for a walk instead of a sauna. I do want to take them to a sauna some time, but yesterday I did not have enough cash, and to go would have been out of the perfect drive. Instead we went for a walk.

Hurting, burying or killing parent: In the example below Audrey’s height shows her as a child. She is releasing anger about the attitudes and situations her father forced ‘down her throat’.

To be free of the introverted restraints and ready made values gathered from our parents, at some time in our growth we may kill or bury them in our dreams. Although some people are shocked by such dreams, they are healthy signs of emerging independence. Old myths of killing the chief so the tribe can have a new leader, depict this process. When father or mother is ‘dead’ in our dream, we can inherit all the power gained from whatever was positive in the relationship.

Seeing parent drunk, incapable or foolish: Another means of gaining independence from internalised values, or stultifying drives to ‘honour’ or admire father or mother.

Dead parent in dream: Either the beginning of independence from parent; repression of the emotions they engendered in us; our emotions regarding our parent’s death; feelings about death. See: dead people.

Example: Dreamt that while talking with my wife I remembered that my son and I had murdered someone years before, and buried the body under a great slab of cement. After the murder the guilt – or rather the fear of being found out – was awful, but as each period of time passed, we gradually managed to lose memory of what we had done. But now I had remembered and felt the anguish of the guilt and fear of discovery. C.R.

When exploring his dream, he says: “I was led to a direct feeling link with my mother as the dead body. I saw, or felt, that when I cut off from her at 5 and attempted independence of my need for her, because of the pain she brought about in me, I had killed her as an inward figure in my life, and buried my feelings of need for her. The cement represented the energy I had used, the decisiveness, to bury her, to get her out on my life. I went on to recognise that killing and burying my mother, or my relationship with my mother, in that way was not in my own best interests. It was really an expression of my own lack of love and awareness of my best survival direction. So imagined I took the bone’s and carefully and reverently buried them, along with my father.”

Example: ‘My father was giving me and another woman some medicine. Something was being forced on us. I started to hit and punch him in the genitals and when he was facing the other way, in the backside. I seemed to be just the right height to do this and I had a very angry feeling that I wanted to hurt him as he had hurt me.’ Audrey V.

Sometimes a dream about our family is a literal statement in symbols, of what we sense is happening in the family.

Example: I was on a train with my family – wife, and two daughters. The train was derailed but nobody was hurt and we got off the train. I was walking in a field near the train. I thought my wife and daughters had got back on the train. Then suddenly another train smashed into the rear of the derailed train making it concertina into a heap. I wasn’t sure if my family were still on the train.’

Roger associated the theme of derailing with a change in direction – the change that was coming about through his children becoming independent. Some months later his wife and daughters left him. Divorce followed.

Example: The movements gradually led to feelings. These expressed a living connection existing between my ancestors and myself. This surprised me because I had years ago gone through the realisations of what I carried from my father and his fathers – the subjugation by church and state. But this was different. It was not that I was still carrying the attitudes and fears, rather that because I dared to step out of dependence and subjugation by authorities, deeper levels of influence of a transpersonal nature were being called out of my body. I experienced the sense of our family having lived for generations under fear – fear of death – fear of what people would do to us if we didn’t conform. My breaking away from such conformity was the activity that was squeezing it out of my body. It felt like changes had occurred in my body to adapt to that way of life.

Inner Father: Many people do not realise that they have an inner father equally as powerful as an external father. You have taken in millions of bits of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with your father, and they are what makes you the person you are. This is true even if your father was never there for you – you still have all the memories of him not being there for you filed under ‘Father’. The memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. Such an inner father can appear in dreams because you are still deeply influenced by what you hold within you.

The inner father can also signify what has been received via genes passed on or ancestral influences. See ancestors: parent integration

Many people are lost and feel as if they cannot more, are trapped, even by past loves. But in fact the more people we can ‘digest’ or accept as part of our own experience, the more freedom we have. Each person we have within us in this way is a new space, a new area or space to live in.

Example: Then I slowly became aware of a deeper sense of the discomfort. It was a feeling of being stuck in one place and not being able to move. It wasn’t anything to do with moving physically but was as an awareness. It felt awful and I tried to move but couldn’t. The only way of describing it was as if we are all made out of the same stuff – as an example concrete – and as such we filled all space. So the little space I filled could not move because all around was filled by others. I felt really stuck and wondered what I could do, but there seemed no way out of it. Yet I could not believe this was really how things were.

Most of this was spontaneous thoughts and movement through the experience, so that was how I was led to thinking about my cousin Sid again, and his situation of being constantly linked with his mother even after he died. Then I realised that I was linked with Rita, and in feeling that I realised that I could move in at least two positions – me and Rita – because of the loving connection I felt.

Then came a flood of realisation, every person I had loved was another position I could be in; and then I knew all the animals I had loved and even people I had a casual relationship with. But there was even more because in dreams and sessions I had become or encountered amazing things, people, creatures, the alien beings and others. I knew then that I was FREE to go anywhere and be almost anything, because their life pattern was now part of me. Then with a rush of wonder, I realised that the more people and creatures I loved, the bigger I became. See Digest

Useful questions and hints:

How is my father portrayed in the dream – dominating – caring – distant?

What does this say about the ‘father’ influences I carry inside me?

Does my dream show what impact on my present life my father has?

You can go back into the dream and become your father, and have a conversation with him.

See Life’s Little Secrets – Being the Person or Thing – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Processing Dreams

The Ex

Ex’s play an enormous part in many people’s dreams. The reason is that dreams about ex’s are very tricky for several reasons. To start with most people are often totally unaware of the experience they take in and how it interacts with them when we love or interact with someone. In other words because we memorise the feelings and responses we felt; and because we learn through our experiences, we are changed by them. The memories and the learning are part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. You have taken in millions of bit of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences, along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with someone and they are what makes you the person you are. Your dreams tend to put all that in the image of the past person when you are dealing with the influences left in you from the relationship.

A very beautiful and deep dream (Love was written in blood) can be seen at least in two ways. The usual one is to see it as about a physical partner that is there for you to find. Another more likely view is to see it as the you that you lost without warning – the being that will make you whole and let you know what real love is. But love is learnt and becomes habits at the early experiences – as a baby – of being loved, abandoned, left of abused. All those are very real ways leading you to painful emotions in the present relationship.

Traditions from the past and our own dreams if explored, show that we inhabit a body which is polarised as one expression of gender – male or female. But the ‘we’ that experiences life in a body is a whole being, female and male. Being in a body leads us to long for wholeness which we feel we do not have, and so long for a partner of the opposite sex to feel whole. But of course it is only an illusion of wholeness and has to be sought again and again by having sex. But that is natures or the instinctive way to procreation. See Archetype of the Animus and Archetype of the Anima

This search for wholeness in many cases. Sets up a bloody conflict between the sense of being in a body and the longing for the real love of wholeness. Look around you at the bloody mess that comes for such deep longing for a partner –  amount of ex’s you see, even in those who have ‘everything’.

One of the great and often self-defeating identifications is that with our body. If we accept that dreams portray in images our conception of self, then dreams suggest that our identity largely depends upon having a body, its gender, health, quality, skin colour, the social position we are born into, and our relationship with others. In fact, we know that if a person loses their legs, becomes paralysed, loses childbearing ability, becomes blind or is made redundant, they face an identity crisis. Yet despite all of that they still exist as a person, and if we realise that early we can avoid all the pain and distress caused by a complete identification with our body and our ex’s.

Even an absent parent is a huge figure in our inner life. In dreams we meet them again and again in ex’s, in lovers lost or in the figure of parents. For we are not dreaming about them but the memories, hurts, lessons and experiences stored within us. Everyone we have known are in fact figures of our inner world. To become whole, to love ourselves we must meet, acknowledge and integrate the people we carry within us.

Example: I am not pregnant, but dreamt I was at my ex’s place, with whom I spent a night together 3 months ago (1.5 yrs after our breakup), and he’s cold/avoiding me ever since (claiming he’s seeing someone). In the dream, I was not pregnant with him, and was convinced I was about to deliver around that day.

Example:  It started from a month ago, things started to change. Not so bad, but it’s just only the dream that he has been having lately. He has been having the same dream this past a month! He talks in his sleep. He says his EX’s name over and over again, and then some words too. I love him to death, and he loves me too! I have no other problem with him. Oh well, few months ago, we had few, but we got through it.

 

The Big One

Many dreams of the man we struggle with or dream of love with, are actually either a way we release the tension of our enormous desire for love – or are actually developing a relationship with the most important man in our life – our real soul mate. I am talking about your real other half, the man you are, under the influence of having a female body. See Women’s creative power

But I suppose one of the most striking things I experienced in recent years is that a dream image is just a ‘front’ for massive data banks of experience and information. For instance, supposing we liken your memory to a huge filing system – rooms of it. Within those rooms there is a whole section marked ‘MAN’. Within that section of ‘MAN’ are countless folders with experience and information in about particular men in your life what you have learn or experienced – from father onwards.

Apart from that there is a big file or system of files dealing with what you inherited culturally about MAN, and also what you have absorbed from mother and other women. Then there is the media and books. There is so much. What particular aspect of all this a dream is expressing depends on how the dream presents, clothes, acts, speaks and relates as the man. So the dream image is a communication between your waking awareness and those massive files of information, and dealing with a particular aspect of your life and development. There is a whole book here somewhere. As for the female male, and the male female, this is one of those lifetime areas of growth we each face and achieve in lesser or greater degrees. Fundamentally we are without a particular gender, but in connection with our body we often have very marked female or male characteristics and responses to life. However, as we move through the major problems we are wrestling with we start meeting our other half and finding symbols of blending. Eventually the male and female are one in us, though we can easily continue to live as a male or female. A way of cutting through to direct understanding is to use Being the Person or Thing

If it is a man’s dream it is an aspect of your own personality expressing in your dreams. See Characters and People in Dreams

Dreams are ways in which the feeling urges which unconsciously direct so many of our decisions express themselves, are gratified, or are explored. Therefore the male, who appears almost as frequently in a woman’s dreams as her first love, is the man she is fantasying a romance with. For instance, Christine’s deepest impulse was to be wholly in a relationship with her husband Andrew. Difficulties he experienced in regard to sex frequently led him to withdraw his warmth, leaving Christine uncertain about where their life together was going. While alone visiting her family abroad, she met David, her own age, an old friend of the family, and separated from his wife. As Christine was depending on friends and relatives instead of hotels, David offered his own place.

Christine turned it down, but she dreamt she was secretly meeting David. The meetings were very pleasant, except that Christine constantly had the ‘looking over her shoulder’ feeling.

From the dream Christine realised that she was at least considering the idea of looking for another partner. There was still too much good in her relationship with Andrew, however, for her to sever connections with him and be wholehearted about another man. This is why the meetings in the dream were ‘secret’. In that situation though, there could be no real pleasure for her either with Andrew or another man. The dream was therefore a way in which she experimented with directions, and her reactions to them, in a safe way. It is like being able to do something quite different in life than you are doing, then wake up and find you are safely back with no changes. You are then left with the possibility of changing direction, or maintaining the present one.

A Dreamer’s Comment

As a 50-yr-old woman dreamer, I want to add that these men of ours may be more numerous and more varied in person than, perhaps, the men in a man’s dream. Yes, over time, one of the men might dominate, but I don’t believe he is necessarily the most important. The stranger may be absolutely as vital to our female Life as the “husband.”

See Archetype of the Animus; Surviving Love and Relationships; Learning to Love; Love; Teenage Girl’s Love Dreams; Archetype of the Lovercou

  Counsellor

Below are hints about how to approach new images.

 Abandoned

Useful questions: 

Are you facing feelings of dependence in this dream? Or is your dream showing a fear of being left or losing someone, perhaps arising from an actual experience of loss in the past? It is worthwhile to take time to think about these questions because they are fundamental to how you relate to others. Enormous dependence is normal as a baby, and if this is disturbing you still it can lead to feelings of being abandoned.

Did your parents die or abandon you even in a minor way such as leaving you in hospital?  It is important to explore such powerful feelings of helplessness, anxiety or sense of abandonment, as then can be left over undealt feelings and responses from childhood. So ask yourself what events or changes in the present are producing such feelings in your present dream.

The following example describes such feelings and their effect.

Example: I was in a very loving relationship in which I had developed powerful emotional links with D. We communicated many times each day while apart at work, etc. But one day there was no communication. I felt tremendous anxiety and emotional pain and shock, really frightened that she had dropped me. In fact she hadn’t, but my fears were very real and difficult to deal with. It was a real shock. Peter.

Peter realised that the tremendous shock was due to his deeply felt fear that his mother/lover could desert him at any time. That fear had arisen from actual experience of abandonment. The change in D’s behaviour triggering his feelings.

Can you see signs in this dream of how others, particularly your parents, felt about you as a child? If so, have the feelings engendered become habitual? It may not be true that we were not wanted, but our feelings might be saying it was. A sense of abandonment powerfully influences our relationships as an adult, and can lead to feelings of being unloved in the midst of what is really a happy and caring relationship; sometimes carries an element of self pity. So search your feeling to see what effects your parents attitudes, actions and words had on you, and note down what you realise.

Does this feeling of abandonment influence the way you feel in a relationship? Can you write in the journal what it does in your relationships. The following dream illustrates this.

Example: ‘My Mother asked me to go and buy some butter for her. A chain on my left leg prevented me from going very far. I look down the road and see my Mum, Dad and my four brothers in the back of a car. I wave and call and they drive right past me, going over the chain I am wearing on my leg.’ Lorraine. LBC.

Lorraine’s dream illustrates not only her feelings of being left out of or abandoned by her family, but also the chain on her leg shows her not fully independent. We often feel ‘abandoned’ while we are trying to become more independent.

Does you feeling of abandonment link with any major life changes such as leaving home, or travelling and living in another country, the death of someone close, loss of job or being rejected? Such experiences can leave you feeling devastated or challenged. So look carefully at hat you feel and where the feeling of abandonment arises from? It might not be from the loss or change, but from fear about who you are and loss of your identity – and identity based on the past situation. See: alone; functions of dreams; hero/ine.

Is the feeling in the dream one you have often? If so can you define the feeling and put it into words? Ask yourself why it occurs so often, if it comes from particular triggers, and if you can trace it back to a particular past event.

Example: A woman in her fifties told me that since early childhood until her forties she had experienced a recurring dream that was very disturbing. In the dream she was walking past railings in the town she lived in as a child. She always woke in dread and perspiration from this dream. During her forties she had the dream while her sister was visiting and told her the dream. The response was, “Oh, that’s simple. Don’t you remember that when you were about four we were walking past those railings and we were set on by a group of boys. Then I said to them, ‘Don’t hurt us our mother’s dead!’ They left us alone, but you should have seen the look on your face.”

It seems likely the event had confronted her with the possibility of her mother dying, which at that age she may never have realised before. From that time on the dream never recurred.

What or who have I abandoned or been abandoned by? Anything you can clarify about this leads to greater understanding and ease.

If you look backwards through your life, can you find previous examples of it, and perhaps when the feeling started? In other words imagine yourself going back along a timeline till you find other times you felt this way until you get to the first time.

Example: One evening while lying in bed with my wife I felt she was so repulsive I didn’t want to get near her. It was so strong I wondered how, considering that I often hug women less attractive than my wife, how I felt this way now. I started going back in memory to see if I could find previous occurrences of it and quickly arrived at what I knew was the beginning of the problem. My mother had threatened to put me in an orphanage to punish me for being late for school. This wasn’t an idle threat as I had a very traumatic experience of being left in a hospital with no sense of being taken home. So I rejected her by feeling what a repulsive old cow she was, and told her so. This gave me the strength to become independent from her emotionally. It was exactly what I was doing with my wife.

Sometimes the effects of abandonment can be so great that the cause can remain hidden, and it is only met as feelings of enormous panic, emotional pain or the desire to protect or keep hold of a person. Do you feel great anger, or that the person who you are closely connected with is hateful? Or do you feel as if you are trying to placate someone?

If you dream of abandoning someone else, does the dream express any signs of hidden anger, or that you are abandoning the care or growth of some part of your personality? If so can you clearly say what your feelings or thoughts are? See: Alone.

When you dream of being abandoned in the sense of freely allowing feelings or actions, it can represent a dropping of the moral code, finding a new freedom, releasing pent-up feelings.  Can you note any of these feelings or attitudes in you?

Does an abandoned building or project appear in your dream? Have you left behind, or are outgrowing something that you were involved in and had life for you in the past, but is now either left behind, or that you have withdrawn energy or enthusiasm from, or perhaps given up on? See if you can define what the building or project depicts in your experience. If you can define it, it marks your direction of growth.

Do you dream of being abandoned by a friend or lover? Do you feel anxious about losing a friend or the love of someone? If you can see any signs of this in what you feel, define exactly what that friend gave you – such as support, warmth, criticism, encouragement – and see if you are feeling its loss. Such feelings might point to either a dependent relationship or the trauma of a childhood loss. See if you can find out which it is.

But if that does not apply, do you feel anxiety about losing a friend; or that someone’s death or absence leaves a empty place in you?

An aspect of isolation, or being left, is that it nearly always offers opportunities to meet ones fears and learn greater independence. Difficulties surrounding this are often linked with what we frequently call love, but might, for greater clarity, be called dependence. For instance, if a partner leaves us and we experience great pain, much of that pain and anxiety comes about because we have depended upon our partner to supply, or help supply such needs as money, a place to live, social standing, sexual satisfaction, a sense of being wanted, companionship and support in crises. So can you recognise any of these as factors in you or in your dream?

Summing up. From the answers you have given to the questions see if you can recognise where you relationship with abandonment arises form, or is emerging, in your life. What do you feel about it? Is it to do with an event  in your life,  someone you  lost  or a betrayal?

When you can connect the dream with your everyday experience, consider what the dream is depicting in its drama. Whatever you have discovered from looking at your dream, try to use the insights in your everyday life. Build them into the way you feel and think, and watch yourself grow.

The point of transformation. In every dream and in every life situation there is a way through to a different life. See Secrets of Transformation 

  Baby in my dream 

Useful questions: 

Your dream baby is very special to you. It doesn’t matter that perhaps the baby in your dream is the child of another woman, it is still the baby of your dream. Like any baby, it is something new and vulnerable that has come to life – come to your life. The important questions are:

What is it that is new and growing in your love, in your work, or in yourself? Or perhaps it is about vulnerability, because anything new and dependent is vulnerable. Therefore the answers you give to the following questions are important in helping you discover the truth about your dream baby. So give some thought to what is new or vulnerable in your life and write down what you discover. It might be a new venture, a relationship, or it might even be a business, so take a while to answer.

Are you having anxious or strange dreams about your baby? If you are pregnant or hoping for a baby at the time of the dream, your dream baby may be reflecting your hopes, fears or intuitions about pregnancy. Many pregnant women have very distorted or weird dreams while pregnant. So do not feel that such dreams are predictions. They are often ways of releasing anxiety or of expressing hopes regarding your unborn child. See: Pregnancy and Dreams.

So are these dreams about my fears? If you can admit these are your fears then you can magically transform them into your strength and creativity. So write down what your fears are and what you really want your baby to be.

How would you describe the condition or situation of the baby? The baby in your dream might be hungry or ill. It might be wonderfully advanced and already able to speak. Whatever the condition, this is a description of what is happening with the newly emerging or vulnerable part of you. Therefore try to put into words what you see or feel the condition of the baby is.

As an example of this, here is a fragment from a man’s dream: ‘I am responsible for bringing up a baby boy. I feel very happy about it and feel committed to it.’ So in this case the condition of the baby is that of being loved and cared for.

What are your feelings or thoughts about the baby as it appears in the dream? What you feel and think about the baby gives an indication of how you are relating to the new or vulnerable part of yourself, or what worries you are discharging. Clarify them to recognise what may be helping or hindering this new experience in your life.

Example: I had a dream that I had a child and had to cancel a test because I had to take care of the baby. I was breast feeding the baby, because it is healthier to breast feed than to give formula from a bottle. The person that I had been seeing wanted to know what I thought I was doing. The question was in an accusatory manner, like I had no business breast feeding my own baby. Then I left the baby with my friends and left. When I came back, they were feeding the baby Tabasco sauce because they ran out of milk. This shocked me because I thought my friends were more responsible than that.

So there are two issues here. The first is the struggle and strength to oppose what is felt to be right in the face of other people’s opinions. The second is that other people can injure your vulnerable and growing self if you let them take over your decisions. In either case it is clear that you have the intuitive knowledge to know what is the best way to nurture your baby.

Is your dream baby a promise or dream come true? Have circumstances in life not allowed you to be or do what is a longed for thing or activity? So ask yourself if the dream expresses any new part of you that has now been allowed time and opportunity to be ‘born’ or coming to life?

Is the dream baby my own child? If we are parents we often dream about our own children. Occasionally such dreams express concerns we have about our own child. We have noticed something ‘out of the corner of our eye’, and the dream puts this into focus. But often such dreams use the child to illustrate a developing part of you. This is because your actual child has characteristics unique to itself. They may be adventurous, playful, thoughtful or highly verbal. To understand your dream you need to define how you see and feel about your child.

For instance a woman dreamt she was sitting on a window sill and was frightened of falling. So much so she couldn’t move. Then she reached out and took her small son’s hand and climbed into the building away from danger. In describing how she felt about her son, she said he was courageous and confident. So her dream was showing how, by reaching out for her own confidence and courage, however immature, she could overcome her anxiety about falling/failing. Her child calls out her inner strength to meet the situation and overcome the danger.

Therefore, is your dream baby or child expressing something you have noticed about your actual child; or does it express some aspect of your character? In either case please describe it.

Is your dream baby dead in the womb or being aborted? If you are pregnant this dream may be a reflection of your fears or concerns regarding pregnancy. There is also an aspect in that your old way of life will die, or be lost forever, with the enormous change a new baby will bring into your life.

Otherwise dreaming of abortion or of a dead baby may symbolise the death of some hope or dream you have been holding. This need not be a negative thing, as it may be time to simply let go and move on. It may also represent letting go of some aspect of your life that has been hindering you, signifying a time of change, a new direction in life.

So has a developing part of you, a relationship or a venture been aborted or not survived in some way? Can you feel any emotions about that or say how you feel about it?

Can I help the baby in any way? This is an important question to answer because your dreams often present you with opportunities to change or to grow. If the dream is dealing with an emerging part of your nature, or a new love or project, protecting and helping this new dimension of your life is important. So, for instance, if your baby needs feeding or affection, sit quietly and imagine yourself feeding the baby, or giving it affection. Do whatever you feel is needed to help it.

Does you dream show any problems about the baby being born or surviving? Or are they problems in the way, things you have to do to allow it to be? Define what the problems shown in the dream are, and in doing so see what is holding this new and vital part of you back.

Is this an intuition about a baby’s or my baby’s situation? Quite often we dream about awful events in connection with our baby or child. Because these can be incredibly disturbing it is important to understand their meaning. As a first step there are at least two types of dreams that deal with disturbing events. The first type of dream is called ‘representative’. And the following is an example of it.

I am on a country walk with my wife and small son. I look back to see my son fall down a deep hole. I rush back to see him drowning, and wonder whether I should jump down to help him. Then suddenly he is okay and with me again.

The father was incredibly worried that it showed a bad situation for his son. But as we explored it we realised that the son represented his marriage. He had a terrible row with his wife the day before, and he was frightened that it was the end of their life together. The son in this dream was the result of their marriage, what they had created together. So if the son had died it would have shown the father feeling their marriage had no hope of a future. But the dream showed the son fully recovered, showing that even when he was feeling bad, his dream showed him a different outcome. So it represented the father’s intense feelings and the possible outcome.

The other type of dream can be called direct insight or prophetic. Such dreams are usually not in any way symbolic and are highly uncommon. They do not include such things as are seen in the above dream which quickly switches from danger to ease. The following dream is an example.

One morning my wife woke and told me she had dreamt about the baby of two of our friends. The friends, a man and wife, were living about 200 miles from us. We knew the wife was pregnant, and about a week or so before the dream we had received a short letter saying their baby, a boy, had been born. We were not on the telephone at the time, so the letter was our only means of communication.

In the dream my wife saw the baby and a voice from behind her told her the child was ill. Its illness, she was given to understand, was serious, and would need to be treated with a drug taken every day of the child’s life. The reason for this illness and the drug use, she was told, was because in a past life the person now born as the baby had committed suicide using a drug.

In this dream very definite information was given that could be checked. I didn’t take the dream seriously, thinking it was some sort of personally symbolic dream. The dream was sent to the couple, and about a week later a letter from them said that the letter and dream had crystallised their already existing anxiety about the baby. It had not been feeding well and was fretful. On taking it to the doctor nothing definite could be found but special tests were made in hospital. From these it was discovered the baby was dying. It lacked an enzyme which was needed to digest calcium. To compensate it was given a drug, which it has had to take every day of its life to make up for the lacking enzyme.

The dream did not represent a situation, it described it clearly. Also it could easily be checked. So if you are uncertain, always go for the representative dream, as prophetic dreams are extremely rare.

So the questions to ask are: Is this dream making a direct statement? If so can I check it for accuracy? If it is a representative dream, ask yourself what it represents symbolically, and go through the questions above. 

Does my dream show an infant body with an adult head – or adult body with and infant head? Ask yourself what this suggests? Do you feel you have an element of you that has not developed or matured fully? If so, can you describe how it expresses in your life? See: Ages of Love.

Have you adopted a baby or given a baby for adoption? Have you taken on other person’s stance in life, one that you feel will offer the opportunity to grow?  Or is this a way of grafting another person’s ability to conceive a new life of ability to your own abilities? If you are trying to adopt a child, does the dream show the concerns or fears you feel, or is it very positive?

Is the baby a girl or boy? What do you feel is the difference between a girl baby and a boy? If you can define the difference than you can see what sort of new thing you are caring for or helping to grow.

Is my dream baby crying – and if so for what? Can you say what it is your baby is crying for? If you can define this, can you give it what it needs? Is it that it needs to feel happy and relaxed in its environment, to feel wanted and loved; does it have a sense of connection with other people? Is there something distressing you at a feeling/needing level that you are not acknowledging; a new project or aspect of self needing more care?

Has the dream baby been dropped? Are you being careless in meeting the needs of your vulnerable and growing self? Or have you mishandled an opportunity or relationship or ‘dropped’ someone or been ‘dropped’? Or is there any likelihood of an aborted baby?

Example: I turned and ran with the pram at a small boy on a tricycle who was pedaling toward me playfully. We laughingly collided. Not a bad bump, but enough to send the baby over onto the ground on its head. The baby cried but didn’t seem badly hurt. I realised it was the second time I had dropped the baby, and felt I must be more careful and responsible. We were then preparing for a storm on the ship.

It was during the past few days that my wife told me that her period was late. She thought she was pregnant. This caused an awful situation between us. I was out of work in a town that offered me no work. I suggested she had an abortion. As it turned out it was a false pregnancy. However, the damage had been done. Apparently I had dropped the baby?

These questions need to be answered with care to get to the right feelings and insight into what is happening in the important deeps of you.

Is the baby being hit? Can you see any signs suggesting you are still trying to destroy or repress the development of your own child self? This is so important a question it is worth taking time to consider. So can you see any evidence for self criticism that damages your creativity or growth? Can you recognise that as a child events, parental or social punishment or restrictions, may have held back your emerging curiosity, enthusiasm, sexuality, or love? Maybe these things were crushed. But they are still within you to resurrect, and will call out to be healed. So the hitting would be a continuation of the repression that you received in your early years. 

Am I involved in losing/not finding a baby? In what way have I lost or feeling that I have lost something to do with my spontaneous, and childlike self? Or are you the lost and abandoned baby – or feeling uncertain of your worth and love? 

Is there a neglected or forgotten baby in my dream? Many dreams about babies show a starved and neglected baby.

Is my dream about the mysterious side of parenthood? There is a wonderful side of dreams about your baby that is often completely overlooked. To quote from the researcher Elisabeth Hallett’s writings, “I stumbled across a mystery. I was working on a book about the postpartum bonding time, gathering parents’ personal stories, when I was struck by an unexpected fact. Quite a few parents emphasized that their connection with their baby had begun long before the actual birth. They told of sensing contact and communication during pregnancy–and in some of the most spine-tingling accounts, even before conception itself.” One man dreamt the following, already mentioned above:

One night I was awoken from dream that frightened me. I was in a room with my wife and we were aware of a powerful spiritual being. He said for us not to be frightened, and ask us to have sex because he wanted to be born to us. It was such an impressive dream we went ahead, and within a short time I dreamed my wife was pregnant with a boy child, a special child. When he was born he showed something of his specialness early by starting to walk at six months.

Often these dreams are a form of communication between the mother and the child she is carrying, and in such cases a special bond develops. Or the unborn child tells of his past or what it wants to do in its life. One woman told of a dream in which her unborn child told her it was to be a girl, and its name will be Tamsin!

Such dreams are easily recognised by their clear messages and feelings of knowing your baby and its connection with you.

Summing up. From the answers you have given to the questions see if you can recognise what new thing has come into, or is emerging, in your life. What do you feel vulnerable about? Is it to do with someone you love? Is it a new attitude you have to the way you express yourself? Or perhaps it is a new project you have undertaken.

When you can connect the dream with your everyday experience, consider what the dream is depicting in its drama. Is it saying the baby is healthy and strong? Does your baby need support? Is it nourished? Whatever you have discovered from looking at your dream baby, try to use the insights in your everyday life. Build them into the way you feel and think, and watch your baby grow.

The point of transformation. In every dream and in every life situation there is a way through to a different life. See Secrets of Transformation 

 

Horse 

Useful questions: 

There are great similarities between the horse and the dog. They are both domesticated animals, and so represent urges and drives you may have learned to harness or direct. The big difference is that the horse can carry us and serve us in our labours much more powerfully than a dog. 

Do you feel any pleasurable exuberance or energy in the dream? If so do you sense any feelings to do with well being and enthusiasm and that it – the horse – can ‘carry’ you through the day easily?

This wonderful energy can be felt as sexual well being or physical drive to work. Some times the tremendous feelings that can move a horse to run and jump through sheer pleasure. So it important to define what you feel and where it is taking you.

Do you feel the horse is taking you somewhere you do not want to go or are afraid of?

If you feel fear can you say what it’s about and where you feel it is taking you?

Has this got anything to do with the process of ageing and the natural process of life that can drag you sometimes unwillingly toward old age and death?

Therefore in old age the unbidden processes that move toward death may be depicted as the horse in a threatening or helpful role. That is not in itself and awful thing or something to avoid. The dream process can transform such fears into wonderful insights. See; Examples Horse and Carriage.

Is your dream horse panicking, or are you panicking riding it?

A horse is not only a dynamic power and a means of locomotion; it can carry you away like a surge or instinct. It is subject to panics like all instinctive creatures which lack higher consciousness. Therefore it is worth asking what has panicked you or the horse and talking to it – yourself. Talk to it and pat it as one would a horse to calm its natural instincts, or encourage them if necessary.

Is your horse expressing love to you, or a tremendous urge to serve and help?

Have you noticed this urge in yourself; and if so how are you dealing with it or expressing it? What do you feel  natural love is for? And can you take time to think about it and write it down?

Does this dream have any links with sorcery and magic spells?

If you explore those feelings where do they lead? Obviously you may be scared of such feelings, but if you can face your fears they may lead to a very new way of living.

What colour is the horse in your dream?

The colour of the horse is very import in dreams. So see what you arrive at and write it down. For instance what would be the difference in what you felt for a black horse and white horse, or even a golden horse? Think about that before you read on.

In mythology and folklore the black ‘night horse’ can sometimes be link with death. The white horse is often seen as a herald of success or enlightenment.

Are there any feelings of love or sexual feelings between you and the horse?

In a woman’s dream do you feel a male strength from your connection with the horse? Or in a man’s dream do you feel any support and love as from a loving woman?

Is your horse wearing blinkers? Can you see that you are shutting out seeing things; either to not allow yourself to see what is happening around you; through anxiety about life, or to concentrate your attention?

Are you controlling the horse through fear of it? Do you feel that you are frightened of your urges running away with you? Are you trying to control, fears, feelings of love and sexuality, or your own natural drives and emotions? Is this because they are powerful enough either to give you motivation in your activities, or drag you along unwillingly?

Do you dream of a dead horse? Have you experienced a serious loss of energy or motivation which is leading to illness or depression? Or is this an old and dying set of habits and motivations or way of life that has died?

Have you fallen off your dream horse, or seen someone else fall off? Have you been relating badly to your urges and needs? This might cause you to come a tumble, especially if you are not taking care of your health, sexual or exercise needs; after all you are an animal and an animal has its needs. So have you not understood who you are as a mammal? This could result in tension, breakdown or illness.

Are you or someone else dragged along by a horse? Impetuosity of feelings; feelings dragged along by natural urges.

Horse race: The events of everyday life, and your relationship with people; everyday competition and where you rate yourself in it; what happens in the race shows how you are relating to opportunity, or how you feel about your accomplishments and being part of the ‘human race’. Perhaps this indicates your urge to gamble and its outcomes.

Horse running freely: Allowing your emotions or sexuality free reign to express naturally. Love of life.

Horse unwilling to move or carry: Your natural or instinctive feelings are against the action or direction you are trying to go.

Man on horse: This has sometimes suggested a messenger, but can also indicate a good relationship between your natural drives and your waking self – if the person rides well.

New born horse: Emerging energy or new motivations.

Old or worn out horse: State of your feelings, perhaps worn out from overwork, or it may refer to a member of the family in a similar way.

Riderless horse: Sometimes represents the death of someone, as in the following example.

What was involved in that decision?

What natural almost instinctive side of you feels like it is fighting for survival?

What sort of horse was this? I suppose I mean what was its character, considering what you said about its mythological nature. And what would be lost by its death.

 

House in My Dream

Useful questions:

There are so many things a house contains, such as an attic, kitchen, a hallway and stairs, these are listed separately, so if you can’t find them in this entry search for them elsewhere.

When you dream of a house, you are meeting a hugely important and many sided representation of yourself. It is both many faceted and multidimensional.

Each dream image holds enormous data, emotional response, and created patterns of behaviour. So in considering the house in your dream you need to remember you are in touch with a full surround databank of fantastic information about you, your past and your possibilities. You can interact with this information by exploring it in the right way. And to help with this let us look at and question some of the possibilities your dream house might hold. Let us start by asking how, in general, you would describe this house. 

For instance how old do you feel the house is – and in stating its age, does that connect in any way with your own age and time of birth? If so how? If the age differs from your own age, what period of time or your life does it coincide with and what relevance has that to you? How old the house is does not simply refer to your physical age. But also it can refer to what period of social attitudes your were born in and influenced by. 

Is it a strong house, or are there weaknesses? In other words what does the dream house suggest about those things? For instance any weakness in the house needs to be seen as difficulties you have – and of course strengths as signs of ability to cope with life. So see of you can find any associations with weaknesses or strengths.  Is the house well built or weak in some areas? If weak what areas of yourself or your body can you gather from that? 

What style of house is it? The style of the house can give clues to what you have inherited from the past, from your family and culture. The style of the house may also suggest something of your attitude to life. As you explore the house in general look for connections to any aspect or period of your life.

The style can also suggest a period of history and the attitudes and morals of it. It can also depict the particular skills or strengths you have. And you need to ask if your personality and inner life reflect those skills or lack of them? After all, some old houses have so much workmanship and quality in them.

In the dream how are you relating to the house? Are you arriving, leaving, repairing it, pulling it down, or exploring it? Whatever you are doing, or in whatever way you are relating to the house, what does that suggest about what you are doing to your body, your personality, or your way of life? For instance if leaving, are you leaving a way of life behind? If renovating, what attitudes or part of you are you changing?

Are you searching for or finding something in it? Or perhaps this is about an event, a relationship, or an influence you can feel in connection with the house. Try to define the influence or whatever you experience, and see if you can notice how that is active or influencing your current life.

Is this a house you once lived in, or does it remind you of such a house or dwelling? If so what was your way of life in that house? What happened to you there – were you going through puberty; were you in or leaving a relationship; was success or failure experienced there; was it a move to or achievement of independence? Whatever you remember or define about it, how is that relevant now and in what way is it active in your life?

What is the environment or atmosphere like in the house? Sometimes it is easier to see this looking back as you are often too immersed at the time, so take time to describe it to yourself. 

Have discovered a new area of the house, or found a door or a room you never knew existed? If so what is the new area like? What atmosphere or feelings does it arouse? What do you find, feel or discover in this new area? In what way does this reflect discovery of new attitudes, talents or aspects of you?

Example: An actual example of this is of a woman who wrote telling of a recurring dream in which she discovered a door in her house she had never seen before. Beyond it was a whole apartment she has never known or used. It was obviously an area of her life she had never lived in, but she had no idea what. A soon as she imagined entered the apartment she began to remember and feel again things that had happened in her childhood. Her mother and father had separated when she was very young, and her mother had constantly presented her father as weak and of no value. But the feelings that arose were of the love of beauty and art that her father had shared and helped unfold in her. But she had kept that part of her closed because of what her mother had said. Now it was open to her again and she could allow it to unfold further in her life.  An important point here is that the woman did this working alone on her dream, not with professional help or supervision.

Is your dream showing a falling down or destroyed house or building? Can you see that something is passing away or has passed? This can refer to a way of life or a particular personality style. For instance one may have been brought up to be very moral and rigid at one stage of ones life and then a major change happen and one becomes more mobile and adaptable. This could be depicted as a building or house that has fallen or been knocked down; ageing and the process whereby one loses some functioning or sexual attractiveness of the body in ageing.here any signs of health problems? If so ask yourself what in you is failing.

Have you discovered a room that you have forgotten or forsaken? Are you beginning too realise that you have buried or walled up parts of who you were? Sometimes great needs lead you to forsake yourself in some way, as in the example. 

Example: I landed on the flat roof of a house, and suddenly realised I was on the roof of my old home, though it didn’t resemble it at all. Standing there I could see down into a room, or an area, that had got walled off as my home was being renovated. This is an important point because my old home was a huge project that never got completely finished. As I looked into the rooms I saw many objects I knew belonged to me from the past, and I would go back to examine to see what were useful to me now.

Has a new area of you been discovered? If so what is in it? What atmosphere or feelings does it arouse? What do you find, feel or discover in this new area? In what way does this reflect discovery of new attitudes, talents or self discovery in you?

As you discover the room, what do you feel or realise? If you cannot get into the room what do you feel is stopping you? And does the room remind you of any time in your life or period of activity or relationship?

What do you feel led you to forsake the room and if you can see object there, what use to you are they now?

Sometimes the events that have led us to wall up part of our experience contain intense emotions. As in the following example:

Example: I felt a bit anxious as I went to the tower and felt I could face whatever the influence was – perhaps of ghosts. I took one of the bombs I must have been carrying and blew out a wall in the tower. I had could see a whole family who had been walled up many years previously. The scenes of their death were very moving – baby in the arms of its mother etc.

Of course dreams are often very dramatic in their portrayal of our inner feelings. Even so, it is worth while asking yourself what part of your family life has been denied so strongly?

Does the house give you an impression of great age? Is it older than you are? If so what are your impressions of it and what it contains? What is your relationship with it and are you searching for or finding something in it? Try to define the influence or whatever you experience, and see if you can notice how that is active or influencing your current life.

If this is an old house and you gain entrance to new areas, you need to ask yourself what influences from the past – perhaps the long past – are emerging in you at the moment.

A very old house, especially if it is large, can depict what could be called past dwellings, or past lives involved in or connected with your present life. In general it depicts the past from which your present life has emerged, and the influences from which it arises. If you can imagine yourself in the house you may be able to clearly experience what its influence is. (For help doing this see: Exploring Your Dream)

Does this house belong to somebody else and how are you relating to this house? Are you entering or leaving this house? Sometimes such a house can suggest your relationship with someone else. If not that then are you entering a new or different way of or situation in life? So can you connect with any of those suggestions, and if so in what way?

Is a new relationship indicated in any way, or you becoming intimate with someone?

Or are you looking for something, a new relationship or even a new experience of living?

What social status does the house suggest? Do the surroundings of the house suggest wealth, poverty or some level of social status? If so try to define it and how you relate to it now or in the past.

Are you entering the house? Are you looking for something or examining yourself – your mind and emotions? Or are you entering a new relationship and becoming intimate with someone?

Have you left the front door open?  Do you have an ‘open door’ for strangers and friends? Or is it that you are open to a new relationship, or to move in and out of a situation.

Is the back door shown in your dream? Is there any connection in the dream with family members or those you trust coming into or leaving your life?

Are attackers or intruders coming into the house? Can you feel any social pressures or exposure to criticisms? Or are there any indications of an infections of some sort?

Is your dream house burning or falling down? This suggests very big changes in attitudes. So do you feel as if your past way of life or way you life is either under threat or that you want to leave behind old standards or dependencies?

Are you involved in buying a house? This suggests you are making a decision to change, or wanting a change. Can you sense this, and can you see that it face you with making a choice? So do you have any feelings of uncertainty about deciding what to do with your life and even relationships? This might also need you to clarify what you want, and what you would like.

Cramped house: Feeling of need for personal change; feeling restricted in home environment or in present personal attitudes.

Is the front of house shown? Is your personality, the part that you deal with outsiders, or you present to the world, involve?  Also, what is happening to the front of the house, the façade? Is it being redecorated, falling or torn down, or restructured? Think about what that means and see if it expresses something you are aware of.

The point of transformation: In every dream and in every life situation there is a way through to a different life. Secrets of Transformation 

There are so many things a house contains, such as an attic, kitchen, a hallway and stairs; these are listed separately, so search for them elsewhere.

Secrets of Transformation

1. Who we believe we are, and what we feel is real or fundamental in life, is usually a false view. We usually base our identity on what we look like, what others say we are – good or bad – our social or financial standing, and what we feel reality is. We often feel that way because we have a fixed idea of what reality is at that reality is stable. Yet at every moment the world and universe are constantly changing. Constantly we see new patterns, as with the weather. Each day is unique. Trying to summarise or define life reminds you that the universe is never the same at any given moment. Subtle changes have taken place in every shifting moment.  Even within the human realm, the dreams, urges and creative moments of individuals throughout the world have slightly shifted what we call reality.  They may be minute units of change and tenuous, but together they add up to the changing landscape and experience of our lives.  So you can never really define it, even if it is something you have experienced.  Even what you hold on to and manifest gradually fades away. So let go and approach each moment as if it offers a new opportunity. To enlarge understanding of the points here see: The Magical Dream Machine; Identity.

2. Remember the precious moments when you knew the precious moment.

3. We are all only a brushstroke on the canvas of Life. Stand back and admire it and see how however small your mark is, you are part of something beyond belief or even understanding. So see the bigger picture.

4. When you have explored your dreams deeply enough, you will realise that we are all part of a huge virtual reality, a huge film, in which no matter what events are played out, nobody is hurt. However, as humans we tend to judge everything. By doing so we shut ourselves off from really participating, seeing, and understanding.  After all, there is only change, no final death, only the experience of it.

5. In the moments of greatest awareness, this life seems to be a playground.  We are all so young, and it is silly to feel superior. We are all so tiny, and it is on the goodwill of Life itself, huge beyond imagination, that we exist.  It cares for us.  Can you imagine it?  This gas breathing, farting, sex banging, bag of water – yet Life sees we have value and potential.

6. We have so wanted to be manipulators – in charge, in control.  We have so wanted not to feel insecure!  That desire leads to enormous insecurity.  As creators, that is the world we create.

7. If you look around, you will see that the highest and lowest are inseparable.  The good and the bad, the light and the dark need each other and are inseparable. The most refined and the coarse run together somehow and are needed by each other in creativity.  For the highest to take on form it descends into the very fundamental, to the slime and the deeply biological and earthy. If you can see this you will experience that extraordinary moment of creation, in which everything is there together, unseparated.  We partake in that extraordinary moment of creation.  And it is only when we can love as broadly that we can be a part of it.  It is only when we can love that broadly that we can enter into it without manipulating it.  But there is a quiet presence to be drawn upon if we so seek.  That presence enters every moment.  There is no moment more significant than another.  This is the moment of creation.  This is the moment when you can recreate yourself – again and again and again.  Or perhaps you want to create yourself again, and hold onto that moment.  Or you can play with it until you have exhausted it and let it lie in the way.  Isn’t that life, when we hold on to moments, lover, beloved, the child, the lost waif, princess and the prince, business person, the world dominator – my God, the roles we can assume are extraordinary.  And it’s all okay because it is all a part of creation and creativity.  Nothing is ever lost or destroyed.

8. In every moment there are opposing opposites. It is the energy of Life. If you get trapped in one polar opposite or another, it leaves you feeling powerless and the victim of life. But if you stand in the middle you are at the point of creation. At that point you can ask how to get out of the traps you are in; how to find release from pain; how to find what it is you REALLY want.

 

Exploring your dream symbols

To get really into your dreams, you need to be able to play a little with imagination – you know, that wonderful creative thing we have. And if you haven’t exercised your imagination recently, you ought to try.

So a staring point is to stand in the role of the character or image of the dream you are trying to extract more from.  So if it was a car you dreamed about, chose to be the car.

So to start with it helps to be sitting comfortably and undisturbed. Then you close your eyes, enter into the feeling sense and imagery of the dream, and describe the car.

Do not do that as if you were describing any old car, but exactly what is in the dream. It helps if you think of the car as if can help to imagine you know nothing about it. So what  is a car, and  what is its purpose and why do we use it?  Then you can be even more imaginative and take n the shape of the car, what it feels like, and it how it relates to the human you. So if it were a person imagine in your dream, what it would be like being in their body?

Example – I am a car. Joel has recently purchased me, and he is driving me, largely because he feels I will help him gain respect from other people. I am quite a large car, and have a lot of power. But even with all this energy I do not make my own decisions. I am directed by Joel’s desires and wishes, and enable him to fulfil them more readily.

From this short description it can already be seen there is a suggestion the car represents Joel’s emotional and physical energy, directed by his desires and decisions.

If we then explore Joel, we would get a perspective on why he is in the car – “I am seeing a woman I fancy, and hope I can attract her with my car.”

To go more fully into this approach, as you take on the role and have finished describing yourself as the object or person, now notice what you are feeling in yourself as you really. Give attention to what changes occur as you notice what is arising in your body, your feelings and imagination. This is a bit like watching a blank television screen, waiting for something to show. Watch until something relevant or promising starts to arise then observe it as it grows.

Describe what is observed until you have got to the end of your description and observations. Take your time with this.

alone Being alone in a dream expresses one’s sense of isolation, feelings of loneliness or independence, depending on dream feelings. Idioms: Go it alone; alone together; alone = all-one.

Useful questions:

Do I feel okay about being alone in the dream or in waking life?

Are any feelings or fears about independence indicated or relevant?

What is the theme and drama of the dream adding to the aloneness? See: drama.

Examples

“Last night I had a dream which shook me somewhat, and I wonder what you make of it. I am a mature 40 year – old, don’t normally dream, and am not unduly fanciful, but this dream has really shaken me. It felt like death. In the dream, my husband and I are at some sort of social club. The people there are ex-workmates of mine and I am having a wonderful time and am very popular. My husband is enjoying my enjoyment. Then he and I are travelling down a country lane in an open horse-drawn carriage. It is very dark and is in the area we used to live in. We come to a hump-backed-bridge, and as we arrive at the brow of the bridge a voice says, ‘Fair lady, come to me.’ My body is suddenly lying flat and starts to rise. I float and everything is black, warm and peaceful. Then great fear comes over me and I cry out my husband’s name over and over. I get colder and slip in and out of the blackness. Then I start to wake up. It takes a tremendous effort, as my body is very heavy. I am extremely cold and absolutely terrified, with a feeling of horror. There seems to be something evil here. I force myself to get up in the dark and go downstairs. Even with the light on I feel the presence of great evil.”

The first part of this woman’s dream and what she says of herself shows her as an outgoing person, with a happy disposition. She likes people, and they like her; she is probably good looking, and healthy. She feels herself successful at what she has worked, and has left having acquired friends. The relationship she has with her husband is also depicted as one in which pleasure can be allowed within caring independence. Her dream image of herself is therefore created out of her own confidence. Dreams frequently summarise the quality of ones life and the ‘story so far’ in their first scene.

The second scene is made up of several parts – the journey, the woman’s relationship with her husband, the force of nature symbolised by the horses and the countryside, and the unknown seen as the bridge and the voice. To understand what this reveals of the dreamer, look at the vital clues: what she has said about herself and what she felt in the dream. If you strip away images to see what attitudes or emotions are exposed, you can see the forces behind the dream plot. The most poignant statement she makes is in saying, “It felt like death.”

If we consider the central image of the dream, the hump-backed bridge, in relation to what she says about her age, the feelings of death’s approach make sense. When you approach a hump-backed bridge you climb, but at the very brow, the descent begins. Isn’t that a powerful symbol of life? In our younger years our strength, sexuality and ability to meet life with resourcefulness and independence increase, until middle age, when the decline sets in. You cross over – as this woman crosses the bridge – from one type of experience or view of life to another. The passage of time is seen here as the horses pulling her carriage inexorably towards the change.

But the dream’s beauty, its depth and drama, are in the voice, and in the discovery of how death ‘feels’. They tell us something about women’s inner lives, PLURAL. They reveal how, in her prime, a woman confronts change and the view of death in a way few men do. “Fair lady” the voice of change calls, “come to me.” And it beckons the dreamer towards a hefty mid-life crisis, asking her to exchange her sexual peak, her firm body, her fertility, for the different perspective of post-menopause.

Many women – men too of course – gain their sense of value as a person from their ‘attractiveness’. Losing whatever it is that makes them sexually desirable and socially popular – or fearing that they are losing it – will lead to a significant change in their way of life and their feelings about themselves. This is what makes the dreamer call for her husband. This is what produces the feeling of isolation and terror. A woman needs reassurance and love at this point in her life. She may behave indecisively and deflect the advances of her man through a lack of self-esteem.

Fortunately the human personality is resilient. Even though we are reared to identify ourselves with what our body looks like, what it can do, what sex it is, what age it is, and how others react to it, we CAN grow to mature independence without constant reassurance.

Some people create these nocturnal horror movies when leaving school or sitting exams. But middle age is just another phase of life, with as much potential for growth and love as any other phase – and as much room for failure. This woman fears what she imagines middle age will do to her. The dream isn’t an intuition of her future. See also Exploring a Dream

 Identity and Who You Really Are 

Meeting the I AM

If you say to yourself, “I am tired. I am hungry. I am depressed. I am happy,” you are describing the changing conditions of your body and your mind. But if you say – “I am” – you are describing the fundamental part of you that experiences the changes. The ‘I AM’ is there all the time isn’t it, behind all changes? But it is as slippery as an eel to catch hold of. That is why it is necessary to learn it. Instead of realising your naked ‘I AM’ you tend to see only your thoughts and emotions, your shifting body, all of which are constantly changing.

This – I AM – survives sleep. It survives the shifting world of your sensory impressions, your thoughts and emotions. It is the ever present awareness behind the experience of your life. It doesn’t change with the tides and calamities of events. This is the rock upon which it was suggested building your house, your dwelling place, your identity – while your sensory impressions, your thoughts and emotions are the shifting sands warned against. It is within the awareness of this I AM that the conviction, not belief, in eternal existence lies. It is to the meeting with the ‘I AM’ that a real sense of who and what you are can be built. When you experience your ‘I AM’ in its nakedness, you KNOW you have existed throughout eternity. It is not a question of belief, or of being told. You experience yourself as an eternal being, standing beyond all the shifting winding paths of your body, your mind and feelings.

Meeting Your Eternal Self

So what is it like to meet this conviction of eternal existence, and what is the value of it? Why have people sacrificed so much for it?

It is easy to see that while you are convinced that your real identity is your body; while you are convinced that your emotions and thoughts are your only reality, you are incredibly vulnerable to uncertainties, fears, dashed hopes, feelings of failure, the emptiness of success and painful betrayals. These can toss you around like a scrap of paper in a gale. They can be the stress that is at the root of illness. Discovering yourself as anchored beyond change is enormously healing. Yet if you close you eyes and so lose you sight temporarily you can still know you exist. If you have the misfortune to lose an arm or a leg you still exist. Or as I experienced in a devastating stroke, despite being unable to talk, walk or respond adequately, I knew my central self still existed. I knew that what had been damaged was the physical mechanism of allowing me to express physically. I knew also that if I had built my sense of myself on my body functions, I would have been in a breakdown situation.

Even in dreams, while partly lost in the swirling world of the dreams imager, you still, behind it all, know you exist. And it is that awareness of the ‘you’ behind all the shifting phenomena that is the reality.

Although the I AM is beyond thought, beyond emotion and physical sense impressions, and at first appears to be an empty void – the Cloud of Unknowing as an early Christian mystic described it – it is like a spring from which can emerge healing of body and mind, creativity, intuitive perceptions.

 magical dream machine We all dream every night, so we each have what could be called a Magical Dream Machine.

To gain a feeling of this, imagine yourself entering one of those game machine areas where youngsters can ride a motorbike, or ski down a slope. But instead of a simulation of a car, you discover a large machine that you can climb into and become completely enclosed. When you close the door, contacts link onto your body and head in the complete darkness. It is quiet as all the external sounds disappear, and you relax your hold on your body and senses. Your whole experience of yourself shifts as the external world melts away, along with your awareness of your body. That is sleep.

But now – in the darkness a light glimmers. Gradually it takes shape. The shape of a person is suggested. In the time that follows he or she evolves form, moves, and you have full sensory experience. You are totally involved, with all your emotions and sexuality responding. Changes occur and you love, fight, fear, murder or bring to life again the person, who can become an animal, a devil, God or a bodiless voice lost in a sombre countryside. Your experiences are totally real, and you move through heaven and hell, despair and joy, darkness and light. Scenes from your past can be revisited – or totally new experiences can be felt so clearly, you are enriched.

That is a dream.

Seeing Is Not Believing

If you had been in such a machine, and on coming out of the total involvement of these moving experiences, you were told you had created it all yourself – that on the black screen you had, out of your fears, habits, secret longings and passion; out of your immense store of memories; with your unbelievable range of feelings and creativity – you had given form to urges and processes in your body and made this rich world of experience, what would you feel? Would you disclaim responsibility? Would you consider it meaningless? Would you realise what amazing creativity and potential you have?

In your dreams you create such a world and such experiences. But perhaps you have not taken time to consider the wonder of your creative process in dreams. Every night you create a new drama. You conjure out of your own being the people, the creatures, the surroundings of your dream. Then you give life to what you create – not only life but purpose and drama. You are a supreme dramatist, playwright, actor and actress. You are the great Creator – in your dreams. Considering this, have you ever wondered why that enormous creativity does not flow into your waking life? You can see that some people have that creativity and are enriched by it personally and financially. Why not you?

In considering how you reply to this, remember a few well-known facts about how you encounter the so-called ‘real’ world of waking life. Firstly, when you look at an object such as an orange or apple, remember that although you have the sense of seeing what colour and texture the fruit has, in fact all you are seeing is reflected light. You never see the actual colour of the object.

Also, as far as texture is concerned, this is a mystery to you. Texture depends entirely on what you approach the fruit with. If it is an electron microscope, then the texture is one of shifting swirling atoms and subatomic particles. If you were tiny the apple would have a very different appearance than it does to you at your present size. Also, remember that you never actually know what the apple feels like or looks like directly. Your eye takes in streams of light that are translated into nervous impulses transmitted along the optic nerve. In the brain these nerve impulses are again translated into an image that enables you to have some relationship with an apparently external world. In the same way the nerve endings on your fingers transmit signals that are translated into sensation.

Similarly the television picture you watch on a screen is translated from signals the TV set is sensitive to and changes into pictures, colour and sound. The signals are not in themselves images, colour or sound. So, like the TV, the world you feel so sure you are seeing and experiencing, is one your brain has created in order to enable you to deal with survival. Even so it is a translation of ‘the world’ that has been shaped by evolution and its limited needs. You only respond to very narrow wavebands of light and sound for instance. So you do not know much of what is actually going on in the world anyway. Your eye, as a lens produces an upside down image of your surroundings, and this is ‘corrected’ to help you move around more easily.

Considering that you only experience a virtual reality of the external world created by your brain – and that is itself limited to a tiny fraction of what is actually surrounding you – you cannot take seriously your perceptions of the world or people. There are so many radiations, energies, and depth upon depth of texture in the cosmos and objects around us, that in effect we are blind and deaf.

You Are the Creator 

So it is true to say that you live in a world, in conceptions of yourself and your surroundings that are a self-created virtual reality. You could just as correctly be asked the question of whether you accept that you create all you experience in regard to the objective world, as you could of the magical dream machine.

However, we are discussing dreams, but remember that what is said could equally as well refer to your waking life.

So, your dreams are a magical place in that you have the ability in them to create a totally real world. Do you discount them? Do you see that you create your own world of experience in them? If you do, have you wondered why you may have a propensity for creating what you do. Or why, with such creative potential, you might still lack self-confidence? Just as you create your surroundings in dreams, you also create the psychological and sensory world you live in. Understanding your dreams can help you to clarify why you at times create what does not satisfy you, and how to generate a whole new world of experience. You can take charge of your creativity and ride with it instead of being at its mercy. Such power, after all, can as easily produce misery and ill health as pleasure and ability – unless you learn to direct it. Such creativity can lead you into hell, or create a heaven.

 

 

 

Cobwebs

Many dreams of cobwebs stress age, death, of old palces where nobody has lived or been in for ages. So it might relate to either being lost in past memories in which there is little life and movement; or that you need to or are I clearing out the dust and cobwebs in your mind?

Example: It seemed a terrifying thing to be dead and descends into a crypt, lifeless and without motivation. Here I felt or experienced a very strong sense almost like a dead body, if it had awareness, might feel in a crypt. This is quite difficult to describe. I suppose what I was experiencing was a sort of ready made or social image of death. The sort of fears we have about it. It had in it the sense of dust, decay and cobwebs – the quiet dead silence of the tomb. But here, right in the midst of death, I had the sense of eternal life, of resurrection.

Example:  was trying to rearrange the furniture in a bedroom. I was sweeping behind some long curtains that had been hanging for a long time and I knew there was a big spider that could come out at me at anytime. I felt afraid but still kept sweeping the cobwebs away. See Web

Bat Bats – Flying

The flying bat is often associated with the devil or vampires, night or death. It is a creature that can see in the dark, lives in caves, and so is an aspect of unconscious inner workings, that go on in the darkness, or the part below our conscious awareness. But it is we who create this fear.

It can therefore represent thoughts or influences emerging from the unconscious, and can be wonderful rather than frightening; being able to see in the dark – i.e. intuition. As such it can be felt as a fear of the unconscious. See Facing Fear.

The Australian aborigines see the bat as the spirit of death.

Example: I had a dream that I was playing tennis with a friend and suddenly a black bat attacked on my neck and bit me and when I look at the ground there are unfamiliar animals that are crawling there and a man is sweeping all of the tiny animals. I ran in the house and a tiny blue bird follows me and I close the door. In my dream my house don’t have a roof and I let the bird fly in the sky and I look at the poor animals being swept outside the gate like a leaves fallen from the tree. They are alive and they can move but it seems like they are afraid of the man. Then I was running outside like I’m playing hide and seek with someone and I enter another house and my relatives are with me and I met a guy inside the house and we went in a room and from window I saw my kids playing outside.

As can be seen from the dream, the bite of the bat can bring about an enlargement of her ability to see and appreciate things.

Being scared of bats emerging can indicate real fears about traumatic events that you have repressed from memory. Films often use bats to suggest evil or feelings about vampires. So if you dream of vampires, it shows that you are dealing with a past event, probably involving a realtionship, which led you to feel terribly weakened.

Example: In the first dream, I was climbing a long flight of horribly rickety stairs in my father’s and mother’s house (that started as a church). I was terrified, and when I got to the top, I knew there was something horrible behind the door that scared me more than I could even say.

In the next one, I opened the door and all sorts of bats, ghosts, debris and STUFF flew at me from above.

The dreamer later discovered by exploring her dreams, that her father had sexually abused her.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What did I feel about the dream bat, and what part does that feeling play in my life at present?

Was there something I realised on seeing or dealing with the bat?

If there was fear, what was it about?

Try using Processing Dreams – Being the Person or Thing – Practical Techniques to explore their meaning

Thoughts and Words

If you think about a friend, ask yourself, ‘Is this thought my friend?’ If you have feelings about the friend, ask yourself, “Are these feelings an actual representation of my friend?” No, they are not, but are simply your own thoughts and feelings. You cannot conjure your friend into existence by thinking about him or her. Thoughts and emotions are copies of things, just as a photo is a copy of something. They are never the people or things they attempt to copy. They are never reality.

So PLEASE remember this when you build your opinion of yourself with thoughts or emotions.

Words are what we usually build our thoughts with, but is the word BIRD ever a reality? Or your thoughts about failure, success or in fact anything, are they the REALITY of YOU.

At the other end of our waking awareness is an ocean of consciousness that does not have a focussed sense of self. This ocean of consciousness that is at the core of your being is what has been called many names. As you learn to enter more fully into your dreams you will gradually realise that your real self isn’t the body with a gender of male or female, but a shape shifter. You also will have learned how to dive under the surface of your conscious personality and realise that there is a huge and wonderful world often called the unconscious. It is actually awareness of Life, and in it you can become a bodiless consciousness, or be an animal, or know the wonder of animal consciousness.

But words are also wonderful, because they are ways we can communicate in a small way with another being in a body, another person. Such ability to think in and use words is incredibly important. The wider self in which our personality is enfolded in does not think in such local and body sense ways, so our personal learning is so important.

An example of this a dreamer wrote that she wants to change the way she reacts to scary things in her dreams. She had read on this site that nothing can hurt you in your dream – transforming one’s inner dream world. She felt that it is almost impossible to influence the unconscious so felt stuck.

The next communication she sent said that she was amazed because she had actually been unafraid in her dreams. The point I want to make is that having read that you need not be afraid in your dreams, the message was now a part of her unconscious.

We are not alone in the conscious world; we are always enfolded. But the tragedy is that what we believe in our conscious personality builds brick walls that we cannot get through – unless we have new information that challenges our present beliefs – you cannot be hurt in your dreams – unless you run in fear of the scary images your mind harbours.

Using Your Voice

Instead of movement to help you relax and release tension you can use your voice. Take about fifteen to thirty minutes for this. Use quiet background music as an aid to giving yourself permission to make sounds. But be careful of pushing your voice too far as you may become hoarse.

1 –        Stand with eyes closed. Become aware of your breathing rhythm. Slowly deepen it but do not speed it up. If anything make it slower and fuller.

2 –        When you feel at ease with this add a sound to the outbreath. It is easiest to use the aaaaahhhh sound at first.

3 –        Keep this going until you feel the sound flowing out easily and reasonably smoothly. Then move the sound around by changing the volume. Make it soft, make it loud. Try the different volumes of your voice and the different levels of power.

4 –        Next try shifting the feeling quality. Make different sounds to see what variety of feelings you can discover or express. If you hit a satisfying sound, something you can enjoy, move it to express laughter, change it into sadness, thoughtfulness, anger, hurt – in fact try it in all sorts of pitches and feeling qualities.

	5 –        This can be very entertaining because the voice is an incredible instrument, so enjoy yourself with the instrument you have played since babyhood. If words find their way into what you are doing let them – but see what range of feelings you can express with them. For example try making animal sounds, and when well into it set your voice free to do what  IT not what YOU want.

6 –        When you have finished playing the instrument of your voice, relax quietly on the floor for a minute or so. This quiet period after the voice exercise is often very healing. It can produce very real internal peace.

Advice about Breast Feeding

Quoted from Tesco Plc

 Colostrum

Exploring a Dream

By Brenda Blake

I dreamt I was somewhere and was with four Canadian Indian Elders, holding up a baby. They were going to do a heart cleansing ritual. D. my boyfriend and his daughter walked past without noticing the elders and they made their way to a barrier, where I stood on the left. The man behind the barrier spoke about Aberdeen St in Tasmania. I told him I can tell you about Aberdeen street as I used to live there.

Later I explored the dream with Tony. I decided to explore my dream by being the elders – i.e. imagining mysefl as them. As soon as I did I felt the pride and awareness of the native people and the traditional clothes they wore. I could feel the feathers hanging down my back. Then I went deeper into being the elders, and as I stepped into their wisdom, a deep pool of water appeared in a cave behind them. Tony asked if I could enter the pool, which I did with ease, diving deeper and deeper into it. See Being the Person or Thing

	As I did this I suddenly felt there were others in the water, and that suddenly had no sense of having body nor did I need one. I was ‘It’, and the wisdom and It was me. I could ask any question from this place where thousands of others existed. For we all were merged together and yet have separate identities, and because of this I shared all their collected wisdom.

I asked about the baby that appeared at the beginning of the dream, and the heart cleansing ritual.

Then I felt as if I became the baby full of life, more than words can explain. Its umbilical cord was still attached and it had this black yucky poison which it had been fed on. As I watched the cord dropped away, one of the elders vomited the black yuck as a release of the poison it had absorbed.

Then I wanted to explore D. and as him I felt his life was full of rules and regulations, and I felt it was also me who had lived in that way. This led me to feel the need to change D. to Adam from a previous dream I  had recently worked on. I realised it was about need to step off the known ground and dare to step onto the unknown.

Then as D’s daughter I felt my head was tight and full of the black mess of my fathers story – his experience of being a soldier in the war and the influence it had on him. I took the daughter into the pool where small  cleaning fish came and was eating all the blackness surrounding her. The barrier was another part of me, a controlling part which I put into the pond too. The man behind the barrier was about the past and I did not feel the need to go there, so he went into the pond along with D. which became part of the ‘Isness’ – The quality of being; existence as something.

Later Brenda wrote the following to me:

Hi Tony , I want to tell you about the ripple effect of the shift that took place after the work we did on the day I left.

So after surrendering to the hell of pain of my father cutting me off, abandoning me, the letting go was difficult, as the child in me felt I could not let it out. The fear of exposure and judgement came up but then I got past that and I screamed as the pain poured out. That allowed the energy in my body to move from my womb area through me up to my head where it released. And my I experienced my pomegranate self. I was full of life’s seeds – how magical!!

Driving on my way back it was as if the links became clearer, I realised that my relationships with men all had the pattern of abandonment. The boyfriend who put the LSD in my coffee was abandoned by his father; my next boyfriend abandoned was abandoned by his mother; even my husband was experienced abandonment because of his mother’s early death. Also, the same with D. whose mother died when he was 15yrs old.

It brought to mind the book Families and How to Survive Them by Robin Skinner and John Cleese, it talks about how we unconsciously ‘window shop’ for partners who fit our patterns. Can we ever get passed that I wonder?

Thank you again for the work we did together, there is no-one I have met who works in the way you do. XXXXXXXXXXX❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Tsunami Dream – Also Brenda’s dream and work

 

 Tsunami  Dream Also Brenda’s dream

I was in a building which felt like a college with huge glass windows, I was walking down a staircase which faced the window. I could see in the distance a Tsunami  coming towards us and I found Collette to tell her. We went to see if we could find a way out for everyone; at the back of the building there was an open area that had an opening with big rocks like a gully. Collette and I agreed it was a way out and Collette went to get the others, but as she did my arm went over the boundary and my hand felt water and I knew it was too late and I went to tell Collette. I felt fear and acceptance that there was nothing I could do.

Working on this dream with Tony who invited me to be the Tsunami, which I did so using the same therapeutic models mentioned in the above dream. i.e. Being the Person or Thing

As the Tsunami I felt expansions in myself, wider, higher and boundless, full of charged energy. Staying with what I was sensing I felt my attention was drawn to something pushing from behind me. I followed that sensation of what was pushing me, it went down my body and continued to go down deep into the earth like a root. As this continued the image came to mind of being in an umbilical cord; I was it and in it I felt sick between my throat and belly. staying with what was happening I felt a black tar like substance it felt like it lined part if the inside of the cord, it was thick and dense and I felt it was something I had been dealing with all my life; it felt it was my mother’s but as I became aware of that thought I knew that it went a long way back to ancestral  or beyond.

I felt emotional, staying with the image and the dense heavy blackness; something started to move in my belly, a bubble type ball of energy came out from the blackness into my hands. I felt like I was the baby inside, holding the energy bringing it out up my body, then taken back in through my mouth like eating its own tail, a complete circle moving slowing down my body transforming the blackness as it went .

I became the Tsunami again and in it I saw that it was like an LSD trip, levels of attachments, what you identify with, like being in a room but you are not a room having things in the room but they are not you having emotional attachment. But you are not those emotions that it can wash away what we/I am, not my attached emotions that I am letting go, but of stories of my self, I am not the story but have lived through it. I am the energy of the Tsunami the energy of everything.

As I made my way home I felt very in the moment waves of people  all colours, cultures  shapes and sizes, on the bus  the conversations behaviours I could see myself in it all  buildings cars traffic lights all connected.

See Peer Dream Work

BODY DOWSING

THE WONDER OF LIFE

Wonderful Life, I look around and see what you have built, and I admire it. I see you have built such beautiful things, such variety and I want to learn. I want to learn how to do that, I want to learn how to take part in creation. I know I am only a learner, but I bring before you my life, but I am eager to learn. My life is all I have, and I offer this in the process of building and creation. I am just practising – just practising. I am just practising trying to build something beautiful. And I know it doesn’t matter if I don’t make it this time, because I have eternity. It is okay if I don’t get it right. I am trying to do my best. Sometimes I look at what I’ve done and I think, that wasn’t very good. You hurt too many people there. I live with that. It’s okay. We all make mistakes. It’s good to recognise them. It’s good to recognise that there is such a lot more to learn. But I keep trying. I try to keep the doors of love open. It is painful sometimes. But I have found a place beyond pain. See Mountain Path

I witnessed an atheist talking to a woman he was confronting, “Religion;” he said, “that’s surely a direction for failures and people who can’t really cope with facing reality.”

And the woman he was accusing of this inability to face reality said, “You poor man! Is your mind or awareness so tiny that you have never realised the forces and processes of your own body are beyond anything you understand? Can’t you see that your very existence is brought about by things so far beyond your knowledge that it is only a statement of your impoverishment to suggest an awareness of God is an expression of some sort of smallness and failure. Have you never understood that? Have you not seen that religion is not only an acknowledgement of what we fail to understand and yet depend upon, but it is also an opening to it, a willingness to relate to it? It can also be something far more even than that. It can be an active loving relationship with what gives you life. And such love is an exchange, a sharing, and a way of merging one with another. It is an exchange – a sharing of bodily fluids – the very substance of life. Imagine that; a glorious love affair with the very spirit of life! A love affair with the invisible and forever indefinable. Is that something you are afraid of?”

Going Beyond

While I was watching an episode of Star Trek – Enterprise, I had a powerful emotional reaction to it, one of wonder, curiosity and excitement. I cried out, “What the fuck does it all mean?” and I felt my question was being answered. This was followed by a sense that I had entered a different state of mind or awareness.

The first experience was as if a voice was talking to me, but it wasn’t just words, but was an understanding about what I was told. To start with saying, “Tony, when you were young you went Beyond.” I understood this to mean when I was about nine or ten I had a surgical operation on my nose. I was given an anal anaesthetic and during it I fought the nurses because it felt as if I were dying.

In the present experience, I was told I had experienced death and the experience was so vast but never remembered at the time, but had influenced my life extraordinarily. I had not died physically, but even so I had experienced death and went beyond the normal view of life. The going beyond was still working in my life, and so I was told the following:

It was that in a few years’ time – this took place on March 2017 – , the world situation would worsen, a chaotic situation would occur. I was warned that it was good if we would be living in rural surroundings because it would not be so bad in social situations, but even so it would be wise to protect ourselves.

I remembered some of what happened to me, because the nurses never explained what they were doing to me, and because the operation was on my nose they tried to use an anal anaesthesia. The result was I fought like hell and kicked whatever the nurse was using to pour into me, out of her hands. The operation took place about 1947. Here is something I entered into my journal in 1975 after I had used LifeStream.

The main theme is clear and strong. It was all to do with the rectal anesthetic. I started by cursing at the nurses, and releasing feelings never touched in the reliving of the event. I didn’t like women. I don’t like women. The feelings were there because it was not explained to me what was going to happen about the rectal anesthetic, so I fought and kicked the equipment away from me. The nurse simply came back with other nurses who held me down and gave me the anesthetic. So, it felt like I was being attacked and being killed by a group of women despite my pleading for them not to.

As all this came up masses of realisations poured out. I saw that because the nurses had attacked me, I had hated and feared women. After all, several of them apparently attacked me in order to kill me. I felt that way because as I went under the anesthetic, it felt to me that I was dying and experiencing death, along with a state of consciousness in which I felt to be God. It hit me powerfully that from there on I started reading and being fascinated by books, first on science fiction, then on death, rebirth and God. I was about nine at the time of the anesthetic. All my life I have been trying to understand how I was God. This session had in fact started with many exclamations of, “I am God.”

Now it developed further. “Don’t do that. Dirty boy. You dirty boy.” I was amazed as this came up. I felt sure one of the nurses had said this as I fought and kicked the anesthetic from her hands. So, I had been hypnotised into not fighting for my life, and being a “dirty boy”. The session finished here, so I didn’t get into seeing how this had hypnotised me, and influenced me.

Later still, using LifeStream I saw why the ‘Going Beyond’ was wiped from my awareness. It was because the mixture if meeting death and the fear of the nurses pushing me into death had caused terror in me, terror I couldn’t deal with as a child.

Also in a session of LifeStream – I knew this referred to when I had the rectal anesthetic. I had already relived the actual event, now the anger and bitterness was emerging. There was some shouting and body tensing. It also seemed to connect with the anesthetic in hospital and I recognised a connection with the recent hospital dream.  I understood that the transference of libido or life energy from mouth to anus was okay, but it couldn’t properly transfer to my penis because it was broken. Then, added to that, my rectum was raped with the enema and broken. So, there was a real messing up all around. No wonder I have a pain in my arse recently after intercourse.

I then started shouting out, “Fire. Fire. Death up my arsehole. I’m dying. Fire. I am God.”

The session ended here, so this part did not clarify. But as far as I understood it, I was going into the consciousness of anaesthetic. The anaesthetic felt like fire up my rectum. Also I felt as if I were blowing up like a balloon that would burst. I was terrified I was being attacked and killed. I was dying. Perhaps I reached the state of consciousness in which I felt I was God. So, God, death, fire, attack, were all associated with my rectum. Maybe also the idea God raped me?  

 A Whole New Way

This means going beyond the usual limitations of the body and its senses. But it is also ways of going beyond your habits of reactions, moving beyond the habitual thought directions you take, and the ways we get stuck in life.

Another description is Altered States of Consciousness. It is also often linked with Out of body Experiences –Near Death Experiences and Opening to Life

. But I want to show how it can be provoked by normal life experiences.

If you can understand that this type of going beyond is just as life changing as near death experiences, it opens a whole new way of seeing the way forward for children and adults.

Most of us only know life through the limitations of our body senses, and through the things we had be brought up to believe. We probably believe we ARE the shape of our body, and we can only do what it can do. However, as can be seen from the lives of some of the people who have extended their awareness, our mind can sometimes reach completely beyond the body senses. When we first find the narrow walls of our senses disappearing, most of us feel some panic, and may fear we are dying. Some people during an anesthetic feel this fear or experience of going beyond.

I feel that children are often misinterpreted as being over imaginative or fanciful because they often have already gone beyond without any unusual experiences being the cause. I have seen this in at least two of my children.

A good example is when my son Neal was young. I was standing in the kitchen leaning against the cooking range to keep warm, and thought I needed to get my shoes that were in another room where Neal was. I thought of shouting to him but thought it was too complicated for him to understand. Then a few moments later Neal walked in carrying my shoes.

At another time, I was driving my car on a cold morning taking my children to school. I couldn’t see out of the back window, it was prior to having heater strips in car windows. I thought of asking Neal to wipe it, but felt he didn’t have anything to wipe with. A moment later I checked mirror and saw Neal was wiping the window with his hand.

One more – My son Leon told me when he was about ten, that he was going to earn a lot of money, and he was going to use it to purchase a large piece of land and keep animals on it. Forty years later this has all come about.

The thing is that we should never criticise our children for telling us such things. Even if they do not come about, children’s imagination is a powerful and useful thing to have. See Hallucinations and Hallucinogens

Can We Learn from It?

I personally do not have a collection of other cases to support my claim. My claim is that we are all the time only a hairbreadth away from experience our own hugeness. The example I gave of Neal shows that we are actually in a situation of sharing our awareness without any great stimulating circumstances. Our mind may be part of the hugeness and we only shut it out because of our training to avoid it – but we have to remember that having a personality with self-awareness is a very new thing and has only existed for a short time. Before that we were like animals that lived only in the Life Will – what we usually call instincts. So, the development of self-awareness was an immense step, and left us very vulnerable, and still does. See Criticism

Many people as their awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own inner world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of your Life, which we are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking us, and it is a shock.

 Science Sees It Similarly

Kevin Nelson, a neurophysiologist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, says NDEs may be little more than dream-like states brought on by stress and a predisposition to a common kind of sleep experience.

Sometimes fainting can be enough to trigger NDE-like sensations. Nelson says that that’s because despite the name, NDE has little to do with actually being close to death. He argues that the experience stems from an acute bout of “REM intrusion” – a glitch in the brain’s circuitry that, in times of extreme stress, may flip it into a mixed state of awareness where it is both in REM sleep and partially awake at the same time. “The concept that our brain is either 100 per cent awake or 100 per cent in REM sleep is absolutely erroneous,” says “Mark Mahowald, a neurologist at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis. “We can have pieces of one state intruding into another, and that’s when things get interesting.”

To put that into simple language, REM sleep means we are experiencing dreams. So, they are saying that our sleep process can occur while we fully awake, and people usually call that hallucinations. But it is simply our huge mind appearing, and it is just like dreaming. The voices heard, people seen, smells smelt, while dreaming, although appearing to be outside of us as in waking dreaming (hallucinations) are no more exterior than the things and images of our dreams. With this information one can understand that much classed as psychic phenomena and religious experience is an encounter with the dream process. That does not, of course, deny its importance.” See Waking Lucid Dreaming

As explained above, the dream process can also produce movements and sounds while asleep or awake. But it is not usually realised that the whole phenomena of dreaming can occur while awake and you are in a receptive state of mind. Any visions, voices heard or hallucinations are all the product of the dream process breaking through the barrier that usually only allows such things while asleep. If you have had such an experience you will see, if you think about it, that as with dreams, images, people, voices appear as if outside you. That is exactly the work of dreams, which project a whole dream, its drama and characters, onto the screen of our mind.

Example: For a while I drew nearer the awareness of ‘God’. I wanted to be able to have a clear view of what this experience was and how to describe it. It seemed to me that there was no great astral, ethereal being we call God. In my awareness I sensed that there was something connected with the living bodies and minds of all things. It was something like music in the sense that out of the many separate instruments an overall sound arises.

Or it could be like the body that comes about from the unity of countless cells, yet is different than any single cell. A reality that does not have its base on any one thing, yet has existence nonetheless. So I saw God as a reality that is as ever shifting as music because of the changing face of physical events and mind arising from it. This thing ‘God’ is as near to us and as practical as our own heartbeat. If we feel our heartbeat and honestly ask ourselves what causes our existence, do we really know? We probably have some formulaic idea such as chemical or biological processes. But neither chemistry nor biology explain the full answer. What is at our base is a mystery, and it seems wise to me to stand before that mystery humbly and open to it in our dealings with everyday life.

My sense of God did not present itself as something that was an ultimate being causing all things, but as an intrinsic aspect of what exists, and that exists because of reality, and acts upon it. You can never grasp it because it always moves and evolves. I felt it to be like wind. Could I be the wind? It is featureless yet touching and influencing things.

Then a strong image of a snake arose. The influence of God, of the featureless power that can enter a human life and transform it was like a snake. The dream snake can bite you, and its venom may flow throughout your being and kill you. Most of us are very frightened of this. The reason being that the venom will take away your personal boundary of self. It melts the boundary of egoic self-interest, and personal connections with family and children, with choices in action. It replaces the personal interests and fears with a self that is part of the one great life. So, the fear of the snake is not because its venom is deadly, but because it transforms. It turns you into a being who is part of the whole. It robs one of the artificial walls placed between self and the collective pool of life consciousness. T.

Summary

Going beyond is a normal experience, and is not limited to the psychic, ‘spiritual’, mystic or unusual type of person. It happens to children, to adults, to those living a normal life, or even those dying – for it is the Core Self expressing a life function by dreaming while awake.

It happens to everybody when they stop repressing their flow of thoughts and feelings, or controlling them. Carl Jung said clearly, “Stop editing what you think,” a complete opposite to controlling meditation.

I have described this fully in Life’s Little Secrets – Opening to Life – LifeStream – Many Ways To A New Life

 

Mammoth

Our personality is a young new thing. It grows throughout our life, but its roots reach into the processes of life and consciousness active in our own being, which are as ancient as life on this planet. Life on the planet is also only an extension of processes active in the cosmos. So in dreams we often sense this primordial past out of which our present self has grown, and frequently depict this meeting as a prehistoric animal such a dinosaur or mammoth.

When you were conceived you were at the very beginning of life forms. In fact we have to go to the very primal to reproduce. That may not mean much to most people, but in the dream world it means an enormous amount. Because from there we go through the whole process of evolution as we are in our mother’s womb. Again, most people say, “So what. I don’t remember!” You remember not in ordinary memories, but in ancient feelings of fear, or religious wonder or even intuitions of life’s meaning. But of course we do and such memories are seen in our dreams. So when you learned language you forgot all the past.

So, dreaming about a mammoth is linking you with primeval awareness and strength. It represents the power and influence of the potent forces active in your body and mind, that if you relate to well bring about health and success, and if badly illness and ruin. For example the mammoth can refer to the powerful responses in us such as fear, sex, survival, and the power of imagination to evoke great anxiety or great pleasure. Often our personality evokes these forces in a destructive and disorderly way, all of which are ancient influences in us.

 

 

Questions You Asked

Also there are questions asked by a Young Student – by my friend Chris Campbell, by Tony Interviewed by Maxine, by Catherine, by Dave and Tony – and Tony’s questions answered in his book ‘Dreams and Dreaming‘ Questions Answered. But an Interview from a different standpoint by my friend Dina Glouberman, as Tony’s Story – 8 months after his stroke. Also Vicky’s interesting Communications With Tony and Emily’s Communications

QUESTIONS – With many Answers

An experience that explains many puzzling dreams

Animal in my dream – What does it mean?

Altered state of consciousness – What produces them?

Baby or child is dying or dead – Why do I dream it?

Cannot be hurt or die in your dreams.

Changing your dream by using your imagination/visualisation

Colour and Energy in our Dreams – Do We all Dream in Colour?

Don’t Expect Perfection

Dead Partner or ex who I have moved on from – Why do I keep dreaming about them?

Dead – Raising them Death – Do dreams explain death to us?

Destiny – Thoughts about Ours

Dreams – Getting at Their Meaning

Ex or a dreamed of ‘soul mate – what can I do?

Expanding the Mind

Extending Awareness

Fears – How to face our own

Features Found on Site

How Can I Integrate The Effects From Parents Grandparents or Ex’s

Inner People in your dream. Inner Mother – Inner Father – Inner Woman/Female – Inner people – What Is Inner Me?

Not Enough Information

Nothing Can Hurt of Kill You in Dreams

Parents, grandparents or an ex – How can I integrate the dreams about my?

Relationship Difficulty – how can I recover?

Sleep paralysis – Explain it and how to move beyond it

Son or daughter is killed – Why do I dream my they are killed or dead?

Stuck in life – unable to move or grow – How do we change?

Summing Up – The things we need to know about understanding our dreams

Symbolism of dreams and their imagery

Talking to oneself can be very helpful and good

Talking with those who have passed on

The Dream as a Code and How to Understand It

The Life Will – Understanding It

Understanding from dreams – How can I get more?

Victim – How can I Avoid Being My Own?

Visionary experiences, hallucination or hear voices while awake – Explain how people can have them

What does it mean when you talk in your sleep?

What Happens When We Die?

What is the main action in the dream?

What we need to know about Ourselves

What We Need to Remember About Us

Where did I come from?

When dreaming you are not in the waking world with its rules and laws

Why do I keep dreaming about my dead husband or ex who I have moved on from?

Why do I suffer anxiety about a dream of my child dying or ill?

Why do some Christians say dreams are the devils work?

Wolf/dog/bear/monster in your dreams – Do you actually imagine that it is real ?

Women’s creative power

Woman meeting with menopause

You are a dual being

You are the projector

 Questions asked of Tony by Chris Campbell

Chris Campbell explained her reason for asking Tony to do this interview by saying, “When you (Tony) talk to my son about physics or metaphysics or simply questions that life throws up, he has always loved the particular way you explain things, so I wanted to capture, as naturally as possible, your responses to questions that have come up over the years and to have a record of them.

How would you describe the origin of things?

So what do you think of people who are considered very enlightened or who have special healing powers that have proved to be valid?

Enlightenment is usually seen as a fruit of the spiritual path or a spiritual life, so what do you see as the spiritual path?

When you mention the unconscious, what do you mean?

How would you describe what happens when you open yourself in that way?

You used to talk about Grof a lot. How do you connect his work with what you have said?

So, do you mean that they were remembering former lives? Or were they tapping into a collective consciousness?

Under what circumstances or conditions can we do those things?

Need that concept of death have the ideas of love attached to it?

And that enormous self giving in scientific or, physics terms, is what?

When you talk about Christ, because it is a term that has been hijacked by people, what do you mean?

I am wondering what you understand about the subject of life after death. What do you think happens to you when you die?

Do You Think we can Prepare for Death?

What is it like when we die?

You told me that when you were at my mother’s funeral something happened to you that was very impressive. What was that?

Do you then believe in reincarnation?

This has reminded me of something you talked about in regard to physical substance — matter. You said that modern physics has shown that we change it by looking at it. What are the implications of that?

Are There Parallel Universes?

Does the Breakdown of the Brain Mean the Loss of Personality?

Does the Mind Reach beyond the Body?

The Mystery of Parenthood

What are the Star Beings?

How can we know what our dreams mean?

Explain how people can have visionary experiences, hallucinations or hear voices while awake.

Any visions, voices heard or hallucinations are all the product of the dream process breaking through the barrier that usually only allows such things while. If you have had such an experience you will see, if you think about it, that as with dreams, images, people, voices appear as if outside you. That is exactly the work of dreams, which project a whole dream, its drama and characters, onto the screen of our sleeping mind. Many people hear voices and see things as described above, and in many cases this is normal. Some people actually use it for psychic purposes to see if they can get intuitive information from their unconscious. Research has shown that many people hear voices, and it does not in itself suggest they are suffering a mental illness. It is only an illness if the person feels dominated or takes them to be an exterior influence. Otherwise they are simply another sense that can be used and ascertained like any other information.

But often visions and voices can give a wonderful new view of a persons life; a perspective difficult to attain otherwise. In fact older cultures often felt that if a person couldn’t see visions or hear voices they were in some way crippled. However, because they are the overflow of the dream process, people who have not been able to meet what are unconscious fears will sometimes see very strange things as they wake and the dream process carries on. A report issued by The University Hospital of Zurich says – Soon after her stroke, the 73-year-old woman reported a peculiar and incredibly vivid hallucination or dream. She was not sure whether she was awake or asleep, says Claudio Bassetti, a neurologist at the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, who documented her case. After that, she lost the ability to dream completely for about three months. This suggests that hallucinations and dreaming have the same origin, says Claudio Bassetti.

Explain the sleep paralysis and how to move beyond it

Many people experience feeling paralysed while they are partially awake but dreaming. This may be due to the fact that voluntary movements are inhibited during periods of the dream process. All brain signals to the voluntary muscles are stopped. Therefore if we become slightly awake and attempt to move at that time we feel paralysed. This is not sensed as a problem if we are unconsciously involved in a dream. While dreaming another level of will takes control of the body, so any sounds or movements made are not from ones conscious will. If enough self awareness arises in the dream state, then awareness of the inability to move may occur, along with the anxiety this can arouse. In fact this is probably only a problem to people who are frightened of the paralysis, as for most people, active dreams manage to break through the inhibition enough to cause mild movements and vocal sounds. In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us.

The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender. Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as dreams. While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we sleep our voluntary muscles are paralysed – so another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak; but the second will takes over when we sleep. This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where – See ESP in Dreams; Edgar Cayce.

Another factor is illustrated by what Susan says in the example below – the harder she tries to move the worse it gets. Our unconscious is very open to suggestion. If this were not so we would lack necessary survival responses. In a dimly lit situation we may mistake a shape for a lurking figure. Our body reactions such as heartbeat, react to the mistake as if it is real until we gain fresh information. Whatever we feel to be real becomes a fact as far as our body reactions are concerned. The fear that one cannot move becomes a fact because we believe it. When Susan relaxes, and thereby drops the fear of paralysis, she can be free of it. This applies to anything we feel is true – we create it as an internal reality.

‘It starts as a dream, but I gradually become aware that I cannot move. The harder I try to move the worse it gets and I become very frightened. I can neither move nor wake myself up. Sometimes I feel as if I am leaving my body. But to deal with the fear I have learned – its a recurring thing – to stop struggling, knowing that I will eventually wake.’ Susan Y.

The excellent description in the following example was given by Roy Herbert. It was taken from a feature he wrote. Unfortunately the news-cutting did not have either the name of the paper or the date with it.

‘In this condition, I can hear what others are saying to make me come to. The bed-room is the one I am in though sometimes altered in layout and the real persons in it may be joined by dream ones. I can speak and even offer suggestions on how to bring me awake, such as cold water on my head, though I am told that the words are not intelligible. I am aware that my mouth is dry. My brain is working on some levels that are far from asleep. I have been able to censor swear words from anguished advice I am offering the rousers for fear of offending them, though I am not awake.

The worst thing of all is that I have almost no power in my limbs while the struggle is going on. The prospect of sinking back into deep sleep, unable to move, is terrifying – so dreadful that I finally burst fully awake with the sensation of shooting up through water into the air. I don’t think that I can be unique in floating halfway, half awake and half asleep, paralysed but speaking and thinking in a half real world. It might be interesting to hear from other sufferers.

Other strange phenomena occurring either during or on the edge of sleep probably have similar causes, or are linked in some way. Roy Herbert’s description vividly portrays the experience of being locked half way between the ‘waking’ world and the ‘dream’ world, and perhaps that is part of the fear experienced. But the threshold of waking that Roy is trying to approach need not be the one that leads to a loss of the dream state. What I mean is that Roy’s dream imagery stops when he wakes. For many people their dream imagery persists when they wake, and they have to travel further into waking than Roy does to lose the sense of having no control, or of being invaded by experiences from ‘outside’ themselves. (See: hallucinations and hallucinogens.)

Much of the problem felt by people in these states arises from their relationship to what is being experienced. Many people actually seek the state Roy describes through self-hypnosis. In my teens I studied and practised a mixture of relaxation techniques and self-hypnosis in an attempt to explore what Tate later called altered states of consciousness (ASC).

After a few months practice I found I could enter a condition where I had no sense of a body, and felt myself to be awake in the depths of sleep. As I had consciously sought this there was no fear attached to it, and I could rouse myself easily. However, the terror Roy and other people speak of in regard to the paralysis, I have experienced myself, and witnessed in other people, who felt themselves powerless against a spontaneous eruption of emotions or urges from the unconscious. If we can understand that we have two levels of will, the conscious will that enables us to move around and make decisions while awake, and the Life will that takes over when we dream, creating full surround environments and events, and paralyses our conscious will to some extent.

The Life will that we confront in dreams and sleep paralysis is what directs all the functions of our body and mind. It is far more important than our conscious self, and actually needs to take over more fully sometimes to regulate, grow and harmonise our being. When the unconscious will pushes through to waking awareness we experience it as what have been called hallucinations, a voice speaking to us, spontaneous movements or speech, as happens in dreams. For may people who experience sleep paralysis they feel a terror that either some outside force has or is taking control of them; or else they fear they are dying. The images we see if this state are actually created by these fears and are not external beings trying to control us. It is our fear of this great Life Will that causes it. It is strange indeed that we are terrified of our own life process. See Edgar Cayce

If that can be fully digested you can begin to work with and actually gain benefits from what is really an extension of your mental processes and possibilities. If you have this ability and do not suffer fear, then you have a wonderful talent that could transform your life. Sleep is a huge country that many of us have never explored, and that is why so many people are terrified when they wake up in the very different world of sleep. When we sleep a huge process is at work, the process of life that in fact keeps us alive. That is going on under the surface all the time, but when you wake up in sleep it can feel like an alien force is attacking us – us being our conscious personality.

We are so out of touch with life within us that we react to it as if it is an enemy. Something else we have to realise is that we are also dreaming; so any impressions and information we meet is presented is images and drama. Because dreams mirror what we feel and fear it can be shown as an attack. In other words your fear creates the fearful dream images. While your voluntary muscles as paralysed another process takes over – your unconscious or inner self – and so it tries to move you apparently against your will. If you stopped fighting it, it would make very sensible movements that are a way of moving you toward healing. Some people who understand what is happening and allow it. In fact some people have learned to allow such movements while awake. See LifeStream

We usually think that being awake is the ‘everything’ of life. But if you think about it, it is only a small part of who you are. Every time you go to sleep you swing to the opposite pole of your awareness. You go to the depth of who you are; the very Source of your existence. Of course it is a very different level of being than waking awareness. And to get there you go through levels of existence – and your sleep paralysis is one of the early ones. But most people lose self awareness when they go to sleep, but there are some who can maintain awareness right the way through to the Source. It is an extraordinary experience.

Why do some Christians say dreams are the devils work?

Many fundamentalist Christians assert that we should all live in a way suggested by the Bible. However, their interpretation of the Bible is one which does not accept that dreams were taken seriously by early Christians. The story of Joseph the dream interpreter is central to this, as is the guidance given in dreams to the apostles in the New Testament.

Unfortunately such beliefs about dreams are founded on a bad translation centuries ago. Jerome was born at Stridon, a village near Emona, then part of north-eastern Italy, in the fourth century. He is best known for his translation of most of the Bible into Latin. His writing, probably influenced by the church, had a cataclysmic effect upon how dreams were viewed by western Christians for the next fifteen centuries. Jerome apparently deliberately mistranslated the Hebrew word for witchcraft, anan, which was considered a pagan superstitious practice, as (observo somnia), “observing dreams.” The word anan appeared ten times in the Old Testament; seven times Jerome correctly interpreted it, as witchcraft or a closely related practice, such as divining; but in the other three cases, where the Hebrew text is specifically condemning witchcraft (anan), he redirected the condemnation against dreams. Thus, the prohibition “you shall not practice augury or witchcraft” became “you shall not practice augury nor observe dreams.”

And He said, “Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, I the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream” (Num. 12:6). “I will pour out of My Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” (Acts 2:17). “For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; Then He openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction, That He may withdraw man from his purpose, and hide pride from man. He keepeth back his soul from the pit, and his life from perishing by the sword.” (Job 33:14- 18).

The fundamentalists’ fear is founded upon a rational difficulty. Many people base their life on superstitious beliefs such as the power of an amulet. The fundamentalists want believers to abandon any such dependencies and place their trust in God, or rather in the interpretation they preach of God. Dreams are seen as another source of speculative dependency, and so are criticised. This has some historical context in that the early Christians had a long struggle with converts to eliminate their dependence on gods connected radicals.

If you face this difficult question yourself, it is important to define what is meant by God, and what your personal relationship with God is. From there you might have a clearer idea of what is a suitable direction for yourself.

What does it mean when you talk in your sleep?

In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender. Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as dreams, in our breathing and heartbeat – our life. This I have given the description as the Life Will.

While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we dream our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will takes over when we sleep. See Sleep Paralysis

This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will and in fact runs all our important life processes like heart beat, digestion and also dreams. See  Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind; ESP in Dreams.

For simplicity I have called this experience, of what is actually ‘waking lucid dreaming’, ‘LifeStream’. It would take us too far out of looking at dreams to explore it, but it can be studied within these features: Waking Lucid Dreaming; LifeStream–People’s Experience of LifeStream– Life’s Little Secrets – Arm Circling Meditation

So it is the Life Will that causes such sleep speaking, glossolalia and sleep movements.

My boyfriend frequently talks in his sleep and asks me things. When I wake up and ask him what he is talking about he gets incredibly insistent and demands answers. I now usually tell him to go back to sleep and he does, but sometimes I think he is awake and things he says worry me. Why does he do this? – Debbie.

The answer to Debbie’s question is probably that her boyfriend carries worries into his sleep. Instead of talking them out with Debbie while awake he wrestles with them in his dreams. The worries then emerge in a way that concerns Debbie  more than if he were to approach them directly.

A more general understanding is explained under the question of What makes me move or fight in my sleep? Sleep talking ranges from the incomprehensible and gibberish to the other extreme of someone like Edgar Cayce who spoke 14 million words in his sleep, all taken down by a secretary. Cayce – pro. kay-see – was able to tap the transcendent within and report information about health or any other subject asked about.[i]

In general though we may wake ourselves from sleep when we cry out from a troubling dream, or sometimes in exciting dreams such as making love.

Sleep talking occurs in REM sleep as well as in non-REM sleep. In REM sleep the person can usually remember some dream fragment linked with the talking. In non-REM sleep no such memories can be found. An interesting description of sleep talking is given in Tom Sawyer after Tom witnessed a murder.

“Tom, you pitch around and talk in your sleep so much that you keep me awake about half the time.”

Tom blanched and dropped his eyes.

“It’s a bad sign,” said Aunt Polly gravely. “What you got on your mind, Tom?”

“Nothing. Nothing’t I know of.” But the boy’s hand shook so that he spilled his coffee.”

How can I get more understanding from my dreams?

See Clicking On

Symbolism of dreams and their imagery

So to understand how dreams come about  and realise what your dreams are telling you, it can help if you realise that just as your eyes do not directly allow you to see, but nerve impulses are sent to the brain where they are translated into living pictures. Nothing we sense in the world is directly known, but it is all impressions that are translated into a sense of smell, sight, hearing, etc.

So the eye receives reflected light from an object that is translated into nervous impulses, which is then received by the brain which translates what are formless nerve impulses into what we feel we see. So in dreams we tend to put pictures or images collected from everyday experiences to put an interpretation on our formless dreams. We do this because we tend to have an experience of the world based on our body senses, and our dreams and communications from the dead come from a very different environment, so we put it in images and ideas we understand.

So when we dream about a dead person communicating with us it can be distorted by our view of what death is – or our associations with the dead person. So if we believe in ourselves that when a person dies they are finished it creates our own view of death, or one that is a mixture of a real communication and our beliefs. Such thoughts, even if unconscious, can cause such dreams of seeing the person we know has died being seen alive in their coffin and assuring us that they are very much alive. Most people we know in waking life, and then dream about, are an inner person we carry within us and use in our dreams. An inner person is the collection of all the memories and experiences of them – not them as a person. See Characters and People in Dreams also WHAT WE NEED TO REMEMBER ABOUT US!!

An important piece of information for those who are really exploring their dreams and discovering spontaneous outflow, is the following: It helps to be clear about the point of allowing physical fantasy if one understands the way completely unconscious inner events gradually emerge into consciousness. W.V. Caldwell, writing about the way Van Rhijn has defined the levels of consciousness says there are four stages:-

1] The deeply unconscious physiological process, such as cell generation and digestion. This is shown as psychosomatic symptoms. If they are problems which cannot move more fully into consciousness and so are held at this level, they become psychosomatic pains or illness. This becomes clearer if we consider human life in relationship with other life forms. A plant for instance might have some sort of bacterial illness, but would not be able to bring that to awareness. To be able to do so it would have to develop another type of nervous system. That would be a type found in reptiles. But even that might be felt but it would not have focussed awareness of the human body. Even so in humans such information has to travel from the deep unconscious through different levels. In a sense many things which occur to us, although they are very real and definite, never become a part of our conscious life, but always remain in the ‘plant’ level. If they are to move from ‘deeply unconscious physiological process’ to becoming known consciously, there are stages such events go through. Therefore to bring such things to consciousness it cannot at first be known as words or even of dream images, but is without the form of images.

2] As the physiological or psychobiological process moves nearer consciousness, its next level of expression is postural or gestural. Thus we may express our deepest hidden feelings in an unconscious body posture or movement. Not only our feelings express in this way, but also our physical tone or health shows in our gestures and movements. Even the plant droops if it needs water. This level may be released by movements, by expressing through the body a pain or feeling.

3] Next, when something moves from the gestural to the next stage of expression it becomes a dream or a symbol, which although it may not be understood, is now entering the arena of awareness. Here we see how things are expressed that were very much out of out normal waking consciousness, which is usually largely based on words and thinking. But even here it is still not known and so is expressed in symbols. The symbols are not the actual message being projected, but are images that we have associated feelings and ideas about. It is only in finding what our associations are that we can understand a dream. When that is done we shift into the next level. See Working with associations

4] At this stage, what had been deeply unconscious, then symbolised, now becomes known enough to be verbalised or thought about and analysed. If one had attempted to verbalise something in level two it would have been so far outside of consciousness as to defy description. Also, when looking at these levels or stages, they suggest that the dream process is a means by which deeper stages can be portrayed to awareness in order to make them known. Therefore, by working with the dream process via exploring a dream, we can tap deeper levels of awareness and make them known. It is important to express the symbols of a dream in words that are in fact an insight into the deeper levels of the dream.

An interesting example of these four stages and how someone can work through them is given by Wilhelm Reich. When the abdominal tensions (psychosomatic) of a patient were released the man found his body making spontaneous movements (gestural). These were allowed and the movements gradually led the man to take on the posture of an animal (dream) – he and Reich both felt it to be a fish.

This puzzled both of them as to it meaning, but as the movements continued the man first realised he felt like a fish caught on a hook and line, then suddenly, that was how he felt in regard to his mother. As can be plainly seen, the first level is seen in the example as the man’s unconscious abdominal tensions, built into his physical structure. When these are loosened and considered by the man’s conscious attention, and the spontaneous self-regulatory/dream process is allowed to function, level two manifests as movement and gesture. This moves to level three where the movements are recognised as a symbol – the fish. Then the fourth level, insight and understanding are achieved when the man realises the fish represents previously unconscious feelings he has about his mother. At this point he can verbalise and analyse. I believe that being aware of such facts enables us more easily to open ourselves to the Life process and trust what it produces. See Secrets of Power Dreaming – Life’s Little Secrets

Colour and Energy in our Dreams

Below is a dream that explains what colour and energy means.

I am in a landscape and notice that everything is brown; the whole world is brown and lifeless. There is also a feeling of solemnity or dullness. I have enough lucidity to wonder why the world of my dream is so brown and dull. As I ask this I become more aware of what feeling the brownness expresses. It is seriousness – with no room for humour or fun. The feeling deepens, real enough and clear enough to look at and understand. I see it is my father’s attitude to life that I have unconsciously inherited. I realise how anxious he always felt about life, and how I took this in. That is how I became a ‘brown’ person. I see too that I do not need to be either brown or serious anymore.

Then the landscape changes. There are trees, plants and animals in brilliant colour. I wonder what this means, and the landscape begins to spin until the colours blend and shimmer. Suddenly my body seems to open to them, as if they are spinning inside of me, and with a most glorious feeling, a sensation of vibrating energy pours up my trunk to my head. With this comes realisation. I see how stupid I have been in my brown, anxious existence, how much life I have held back. The animals and plants are the different forces in my being that blend into energy and awareness. I feel I am capable of doing almost anything, like loving, writing a song, painting, telepathy, or speaking with the dead. This sparkling vibrating energy is life itself and can, if I learn to work with it, grow into any ability or direction I choose. I wake with a wonderful sense of my possibilities.

Also see – Energy Sex and Dreams

Why do I keep dreaming about my dead husband or ex who I have moved on from?

Each person we spend time with, fall in love with, make love to or grow up with, or even animals, we develop an incredible and often invisible bond. For instance many women and men write and ask why they keep dreaming of partners, parents of even old friends they have moved on from.  You keep dreaming about your dead husband, your ex from years ago or old friends because while you lived with them you experienced millions of memories, situations, conflict and learning experiences. So you carry them with you as memories, lessons learnt, love or anger still trying to find a way of being absorbed. So in a way it is not your husband, ex or others you are dealing with but yourself. We cannot have a mass of experience with someone and move away without it influencing us. Life is, in a very real way, a learning experience, and every new experience has to be fitted into what we are learning. See Absorb 

But there is another type of reason for what carries on influencing our dreams.

Example: While at work I saw deeply into Flo some weeks ago. She was just standing talking to Vic, the boss. There was nothing in conversation or obvious actions that showed – yet suddenly every tiny movement they made seemed to tell me about them. It showed, suddenly, that there was a wider awareness in me, that sometime back, Flo had a physical, sexual, relationship with Vic. I saw as though words could have been said, that any intercourse, especially if with deep feeling, forms a tremendous although invisible bond between people. They literally become linked in their souls, and intercourse must therefore not be lightly undertaken. I saw as if a real action was taking place that things flowed between them all the time from this usually invisible linked they had forged trough sexual intercourse. Afterwards I asked Flo whether she had been deeply related to Vic. She told me she had slept with him, and said she would never look me in the eyes again.

Also there are many questions left unanswered in you – there is no full stop at the end. So you are all the time, especially in your deepest self, still seeking answers, so will continue to dream until you find satisfaction or integrate the lessons learned from the relationship.

Colour – Do We all Dream in Colour?

No, it depends on the individual’s reaction to colour. It seems to me that more women dream in colour, probably because they are so much more involved in colour in their dress code. Very often a person is not aware of any colour until suddenly a colour is realised in their dream. I personally am only very occasionally aware of any colour in my dreams.

Example: ‘I was standing in a very beautifully carved chapel or religious place. There seemed to be shadowy nun or monk like figures around. But it was the exquisite colouring of the place which filled me with a sort of ecstasy. Everything was in the most delicate shell pink.’ S. C.

What does the animal in my dream mean?

The fact is that as humans we are mammals, and so have built into us many of the feelings, fears, longings and reactions that other mammals have. We also have all the whole levels of evolutions of animals built into us in the levels of our brain. So in our dreams we frequently express our fears, longings and reactions in the images of animals. See Levels of the Brain

As a baby you were a small vulnerable animal, with all the natural instincts to feed, to survive, and to bond with your mother. When you were in your mother’s womb you started off as a bundle of cells; these gradually became a fish like creature with gills, and then onto a mammal form. It shows that we have all the animals built in us. So the animals we dream of are parts of our wholeness, and unless we are reared by humans who teach us to speak we remain an animal. See Animal Children But as people educated in the modern paradigm, many of us are totally out of touch with the animal that we are, and have never been able to raise it to love and protect us, and instead are often frightened of it when it appears on their dreams. As a child we are often told not to do things – such as do not get angry, or told to be nice to everyone, but the intuitive animal side of us feels and act on its superior insight – that would allow them to mature with our animal self intact so we grow up repressing it, and often miss the natural curiosity of our inner mammal. But also the animals in our dreams may seem to turn against us and attack us. But in the images of our dreams that is understandable, for when we are frightened or stressed our own body turns against us producing toxins that can cause grave illness. So please see Norman Cousins; Dreams are Like a Computer Game; Archetype of the Paradigm,

What many people find is that they are frightened of their dream animal, or have never learned to help it evolve into the human world. This means that many people have a great lack in themselves and in their dreams they have to meet and work with the animal in them. The animal you dreamt is a wonderful and massive symbol, and apart from any personal associations we have with it can be a link with the animal we all are. I often say to people you ride on the back of an ancient beast. The ancient beast is our body, and our conscious self is the modern and recent rider of it. Some ‘riders’ do not understand their animal needs – and the fact that we have several levels of brain that are independent of each other proves this. Yet our conscious self is only a tiny part of us and we have a massive background of life behind it. There are some very deep connections we have with dream animals. the following examples show something of this:

Suddenly I in my dream I had inwardly become a dog that barked. In fact my bark woke me up and I was aware how the dream dog was myself, and it was me who barked. My soul had experienced the condition of a barking dog. Just as suddenly as the bark sounded from me, I knew that the homosexual desires shown in the session were not psychologically caused, but arose from this animal, instinctive dog nature in me.

I can now see that some of my sexuality arises not from love, but from the drives of this dog part of me. Similarly, much of my aggressiveness has come from this source. But this is still too new for me to see any deeper into these parts of my nature, and what subtle influences they have on my inner and outer life.

Here is another dream that allow dealing with another issue is equally showing how we and the animal are one in our dreams.

Example: I am sitting in the hotel staff room eating lunch at a large dining table. One by one I am joined by perhaps a dozen women. The atmosphere is pleasant, easy and light hearted. I enjoy the feeling of being the only male among a dozen attractive women. Then I notice a strange thing. One by one all the girls around me turn into cats, but carry on laughing and talking as if nothing is happening. I find this interesting and not alarming. I am aware each girl turns into the sort of cat that is right for her – a vivacious redhead becomes a purring orange tabby; an aloof, slightly superior lady becomes a Siamese; the only ex-girlfriend of mine present becomes a black witches familiar. I remember turning to my left and asking: ‘Tell me Rebecca, how did you do this?’ The Rebecca cat giggles with a human voice and says: ‘He doesn’t have a clue, does he?’ As I look at the Rebecca cat I realise she still has her human eyes. This I realise is true of all the cats, they have human eyes in feline faces. As I realise this one says: ‘I think he’s beginning to understand now’ and laughs. Paul C. Teletext.

Depending upon how the animal in your dream is presented, and what it is doing, dream animals represent your fundamental drives such as the fear reaction, anger, need for food, urge to breathe, sex or procreative drive, parental urges, drive for recognition or dominance in groups; survival drive; love of offspring; spontaneity; home building. They depict these drives perhaps stripped of their social forms of expression.

Example:I see tiger/lion in my dreams for at least once in a month, Whatever the stage is, I find one thing is common in my dreams that first I spot them somewhere and I’m not frightened of them at all; but after that suddenly they follow me, chase me (by running fast) and then at the moment they going to attack me I wake up.. And this is done by a single tiger or a lioness… I am dreaming this from the past 6, or more than 6 months, and it’s getting serious. Please help. Take care.

Fear changes the whole dream, because nothing can hurt you in your dreams; you cannot even die in a dream. Of course you can experience feelings of dying, but then you are fine. The tiger/lion is a part of you and your fear turns it into a threatening thing. The tiger/lion keeps coming because it wants you to learn not to be afraid of yourself – for all things in dream are simply images you create – everything in dreams is all you. So when you are no longer afraid the tiger will become a friend and will give you great strength. But many people have a very different relationship with their dream animals.

Example: My dream was not frightful. My Bear dream and I were walking, he put his nose in my hand and nuzzled, we walked home, I went up to my door and Bear went next door and rolled around in the neighbors driveway and rested.

Example: Then in my next dream I had my new pet tiger, the same one I had taken from the zoo, and I was caring for it in my backyard and me and the tiger were both really happy. Then in the last dream I remember, I had to try and hide my tiger so that nobody would know I had it, but unfortunately the neighbours spotted it and reported me as the thief of the tiger from the zoo, and a strange man came and took the tiger. I tried to explain that someone gave me the tiger, but he wouldn’t listen, and I lost my tiger, and was completely devastated and humiliated because I was in the media for stealing the tiger.

As such the animal can portray your relationship with the fundamental life processes in you. Dreams depict these processes as intelligent and responsive, not just as chemical actions and reactions as modern medicine so often does. Therefore your conscious attitudes influence these fundamental living processes in you – processes that maintain health, digest, beat your heart, rebuild damage and fight infection. Negative feelings or attitudes can cause these ‘animals’ is you to despair or lose motivation, and thus lead to depression or illness. Remember that in looking at the animal in your dreams you are yourself an animal. You as a person are a tiny spark of consciousness, a little bit of self awareness riding an incredibly ancient animal you all your body. Remember that your body has formed from cells and genetic information that has gradually developed over millions of years. It holds that information in it unconsciously. The animal in your dreams depicts this ancient wisdom and how you relate to it. It shows you how you are dealing with the urges in you that are natural, but might need to be helped into modern life or transformed in some way, not killed out, maimed or tortured. Please read Secrets of Power Dreaming and Avoid Being Victims

Facing our own fears

Fears are a natural reaction to certain things, and the can become habits and can play over and over with no real cause. See Avoid Being Victims

Also remember that dreams are a very different world than waking life, and in fact even if you experience a dream of great terror nothing can hurt you. But of course you may wake feeling the same terror, yet nothing has actually hurt you, you are merely facing your own feelings of fear. In fact dreams are like a computer game with a very real virtual reality – you can be killed a hundred times but the game/dream does you no harm.

Example: I had dreamt my wife and I had been talking about whether there were any ghosts in the house. On going to bed I sat in bed and challenged any ghosts to show themselves, certain I could handle them. There was no response, and feeling rather smug I lay down to go to sleep. Just then the door creaked open, and in walked two black men who looked as if they had climbed out of an old grave. Their flesh was falling off them and they were blank eyed. I was terrified and made the sign of the cross and said a few holy words to ward them off. It worked and they went, but not for long. This time all my signs and prayers didn’t get rid of them and they put their dead hands around my throat strangling me. I woke screaming and frightened.

What I gathered from these dreams was that originally I had repressed parts of my own natural sexual feelings, shown as the black men. They were dead because I had killed this part of myself as a teenager. But I was deeply frightened of these sexual urges because of what had happened in adolescence. So I never had such a dream again.

I found that to get rid of the fear I had to face what it was about instead of running from it as if it would kill me. Simon, as a human being you are not simply a creature that responds automatically to your environment. Even intelligent animals such as chimpanzees and foxes do not simply responded to their environment instinctively. They learn certain types of behaviour from their parents, from experience, and from their fellow animals. They, like us, are capable of learning. Our own relationship with parents, other human beings and animals during infancy, passes on to us an enormous amount of information through our ability to copy behaviour, through word of mouth, through our own experience, and through reading or viewing.

So, many of us have awful images or sense of fear haunting us from being passed on. See The Conjuring Trick It might help to use Secrets of Power Dreaming –  The following is a quote from the National Health Website.

1. Take time out

It feels impossible to think clearly when you’re flooded with fear or anxiety. A racing heart, sweating palms and feeling panicky and confused are the result of adrenalin. So, the first thing to do is take time out so you can physically calm down.

Distract yourself from the worry for 15 minutes by walking around the block, making a cup of tea or having a bath. When you’ve physically calmed down, you’ll feel better able to decide on the best way to cope.

2. What’s the worst that can happen?

When you’re anxious about something, be it work, a relationship or an exam, it can help to think through what the worst end result could be. Even if a presentation, a call or a conversation goes horribly wrong, chances are that you and the world will survive. Sometimes the worst that can happen is a panic attack. If you start to get a faster heartbeat or sweating palms, the best thing is not to fight it. Stay where you are and simply feel the panic without trying to distract yourself. Placing the palm of your hand on your stomach and breathing slowly and deeply (no more than 12 breaths a minute) helps soothe the body. It may take up to an hour, but eventually the panic will go away on its own. The goal is to help the mind get used to coping with panic, which takes the fear of fear away.

3. Expose yourself to the fear

Avoiding fears only makes them scarier. If you panic one day getting into a lift, it’s best to get back into a lift the next day. Stand in the lift and feel the fear until it goes away. Whatever your fear, if you face it, it should start to fade.

4. Welcome the worst

Each time fears are embraced, it makes them easier to cope with the next time they strike, until in the end they are no longer a problem. Try imagining the worst thing that can happen – perhaps it’s panicking and having a heart attack. Then try to think yourself into having a heart attack. It’s just not possible. The fear will run away the more you chase it.

5. Get real

Fears tend to be much worse than reality. Often, people who have been attacked can’t help thinking they’re going to be attacked again every time they walk down a dark alley. But the chance that an attack will happen again is actually very low. Similarly, people sometimes tell themselves they’re a failure because they blush when they feel self-conscious. This then makes them more upset. But blushing in stressful situations is normal. By remembering this, the anxiety goes away.

6. Don’t expect perfection

Black-and-white perfectionist thinking such as, “If I’m not the best mum in the world, I’m a failure,” or, “My DVDs aren’t all facing in the same direction, so my life is a mess,” are unrealistic and only set us up for anxiety. Life is full of stresses, yet many of us feel that our lives must be perfect. Bad days and setbacks will always happen, and it’s essential to remember that life is messy.

You can use your inner strength to clear what blocks you, you are often confronted by two choices – to go up or down – the good or the bad – what you want and what others want – the rules and law of the land and what we ourselves want. This is like an either/or thing – you can go up or down. But dreams have a lot of tricks or talents that we usually forget we have because you can do both. In fact our body or being does everything at once. For instance our body is constantly dying and creating new life.

It is important to realise that you have enormous range of choices, but it is often best to swing backwards and forwards between the opposites to find where you feel balanced. It might help with this by using – Secrets of Power Dreaming

7.Visualise

Take a moment to close your eyes and imagine a place of safety and calm: it could be a picture of you walking on a beautiful beach, or snuggled up in bed with the cat next to you or a happy memory from childhood. Let the positive feelings soothe you until you feel more relaxed.

8. Talk about it

Sharing fears takes away a lot of their scariness. If you can’t talk to a partner, friend or family member, call a helpline such as the Samaritans (08457 90 90 90, open 24 hours a day). And if your fears aren’t going away, ask your GP for help. GPs can refer people for counselling, psychotherapy or online help through a new online service called FearFighter.

9. Go back to basics

A good sleep, a wholesome meal and a walk are often the best cures for anxiety. The easiest way to fall asleep when worries are spiralling through the mind can be to stop trying to nod off. Instead, try to stay awake. Many people turn to alcohol or drugs to self-treat anxiety, with the idea that it will make them feel better, but these only make nervousness worse. On the other hand, eating well will make you feel great physically and mentally.

10. Reward yourself

Finally, give yourself a treat. When you’ve picked up that spider or made that call you’ve been dreading, reinforce your success by treating yourself to a candlelit bath, a massage, a country walk, a concert, a meal out, a book, a DVD or whatever little gift makes you happy. See Dreams are Like a Computer Game; Nothing Can Hurt You in Your Dreams;  Life’s Little Secrets

Experiment with changing your dream by using your imagination/visualisation:

You can always try a different ending to a dream that was not satisfying or not understandable by imagining a different end or a different direction. Do it while wake and relaxed and without interruptions. Imagine yourself in the dream and continue it as a fantasy or daydream. Consider what it is that troubles you or is not what you want in your dream. Now take time to think how you would alter it and how to have an ending that would satisfy you. Now you can, in your imagination, enter your dream and alter the dream in any way that satisfies. Experiment with it, play with it, until you find a fuller sense of self expression. It is very important to note whether any anger or hostility is in the dream but not fully expressed; or if feeling come in or something makes it hard to change the dream. If so, let yourself imagine a full expression of the emotions, the feelings, or the interruption, and keep on experimenting until you find satisfaction. It may be that as this is practised more feelings or insights are openly expressed in subsequent dreams. This is healthy, allowing such feelings to be vented and redirected into satisfying ways, individually and socially. In doing this do not ignore any feelings of resistance, pleasure or anxiety. Satisfaction occurs only as we learn to acknowledge and integrate resistances and anxieties into what we express. This is a very important step. It gradually changes those of our habits which trap us in lack of satisfaction, poor creativity or inability to resolve problems. See Secrets of Power Dreaming

Raising the Dead

People often try to get rid of or deny any connection with bodies that have been murdred. These are parts of you that you have killed out by killing love, or through denying an important drive or emotion.

Example: I recently dreamt of finding dead body in my back garden. It had been dead for a very long time. When I explored my dream I traced the body back to a time when I had killed out my growing manhood because of events in my early life. I felt guilty, but by offering the dead person love it all resolved, because I understood exactly how it had happened. So I suggest giving those dead bodies love, and meeting any emotions that emerge. Love is a wonderful force that can transform the past.

So you can transform the dead and give them life again. Use Secrets of Power Dreaming to do this. Also there is the possibility of resurrection.

Example: I had just experienced a very vivid memory of my life as a woman, a woman who had died in great emotional pain because all her family had been killed. I stood and started pacing up and down the room. I still felt, as the woman, trapped and unable to find any resolution. But a resolution did gradually arise. It arose because I, realised that I must simply remain open and allow the process to continue emerging. And as it did there came again that wonderful feeling of resurrection. The woman and I gradually merged and she knew herself in my life. In doing so she woke up in a new world, in a different world. She realised that she was out of that trap, of that mental and emotional state in which she had existed. She/I wept loudly with the relief of feeling released from such a condition. Still sobbing she rejoiced in what women had achieved in the present time, where they could choose to work, where they could choose to stay in the or leave a relationship without the chains that had kept them bound in the past.

Talking with those who have passed on

I know from personal experience what it is like to talk as the apparently dead to the living. This is because I had an extraordinary out of body experience. I had suddenly felt as if I were shooting upwards and experienced a feeling of coming out of pressure and was now free – like a cork out of a bottle. Then I was awake and looking down at my sleeping body and suddenly felt terrified (I realised afterwards it was terror that I was dying). Then I remembered reading about experiences such as this and was laughing uncontrollably through release from terror. Then I was travelling across the German countryside where I was living, curled up with my knees to my chest, and found myself standing in our sitting room at home in London. It was such an astonishing experience I stood in shock looking down at my body, feeling it and trying to understand.

		My body felt solid and real and I was dressed in outdoor clothes not my pyjamas. Then with great enthusiasm I looked up and saw my mother sitting alone knitting, our Alsatian dog lying asleep in front of the gas fire. I felt sure my mother would see me because I felt physically present and absolutely and vitally awake in a way I had never experienced before. So I called out to her, “Mum, look what has happened.” She stopped knitting for a moment but obviously didn’t see me or hear me. So I felt if I shouted this would reach her. “Mum” I shouted, “look it’s me Tony”.
My dog Vincent in front of the gas fire – 1956

There was no obvious sign that she had heard me, but two things did happen. One was that I saw or realised that she had an upstairs side of her and a downstairs side. Her upstairs (conscious) side had no awareness of me, but her downstairs side (unconscious) gave me a wonderful welcome and I had the awareness of us knowing each other in a formless love. Then at the same time my dog must have heard me shout because he woke and came rushing to me and was so full of love for me he rushed around where I stood barking and showing his joy. I later heard from my mother saying she had had been alone that night as my father was out, and she had seen the dog get up and bark and jump around for no apparent reason.

I learned enormous and important lessons from that. I saw that because I was present without a physical body my mother couldn’t hear me. She needed physical sound to know I was present, but yet another part of her knew and responded. So I saw that if she had thought of me and spoken to me I would know, even though she might not be able to hear my reply – unless she was a medium or learned to listen to thoughts.

The reason being that in the body most people cannot communicate via thoughts. Since then I have learned more and see that whenever we think of the dead with warm feelings we are immediately in their presence. So all you need to do is to imagine them and talk to them, as if you would if they were there physically. Talk to them saying whatever it is you want to communicate. In dreams you will be able to receive their answers. I learned also that my dog could hear and see me, and that he loved me. I know it sounds simple but it is. Communication with the dead is easy, but we make such a big thing of it.

Remember that at death we have no physical organs to speak through, so it all has to be done through thoughts. Also that at the level of thoughts we create huge difficulties by what we think. So a thought such as, “I am not a medium so I cannot talk with my dead son” is like a brick wall that we have created and cannot get through. Thoughts and imagination are incredible powerful and are real at the level of dreams and the dead – and of course our own inner world.

Do dreams explain death to us?

Click on Death Dreams.

Where did I come from?

You are a bright little flower, a bloom, on a very ancient plant. You are not in touch with the forces of Life that keep your heart beating, that makes you breathe even while asleep, So you grew from a seed in your mother’s womb, and as it did so took you through the whole process of evolution. Up until the time when you learned the amazing computer like program called language you were living in the ‘unconscious’. It was only then that this bright and vulnerable flower you are came into being. The ancient plant is the process of Life that is incredibly ancient. And it – Life – is a wonderful thing with such depths and opposites containing everything that has ever lived and been experienced. And your dreams arise from that.

Take two: As such you grew you from a seed in your mother’s womb, and as it did so took you through the whole process of evolution, through the vegetative phase as cell division, then into the reptilian phase and up to the mammalian. Then you entered the time when you learned the amazing computer like program called language, up until then you were a little animal and you were living in the ‘unconscious’. It was only then that this bright and vulnerable flower ‘you’ are came into being. The ancient plant is the process of Life that is incredibly ancient. And it – Life – is a wonderful thing with such depths and opposites containing everything that has ever lived and been experienced. And your dreams arise from that.

Take three: We all start physically from the primordial slime of our ancient world, a slime that we all go back to reproduce as our parents have sex and produce the ancient slime – the sperm and ovum. Then our journey begins and we go through the whole process of evolution, not just our body, but also the levels of expressed consciousness. And as far as I understand dreams, this self consciousness we have only recently arrived at and are very vulnerable in, is only a new thing that has it roots in the animal kingdom, and all the way back to the very beginning of time.

A single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I, are the result of gathered experience.

No plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self.

Who are you? Well, you are not the name you were given, for tha is not you,although you tend to think you are that person or are what you have built around that identity. You were there as the baby before you were born. In fact, recognising that, Zen monks often recommend a meditation – What is your face/identity before you were born?

Thoughts about our destiny:

Now I had the key to the whole puzzle. All the years of my adult life I have been looking, examining, trying to understand. It was all so much like the game of Master Mind. The answer actually exists in the ever-increasing information gathered. If only we could put it all together. If only we could see the pattern of our life experience, our education, our relationships. And then, when we actually solve the riddle and uncovered the code, it is all so simple. So, was the whole process of life and death.

It explains every part of our experience. It is the common denominator into which everything else fits. It links opposites, it explains and resolves conflicts, and it shows differences as only different aspects of the one thing, other sides of the same coin. I have now figured out the code.

Human existence was as I have seen it, that there was no divine plan, no great future for mankind. We are integral parts of the enormous cycles of creation and destruction expressed by the impersonal cosmos. Our existence or non-existence matters not. And the whole is both infinite change and infinite being. If change ceases, there is only the ocean of being. Nothing else really exists in a permanent sense. Being – consciousness – is the only permanence. All else comes and goes.

Living creatures have come about on our planet because that was what occurred in this area of infinite change and variance, in the sweeping cycles of the cosmos. We have no particular future, no destined path. If we exist or disappear the cosmos is, in essence, unchanged. But we are all born with an incredible potential. We all have the power of infinite change, the power to move toward anything we wish. We can be a murderer, a saint or a sinner. There is nothing to stop us. Many people say, “Why does God allow evil to exist in the world?” The reason is that we would be like robots without the ability to choose a direction – even if the direction is unconscious. But we are born with the whole cosmos, the heavens inside us, and so have an amazing potential. That is the meaning of the star coming down at the birth of Jesus – the heavens were there in all of us. But few of us realise that and so make no move to reach for it.

Through what occurred, humans experienced self-consciousness. This was different to anything else on our planet. Animals, like humans, are integral parts of the cycles of change and inter-relatedness. Not being self-conscious, however, they are not aware of their situation, their is-ness, their pointlessness, and purposelessness. They live, they procreate as an expression of their cosmic energies, and they die. But unconsciously they are part of the wonder of the cosmos. Nothing is their own, not their birth, not their life, not their death. But being conscious and able to look back upon oneself and ask, “What am I?” – Humans began to see the awfulness, the loneliness, the absence of choice, the compulsiveness of their situation. They no longer have the connection with the Whole except for some remarkable women and men. Many religious and doctrines stressed this realisation. In Buddhism it is that we are bound to the wheel of life and death. In Hinduism it is stated as being lost and blinded by Maya, and so chained to existence. In Christianity it is stressed we are corruption and food for the worms, and have no existence if we are not saved. We are sheep – that are led to slaughter and eaten by the shepherd.

Mankind ran from this realisation in any and every direction. People like John the Baptist who stressed that destruction and death ended life of humanity were shunned or killed.

But a few men and women worked out the puzzle of human existence and death. They noticed a factor that was not in itself natural (yet it is not unnatural, as in infinite change, everything is possible). The people noticed that humans were, like animals, locked into compulsive instinctual life patterns. Eating, sleeping, sex, self-seeking, were unconscious compulsive drives in which all humanity were immersed. But having self-consciousness, decisions could be made. One could decide not to live out these compulsive patterns. If one actually stopped eating by fasting – restrained breathing – said no to the sex impulse – denied the urge to power – something unusual sometimes happened. We are all born victims of circumstance. But we need not remain a victim. See  The Big Bang.

Thoughts about our destiny

Example: Now I had the key to the whole puzzle. All the years of my adult life I have been looking, examining, trying to understand. It was all so much like the game of Master Mind. The answer actually exists in the ever-increasing information gathered. If only we could put it all together. If only we could see the pattern of our life experience, our education, our relationships. And then, when we actually solve the riddle and uncovered the code, it is all so simple. So was the whole process of life and death.

It explains every part of our experience. It is the common denominator into which everything else fits. It links opposites, it explains and resolves conflicts, and it shows differences as only different aspects of the one thing, other sides of the same coin. I have now figured out the code.

Human existence was as I have seen it. There was no divine plan, no great future for mankind. We are integral parts of the enormous cycles of creation and destruction expressed by the impersonal cosmos. Our existence or non-existence matters not. And the whole is both infinite change and infinite being. If change ceases, there is only the ocean of being. Nothing else really exists in a permanent sense. Being – consciousness – is the only permanence.

All else comes and goes. Living creatures have come about on our planet because that was what occurred in this area of infinite change and variance, in the sweeping cycles of the cosmos. We have no particular future, no destined path. If we exist or disappear the cosmos is, in essence, unchanged. But we are all born with an incredible potential. We all have the power of infinite change, the power to move toward anything we wish. We can be a murderer, a saint or a sinner. There is nothing to stop us.

Many people say, “Why does God allow evil to exist in the world?” The reason is that we would be like robots without the ability to choose a direction – even if the direction is unconscious – we would be like robots with no will of our own. We have freedom to do whatever we will, which means making decisions that lead to our own misery. But remember we are all involved in the wonderful game of life – like snakes and ladders, what we do influences what happens to us and our decisions actually create our future. The thing is to learn what takes you in a direction you want to create, and note what then happens – what are the way Life works? Through what occurs, we learn and experienced self-consciousness.

This was different to anything else on our planet. Animals, like humans, are integral parts of the cycles of change and inter-relatedness. Not being self-conscious, however, they are not aware of their situation, their is-ness, their pointlessness, and purposelessness. They live, they procreate as an expression of their cosmic energies, and they died. Nothing is their own, not their birth, not the life, not the death. But being conscious and able to look back upon oneself and ask, “What am I?” – humans began to see the awfulness, the loneliness, the absence of choice, the compulsiveness of their situation.

Many religious and doctrines stressed this realisation. In Buddhism it is that we are bound to the wheel of life and death. In Hinduism it is stated as being lost and blinded by Maya, and so chained to existence. In Christianity it is stressed we are corruption and food for the worms, and have no existence if we are not saved. We are sheep – that are led to slaughter and eaten by the shepherd. Men ran from this realisation in any and every direction.

People like John the Baptist who stressed that destruction and death ended life of humanity were shunned or killed. But a few men and women worked out the puzzle of human existence and death. They noticed a factor that was not in itself natural (yet it is not unnatural, as in infinite change, everything is possible). The people noticed that humans were, like animals, locked into compulsive instinctual life patterns. Eating, sleeping, sex, self-seeking, were unconscious compulsive drives in which all humanity were immersed. But having self-consciousness, decisions could be made. One could decide not to live out these compulsive patterns.

If one actually stopped eating by fasting – restrained breathing – said no to the sex impulse – denied the urge to power – something unusual sometimes happened. We are all born victims of circumstance. But we need not remain a victim. Therefore it is wise to be able to recognize that these are habits of reaction to events. We might say we are victims of the world or life. But we can alter it by learning how to change our habits. And it started for me a long time ago, because I had to learn things without which no change could have taken place. I do not mean book learning, but learning by living it.

The first thing I remember learning was that I could change habits. Fortunately it was a simple habit. I noticed that as I walked through the building I worked in I left the doors open. I believe I had read somewhere that the only difference between a criminal and a successful person was their habits. So whenever I left a door open I would close it – even if I had forgotten and walked on, I turned around and closed it. Within a short time it became a new habit to close doors, all done now without effort. So that was the first thing I learned, and then moved into greater challenges with my psychological habits. These were hard because many of them were unconscious and I had to dig deep to find them. See Life’s Little Secrets.

The next thing I needed to learn was that we are all victims, but we do not admit it. What I mean is that we are all victims of beliefs, convictions, words people say, what people or parents have told us or hit us about – and I am not talking about traumas. 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.

We are all an amazing keyboard influenced and moved by all the interactions with people, animals and events. The keyboard responds to and produces all the emotions and fears we are capable of. So if we watch movies or read, then words and images move us to tears, fear, wonder, curiosity, terror or even enlightenment. Yet we are only seeing images, yet we are moved, and unless we are aware of it, we can become victims of our own impressions. People are often terrified or deeply worried by their dreams; they run in fear from an animal chasing them, or are paralysed by a demon attacking them, yet they are only images that we create in our sleep or witness on a screen.

To run from them is to run from your own feeling of fear. That might be the right thing to do on the street if you see an attacker approaching you, but it is not good to become a victim of your fears, worries, speculations or even hopes. The next part is difficult to describe because I cannot yet see it too clearly myself. I believe the essence of it is that a type of consciousness was produced that had an existence outside of its source in the instinctive, unconscious drives. It also made consciousness shoot up into the abstract realm of thought, and if successful, exist beyond fantasies, fears, unconscious shadows and body conditions.

The behaviour patterns of animals perhaps cause an energy – consciousness pattern – and that is general to the whole species, and cannot maintain individual awareness outside of physical existence. But by blocking the energy flowing into instincts, the energy created all sorts of personal consciousness shapes. In other words, just as electricity in nature is expressed mostly in thunderstorms, but humans have changed nature until we can make it light lamps, produce sound and images, turn motors, produce heat, so the natural state of our existence can be changed to produce a variety of effects. One of these is consciousness – personal consciousness – beyond body boundaries. Thus the survival of death. So we need to see how events, words, our own thoughts are playing on our own victimisation.

If you learn these two you are taking steps toward your own well being. Change the habit of being a victim. We need to learn in some degree the possibility of self motivation. If we do not have this we are all the time motivated by external influences or habits.

Stuck in life – unable to move or grow – How do we change?

Many of us get stuck in life situations from which we may never emerge. The situation might be one of never establishing a full and satisfying sexual relationship; constantly feeling hurt by the actions of others; existing in a state of depression or anxiety; forever having to seek activity or company to deal with ones own inner emptiness; experiencing enormous jealousy or anxiety in a relationship – the list could be endless.

There is however a self help path we can take that can radically change such situations. The first step is to recognise how we personally hold such inner conditions in place. Maybe we might even ask the question as to why we maintain such an awful relationship with life. The answer to that question might very well reveal the most powerful process that freezes us in our difficulty. The power is self justification.

I recently asked a man who had experienced enormous pain through, as he felt, being misused by a woman friend. When I pointed out that this was the woman’s normal behaviour that he himself had described to me, so why was he hurt by it, he said that she should have been more caring for his feelings.

I then asked him if perhaps he was asking her to act like an adult while he maintained the emotional level of response normal in childhood – namely blaming someone else for his hurt. In response he again justified himself by saying that it was normal to feel hurt from such an action. Such justifications, and the statement that it is normal to feel pain in love, at the death of someone close, at the twisting and turning of life events, or because of the unthinking remarks of someone, are the chains that bind us to that misery. Carl Jung wrote, “If we could fully meet our shadow, we would be immune to any moral or verbal insinuations. We would already have seen this for ourselves.” The answer is to meet our shadow – to acknowledge our own follies – to see our own childish behaviour – to be self aware. Please read Ages of Love

Of course that path is not for the weak hearted. It means to stop the continual justification of why we feel and respond in the way we do, and instead, to pull back what we hide from ourselves to reveal the underlying causes of our responses and behaviour. It lies in taking ourselves by the scruff of the neck and perhaps saying, “I am still responding to this as if I am a three year old.

Come on, time to grow up, and stop justifying yourself for feeling angry, jealous, afraid, and ill.” Growth is an innate urge in us. If we stop holding it back we will emerge from childhood and our countless justifications. See Methods of Awakening

In other words, just as electricity in nature is expressed mostly in thunderstorms, but humans have changed nature until we can make it light lamps, produce sound and images, turn motors, produce heat, so the natural state of our existence can be changed to produce a variety of effects. One of these is consciousness – personal consciousness – beyond body boundaries.

Thus the survival of death. Christianity is a whole preparation and initiation into the death state. Buddhism states the existence of Buddhas – self realised ones – within the colourless light. But the realm of consciousness outside of the body is not natural to humans. It has to be cultivated as electricity is, or in the sense the internal combustion engine is. Religious leaders of the past saw this in various ways and degrees, and opened pathways for men and women to move toward this condition. It is simple yet complicated. Any frustration of our nature causes consciousness to split off. See Diamond Body

I saw how the perverts, frustrated, neurotics of this world are the ones who have frustrated their nature to such an extent they have created very personal patterns. But they also need discipline and the Jesus factor to produce the real breakthrough. I did not have it very clearly yet. “Meeting death, the bodiless state, is just like another big fear. It is like the fear of going it alone without mum and dad. Can we face just consciousness? Can we live in the world of the mind minus the body? Can we live in the body minus mum and dad?”

 Don’t expect perfection

Black-and-white perfectionist thinking such as, “If I’m not the best mum in the world, I’m a failure,” or, “My DVDs aren’t all facing in the same direction, so my life is a mess,” are unrealistic and only set us up for anxiety. Life is full of stresses, yet many of us feel that our lives must be perfect. Bad days and setbacks will always happen, and it’s essential to remember that life is messy. You can use your inner strength to clear what blocks you, you are often confronted by two choices – to go up or down – the good or the bad – what you want and what others want – the rules and law of the land and what we ourselves want.

This is like an either/or thing – you can go up or down. But dreams have a lot of tricks or talents that we usually forget we have because you can do both. In fact our body or being does everything at once. For instance our body is constantly dying and creating new life. It is important to realise that you have enormous range of choices, but it is often best to swing backwards and forwards between the opposites to find where you feel balanced. It might help with this by using – Secrets of Power Dreaming

Do you actually imagine that a real wolf/dog/bear/monster is there in your dreams?

How can anything die in the amazing world of your creative imagination? For that’s what dreams are – a world in which you create creatures to scare you, gods and angels to uplift you, and in which you are totally alone in sleep and dreams. Do you actually imagine that a real wolf is there in your dreams? So if it isn’t why you are afraid of it? It is like a realistic computer game in which you have creatures attacking you, presumably to scare yourself – but why, when you could make friends of your own inner powers; for each creature in our dreams is a projection of our inner world and its powers. As examples of this I quote three dreams from different people.

1) I’m always having dreams of me running free in a field on all fours but in my dream I was an all black wolf. Also in one of my dreams I was running on all fours chasing something and I was chasing some thing and killing it with my pack, but other times I just be running on all fours in the woods or a field when its dark and misty.

2) The fourth was a large White Wolf with green eyes that spoke gently with a deep soothing voice. He still comforts me to this day. He would storm in & stand in front of me, snarling at the demons who moved back like the wolf’s presence was hurting them.

3) I was overlooking the forest from inside a building/resort, (stilts levelling the building on a hill/mountainside, so everything was far below me from the window), snow covered pines to my left and just forest straight ahead. As I admired the beauty of the scenery, and eagles flying over the forest, I noticed a pack of wolves far below in the dry area of the forest. A split second after I saw them I was down in the forest right in the middle of the pack. Only a moment of uneasiness took me before I realized, even though in human form, I was part of them and they were part of me. I was one of the pack and feared no danger. End of dream.

So you see, you can be anything you like in your dreams once you deal with your fears. And that is what dreams are for so that you can face the many fears we have in our inner world, and grow into a whole human person. So take irresponsibility for your fears, and know that as with a computer game you are in a virtual reality world in which you can face death a thousand times but never be killed or hurt.

You are the projector

Every image and person in your dreams is an expression of your own life process. As such it is alive and intelligent and is something sent to help you. A dream is like a projection from a movie projector, except that you are the projector. Everything you see as outside you in a dream is coming from you, your emotions, your fears, your beliefs, your joys and explorations are all you, clothed in the dream images and drama.

So when you dream of someone you should not feel you are dreaming about that actual person. As with most dreams, the person in the dream is not the person themselves, but is a collection of associations and feeling about him or her. The image, although it appears separate to you, is in fact your own feelings, body status and emotions turned into drama and all the images of your dream. They are projections on the screen of your mind. If you take the image away and see what the feeling is underneath, that is where the image arose from. You should imagine yourself back in the dream and allow the image to come to you and literally take it into your body.

After all, where do dream images come from except from inside us, and taking an image back into you allows you to feel the emotions, the thoughts or the fears that gave rise to it. In the world of dreams our most intimate fears and longings are given an exterior life of their own in the form of the people, objects and places of our dream. Therefore our sexual drive may be shown as a person and how we relate to them; or given shape and colour as an object; or given mood as a scene, something that haunts our memory shown as a ghost or demon. Our feeling of ambition might thus be portrayed as a business person in our dream – our changing emotions as the sea or a river; while the present relationship we have with our ambition or emotions is expressed in the events or plot of the dream.

Even dreams of God or angels are in a sense a meeting with your highest. A dream portrays each part of us, such as our ambition, as being exterior to us, because a thought or an emotion is something we experience, not something we are. By showing our urges or fears as people or places exterior to us, our dreams are able to portray the strange fact that while, for instance, the love we have for another person is intimately our own, we may find such a feeling difficult to bear, as when one is married and falls in love with someone else.

While we dream, the subtleties of such dilemmas are given dramatic form. To observe our dilemma as if we were watching it as a play, has very real advantages. The different factors of our situation, such as our feelings for our marriage partner, our love of the new person, and social pressures such as our family’s reactions, might all be shown as different people in the dream.

Difficult relationship – how can I recover?

There is no way you can ‘have nothing to do’ with someone you have been intimately involved with. It doesn’t work like that. Most people are often totally unaware of the experience they take in and how it interacts with them when we love or live with someone. In other words the memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. See Moved on from.

So you have taken in millions of bit of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met and they are what makes you the person you are. Your dreams tend to put the image of the past person when you are dealing with the influences left in your from the relationship. See this wonderful example.

It sounds as if you are not honouring what you have taken into you, and it is giving you indigestion of the soul. What I have found over years of investigation that everything we take in, experience as well as food, needs to be dealt with in a particular way. We are a living process like all living things. We have to transform what we take in into living processes. For instance when a plant takes in water and nourishment it changes it into living cells the same with us if we are healthy, we change food into our living body and awareness. As I wrote years ago, “We often take for granted some of the most astounding facts about our everyday life. They seem so normal we barely notice them. But just think, the potatoes or rice you ate yesterday, is today capable of sitting and laughing at a television program. When you digested the food you ate, in some way that is truly astounding it transformed into your movements, and feelings, and being able to do maths and enjoy a video”. (Quoted from SuperMinds).

How we do that with our experience is slightly different – we have to digest it fully by experiencing it fully. If we do not do that it is like plastering stuff/experience on ourselves that is like thick coating which leads to all sorts of mental disorders. Look around you and see the massive crap many people are carrying.

Experiencing it fully is a life process like digesting out food. We cannot do it consciously because Life in us does it – as you can see in your disturbing dreams. You interfered by trying to kill the guy – in your dreams – and also shut out any further contact with the memories. So, as a start you can imagine taking him, her and the children into you. Literally imagine that are going into your body and you are accepting them – not as outside people, but as the experience you took into you. Then you must allow any feeling to surface fully – that is how we digest experience. In our culture we have been taught to repress everything, that is why we have so much social sickness. See LifeStream and People’s Experience of LifeStream

How can I avoid being my own victim?

If you watch yourself you will notice that whatever you think about you have a feeling reaction to. Obviously it is noticeable in regard to frightening dream images. And dreams are only your feeling reactions put into images and drama. If you watch a horror movie you may feel fear or even terror. Like a dream they are just images, and if the fear continues after the film it is because you keep thinking or feeling things that press the fear button. We all have a keyboard of feelings that when pressed can cause us to feel all manner of things. It is usually outside things that cause the reactions, so we may feel fear, sexy, hope, confidence, terror, wonder, curiosity, lost or courageous; so in a way we are victims of what other people and the world do to us.

Dreams are a way of showing us what victims we are, running away when a wild animal chases us in the dream, or a demon says it will claim us – all buttons pressed. Our ideas and beliefs are the main builders, and it is a world we then live in. We build an inner world that few people realise they have, and that inner world constantly controls how they relate to and deal with the outer world, the people, animals and events we meet.

Unfortunately we often build a terrible world inside us, and this leads to sickness, despair and depression. Maybe I am simplifying a little, but it is generally true. And nearly all reactions are habits, and the trick of shifting them is to start a new habit. Also you need to realise that there is a huge difference between your ‘conscious life’ and your dream life. And to save me writing it all out again, will you please read  Summing Up and What we Need to Remember About Us also see the example under Imprisoned

So to break a habit we need to practice entering a dream in imagination. Here is something to do that can help you to learn. To understand what is being explained, one must sit without distraction and with closed eyes and imaginatively enter into driving a car. As you imagine this, see yourself driving down a very steep hill, with a steep drop on the left. As the car goes down and down, the bends in the road swing this way and that, and suddenly a bend comes up and the car is going too fast to make it. There is a terrible slope, and the car goes right over the edge. Now what did you feel or do when the car goes over the edge?

Note carefully what happened, then read on. Now I want you to do the whole thing again. But this time, as the car goes off the edge of the road to smash down the hill, you must try to make it simply fly up into the air gracefully and land safely lower down the road. Try this before reading on. You may not have been able to control the car once it went over the edge of the road. It either crashed, or you could only slow it down. If you could control it then it shows a high degree of direction of your images and you are changing a habitual reaction. Our fear of crashing is involved, it takes hold of the image and crashes it!

In other words, because we cannot master our fear of crashing, it controls the image we have produced. Having realised this, we can then learn to face fear and move the image where we wish, until another fear or desire is involved. And all we have done is to play with images – dreams! Obviously you may need to practice this to do it well. The tremendous meaning and possibilities of that are amazing. Through the manipulation or observance of our own images, we can discover, trace, change our own innermost processes. That is one of the great wonders behind our dreaming, it displays our fear and wonder, and if we use it we can change our whole reaction to fear. So try it with a real fear you meet in a dream, and play with it as you did with the care image, till you can feel all that wonderful energy that was held back by fear. See carry the dream forward. Also see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYYXq1Ox4sk

A woman’s meeting with menopause

“Last night I had a dream which shook me somewhat, and I wonder what you make of it. I am a mature 40 year -old, don’t normally dream, and am not unduly fanciful, but this dream has really shaken me. It felt like death. In the dream, my husband and I are at some sort of social club. The people there are ex-workmates of mine and I am having a wonderful time and am very popular. My husband is enjoying my enjoyment. Then he and I are travelling down a country lane in an open horse-drawn carriage. It is very dark and is in the area we used to live in. We come to a hump-backed-bridge, and as we arrive at the brow of the bridge a voice says, ‘Fair lady, come to me.’ My body is suddenly lying flat and starts to rise. I float and everything is black, warm and peaceful. Then great fear comes over me and I cry out my husband’s name over and over. I get colder and slip in and out of the blackness. Then I start to wake up. It takes a tremendous effort, as my body is very heavy. I am extremely cold and absolutely terrified, with a feeling of horror. There seems to be something evil here. I force myself to get up in the dark and go downstairs. Even with the light on I feel the presence of great evil.”

The first part of this woman’s dream and what she says of herself shows her as an outgoing person, with a happy disposition. She likes people, and they like her; she is probably good looking, and healthy. She feels herself successful at what she has worked, and has left having acquired friends. The relationship she has with her husband is also depicted as one in which pleasure can be allowed within caring independence. Her dream image of herself is therefore created out of her own confidence. Dreams frequently summarise the quality of ones life and the ‘story so far’ in their first scene. The second scene is made up of several parts – the journey, the woman’s relationship with her husband, the force of nature symbolised by the horses and the countryside, and the unknown seen as the bridge and the voice. To understand what this reveals of the dreamer, look at the vital clues: what she has said about herself and what she felt in the dream. If you strip away images to see what attitudes or emotions are exposed, you can see the forces behind the dream plot. The most poignant statement she makes is in saying, “It felt like death.” See Hysterectomy

If we consider the central image of the dream, the hump-backed bridge, in relation to what she says about her age, the feelings of death’s approach make sense. When you approach a hump-backed bridge you climb, but at the very brow, the descent begins. Isn’t that a powerful symbol of life? In our younger years our strength, sexuality and ability to meet life with resourcefulness and independence increase, until middle age, when the decline sets in. You cross over – as this woman crosses the bridge – from one type of experience or view of life to another. The passage of time is seen here as the horses pulling her carriage inexorably towards the change. But the dream’s beauty, its depth and drama, are in the voice, and in the discovery of how death ‘feels’. They tell us something about women’s inner lives, PLURAL.

They reveal how, in her prime, a woman confronts change and the view of death in a way few men do. “Fair lady” the voice of change calls, “come to me.” And it beckons the dreamer towards a hefty mid-life crisis, asking her to exchange her sexual peak, her firm body, her fertility, for the different perspective of post-menopause. Many women – men too of course – gain their sense of value as a person from their ‘attractiveness’. Losing whatever it is that makes them sexually desirable and socially popular – or fearing that they are losing it – will lead to a significant change in their way of life and their feelings about themselves. This is what makes the dreamer call for her husband. This is what produces the feeling of isolation and terror. A woman needs reassurance and love at this point in her life. She may behave indecisively and deflect the advances of her man through a lack of self-esteem.

Fortunately the human personality is resilient. Even though we are reared to identify ourselves with what our body looks like, what it can do, what sex it is, what age it is, and how others react to it, we CAN grow to mature independence without constant reassurance. If you search your dreams in any depth you will come to realise that the body is not the end. We are all male and female, and have a character outside of what we look or are as a body. Some people create these nocturnal horror movies when leaving school or sitting exams. But middle age is just another phase of life, with as much potential for growth and love as any other phase – and as much room for failure. This woman fears what she imagines middle age will do to her. The dream isn’t an intuition of her future.

Example: Then the throat pain became unbearable. I investigated it and I became aware of doom. If I didn’t fight it, doom would take over. I was weary of fighting it so I let doom take over and sank into the doom and it was then that I found myself at the foot of the great being and total acceptance of my life. Spontaneously, before I knew it I was offering everything as a sacrifice, including past mistakes and cock-ups, and that I had to do this. And then there were the images again of clefts: the earth, female genitals, undersea-ocean crusts opening and something, as yet formless, emerging. This, I suspect, is my creativity in the world. See

Why do I dream my or a baby or child is dying or dead?

Anxiety is a normal part of life, except as humans we do not deal with it well. I have some bird feeders outside the window where I sit and write, and all the time the birds are looking everywhere even between pecks. In humans it would be a sign of great anxiety. They do not suffer the negative effects of anxiety because they express it all the time in their actions. As human we tend to bottle it all up or are frightened of it.

Your love and care for your child or children can trigger your mothering instincts with a vengeance. Being female and a mother holds with it an enormously increased anxiety about your children. You see all manner of things that might be a threat, and I believe that is what such dreams show. Your imagination for such dangers is enormously increased. This is natural in all mammals, and acts as a warning making you aware. It helps to check whether your child or children are okay, and if they are, say to the part of you that is worried, “It’s okay, I checked, but thanks for keeping me on my toes, you can relax now.”

When my son Leon was working for a year prior to entering Cambridge University, he met people who owned wolfhounds, and often walked the dogs. I went with him a couple of times. The dogs were kept in a large pen, and owner went to get the keys for the pen. While we were waiting at the door one of the dogs, a bitch, was kept in the house.

The bitch came to the door to look at us, then ran back, only to reappear again a few moments later to look at us anxiously. This was repeated a few times. I asked my son if she had pups and he said yes. So as soon as she saw we were strangers she rushed back to her pups to check they were okay. Then, for the short period we were there she continued to come and look at us with obvious tension, and then run back to check her pups.

This is most likely about your anxiety about caring for your baby, or it might also have a link with feelings you have about something that happened to you as a baby. It might help if you imagine yourself in your dream – while awake – and hold the baby and see if you can change what happens to your baby, hold the baby till it is okay and healthy. You might need to do this a number of times to succeed. See Secrets of Power Dreaming

Example: Hello, I am a single mom. My son Just turned 7 two days ago. I have had numerous dreams where he has died or the dream will be as of I can’t find him. I Just had a dream about my son and he was playing with some friends and one of them knocked at my door and said that my son was going to die. This woke me straight up out of my sleep. My son gets to the point now to where he wants to be independent at times and I try to tell him he can’t do the things he sees other big kids doing because he’s still so small. I am so protective of my son and don’t want to lose him. I wish I could stop having these dreams where he’s dead, or dies,or I Just simply lose sight of him in my dreams. I worry about him all the time when he’s not with me. What can I do.

And here is Anna’s reply: What I have found helpful with my children is to become more creative with this process. Often our fears make that we only see what could go wrong and it makes that we respond to any request with “you cannot do the things you see other big kids doing because you are still so small” and with that approach we have also sealed the door to any alternative. And so I learned to negotiate with myself and with my son. There is always room to find something your son CAN do, which will bring him one step closer to what he sees other kids are doing, without him going “all the way yet”. Sometimes this implies that he has to practice certain things first with you, before you can trust him to do it on his own.

Your body is millions of years old and is that of a mammal.

I think before you can understand this dream you have to realise that as a modern person you live a life of several levels. Your body is millions of years old and is that of a mammal. Your brain is segmented into several levels, and it carries the basic spinal, the lizard brain, the mammalian brain, and then sitting on top of that is the human brain dealing with speech, thinking, etc. So you are a complex being. But mostly you know yourself as ‘Candy’ – a person relating to the social and physical world around you.

This part of you – what you call ‘me’ – relates to the world quite differently to the other levels of yourself. If ‘Candy’ didn’t have human awareness you would still be a mammalian animal moved by all the urges common to mammals. That means you would probably have reproduced by now. The urge to reproduce is still there underneath all your social programming and consciously developed likes and dislikes, with the social needs and decisions you make. So, if we look at your dream, we see the opening scene is one of trimming back on natural growth, the unconscious emergence of life in you. In fact you are, in your relationship, cleaning up stuff related to your growth or development. You are at an age where as a woman you near a great change. Your ability to conceive and bear a child will go, along with the identity you developed out of being a sexually attractive and nubile female. This, I think, is why the clear up is going on. What you cut back on though are not dead things. You have cut back living growth, and as the images suggest, this means the possibility of children.

Even though you do not want children consciously – and that is fine – the mammal and fundamental life processes in you have constantly been trying to reproduce – thus the dead children. You didn’t actively kill them, but your direction in life meant you did not allow them to live. Now, Candy, be careful how you think about this. Every decision we make in life allows certain things, and kills out or denies the possibility of others. That is life. So recognise that your inner life needs to mourn what it did not have, and allow those feelings. You describe it as  ‘a sad heavy feeling’. See Woman’s Creative Power

Why do suffer great anxiety about my child or dream that are my child is dying?

Your love and care for your baby can trigger your mothering instincts with a vengeance. Being female and a mother holds with it an enormously increased anxiety about the baby. They see all manner of things that might be a threat, and I believe that is what such dreams shows. Your imagination for such dangers is enormously increased.

It may help to hold onto the thought that such fears are natures way of making you aware of all the things that could go wrong, so say to yourself, “Okay – got that. I will watch for it.”

But some mothers dream such dreams as their child becomes more independent – a time of great anxiety for mothers and for some fathers.

Anxiety is a normal part of life, except as humans we do not deal with it well. I have some bird feeders outside the window where I sit and write, and all the time the birds are looking everywhere even between pecks. In humans it would be a sign of great anxiety. They do not suffer the negative effects of anxiety because they express it all the time in their actions. As human we tend to bottle it all up or are frightened of it.

This is natural in all mammals. When my son Leon was working for a year prior to entering Cambridge University, he met people who owned wolfhounds, and often walked the dogs. I went with him a couple of times. The dogs were kept in a large pen, and owner went to get the keys for the pen. While we were waiting at the door  one of the dogs, a bitch, was kept in the house. The bitch came to the door to look at us, then ran back, only to reappear again a few moments later to look at us anxiously. This was repeated a few times. I asked my son if she had pups and he said yes. So as soon as she saw we were strangers she rushed back to her pups to check they were okay.

Then, for the short period we were there she continued to come and look at us with obvious tension, and then run back to check her pups. This is most likely about your anxiety about caring for your baby, or it might also have a link with feelings you have about something that happened to you as a baby. It might help if you imagine yourself in your dream – while awake – and hold the baby and see if you can change what happens to your baby, hold the baby till it is okay and healthy. You might need to do this a number of times to succeed. See Secrets of Power Dreaming

Example: Hello, I am a single mom. My son Just turned 7 two days ago. I have had numerous dreams where he has died or the dream will be as of I can’t find him. I Just had a dream about my son and he was playing with some friends and one of them knocked at my door and said that my son was going to die. This woke me straight up out of my sleep. My son gets to the point now to where he wants to be independent at times and I try to tell him he can’t do the things he sees other big kids doing because he’s still so small. I am so protective of my son and don’t want to lose him. I wish I could stop having these dreams where he’s dead, or dies,or I Just simply lose sight of him in my dreams. I worry about him all the time when he’s not with me. What can I do.

And here is Anna’s reply: What I have found helpful with my children is to become more creative with this process. Often our fears make that we only see what could go wrong and it makes that we respond to any request with “you cannot do the things you see other big kids doing because you are still so small” and with that approach we have also sealed the door to any alternative. And so I learned to negotiate with myself and with my son. There is always room to find something your son CAN do, which will bring him one step closer to what he sees other kids are doing, without him going “all the way yet”. Sometimes this implies that he has to practice certain things first with you, before you can trust him to do it on his own.

What does a demon mean?

“This one has me shaken to my very core.” See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

 Example: I am a person that rarely dreams or maybe I don’t pay attention to my dreams. Three days ago I attended my regular bible class on Wednesday’s and that night I had a dream about a Demon holding a woman and torturing her. It was a nightmare and I woke-up scared. Then on Friday I had a dream that my daughter went on a rafting trip with her friends at college and I received a call from the college to come and identify her body. In my dream, I walked down this narrow hallway and found a corpse drawer that had a tag on the front that said time of death. I pulled out the drawer and brushed away the long hair of a woman and saw my daughter’s face with her eyes closed. I yelled out this horrifying scream and cried and cried. As I was closing the drawer, her eyes opened and I tried to tell everyone she was alive but no one listened to me. I woke up terrified and could not go back to sleep. I am trying analyze what these dreams mean and hope I don’t have any more of them cause my sleeping habits are not good since my first nightmare on Wednesday. My daughter is in college and I have not heard from her in a week. Usually she calls twice a week and I know she is busy with her internship and studying for finals. Maybe since I am worried about my daughter’s welfare could explain why I am having these dreams. I am a single parent and have a business in my home. My son is eighteen and lives with me.

There is an answer to such dreams. Because dreams put worries and anxious feeling in images the demon is an image of your worries or fears you are struggling with. The dream obviously says that your fears are torturing you. Of course the demon is possessing you, because you are under the influence of enormous fear. In a similar way the woman being tortured is you. Your daughter on a rafting trip with friends is a way of showing you that she is going on her life’s journey in a way that you are not involved -and going away from school many mother go through torturous feelings in facing the change. So of course it felt like your daughter had died in leaving you. You experienced a death of your old relationship since she has left for school.

Devil Snivel Havel – They are just words to describe human fears, fears put into us by a church thousands of years ago speaking of things it only had primitive words to describe what it saw. I have met the devil myself several times, sometimes in great fear, and then slowly in wonder and direct insight. In such meeting I saw and realise that devil was lived spelt backwards. In other word it is the Light we are all born with that through fear or ignorance we have turned back on ourselves. In doing so we have created great chunks of stuff blocking the light causing depression, suicidal impulses, and all the many human pains and suffering. But it is not some evil person ‘doing it to us’ it is our own misguided actions that can be undone by understanding them. See Masters of Nightmares

Such feelings, such entrance of foreign and destructive forces, is seen by our unconscious as the devil, demons or even a vampire. They suck away the life force and create illness in your body. Recognising them is very important for your health and person wholeness. This is called a dybbuk in Jewish folklore. Remember that devil is lived spelled backwards, and evil is live backwards. They both suggest the turning of your life force back on itself. Please read Life’s Little Secrets and Opening to Life

A Woman’s Creative Power

You developed this creativity in this way because you have a female body, which for millions of years was devoted to having children. If you deny that part of you – the urge to procreate – you deny yourself. You do not have to become childbearing to have that creativity. It is because being a woman you have the enormous power of creation.

Because you are a woman, you have a wonderful power of creation. You developed this creativity in this way because you are a creature of evolution. If you deny that part of you – the urge to procreate – it can end in feelings of frustration or neurosis. In dreams many women dream of having or caring for a baby. It is an expression of their basic drive, but in dreams it often represents the emergence or birth of a new aspect to your personal expression.

But what I see is that those drives need not be expressed through producing a physical child.  This does not mean they need to be frustrated or repressed, but that they be accepted and directed into another direction. It is instinctive and unavoidable to at least dream of creating a child.

But you can be creative in many different ways without having to give birth to a physical baby. But if you dream of giving birth to a baby, The baby represents a new aspect of you trying to emerge and be cared for and developed.

Of course it can be creating a baby, but you need not need to use your creative power in that direction,  so you would be frustrated if you didn’t allow your creative power another outlet.  In fact that basic, primeval drive is your source of power. It is a great river of energy; out of that your power arises. You do not even need to have a functioning womb, because at your core you are the power of creation. See hysterectomy

Something that I have seen often, is how, particularly women, have often failed to understand the great power they have in their instinctive sexual drives.  Those drives link them with their ability to create and be creative. They be accepted and directed into another direction.  It means being fully aware of the sexual and creative dynamics of interrelations, in business, in work, in everyday dealings with people. It is about creating new opportunities, abilities, artistry and businesses. Because it is a creative impulse it can often lead to creative work in the arts, music, supporting people, creating a business, or working with materials are some possibilities.

Our history shows that women have in the past been given a demeaning situation, or created a demeaning attitude, toward being a woman and having a vagina.  That has been a main feature of feminism.  They have tried to reclaim for women the beauty and the strength of that.  What I see today though, is that despite the physical shape or condition of the woman’s body, she holds within her treasure so magnificent that nothing can demean that.

The wonder is that uniqueness, that beauty, and the love that is there no matter how deformed a physical shape a woman has.  I wonder if there will ever be a form of treatment, even medication, that will enable people to realise their innate wonder, that core of love and transcendence. See The Tree

Pregnant without a man

If it happens you are pregnant in your dream without any man being involved, then you have been made pregnant by the invisible power of Life itself within you.  It is a creation of a part of you that is only now becoming real in your life. In other words a dream baby is a new birth of part of you that is emerging and needs to be cared for. Just as your teenage self emerged and needed understanding, so does this new you that is being born. See Inner World

Many women dream of having a beautiful baby without any sign of a man in their life or in their body. It happens because of that wonderful power of your creation. It is you giving birth to a new and miraculous part of you. Nurse it and love it till it is strong enough to be a part of your outer life. The point for a woman is that she is only incidentally part of the creative act of childbirth. The processes of creation are far deeper than her personality.

This virgin birth represents the human soul or psyche and its possibility of dropping pre-conceptions, thus attaining an inner virginity and thus being receptive to the unseen or unconscious side of self.

This means that when we become empty of preconceived ideas we can receive and conceive, and even give birth to, an extraordinary impulse or power that can open us to a new life and purpose. See How I Became A Virgin

How can I integrate the dreams about my parents, grandparent or an ex?

You have taken in millions of bit of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with someone and they are what makes you the person you are. The memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event.  Your dreams tend to put all that in the image of the past person when you are dealing with the influences left in you from the relationship.When we are young we take so much from our parents to build our behaviour. But often we are unaware of it. And I think the dreams about your parents or an ex are about drawing on all you got from them. Most people are often totally unaware of the experience they take in and how it interacts with them when we love someone.  Please read this wonderful example, it will show how much we take in from those we love or lived with.

For instance your dreams take place in a very real virtual reality, like a computer game. You are actually alone in your dream, so anybody you dream about is a creation from your memories, desires or fears. There is nothing else but you and your feelings, hopes or fears in your dreams. Nothing can hurt you or kill you while you dream. So in the world of dreams our most intimate fears and longings are given an exterior life of their own in the form people, objects and places of our dream.

They are not actual people in your dreams but a very real virtual reality. So I would suggest you integrate all the good things from your relationship with them; because in your dreams about them you are  meeting your feelings. And if you do not do this the negative memories or desires for them will keep coming back.

So try doing this by taking the dream images of your parent or ex and pulling them back into your body. Yes, literally making them one with you. Do this slowly and allow any feelings that arise. This may sound strange but all the images in our dreams are projections from us onto the screen of our sleeping mind; so taking them back into you is like owning them and integrating them. It is called honouring our father and mother.

Think of it like digesting something. In a relationship, whether a feeling relationship or one in which you are learning something, you often absorb things from the person. You might take in such things unconsciously, as you did many things from parents and from the culture you were raised in. So the process of absorption in a dream may refer to such influences you are taking in. Obviously you need to feel the good and the bad emotions linked with them. That is not necessarily easy, and it can help if you use Opening to Life

Example: What a fool I had been to hold onto my identity and isolated independence. Of course I had forged a great independence but at the cost of feeling – and that is all it was, a feeling – isolated and immovable. Now as I opened myself to R. and the love I felt for her, in fact everybody else I had loved, I felt whole and free to move inside.

This opened a whole new dimension in all the dreams other people had sent about being haunted by dreams of ex-lovers. It was because they had actually gained a new dimension, a new freedom, but they hadn’t accepted it. Instead they were seeing it only as an external reality – what a waste. Now I realised that my dream about my mother’s hand reaching mine through the curtain, and then feeling the enormous love and realising that the love came from Life itself. So then I opened to knowing Life/Love, and really felt how because I was connected with all I knew, all I loved, Life would flow to all, and their Life would flow to me.

If it is an ex or a dreamed of ‘soul mate’

Then remember that in the your dreams your most intimate fears and longings are given an exterior life of their own in the form of the people, objects and places of our dream. Therefore our sexual drive may be shown as a person and how we relate to them; or given shape and colour as an object; or given mood as a scene. Our feeling of ambition might thus be portrayed as a business person in our dream – our changing emotions as the sea or a river; while the present relationship we have with our ambition or emotions is expressed in the events or plot of the dream. See Moved on from.

So it is not your ex you are dreaming of, but your dreams are showing you your inner feelings about the past relationship and all the memories needing to be digested and learned from. Remember that because you were together for a while there is no way you can ‘have nothing to do’ with someone you have been intimately involved with. It doesn’t work like that. Most people are often totally unaware of the massive experience they take in during a relationship and how it interacts with them when we love someone. In other words the memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. Please read this wonderful example, it will show how much we take in from those we love or lived with.

So if you are troubled by dreams of your ex, the best way to deal with them is to work on integrating the influence left in you from the relationship. You can do this by thinking about the dreams about your ex and drawing on all you got from him or her. So I would suggest you integrate all the good and bad things. Try doing this by taking the dream images of your ex and pulling them back into your body. Yes, literally making them one with you. Do this slowly and allow any feelings that arise. This may sound strange but all the images in our dreams are projections from you inner world onto the screen of our sleeping mind; so taking them back into you is like owning them and integrating them. It is called honouring what we learned, bad or good, from the relationship.

Think of it like digesting something. In a relationship, whether a feeling relationship or one in which you are learning something, you often absorb things from the person. You might take in such things unconsciously, as you did many things from parents and from the culture you were raised in. So the process of absorption in a dream may refer to such influences you are taking in.

The dreamed of ‘soul mate’ is most likely your inner male that we dream of all our life. And you need to not draw back from full relationship with them. But do not think of him/her as an actual outward person. I know most young women feel it must be an outward person, but it is not. Although if you manage a full relationship and get married to the dream man, then you may actually choose someone who is much like them. See Archetype of the Animus.

Dreams often represent learning or personal growth as an organic process. Ideas and experience are taken in, digested, then form part of an organic whole in an integrated way. This is sometimes depicted much as a tree absorbs through its roots. What is absorbed becomes a living part of the organism. But that does not mean taking it in whole; it is broken down and only the parts that are usable are integrated into the life of the organism, the rest is discharged as waste matter and is later used as compost. See Absorb

There is another factor here too. It is something occurs that in the past and used to be called glamour. I know that in today’s world we think of glamour as relating to being beautiful, or dressing wonderfully. But in the past it meant something else. If you look it up in the dictionary that might say something like –

1. An air of compelling charm, romance, and excitement, especially when delusively alluring.

2. Archaic. A magic spell; enchantment. What happens to us, and this is where your sense of intuition comes in, something in us creates an incredible sense of wonder, a mystery, beauty, and tremendous allure. We identify with this so closely because we feel the feeling is ours personally, and not some amazing illusion and glamour that our being is throwing up to push us into having sex.

Yet, once the glamour passes away and we are simply facing the bare bones of a situation we wonder what the hell has happened. For myself, I believe that maturity is when we recognise the incredible power of glamour, manage to avoid the ridiculous things and beliefs it tries to lead us into – this man/woman is the most beautiful and wonderful creature on earth. So desirable I would give everything to have them hold me and make love with me – sort of feelings.

What Produces An ASC? See Altered States of Consciousness

An experience that explains many puzzling dreams

I quote something that shows how much we take in unconsciously and copy. It is a personal experience by a famous psychologist – Philip Zimbardo. Humans have an ability to ‘read’ body language, but it usually takes place unconsciously. It was probably developed in the human race prior to the emergence of spoken language as we know it today. Now it remains as an almost unused function, but operates at times during shock or ‘trance’ conditions — i.e., when the conscious personality surrenders its decision making and critical faculties. It is also why we dream so often of people we have known. But apart from that we take into ourselves a great deal from anybody we loved or spent time with. Most people are often totally unaware of the experience they take in and how it interacts with them when we love someone. In other words the memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. You have taken in millions of bit of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with someone and they are what makes you the person you are. Your dreams tend to put all that in the image of the past person when you are dealing with the influences left in you from the relationship.

“It was my first day back to work after recovering from a traumatic automobile accident. I was lucky to be alive with only torn ligaments in my leg and a concussion: the driver had been killed by the impact of a head—on collision. As I hobbled up the three flights of stairs supported by a crutch, my initial joy of returning to school was suddenly suspended. With each step I took a strange sensation occurred: I could ‘feel’ myself BECOMING my younger brother, George. Not IMAGINE ‘as if’ I were George, but being transformed physically to be him. I perceived my face changing to be his face and my body doing likewise. My limp became more pronounced, and it took great strength to climb the last flight. In a panic, I shut myself in my office, not wanting anyone to witness this strange transformation. I avoided looking at my reflection in the window for fear I would see his face and not my own. Had I really become my brother or was I MERELY hallucinating? Time passed during which I tried frantically to relax, ‘to pull myself together,’ and make sense of my distorted sense impressions. After all, I was a normal, serious scientist type not given to such flights of fancy. I lived by the reality principle. My secretary and colleagues knocked and came into the office before I could say I was busy. They were worried by my abrupt disappearing act. They were relieved to see I was ‘my old self again,’ and I was relieved to see them responding to me as if I were Phil and not George. A glance at my reflection confirmed my hope. I had changed back, ‘or was no longer George or George was no longer manifesting himself in me.’ Whatever? Weird, no? But why? When we were children, George had infantile paralysis and for a time had to wear leg braces and walk with crutches. I would accompany him to therapy sessions and observe his frustration, embarrassment, and anger at not being able to function normally. Since we were only eighteen months apart in age, I could readily empathise with his feelings. I may have also felt guilty at being glad I too was not crippled. Once I recall volunteering to exchange places with him in the swimming pool exercises, but the nurse chided me, ‘being crippled is not fun and games young man.’ I was about four at the time. As I hobbled up the stairs to my office some twenty five years later, the pattern of feedback sensory stimulation reactivated this prerecorded motor action plan. Memories of George’s posture and movement were enacted. I had retained mimicry responses of his motor activity that I had observed so intensely. Now I was changing places with him, but not consciously and not volitionally. The suddenness and vividness of the hallucination was frightening because it was so real, yet at the same time contradicted my knowledge of reality.

Philip Zimbardo calls his experience an hallucination, perhaps because he felt fear. However, if we remember something we do not call it an hallucination but a memory. Realising that we remember via body feelings, posture, emotion as well as images and words, enables us to see that Philip, because he was in a similar situation to that which his brother had been, remembered a whole set of responses. During dreams and LifeStream such experiences are not unusual. When they are not seen as abnormal we can accept them without anxiety and they add to our range of information and experience. In fact, if Philip had not been disturbed by his experience, but had sought it as a means of understanding his brother, he could have gathered a great deal of information from it. If we realise that we gather such information from everybody we contact, we can see that we have a very rich source of insight into the lives of those around us. These are important points to understand when we are at looking our dreams.

You cannot be hurt or die in your dreams – Click on No Hurt

You are a dual being Click on Dual.

How do we get stuck in life – unable to move or grow

Many of us get stuck in life situations from which we may never emerge. The situation might be one of never establishing a full and satisfying sexual relationship; constantly feeling hurt by the actions of others; existing in a state of depression or anxiety; forever having to seek activity or company to deal with ones own inner emptiness; experiencing enormous jealousy or anxiety in a relationship – the list could be endless. Orthodox medicine, recognising how difficult it is to help people move from such mental emotional prisons has turned to chemical attempts to shift the person’s inner state. Overall this sometimes seems to aid, but is not a universal answer to the human condition. There is however a self help path we can take that can radically change such situations. The first step is to recognise how we personally hold such inner conditions in place. Maybe we might even ask the question as to why we maintain such an awful relationship with life. The answer to that question might very well reveal the most powerful process that freezes us in our difficulty.

Example: I had an insight that I had got into a negative feedback loop. Because I had got stuck in this place, then I feared I was stuck there in reality, which produced the certainty I was stuck, which produced the inability to move out. We feed back to ourselves images of failure and feelings of unattractiveness, and all the other negative feelings we all meet during the week. Instead of looking at them and seeing them as passing feelings, we take them as impressions of reality and drown in them. We accept them as true and start to live them. When that happens we see conformation for the negatives and so it goes on.

I tried to find the way out of the loop. The only way out I could find was the realisation that the loop has no end, like the figure eight. There is only one thing to do, stop it playing. Grab it and stop the crazy record or habit carrying on.

To help with this, to help grab the thing and kill it, we obviously have to realise it is untrue. If we still believe the loop to be playing a truth, then we only strengthen the action. So for its cessation we need to realise that our sense of self is a constantly moving fragile thing that has no stable reality. We aren’t ANYTHING – stable, so how can we be a failure, or a success, or great, or of no account, or any thought or feeling? No thought or feeling represents our reality. No feeling, or sense of ourselves, is anything more than a sense, a feeling, it is not us. So how could this feeling represent some sort of permanent personal reality?

See Conditioned Reflexes or Responses

The power is self justification.

I recently asked a man who had experienced enormous pain through, as he felt, being misused by a woman friend. When I pointed out that this was the woman’s normal behaviour that he himself had described to me, so why was he hurt by it, he said that she should have been more caring for his feelings.

I then asked him if perhaps he was asking her to act like an adult while he maintained the emotional level of response normal in childhood – namely blaming someone else for his hurt. In response he again justified himself by saying that it was normal to feel hurt from such an action.

Such justifications, and the statement that it is normal to feel pain in love, at the death of someone close, at the twisting and turning of life events, or because of the unthinking remarks of someone, are the chains that bind us to that misery.

Carl Jung wrote, “If we could fully meet our shadow, we would be immune to any moral or verbal insinuations. We would already have seen this for ourselves.”

To meet our shadow – to acknowledge our own follies – to see our own childish behaviour – to be self aware. Of course that path is not for the weak hearted. It means to stop the continual justification of why we feel and respond in the way we do, and instead, to pull back what we hide from ourselves to reveal the underlying causes of our responses and behaviour. It lies in taking ourselves by the scruff of the neck and perhaps saying, “I am still responding to this as if I am a three year old. Come on, time to grow up, and stop justifying myself for feeling angry, jealous, afraid, and ill.”

Growth is an innate urge in us. If we stop holding it back we will emerge from childhood and our countless justifications. See Avoid Being Victims – Martial Art of the Mind – Water Wonderland – A Way Through – Meeting yourself

The dream as a code

The dream can be likened to a cartoon, which expresses or comments upon a situation by using images. The dream can also be likened to a strange language, which we have to translate to arrive at its meaning. As Nietzsche suggested, it may be that the dream is our own archaic language, which at one time was the universal thinking process of humans prior to speech.

To some extent we can easily see the possible truth of this by a simple experiment. The experiment also helps us in understanding the language of dreams, and thus begins the process of interpretation. The experiment is simply this – try to think without the use of words! To be more specific, imagine that you wish to tell someone that: ‘What most people call prophecy, if looked at rationally, is usually an unconscious analysis of present events, and our projection of their consequences into the future. I have purposely given a rather difficult idea to use in the experiment, and it should be done now before reading on. Then one finds that without words, one is thrown back upon the use of images, symbols, dramatisation and depiction of various emotions.

It would be interesting to know exactly how you have been able, if at all, to express the given idea about prophecy. Here is how a dream has done it. ‘I was looking into a crystal ball, when suddenly I could see a whole file of men walking along some railway lines. I called John (the dreamer’s husband), and said “Look, there is a picture in the crystal!” He looked, but then pointed behind me, and I could see that what I saw in the crystal was only a reflection of what was actually going on in the street behind me.’

This experiment of expressing ourselves without words, is very important. It demonstrates a number of things necessary in dream interpretation. Firstly, it shows that the dream may be our heritage from the past. It could be the method of thought used prior to humanity’s use of words. If so, it suggests that human consciousness is stratified, and our present type of consciousness is built over and developed from the older level.

It also clearly shows how we link up ideas such as ‘prophecy’ with an object such as a ‘crystal’. The complex idea of the future being a reflection of the present is dealt with by the clever positioning of several images in the dream. The difference between speculative and logical thinking is also expressed by the man and woman. If we explore this idea a little further, we will quickly be able to see how a dream might be able to use common objects and events in our everyday life. Just as we have seen how a crystal expresses the idea of the future, or prophecy, our favourite armchair could express comfort or our sense of relaxation.

To understand such things we have to be careful to investigate just exactly what we do feel or think about such things. For instance, our car is something we use to get from one place to another. It is a vehicle. In a sense, a school is also a vehicle, it transports us from ignorance to knowledge. But if we always feel ashamed when in our car, because it is shabby; then the car used in the dream represents our shame, our desire for better things. Therefore we have to carefully note what our relationship with the dream symbols is.

Our dream may not use our car, but just a car; when it becomes just a means of transport, about which we have no feelings except those in the dream. Similarly, if friends or acquaintances are pictured in dreams, then they are used because of the ideas and emotions we associate with them. Therefore, a friend who is always miserable and unsure of himself, represents our own feelings of uncertainty and misery. The warm emotional friend likewise is a symbol of our own feelings. Sometimes dreams play on words and symbols together. Thus, if we dream of finding an old leather bag which did not belong to us, unlocking it with a key, only to find rotten and evil smelling food inside, this would be a very caustic comment on our sexual relationships.

In effect it is saying, I picked up an ‘old bag’, had sexual intercourse with her, but found it unsatisfying and in the end, distasteful. Although we have said that the dream may be a pre-language thinking, now that words have been added to our experience, the dream will naturally use them. In fact the dream uses any available material quite without our conscious sense of appropriateness. Thus, colours, words, images and feelings will all be collected to express what emerges from within as the dream. In most cases, however, we can arrive at the meaning of the symbols through our own associations with them.

Of course, many symbols, like the crystal, would be almost universal, but they are only universal because enormous numbers of people have the same, or very similar, associated ideas concerning them. If one’s mother had used a crystal ball to hit one on the head as a child, it would no longer associate with prophecy, but punishment.

A look at advertisements shows us how often such symbols are used to quickly convey a message without words. Thus a doctor or nurse expresses healing or sickness and the authority to support in your need – a lightning flash is energy, speed and power – a policeman, law, protection or conscience – an attractive  person of the opposite sex, sexual or emotional pleasures – and so on.

Very often, the dream picks up a theme from the day’s experiences, and uses it to illustrate some inner condition. The following dream is an example of this.

‘I was looking everywhere for some green stuff to eat. I saw a field of cabbages, but, as they were not mine, could not eat the leaves.’ A couple of days before, the dreamer had prepared a salad for dinner, as it was winter, and the family were getting few ‘living’ foods.

So we see that the conscious concern over ‘living’ foods has been used as a symbol in the dream. Thus the search for green leaves represents a search for something of her own that is living. The woman had been wondering what her own personal capabilities in life were. As the dream shows, she will not be satisfied or feel happy by simply taking or copying what others have done, or eating the rewards of their labours.

One last thing about the use of symbols and our attempts to interpret. Some symbols may be used a number of times in different dreams. In such cases, or in analysis generally, we have to realise that a symbol is influenced by the symbols it is grouped with, and the way it is used. To understand this, if we realise that words are symbols of thoughts in daily life, we will see clearly what is meant. As a demonstration of how one symbol (word) can alter its meaning due to context, I do not think I can better the efforts of Leslie Weatherhead when he wrote:

“For instance, in Mesopotamia you might have an officer who had blue blood in his veins and who at Oxford had been a blue. Rarely would he be a blue after dark when the whiskey went round, unless of course he went out on the blue on some stunt or other. Then he might be in a blue funk, and the air would be blue with his language. But in time he would recover from his fit of the blues, get his leave and pay, and blue the whole of the latter in a single day of the former, and he wouldn’t spend it on blue stockings either.”

So when interpreting, although we have to understand each individual symbol, we also have to see that symbol in context with the rest of the dream. Only in this way can we understand it properly.

Talking to oneself can be very helpful and good

To quote from an article by Rin Mitchell, “Start talking to yourself to increase the performance and function of your brain. It is crazy not to talk to yourself because you would miss out on the benefits that come with self-talk. The key is to practice doing it until it becomes natural. You can use specific “cue words” in your self-talk to help you in whatever goal or task you would like to complete. Eventually, you will learn how to self-talk in a way that benefits you the most in every situation.”

He goes on to say, “Mental and vocal monologues are essential in learning and performing better in life. Researchers have identified that talking to yourself is insanely great for the brain. The better you are at self-talk the better off you will be. When you give yourself mental messages whether out loud or in the mind, it enhances your attention span—allowing you to concentrate despite distractions. It helps to regulate your decision-making capabilities, and to control how you respond to your brain’s emotional and cognitive processes.”

But there are even deeper benefits. Once while on a local small beach with my children and dog, we had fun clearing the debris brought in by winter storms, and built a bonfire with it. Some of the debris was aerosol cans. So I got the children to stand behind a large rock and threw the cans on the fire one at a time. After the third dramatic explosion our dog ran frantically from behind the rock and headed home – at least a mile away. Three years later, my wife, I and the dog were on that beach sunbathing. We had been there for hours, but as the sun sank I stood up and leaned on that same large rock. Suddenly the dog looked at me strangely, turned and was gone. It was a dramatic example of conditioned reflex.

Although we are used to thinking of animals showing conditioned reflexes, we seldom realise what a large part they play in human life. This is obvious in the problems we would face in going against social conditioning. When we move against an implicit social conditioning, we feel the pressure or pain of that – whether it is sexual, clothing, or whatever it is. If we go against such conditioning we may discover the underlying feelings and forces that have created the conditioning in the first place.

Dreams often reveal to us what our conditioning is, and how it was imprinted. When I left my first wife and was living with my present wife, we shared a lovely country cottage in a small hamlet. Although beautiful, the few months I lived there were an emotional hell because I was away from my children, and because of the pain of the divorce and inability to get work. My second wife and I then moved to be nearer my children. We had left some beehives at the previous cottage however, and so six months later we started driving back to collect them. On the way I started experiencing severe stomach pains. The suddenness of this, and the fact I couldn’t think of any physical cause for the pain made me investigate my feelings.

As soon as I did this it was obvious that a part of my nature which was usually unconscious, was just like my dog, responding in a conditioned reflexive way. The cottage was a place of torment – why were we going back. More to the point, how could it stop me going back? How could it deter me from facing that pain again?

As soon as I understood the cause, I spoke to myself just as I might have spoken to my dog, or a disturbed horse – I said to myself “Look, it’s okay. We are not going to stay at the cottage. We are going to collect the bee-hives and leave. You will not be pushed into that pain.” As I did this the pain slowly melted and did not come back. So talking to oneself when one meets such events is incredibly important. Try it yourself and see the results. It can relax you in stressful situations and can do wonders. But do not tell yourself lies. What I told myself that got rid of my pain was true , not a lie. So perhaps saying, “I am the greatest and will meet any difficulty with strength” might be a lie. But saying something like, “Wow, that pushed me into feeling like my legs turned to jelly, but we have faced things like this before and always survived. So let’s face this together and see it through.”

Summing Up – Or if you can’t find you wanted see Questions

There is so much to learn about dreams and how to approach, explore and benefit from them. To understanding your dream, you need to realise that the images in our dreams are just emotions, thoughts, fears. traumas, ideas, and feelings projecting out of you and appearing as images, people or scenes outside you on the screen of your mind.

1 – 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 like image 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.

But such fear can be caused because if undealt with traumas from childhood are not faced, or by being exposed to awful film images that you believe are real. Read Life’s Little Secrets and Martial Art of the Mind

It is also important to realise that every image, every scary or terrifying thing, is taken place inside you, in your mind, as you sleep. This means that every awful animal, every scary thing, or person, is created out of your own fears and must not be seen as outside you as happens in waking awareness. The problem is that we are often scared of or frightened of experiencing our emotions and so they confront us in our dreams. Avoiding them or controlling them is like running away from oneself – there is no escape. See Life’s Little Secrets

Also, a dream is a communication between what has no recognised form – our core self – as far as our personality or reasoning mind is concerned. So, to do this it uses images of people, things and animals, as well as scenes that we might understand if we explore what we associate with the dream images. For instance, a man dreamt of a tarot card reader. But in understanding how dreams work the tarot card reader represent his own intuition, because that is what he associates with being psychic. This next example from Oliver, a boy of six, illustrates how such fears as shown in the above example can be met with a little courage. It is a dream which recurred several times, so his description is of a series of dreams.

Example: ‘I am in my bed in my own room and I hear what I know to be a wolf wearing the sort of clogs worn in Lancashire. When the wolf gets to a certain point, there is a bang, and I wake terrified. My Mother’s reassurances do not help. Each night he gets a bit nearer before my panicky awakening. The night came when I know he will reach me. Sure enough he arrives, and the bedroom door – in my dream – is flung wide open with a tremendous bang. There is no one there. I never dreamt it again.’

When something gets nearer to us in a dream, it means that it is moving nearer to consciousness. So, Oliver’s wolf – or at least, what it represents, namely his response to his childhood fears – is becoming ever more conscious. This means he is facing his fear and thereby dealing with it. If he had run away or fought to keep the door closed, then it would have gone on haunting him. When he met it he saw that it was nothing except his fear. The dream therefore was a great teacher.

2 – All the people, animals, places you see in your dreams, are simply your own feelings, fears, hopes and wonder projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind as images. So, it makes sense to take the image of your dream person, thing or animal back into you and own it. In that way, you are meeting and dealing with the things about yourself you are not owning or conscious of. That is why dreams are often difficult to understand, because we are hiding things from ourselves. To do this you can use Being the Person or Thing

Nearly always when people dream about someone they know or a strange new person or situation they automatically believe the dream is about that person, situation, or animal. But when we think of our friend or partner our thoughts are not them – just our thoughts and feelings about them.

So, dream images are ways of communicating via our associations not actual things or people. In the world of dreams our most intimate fears and longings are given an exterior life of their own in the form of the people, objects, and places of our dream.

Therefore, our sexual drive may be shown as a person and how we relate to them; or given shape and colour as an object; or given mood as a scene, something that haunts our memory is shown as a ghost or demon. Our feeling of ambition might thus be portrayed as a business person in our dream – our changing emotions as the sea or a river; while the present relationship we have with our ambition or emotions is expressed in the events or plot of the dream. Even dreams of God or angels are in a sense a meeting with your own higher mental abilities. See – Dimensions of Human Experience; Characters and People in Dreams; you are the projector

3 – You may find this hard to believe, but very few of us have managed to mature emotionally beyond babyhood or childhood.

By adulthood I mean the ability to be very independent and at the same time loving others. It means not being hurt when someone you ‘love’ leaves you, for you are aware of the reality that change happens and are not crucified by it. Dying or death is not a great fear, because you have experienced being alive and know that death is a part of living.

It is also about being adaptable, for if you cannot adapt to change then you are stuck in life situations that otherwise would be crushing. Fear is a part of being a human animal, it guards us against hurt and pushes us to act with strength, but a mature person does not live in imagined fear as is shown in dreams where people are terrified of ghosts, demons, the devil or zombies, also, it means we have a fair or better level of mental health.

As an example of what is stated above, for the last 50 years, the developed world has experienced unprecedented peace, prosperity, and technological comfort. And this is the result. Yet in the U.S., one in four women is taking a prescription drug for mental health.

We are mostly still stuck at an age where we are vulnerable to such things. You would expect people to have become less violent. Instead, starting in the ’70s, there was an explosion of violent crime, which was eventually brought under control only by incarcerating the highest percentage of our citizens of any country in the world. Meanwhile, according to the General Social Survey, from 1972 to 2006, women rated themselves less and less happy each year, as by almost every objective measure their lives improved. Please read Beware of Love; Avoid Being Victims

My view is that we have not realised that we are basically instinctive animals that have attained self awareness, and our culture has not helped us to recognise that we have all the worst of animal instincts without any training to help us transform our reactions – as many tribal people do. Also, we are almost all carrying huge infant traumas from childhood. See Meeting Fear and Terror

4 – When we meet or confront something we are uncertain about, or scares us, that stimulates us sexually, or threatens us, we either react to it emotionally or try to explain it to ourselves in some way. In a sense, we are symbolising the event by giving it an emotional response, or explaining it in words. A recent research report says that the outer world we are so certain is the real world, is not so solidly real as we believe. The colours we are so sure we see comes from certain properties of what we have in front of us, it absorbs some kinds of light and reflect other kinds of light, which are then received by the eye as formless impulses, which are then passed along the optic nerve as formless nerve signals, and then transformed in our brains into a subjective experience of colour.

In fact, our mental faculty, our brain, is a fantastic interpreter – it interprets formless impressions, scary emotions, into things which we feel make sense to us. So, a scary feeling which we have no rational explanation for may be interpreted as the images of an evil entity or zombies. Sometimes if something we are very uncertain about impacts on our senses, we may even interpret it as a flying saucer or an alien abduction. So please do not think that the image is about real life, everything is a way the human brain interprets impressions, so everything needs investigating – maybe by using Practical Techniques for Understanding Your Dreams;  Being the Person or Thing.

5 – DREAMS IMAGES ARE LIKE ICONS ON A COMPUTER SCREEN – You have to ‘click’ on your dream images to make them come alive. Thinking about them doesn’t work. You need to open yourself to the magic of them. See Clicking On; Being the Person or Thing

I believe a dream is a complete mixture of our personality, with all its likes, dislikes, fears, beliefs and convictions, as well as a non-personality experience; a bodiless, formless being – like a hole without any forms in it. It is everything, and as everything cannot take form as something so it remains invisible to us – yet it is our creative centre, beyond time and space. So, our dreams come from a formless cause, but to be understood by our brain, our personality, we clothe the dream with images and drama which is an attempt to understand. The images or scenes are things we unconsciously take in and we build certain ideas or meanings around them. For example, many films show the living dead, zombies, as things to be avoided. So, our dream maker uses them to show how part of our own nature have become almost dead through ignoring them or being frightened of them. See Working with associations

6 – You cannot be hurt in your dreams. You cannot drown, you can’t die in a dream, no tiger or other animal can harm you. Of course, you can feel feelings of dying, or being hurt, or drowning, but they are all images you create because you feel afraid and you haven’t faced up to your fears. See Avoid Being Victims; Dreams are Like a Computer Game

So, the animals you feel in your dream will harm you are your own instincts and feelings that frighten you and are harmless. This is because every dream image, animal or person is a subtle or powerful aspect of your own efficient working. Just as car is made up of many parts to work well, so are we. A car without efficient brakes or carburetor works, but not well. So, we do not work efficiently with parts of us denied, held back, or repressed. Of course it might be a good idea to see why they frighten you by using Techniques for Exploring your Dreams and reading Levels of the Brain; Animals; Animals in our Dreams

7 – Most people feel certain their body is them, and are certain that their body is who they are. But dreams have a very different view of the body. They show again and again if anyone takes the time to record their dreams over a period of time that we all have a body, a soul, and a spirit.

The body is in constant change and will age and die. Dreams see it as like a car that we can use to get some necessary life experiences, but the driver can leave the car and the car does not define the driver. The soul consists of all the personal thoughts, decisions, likes, dislikes and memories of the person – of this lifetime. It can be quite limited in its perceptions because we are only aware of only 1% of visible light and 1% of the range of sound – so we are really blind and deaf, and yet we are so sure we know the world and what it means.

The spirit is basically consciousness/energy that can enliven a body but is not limited by it, and can exist as bodiless awareness. So, from the point of view of dreams you cannot die or be destroyed. Also in dreams – your inner life – you can appear as any form, any gender and any creature. But we are so sure we are the limited world we know through our senses,and we are trapped by this view. See Inner World

Dreams can arise from any of these levels, most dreams are those dealing with the forces of life as they act in or on the body, to rise to consciousness or expression. Thus, dreams would mostly be dealing with the “struggle” or creative activity in the material world that produces consciousness and activity.

Example: While practicing dream recall this morning, without seeking it, a very clear realisation came fully formed. This was that dreams are reflections of, or are, a process going on in the deeps of oneself. This is a process of compensation or balance. That is, balancing foods, ideas, emotions, hopes, body, etc. I saw that if this process were well developed, poisons usually causing death could be dealt with. This is but a poor crumbling shell of the realisation, which seemed to have a reality in a dimension of its own.

8 – Whenever we dream all our voluntary muscles are paralysed. That is fine while we are dreaming, but if we become slightly awake or lucid we are often scared that we have lost control. Such fear show how out of touch with our unconscious or core self we are, so we fight for control. Yet our core self is what keeps us alive, and because of the often-ridiculous things we tend to believe or live by, our core self has to regularly – whenever we sleep – take full control again to balance our life again.

So, we have two levels of will, our Awake Self or Aware Will, and our our Life Will. The life will not only continues to beat our heart and keep you alive, it can express as spontaneous movements. So, if you wake while in the middle of dreaming and experience sleep paralysis the best thing is to surrender and let the Life Will act through you for a while. See Life’s Little Secrets

Example: Facing my adversary and becoming lucid in the dream, I allowed the adversary to kill me with a sword, knowing all the while that absolutely no harm could come from this experience. Fully lucid and looking at my dream attacker I said: “You can plunge the sword through me if you wish,” whereupon my adversary did just that. Then I drew the sword out of my dream body and very lovingly and wisely gave it back to the adversary and said: “Thank you.”

9 – Considering that we all have an inner world or dream world which is far more than the limited world shown by our senses, we can contact the so called dead and also each other, for we are like islands in a sea of consciousness, and the shoreline is the limit of our range of awareness. But our awareness spreads like an ocean in which we are like islands, and beyond the shoreline, beneath the surface, we are all connected.

Also, you can never lose anybody you have lived with, cared for, and loved even when they die. Most people are often totally unaware of the experience they take in and how it interacts with them when we love someone. In other words, the memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. You have taken in millions of bits of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with someone and they are what makes you the person you are. Your dreams tend to put all that in the image of the past person when you are dealing with the influences left in you from the relationship. Therefore, your sense of lose is because your inner life has been distorted by beliefs that we end when we die. Please read this wonderful example, it will show how much we take in from those we love or lived with.

Our unconscious is very open to suggestion. If this were not so we would lack necessary survival responses. In a dimly lit situation we may mistake a shape for a lurking figure. Our body reactions such as heartbeat, react to the mistake as if it is real until we gain fresh information. Whatever we feel to be real becomes a fact as far as our body reactions are concerned. This applies to anything we feel is true – we create it as an internal reality, whether that is religious beliefs, convictions about ourselves such, “I am a failure – I have no talent – Nobody is attracted to me – I am great and everyone can see it” are both terrible things to believe, and will stand in the way of real growth. See Martial Art of the Mind; Inner World; Answer to Critics; Closer to the Light; Jesse Watkins Enlightenment

10 – Also people are very confused about the difference between their waking life and their dream life. They believe that what they dream is the same as what they meet in waking life.  In other words, we take as a truth that what is important outwardly is as important in our dreams. So, you are as upset by a dream as if it had actually happened in waking life. Such mistakes make us feel things that are ridiculous.

This happens with the morals we live by, which may be necessary in waking life, but we try to make them fit to our much bigger and freer dream/inner life, and that causes conflict because the two worlds are completely different. So, in dreams about sex we do not have to live by the same small moral world often necessary in waking life. In dreams, we experiment emotionally and sexually, so dreams often stand in place of actual experience. In doing so we expand our mental and emotional life without any danger or consequences. Through dreams we may experiment with new experience or practice things we have not yet done externally.

Example: Before waking this morning I had an extraordinary lucid experience that involved me in what felt like a real place. The clearest part of this was of myself in a maze. The walls of the maze were made of hedges, as the whole thing was outdoors. But I realised, because I was lucid, that I had purposely created the maze as an experiment. The point of the experiment was that the maze was complicated enough to make it difficult for me to find my way out.

So, confronted by the difficulty of emerging from this dream maze, because of the lucidity, I could understand that this was a dream image, a reflection of the actual world I live in, and in doing so I simply realised that I was not actually in a maze, but only lost in feelings of being trapped in my own mind, and was thereby free of the maze.

I then experimented again and again with this, moving to exist beyond the images I had been, or could be, lost in. This was such an extraordinary experience and realisation it is difficult to put into words with enough impact to make it real. What it led me to see was that all dreams involve us in an environment or situation of one sort or another. Usually we feel the dream to be so real, and the feelings we experience because we are immersed in them, to also be real, that in a very real way we are trapped. But we are trapped in the feelings, ideas, and beliefs, not the dream. So, if we were in a prison cell in a dream, then there would be no way out of that cell without a key. But realising oneself as being the awareness behind the feelings and images means there is no prison; there is no entrapment; there are no walls to hold you. The apparent reality of the dream is then seen as simply pictures and feelings – stuff of the mind that we have conjured and become identified with and lost or trapped in. Even imagery with positive feelings are a form of trap if we identify with them.

The more I look at the experience the more I realise that virtually everybody on our planet is trapped in a prison of their own emotions, thoughts, and ideas. To recognise this in any reasonable degree leads to an extraordinary sense of freedom. To see that we live our life trapped in the world of thoughts, of emotions, of sexual drives, of fears or beliefs, is astonishing.

Most of us interiorise our morals or beliefs into our dream life. In other words, we take as a truth that what is important outwardly is as important inwardly. Then you are as upset by a dream as if it had actually happened in waking life. Such mistakes make us feel things that are ridiculous.

This happens with the morals we live with, by which may be necessary in waking life, we try to make them fit to our much bigger and freer dream/inner life and that causes conflict because the two worlds are completely different. So in dreams about sex we do not have to live by the same small moral world often necessary  in waking life. In dreams, we experiment emotionally and sexually, so dreams often stand in place of actual experience. In doing so we expand our mental and emotional life without any danger or consequences. Through dreams we may experiment with new experience or practice things we have not yet done externally. For instance, many young women dream in detail of giving birth. This function of what might be called ‘imagination’ is tremendously undervalued, but is a foundation upon which human survival is built.

11 – We all live in a dual world, light and dark, male and female, creation and destruction, life and death, waking and sleeping. What many people do not realise is that we are all involved in this duality personally. It is only our body that tends to polarize us male or female, but in dreams we are both and often dream of having genitals of the ‘other’ sex – and using them or dream of a man giving birth to a baby. Also, we are also in the world of waking and sleeping, but we think that sleep is simply to rest our body. We miss realising that we also exist in the wider world of the ocean of consciousness. Most of us are unaware of it because it is the other polarity of us. In waking we are in the polarity of being an individual with focussed awareness on a body and surrounding, like an island. But our other polarity is in the ocean where we are not focussed on any one place or body. See There is a Huge Change Happening; You Are a Dual Being; Life’s Little Secrets

Also, we are all in the process of destruction and creation, we are after all expressions of the Universe. We continue to kill millions of viruses, fungi and bacteria each day otherwise our body would die. Also in every moment of our life we face the possibility of death. In fact, we only live because we are constantly dying. Our body is all the time dying as thousands of cells die, and in doing so the new and living body can continue.

Example: This was not a dream, but a direct perception during sleep. I saw that a large part of my being was dying, and another part coming to life. Andy

 12 – A Dream is like a seed, it is something that comes from a deep part of you; it is something that is working upwards toward being conscious. As such it often, like a seed, takes time to break through to the surface, and then it needs to grow. So often dreams are not recognised for their full meaning until later – sometimes months or even longer. The dream images are attempts to communicate something that has probably never been thought about or even been conscious before, so has never been put into common conscious thinking. It is a communication from the depths, from beyond thought, and so any interpretations that are given by thinking may completely miss the point. But the source of the dream, which is a process of Life, is intelligent in its own way, and will take part in any attempt to communicate. So, exploring your dreams by entering into their imagery and attempting to understand them will be a two-way process. See Secrets of Power Dreaming – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

 

Self Images

The image we have of our self in our dreams, shows the struggle we have with who we think we are. It is the way we try to gain identity. In this struggle, this adventure – very like the Odyssey – we meet all manner of creatures, people, demons, temptations. We travel into dark places, climbs to the heights of wondrous experience, discover magical powers. One of the functions of dreams can therefore be thought to be that of aiding the survival of our identity in facing the multitude of influences in life – and even in death.

We can try to build an image of ourselves through our looks, our financial situation, our sexual prowess or our physical sexual attributes by showing them – the low-cut dress. We may have a self-image built upon our success – as famous singers do.

If the person has positively identified with the society in which they live, and if their self-expression meets with success or reward, then they may experience satisfaction in the first half of their life. If otherwise, they may suffer some degree of depression, anxiety or emotional ill health. In either case the person has been largely shaped by factors other than their own power to shape their life. But in fact, we are made up of many different things which we fail to acknowledge. We are trapped in what has formed us. But the individual can break through the ready-made boundaries of their personality. See Programmed

One of the great and often self-defeating self-images is that with our body. If we accept that dreams portray in images our conception of self, then dreams suggest that our identity largely depends upon having a body, its gender, health, quality, skin colour, the social position we are born into, and our relationship with others. In fact, we know that if a person loses their legs, becomes paralysed, loses childbearing ability, becomes blind or is made redundant, they face an identity crisis. Yet despite all of that they still exist as a person, and if we realise that early we can avoid all the pain and distress caused by a complete identification with our body.

Another side effect is exactly the same as the above; the person believes that the body is them. So, any injury or illness suffered feels like a threat to their own self-image. I witnessed this so many times while working as a nurse. Because of the effects of thinking in that way it hinders healing and recovery of self-confidence.

Or maybe you identify with the way you look, your face, your hair or the shape of your body.  But this changes with age, sometimes radically, and old people often say, “Although I look in the mirror and the person I see appears incredibly different to how I looked years ago, inside I still feel as if I am about 20 or 30 years old.”

In fact, we know that if a person loses their legs, becomes paralysed, loses childbearing ability, becomes blind or is made redundant, they face a crisis with their image of their self. Yet despite all of that they still exist as a person, and if we realise that early we can avoid all the pain and distress caused by a complete identification with our body. But the realisations that those things are all external, and is based on the belief that their body is them is the cause if such suffering. But experience of self shows the human possibility of sensing self as having separate existence from the biological processes, from one’s body, one’s state of health, and social standing. See Near death experience

In its most naked form, the ‘I’ may be simply a sense of its own existence, without body awareness. It is the I AM alone and not the I am worried, I am feeling cold, I am in love, I am alone – they are all things that the I AM can experience, and are all passing impressions, not the stable existence. I see that the dream image is like a holographic presentation of what the dreamer feels, thinks, desires or fears about the person whose image it is.

You can begin to get a sense of this by simply saying, I AM. This avoids you getting lost in all the peripheral sense impressions which are all passing experience. So, avoiding such thoughts as I am depressed – I am lonely – I am a talented person – I am so sexy – I am good to look at – and so on.

Self Hypnosis

We are always hypnotising ourselves via the things we believe are true, and what we unconsciously tell ourselves. So, we are all victims or captives of what we believe in.

We must all at times have seen something or heard something that circumstances assured us shouldn’t be there or should not have happened. One that has occurred to me a few times is that I step into my house and see someone standing in the shadows who shouldn’t be there. My heart speeds up, and for moments I am frozen. Then with relief I see it is a coat hung on a door. All the fear drains away and my heart slows down again. Or it could be a sound of something or someone in the house when you are not expecting anyone, or can’t understand what the sound means. Whatever it is, until you understand the cause – recognising the coat on the door for instance – your whole body and emotions respond as if it is a reality. What you believe to be real is responded to completely as if it IS real.

But self-hypnotism only works when we are convinced or really believe in what we say. Émile Coué introduced a popular method of psychotherapy and self-improvement based on optimistic autosuggestion – self-hypnosis. Unfortunately, if we said to ourselves, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”, our belief system probably says something like, “Who are you kidding,” making the suggestion ineffective.

Coué did however evolve his system to one where an outside authority figure would give the suggestions – making it a hypnotic suggestion rather than self-hypnosis. The reason I believe it worked better with an authority figure, is due to the imple fact that many people believe that experts are superior to themselves, and the respect acts as a powerful suggestion. To make it into self hypnosis we have to get passed our critical mind, which knocks out any positive effects.

But it must be clearly said that what we sincerely believe in can also lead to illness and delusion. For many people actually believe they have deadly illnesses, that awful demons are haunting them, that they are under the influence of alien creatures, or other peoples will, and such can be deadly. This is a very potent form of self hypnosis. So, it is extremely important to be aware of your beliefs and convictions.

But the Biggest Hypnotist

If you click on this link – Programmed – and read it (it is quite short) you will realise that you have been completely hypnotised into thinking you were born to be the person you think you are. And the greatest hypnotist is the culture you were raised in. For there is an hypnotic suggestion that millions of people are in the grip of, in a way that controls them, imprisons them, and denies them their full potential. It is generally called the paradigm of the western mind. It could also be called the worldview or even the religion of most western people – religion because actually it is a belief system. However, if you asked most people in the streets of western cities about it they would not say they believed in what is being called a paradigm, they would insist it is reality. See Archetype of the Paradigm

Richard Tarnas, in his book Cosmos and Psyche, says of this paradigm of the western mind, “As with all powerful myths, we have been, and many perhaps remain, largely unconscious of this historical paradigm’s hold on our collective imagination. It animates the vast majority of contemporary books and essays, editorial columns, book reviews, science articles, research papers, and television documentaries, as well as political, social, and economic policies, It is so familiar to us, so close to our perception, that in many respects it has become our common sense, the form and foundation of our self image as modern humans.”

Just one misconception is that the fastest you can travel is the speed of light. This was proved wrong in 1900 – yet we still are locked into such views. See Huge Change Happening

How do we get passed the critical mind?

A way that is open to many people today is to read up on the latest scientific findings, i.e quantum phsyics. This because we have been raised in a culture that has taught views that are now proved entirely mistaken.

Here are statements of the old view: For instance, that there are immutable laws of nature which, once known, can be used to predict future events. i.e. the movements of the moon.

➢ The laws of nature are exterior to our own will and we cannot change them. King Canute could not stop the tide.

➢ The future is predetermined by what went before, like a wound-up clock. When our spring goes so do we.

➢ Humans are small cogs in the giant machine, and all machines wear out. From this we have been fed the conviction that we will die, and death is the end of us. That leads us as a society into tremendous personal pain when someone dies, or we see ourselves as failures or losers. It can also lead to terrible parenting and criminal behaviour.

The New View

Now it is scientifically shown that the behaviour of particles – that basics of the world and our own body – cannot be predicted. You can only estimate probabilities.

➢ Subatomic particles are influenced by the person observing them. In some degree, the observer actually creates what is observed.

➢ There is no such thing as objectivity. You cannot eliminate yourself from the universe. It and you are not separate. Everybody and everything has a standpoint within it, and therefore, a point of view.

➢ We are participators. The universe in some strange way may be brought into being by our participation; we are all connected and there is no such thing as death – not for our consciousness.

Remember what was said about mistaking something seen as real, only to find it was your mistake?

Can you see that being brought up to be convinced that death is the final end makes it real for you, and as such it alters all the body and mental reactions, it leads to decisions about how you lead your life, how you react to others, what you do in relationships. See Huge Change Happening

Other Ways

A way that you can us to get beyond the critical mind is described in Meditation – Lhag Thong

Or an easier one is the type of meditation used by the Beetles. It is the mental repetition of a word or sentence. The teacher does not use the word OM, but one of the other classic sentences such as Om Tat Sat, or Klim, Krishnaya, Govindaya, Gopi-jana, Vallabhaya, Swaha, or even the well known Om Mani Padme Hum can be used.

The sentence should be repeated quickly over and over for twenty minutes. Do not try to understand it, for the aim is to push the practitioner beyond thinking into another level. It can lead into a waking sleep state where you lose awareness of your body. This is where transformation can take place as the dregs of mind empty out till you reach the clearness within.

When you feel such a different state arise, then you can suggest healing, clearer insight or even that you take the next step of evolution. In doing this recognise that you have to respect your own life processes, if you tangle them, you will tangle yourself. So make suggestions that are a way of deepening your relationship and understanding of Life.

An excellent suggestion to use is – Let the powers of Life in me, clear out the blockages, hurts, and misunderstandings I hold within me. And let that be the release of the wonderful potential I hold within me.

I remember  when I first used self hypnosis I struggled with the idea of how to do it, and also with the feeling that I wasn’t doing it right because I couldn’t see any results. That is why I added the section ‘How do we get passed the critical mind’. But I slowly came to the insights that there need be no struggle and I will try to explain it.

The Easy Way

If you will take a moment to look back at your life from infancy, through youth, adolescence and maturity if you have got that far. You will see that you have passed through a mass of things you did, relationships, plans with success or failure – in fact a huge mass of events. That is the way most of us look at out life, filled with events. But we often miss the huge event. It is so huge and impressive but many of us completely miss seeing that we are ALL in a massive current of energy that moves us all the time in every moment. It is the huge river of our life energy that moves us through babyhood, childhood, teenage and ever onward – it is called the ageing process.

Many of us handle it badly. We are so mixed up with how we look, how we perform, how others see us, whether can keep up with the Jones’s, how much money we can earn – Wow – what a struggle for many of us. In doing so we miss that we are making decisions with attitudes that create and an awful future. For we are constantly putting suggestion into the incredible flow of energy that is our life. Suggestion like, I keep failing; I am not as clever as the top three winners who constantly get rewards; I am just a plain looking person and can’t compete with the real lookers; I want to die; I can’t keep struggling – and so on and on. And that flow of energy and how we deal with it is how our LIFE turns out.

If you think about it you have been carried, pushed, impelled by this current as you were moved through babyhood, childhood, teenage and adulthood. It is the current if Life. This current then carries us on through old age and through gates of death. All the time we are faced by decisions, and each decision directs us on a different path, helping to create our future. And this is the force of growth and change, and often it is fought like hell by many as we are afraid of such changes, especially getting old and facing death.

But every thought, hope or imagination is directing that current. It is as easy as that. It is not a case of positive thinking, trying to fight the negatives and darkness in your life. It is more like holding the suggestion such as –  Let the powers of Life in me, clear out the blockages, hurts, and misunderstandings I hold within me. And let that be the release of the wonderful potential I hold within me – and dangle it in the flow of your day, letting its great flood pass through it.

The result may be subtle or dramatic – so it might help to watch the reaction in your dreams. See Opening to Life

 

Meditation – Lhag Thong

Its name is Sahaswara and it has a thousand petals.

The way to it has been written about but is almost certainly misunderstood.

Here is a quotation. “The attainment of transcendent insight is the real object of the training advocated in the traditional Tibetan Oral Teachings, which do not consist, as so many imagine, in teaching certain things to the pupil, in revealing to him certain secrets, but rather in showing him the means to learn them and discover them for himself.

The Masters of the secret teachings say that the truth learned from another is of no value, and that the only truth which is living and effective, which is of value, is the truth which we ourselves discover.

If this were not the case, it would be enough for us to read the innumerable works in which philosopher’s, savants and doctors of the different religions have explained their views and to choose from among them one which agrees with our own ideas and to which we can cleave. This is what is done by most of these individuals whom the Tibetans classify in the intermediate category of the average-minded.

This stage should be surmounted. It is not enough to see with eyes which, according to the words used in Buddhist Texts, “are only covered with a thin film of dust”, however thin this film may be; it is a question of removing the last trace of dust which interferes with sight.

Literally, lhag thong, means to see “more”, to see “beyond”, to see “extremely”, “supremely”. Thus, not only to see more than that which is seen by the mass of mankind who are crassly ignorant, but to see beyond the bounds limiting the vision of cultivated minds, to bring into being the third eye of Knowledge which the adepts of tantric sects place in the centre of the forehead of their symbolic Gods.

An illustration of this last statement is that the very first suggestion they give to the student is to DOUBT! It is only through doubt that one will come to analyse truly and understand those things their attention is directed to. Following this they are given this advice, spoken by the Buddha. “Do not believe on the strength of traditions even if they have been held in honour for many generations and in many places; do not believe anything because many people speak of it; do not believe on the strength of sages of old times; do not believe that which you have yourself imagined, thinking that a god has inspired you. Believe nothing that depends only on the authority of your masters or of priests. After investigation, believe that which you have yourselves tested and found reasonable, and which is for your good, and that of others.”

	It is done, they say, through non-activity. This is not to be confused, however, with the quietism of certain Christian or oriental mystics. Nor does it deny one a normal everyday life, or demand rigorous disciplines of emotion or body.  To exist is a kind of activity, and it is but normal to eat, sleep, walk, read, speak, laugh, love, breathe, etc.

The non-activity they mean is ‘that of the disordered activity of the mind which unceasingly devotes itself to the work of the builder erecting ideas, creating an imaginary world in which it shuts itself like a chrysalis in a cocoon’. This is very reminiscent of Jung’s suggestion to patients that they allow fantasies to arise in the mind, and then to watch these fantasies, attempting to see their cause, and the underlying forces at work. It is an attempt to step back from our convictions, ideals and morals; to set them loose, and watch them as a silent watcher, who does not interfere, condemn, or condone.

Masters of the secret oral teachings point out that this Short Path is one that many prefer not to take. The guiding forces of morality and social rights have been removed, and the student may fall into one of the pits of extremity that he was previously fenced from. “It may indeed be foolish to preach to an individual of ordinary mind that there is neither Good nor Evil; that his acts have no importance, and that, moreover, he is not the author of them, because he is moved by causes whose miscellaneous origins are lost in the inscrutable night of eternity.”

True, it may be foolish for the multitude. But for some, these ideas come as a delightful shock of confirmation to intuitions half formed and half sensed within themselves. To some of these latter, if they persist, may come Lhang Tong-Transcendent Insight. As the Masters say, the student may persist for years with no result, and then suddenly, one day, while looking at a stone, or feeling the wind upon his face, he is possessed by Lhang Tong, and from all the ties and chains he has found RELEASE.