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Visualise

Your mind is a magical thing, but you may not have been taught to use many of its wonders during your years at school or college. One of the greatest of its abilities, seen in its most impressive form in remarkable works of art, is imagination and the skill of visualisation. With imagination you can soar beyond the limitations of your body and surroundings; you can bring together in creative ways things you had never brought together before. You can leap beyond logical thinking into real insight and creativity. When you add visualisation to an ability to listen and watch, it becomes a doorway to enormous depths within you. Through it you can access treasure of insight and experience that were previously locked in unconsciousness.

To use this well might take some practice, but it is worth the time taken to learn. There might also be some barriers to overcome. For instance most of us seem to have a resistance to imagining ourselves as someone else – even if it is a character from our own dream! Then, to imagine ourselves as an object at first seems even more alien. Please press on till you move beyond such hesitations.

Perhaps without being really aware of it, you already know your body is a screen. When you see a film or read a book you might be moved to laugh or cry, or shout out in fear. Considering that the book and film is not reality, what is happening? Well, the outside images or words are helping you to experience things upon the sensitive screen of your body and mind.

With visualisation a similar thing can occur. But you need to learn how to direct your attention inwards instead of to a film, TV screen or book. So take time to turn your attention inwards and look beyond the surface gross impressions of your senses and swirling thoughts. When you do, what do you observe is going on – do you feel relaxed, tense; are there persistent body sensations or aches; is there an overall feeling such as sadness or loneliness? Learn to notice these and carry on watching. See The Dream World Revolution

We are born with a problem-solving ability present. When we face a life situation in the form of an external event in which is a life problem, usually we respond with deep emotional and mental involvement. The transformation in ourselves occurs because we are led through the experience and events we face to the point where a shift occurs. The mental changes that do not solve problems are those that simply replay the difficulty without moving on to a change in the events to bring a shift of feelings and realisation. Once we realise that this is a fundamental process our mind uses in problem solving, we can take it up consciously and make use of it, extending its efficiency far beyond the level occurring without conscious help.

To put this into plain language, supposing painful childhood events had left someone with the habit of building a powerful shield between themselves and others. Suppose this barrier was like a great metal shield they erected every time they felt slightly hurt, thus stopping them from prolonged intimacy with others. To attempt a change in this habit, one need not wait for a dream. If the situation has been seen, the first step is to create a pictorial representation of it just as a dream does. So, in this case the person could be depicted as having powerful great doors which could be shut whenever anyone came close.

The next step is to act this out alone or with one or two other people who are sympathetic to the technique. It can even be done by imagining – fantasising – the action. The person could act out closing their powerful doors and excluding people.

So far this simply represents the negative habit the person has built into their life, but this is important because it makes it real for the person. The next step should be taken slowly, and with as much openness to emotions and delicate feeling responses as possible. This is to enact a shift from the problematical position to a different one where they try opening the huge doors that block them. So, the person might try opening their doors – but not automatically – with sensitivity to what fears, emotions they experience in doing so.

Any example of doing this: Dreamt that at the same time I was myself and had spent a long time following clues in my research into the unconscious. One line of clues had led me to go through a door in the house in which I lived. This house has no clear connection with any house I know, although it reminds me vaguely of G. L’s house. The door led to an area somewhat like a cellar or basement. It was certainly down some steps, but I felt more as if it were an almost secret place within the house rather than underneath it. It was dark, with no windows though, and was similar to being down deep.

I was like a detective following clues. To follow the clues, I tried an experiment. I sat in this interior place facing a tunnel. It was maybe about five or six feet high. Where I sat was dimly lit, but the tunnel led into complete blackness and the unknown. I believe I repeated some keywords and looked into the tunnel.

I had neither warning nor expectation for what happened. I was overwhelmed by terror, as if the very darkness of the tunnel was a living force of fear that entered me and consumed me. I screamed and screamed uncontrollably in reaction and found myself running back up the stairs.

Nevertheless, a part of me was observing what had happened, and was amazed and realised I had found something of great importance. Somehow, I managed to turn my screaming self away from the tunnel. But on my right – it had appeared to be behind me – was another tunnel that brought about the same terror.

I managed to get to the door, open it and get back into the everyday part of the house. I remember feeling, as I did so, that I hoped no one would observe me coming out, as in some ways it was illegal to go into or be in such a place. I also feel as if I have had many, many dreams involved in the house, that I have never brought to consciousness before.

In meeting the terror of the tunnels using the method described above, I first felt two string connections; firstly I felt that society puts an authoritative and restricting stamp on the people by considering that only psychiatrists, doctors, priests, or professors have anything useful to say about it. This led to my sense of secrecy or illegality shown in the dream.

The second association was with feelings that I had a lifelong habit of retreat form adult functioning, this showed itself in a spontaneous movement of me burying my head trying not to be involved or to see.

But it worked out as my struggle to avoid the rectal anaesthesia as a child during a medical operation I experiences as a nine-year-old in which I kicked the bottle that held the anaesthetic that was being poured into me. I wasn’t experiencing the emotions of that, only the movements and intuitions about its connection with the dream. That is, I kept saying, “I didn’t hurt anybody. I didn’t.” This was expressive of a sense that the pain inflicted to me during the operation, must be because I had done something wrong. I could see that I associated inflicted pain with the punishment a parent gave because of some “bad” action. So, I could not understand why the pain had been inflicted on me.

Because the operation was on my nose, I couldn’t be given anaesthetic via the nose, instead the nurse tried to stick a pipe up my behind. She gave me no explanation about why or what she was doing, so I fought like mad and kicked the bottle of anaesthetic out of her hands. But again, without explanation she brought several other nurses who held me down as they applied the anaesthetic. The effect of this made me feel I was being blown up and I felt I was dying, so was fighting for my life against what felt like women attacking me and trying to kill me.

I screamed, struggle to and shouted, expressive of fighting with nurses. What I screamed was pleas to be left alone. What had I done to deserve such an attack? I screamed to my “attackers” to stop.

What arose from all this was the distinct reaction that people could not be trusted. For no good reason, and despite physical struggle and screamed pleas for them to stop, they yet persisted and caused me pain. So, I saw that out of my experience of people in those situations arose a powerful suspicion and mistrust of people. Also, I developed a belief that people are purposely deceitful. This was because my mother, and nurses, doctors, say such things as, “This won’t hurt. Everything is going to be okay. You’ll go in, they will put you to sleep, and you won’t feel a thing.” There was no mention that nurses might attack me and subject me against my will to what felt to me like death.

The sense of death equated with pain and people hurting one. At the time of the anaesthetic my conscious identity had been plunged still with some awareness deep into the unconscious. The loss of shape or senses was felt to be death. So, a conditioned reflex had been set in me lasting many years until I recovered the memory of it and so transformed the terror into understanding. The conditioned reflex was or is that when I get to the point of consciously entering the unconscious, my frantic screaming and struggling for life was triggered. It was the way I mastered the nightmare using such things as Opening to Life and Secrets of Power Dreaming

The Dream World Revolution

IN her book, Creative Dreaming, Patricia Garfield quotes the story of Margherita, wife of the Italian writer Giovanni Guareschi. Margherita suffered a period of deep depression during which Giovanni discovered a simple way of helping her. Margherita told him of her disturbed dreams in which she wandered endlessly alone through streets and felt imprisoned by feelings of unhappiness, desire and fear.

In response to this Giovanni suggested, much to her annoyance, that in her dream she get herself a bicycle – she did not know how to drive a car.

After only a few days Margherita actually began to dream of using a bicycle and told Giovanni that her dreams were in fact made easier by it, and she awoke less tired. However, after only a week of success she fell once more into her deep depression because she had a puncture, and had again to walk. Giovanni, in his urgent attempt to help her, told her to mend the puncture in sonic way. Margherita said this was not possible as she was completely alone in her dreams and did not know how to mend a puncture. So (Giovanni took her into their garage and taught her how to remove the tyre and mend the puncture. He helped her to practice this until she could literally do it blindfold In this way it had become a new habit.

It took three nights of dreaming before Margherita excitedly woke to tell she had successfully mended her puncture. Her new happiness and sense of independence, real in her waking life as well as in her dream life, lasted for several months. So much dependence had grown out of her dream success, that when her next problem arose she was cast down not only in her dream but also in her waking life. While riding a mountain road in her dream, she had slipped and fallen into a steep gully, where she lay injured. Giovanni tried once more to help her, studying books on rock climbing. Margherita felt, after attempting to use these techniques, that she was too weak and injured. So Giovanni pressed her to call him in her dreams . . . call him again and again to come and help her. ‘Don’t stop calling me’ he pleaded, ‘who knows, I may hear you.’

That very night while away from home he felt sure he could feel Margherita calling him. Hurrying home he found her calmly getting a meal ready. On asking her what had happened she told him she had slept and dreamt again of being in the ravine. This time she had called him continually, and at last he had appeared, thrown a rope to her -and pulled her out of the ravine. Margherita’s summary was, ‘I am not worried any more. I now know that if I am ever in danger and I call to you, you will hear me and come.’

Just as a dream can deeply influence our waking life by its fear or pleasure, so our waking activities and imaginations deeply influence our dream life. For instance, when counselling people who find it difficult to make friends or show affection, there is a way of helping them to examine and disperse their fears. They can practice, in the counselling situation, the process of making friends and actually physically reaching out to hold hands, hug and express their feelings. For them, the act of reaching their arm out to somebody else is usually like breaking through a powerful barrier. The barrier is actually made not of bricks or wood, but of anxiety, feelings of not being likeable or being different to other people. So strong are these walls of feeling that some people remain imprisoned in them for a lifetime. Breaking through them requires new action, a revolutionary new relationship with oneself and the world.

Bill, a man Hyone and I worked with, had felt since childhood that he was physically unattractive. He had developed this feeling about himself because his mother had never shown any pleasure in handling his body as a baby. All his childhood messes and dribbles had been treated as repulsive and dirty and these feelings surrounded him in his personal prison. We asked him to feel his need for making contact with us, and when he was ready, reach out for us, but not to do so as a mechanical action. For ten or fifteen minutes he could not move, his walls of negative feeling were so strong, but gradually and with deep emotion, he came to us and held us, feeling our pleasure in response to him.

Margherita and Bill were prisoners of their own feelings. Margherita managed to break out of her prison by first learning to feel more independent and capable through the bicycle; and secondly by learning to reach out for contact and help when she needed it. Her calling in her dream was as difficult for her to achieve as it was for Bill to physically reach out to share contact. In both cases a pressure of negative feelings, almost like a resisting gravitational force, held them back. And the important point is that although not everyone has the opportunity or cash to visit a psychotherapist to help them work their way through the wall of feelings and habits which imprison them, almost everyone has the chance to do it in their dreams.

Whether we learn to meet our problems and transform our life in waking or in dreams, the results are the same. Wherever we do it, we have met the negative feeling and passed through and beyond into a new area of expression. In fact, our dreams and fantasies give us a much more varied sphere of experience in which to practice meeting our fears, making love or exploring new areas of ourselves. However we practice, we gain confidence for real-life situations. After practising making contact with us, Bill actually met and developed a relationship with a young woman that same day. The relationship lasted several months and enriched them both.

Patricia Garfield gives examples of several people with a naturally retiring disposition who, after meeting a dream attacker with real aggression, were able to directly ask for what they wanted in waking life. One woman asked a man smoking in a non-smoking area of an aeroplane to stop, which he did. This followed successful positive action in a dream. Beforehand she would not have dared ask for such a simple request, but would have remained angry and unsatisfied.

It might help to understand how this action of changing a few images in a dream can change our life, if we realise something about a dream symbol.

The nearest everyday thing which can help us understand a dream image is a word. If I write the word SAUCEPAN, you will find it almost impossible to have any other view of it than as a cooking implement. If this is changed a little by writing – red-hot saucepan -something different is communicated.

If you are not used to dealing with dreams, you may believe a dream image can never be likened to a word. A word has a fairly precise and commonly agreed meaning. A dream image, you might believe, is a rather random thing. But if you had not developed words for communication but had to use mime, posture, environment, to express meanings, would you use the image of someone slouched in a chair smoking to depict happiness and creativity? Our sense of body language, scenery, situation, is so acute, thousands of people can watch the same communal dream – a TV film – and feel similar responses. So, without realising it, we have commonly accepted fairly precise meanings attached to particular images, body postures, clothing and so on.

Miscarriage and Vitamins

While living and working in Combe Martin, Devon, a young woman stopped me in the street saying that she had just been to the doctor because she had just started bleeding and the doctor told he she was miscarrying her baby and there was nothing could be done to stop it. In fact he told her to go to town and buy herself a new outfit of clothes to take her mind off it.

I believe she had talked to the man in the post office who had lost a lot of weight using my advice about his amazing weight lose using vitamins. So she asked me if her baby might be saved. I had never dealt with a miscarriage before but I knew that most people eat white bread and white rice and eat a lot of shite sugar so they lack enormous amounts of vitamin E and the B vitamins. So I suggested she took a strong vitamin E tablet, a good Vitamin and mineral capsule each day and at least 500 mlg of vitamin C daily. Because I knew that vitamin E is important in child bearing and preventing downs syndrome I suggested she took a strong dose. Also vitamin C strengthens the capillaries that if a person if not getting enough C vitamins the capillaries are weakened causing bleeding and bruising.

She came back a couple of weeks later and told me she had taken the vitamins and that the miscarriage had stopped. Looking at her I could see her hair was now a shinning crown upon her head, she looked radiant and later gave birth to a healthy boy.

Psychological Vomiting

Psychological Vomiting – Self Regulation

Vomiting takes place because we have an inbuilt defence system that does its best when our body is attacked, poisoned or injured to deal with, repair or balance what caused the sickness. The process is called homeostasis – meaning any self-regulating process by which biological systems tend to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are optimal for survival. Or, if we put something harmful in us the process sick’s it out again.

But textbooks seldom mention that the process is also active psychologically and is often called Self-Regulation. Jung, Hadfield, and people like Caldwell and Wilhelm Reich, have often written about self-regulation active in the mind and emotions.  Hadfield in his book writes, “Dreams are compensatory or ‘self-regulatory’. Hadfield says of this, “There is in the psyche an automatic movement toward readjustment, towards an equilibrium, toward a restoration of the balance of our personality. This automatic adaptation of the organism is one of the main functions of the dream as indeed it is of bodily functions and of the personality as a whole. This idea need not cause us much concern for this automatic self-regulating process is a well-known phenomenon in Physics and Physiology. The function of compensation which Jung has emphasised appears to be one of the means by which this automatic adaptation takes place, for the expression of repressed tendencies has the effect of getting rid of conflict in the personality. For the time being, it is true, the release may make the conflict more acute as the repressed emotions emerge, and we have attempts to abreact, re-experience the cause, violent dreams (nightmares) from which we wake with a start. But by this means, the balance of our personality is restored.”  See Self-regulation

Nightmares are an excellent example of Psychological Vomiting. for dreams are a process of self-regulation, and they push traumatic experiences that have caused us great emotional disturbance into our awareness as nightmares. But because we have an enormous tendency to pull away from pain we refuse to feel the fear or pain and so repress the nightmare.

Because if the self-regulatory processes of your being ceased their action you would be dead in a very short time. Even a brisk walk causes such enormous changes in the body it would kill you without the action of self-regulation. The production of lactic acid, unchecked, would destroy the system. Also, the drop in blood sugar, unless balanced by the release of glucose from the storage in tissues and liver, would result in collapse. The level after level of safety factors built into our system are nothing short of incredible.

Example: ‘A THING is marauding around the rather bleak, dark house I am in with a small boy. To avoid it I lock myself in a room with the boy. The THING finds the room and tries to break the door down. I frantically try to hold it closed with my hands and one foot pressed against it, my back against a wall for leverage. It was a terrible struggle and I woke myself by screaming.’ Terry F.

Because Terry explored this dream with me, the nightmare depicts fear he experienced while a child during the war. What he experienced when Terry allowed the sense of fear to arise in him while awake, was that he experienced himself  as the boy in the dream – during the bombing of the second world war. Understanding his fears he was able to avoid their usual paralysing influence. On allowing the THING in the door he realised it wasn’t trying to hurt him but was Life Living His life by breaking down barriers of fear that had paralysed him. Now he could live a fuller life without the fear.

 In the feature Self-Regulation, Richet says that instability is the necessary condition for true stability and consider how this works in the realm of the personality, we have some idea of psychological as well as physiological homeostasis. In a very simplistic sense if we are overcome by fear and feel unable to move, we will remain paralysed unless we are capable of releasing and realising the trauma behind the fear. If our psyche is not ‘unstable’ or mobile enough, this compensatory shift cannot take place. These shifts, between the dynamic opposites of our nature — tension and relaxation; pain and pleasure; spontaneity and control, are vital for our healthy psychological survival. Factors preventing such mobility are causes for illness and even death. Locked feelings of guilt, shock or stress are recognised as productive of major illness. So, part of the healthy homeostatic action is to actually be ‘mobile’ enough to deeply grieve or release emotion, instead of being rigidly controlled or coping. The ‘control’ and the ‘out of control’ balance each other. If we are so controlled that we become ill through suppressed anger or grief, we are less in control of our life and wellbeing than someone who can let themselves cry uncontrollably for a while.

Also 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 is in full operation when we sleep and in fact runs all our important life processes like heart beat, digestion and also dreams.

Vomiting physically or emotionally, if it takes hold of your self control and the action is spontaneous, we experience a healing cathartic episode. The ability to really let go may need to be learned when it applies to vomiting up traumatic experiences and painful emotions. I find it helps if we create something of this feeling consciously, holding our body, our emotions, our sexuality, mind and memories as if they were keys upon which the inner life process can play. In a sense we are seeking to create a condition similar to sleep. As we fall asleep, we let go of our control over what we think, what we do with our body, and what we fantasy. Our ‘I’, our decision-making self has relaxed and left the stage free for the life process to create its realisations.  As a culture we are trained to repress anything painful. When we practice as a group, I have called the process Self-Regulation or LifeStream See Opening to Life – 

I witnessed a woman who had just learnt to be open to the life in her relive a moment of her life seventeen years previously. She told me that she remembered she had just given birth to her baby and had agreed to have it adopted, but when it was taken from her she was overcome with emotion. On returning home her neighbour told her it wasn’t good to cry, and she should stop. She did so and seventeen years later she was able to release and find healing from that withheld agony.

Here is a man’s description of his psychological vomiting in LifeStream and his agony of being left in an orphanage.

“It began with a knotted feeling in stomach, went inside myself and found a lump that I had kept deep within that no one could touch or ever has done. I spilt the lump and there appeared two halves of a walnut with a picture of my mother and father in each half as they were when I was a child. As I looked the two halves crumpled into dust. This was the secret I have carried since childhood, that I had parents, unlike the other children in the orphanage, yet the truth was I too was left behind in the orphanage by my parents. The emotions really came to the surface and I really cried. After this wave passed, I was left in a very passive state. I then went into the telephone box that I had dreamt of, and tried to make the call to reconnect, but again another shock, there was nobody to connect with, again the realisation that I was an orphan. Another great wave of emotion tore me apart. I then turned toward the dogs – also in the dream – as they came at me, I began to feel the sickness that I have always experienced in sessions but I just shrugged and let the feeling wash over me. It felt like I have always ended up in hell by that route, and I realised afterwards that hell is hell and will never be anything else.

I felt that there was something deeper and so I kept to a centre line, again there was no feeling and so I turned toward the god dream that I had when Rob was here. The look of total love for me in those eyes gave me the strength to trust my own process. I then went into fantasy, God holding my hand and picking up all the people and events in my life and placing them all together on a stone altar, which he then placed me upon and told me to surrender and allow myself to die. This I did and images of great waterfalls, and molten lava flows filled my being. Then the crisis broke through, and there I was in the kids’ home as my father was leaving. I saw myself, or I should say my being go out to him. I felt that if I loved him, he wouldn’t leave us. I then saw that I was already bonded to my mother and in that moment of transference there was guilt and I was caught in the middle, then he left creating a schism in which was left in my spine with a personality on either side.

Schizophrenia is the word to that covers this state about: Schizophrenia a mental disease marked by a breakdown in the relation between thoughts, feelings, and actions, frequently accompanied delusions and retreat from social life. I then felt what I would call the primal scream emerge from my being and then I was through. I then saw the dogs as my anxieties that have taken up two thirds of my being constantly tearing me apart, also saw that as a kid I didn’t have enough information to redirect the energy elsewhere, but now I had taken a step beyond it.” See People’s Experience of LifeStream

All the above is a modern look at self regulation, but the inner function has been known throughout the ages under different names. For example the most ancient of practices of SR –self regulation – are to be found in tribal religious practices where the non rational spill into the rational. “Colonial attitudes toward Africa have spilled over even into anthropological studies and left a legacy that often characterises the people as intellectually lazy and culturally impoverished. It is easy in the absence of indigenous historical literature to come to such conclusions. But whenever a study goes beyond the customary two years in “the field” necessary to justify a doctoral thesis, the results have been surprising. Unusually respectful and devoted studies made by several French scholars on the Bambara and Dogon people of West Africa, for instance, continue to reveal the presence of a concept of the universe that is equal in complexity and profundity to the systems of Pythagoras or Plotinus, Aquinas, Spinoza, or Bergson while owing nothing to them.

Nearer our own times are the ancient practices named the Indian Shaktipat; then there is the Tibetan Masters of the Buddhist secret teachings who 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. Its name is lhag thong – it means to see “more”, to see “beyond”, it is knowledge not learned but experienced as arising from within. They say that this Liberation is achieved by the practice of non-activity, It has nothing in common with the quietism of certain Christian or oriental mystics. Ought one to believe that it consists in inertia and that the disciples of the Masters who honour it are exhorted to abstain from doing anything whatever? Certainly not. In the first place it is impossible for a living being to do nothing. To exist is, in itself, a kind of activity. The doctrine of non-action does not in any way aim at those actions which are habitual in life such as eating, sleeping, walking, speaking, reading, studying, etc. What then is this activity from which one ought to abstain? It is the disordered activity of the mind which, unceasingly, devotes itself to the work of a builder erecting ideas, creating an imaginary world in which it shuts itself like a chrysalis in its cocoon.

Even nearer our own times is Franz Anton Mesmer.  He found that simply by stroking or touching the patient along the line of the nerves, the muscles would begin to twitch. This twitching, he said, should not cause alarm, even if it led, as it usually did, to an intensification of the patient’s symptoms or even convulsive movements. Throughout these releases, noisy and explosive though they were, he saw how patients could experience a healing of the distressing symptoms.

Prior to this time these convulsive releases were considered to be the work of devils or spirits. This attitude arose out of Christian belief, although Jesus and the disciples clearly used the same technique. In the New Testament are descriptions of people cured by these convulsive releases. Mesmer is a transforming link with our own times because his approach to these phenomena was an experimental and evaluative one. But as was usually the case he was when SR was released he was so badly criticised and the original method was lost and became hypnotism.

Carl Jung who was someone who obviously allowed, experienced and wrote about SR, says in his commentary on The Tibetan Book of The Great Liberation, “If we snatch these things directly from the East, we have merely indulged our Western acquisitiveness, confirming yet again that ‘everything good is outside’ whence it has to be fetched and pumped into our barren souls. It seems to me we have really learned something from the East when we understand that the psyche contains riches enough without having to be primed from outside, and when we feel capable of evolving out of ourselves with or without divine grace. . . We must get at the Eastern values from within and not from without, seeking them in ourselves, in the unconscious. Because of these resis­tances we doubt the very thing that seems so obvious to the East, namely, the SELF LIBERATING POWER OF THE INTROVERTED MIND. This aspect of the mind is practically unknown to the West, though it forms the most important component of the unconscious.”

RESISTANCES – yes, that is a word at the root of the enormous individual and social repression of anything that comes from anything but rational thinking and is stamped out and even feared. But letting go of ones mind, which involves itself in the building and erecting of ideas, and thereby creates an imaginary world in which it shuts itself like a chrysalis in its cocoon.

Why would I want to offer you this without asking you for money?

After all, it took me years of effort to discover the key, and bloody heartbreak sometimes to enter that magic world. Well, to start, the most fundamental of life forms, bacteria even share information with each other? They share what they have learned even with species of bacteria that are different. They give each other building blocks of what they have learned. If they have learned how to deal with a substance that is poisonous to them, then they will pass that information on to other bacteria. They give what they have learned. That is so fundamental to life even bacteria do it, and they do it without asking for payment.

Also, part of my travels took me under the surface of the world. I went into that strange place of the spirit where all things connect. I saw that my life is interwoven with yours in ways that are beyond understanding. I know that if even one or two of you make that journey and find transformation, my life will be the richer, and the world will have more light and love.

Who Am I?

I am a crazy old guy who fell in love with Life – that is Life, not living, which can at times be a trial. I was wounded on the way through youth, but who hasn’t been wounded, many through just being themselves. It takes a long time to really face yourself and admit your own tragedy. But I guess we are all wounded through being born in today’s world. I have licked my own wounds and have tried to lick some of yours. Also, I dared to search for answers, and I have written about the few I have found here on this site, so I encourage you to dare walking the same path. See Features Found on Site

In 1972 I experienced – after a long search – a breakthrough to a new dimension of experience. It healed me of wounds, transformed who I was, and so of course I wanted to share it with everybody. I have done that without any charge in the online features in Life’s Little Secrets – Opening to Life and Dimensions of Human Experience – Going Beyond – Great Dreams That Guide Us

What Resulted From Taking This Path

It isn’t a new path, for many, but many have worn a clear path through human troubles. They dare to take it. It means going beyond what you already know, so needs some daring, or maybe desperation. It needs your creativity, for creativity tears the old to pieces and builds a new form. Or it leaps beyond what you know and with brilliance creates and finds the new.

For me I no longer suffer from terrible emotions or suicidal urges. My life is a long experience of peace without constant ups and downs. I seem to still have a creative urge and still work. But here is a description by a woman the first time she dared to let go.

“Tony explained to us about letting whatever came, come. I did not understand too well, but lay down with the others and he came to each of us briefly and moved our arms, and left us lying (I left their arms in a position when the arms hit a tension). Perhaps two minutes passed when I felt a distinct twitching around my brow, which was repeated, and then it spread down my face, a downward pressing movement. My face was involved then in a big muscular movement, pressing down, seeming to flatten the face, and then spread down the body towards the feet. Gradually my whole body became involved in big waves of pressing movement which flowed down, lifting and tossing my legs, so that my heels were banging on the floor. Wave succeeded wave. I did as he said, and let it happen, using the skills to relax which I had learnt. I wasn’t afraid, although I couldn’t imagine what was happening to me. Instead I felt happy and elated, warmed through. I knew I had found something of great significance, but it was many months before I could put words to it. It remained an intriguing mystery, like a dropping away of chains, or a touching of promise, while I passed through the pain of divorce. I feel that my experience that day released considerable energy. It did not break my marriage – that would have happened anyway. But I received strength which I used for my needs at that time. Months later it came to me with the force of revelation, that I had been born that day.”

So Here’s The Deal

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.

Finding this very ancient self, hidden as it is by all your personal thinking and opinions, you find you are free from all the painful emotions, suicidal urges and personal hurts. To explore it see Opening to Life

You are the survivors of countless generations of living creatures, going back to the beginning of life on this earth – or maybe even longer. You are the end product of an immense creative act – the Big Bang.

Truths about Lucid Dreaming

Some Truths about Lucid Dreaming

According to a review in The Observer, many viewers of the film Inception are confused by it, or what it means. That is, unless they have themselves thoroughly explored the world of lucid dreaming, and understand that you must not measure the lucid experience by what you know, or think you know, about so called ‘real’ life.

In the ‘real’ world if you jump off a high building it would kill you – well, not really, but it would certainly mess up that body. But in the world of dreams, and especially lucid dreams, you can of course experience death- and you can do it again and again, because that it all it is, an experience.

What is so difficult for most people to grasp is that every dream is a real life virtual reality. But unlike those of computer games and computer generated versions you are firmly in the action and feeling it as if it were real. Therefore if you ‘dream’ of  falling you will usually feel extraordinary fear. And of course, if you dream of having a wonderful sexual encounter it IS wonderful, with depths of experience not usually available in waking life.

To really understand dreaming and lucid dreaming you have to understand that you are in an experience without boundaries. I know that is hard for most people to grasp, locked as they are in their view of the world as being subject to time, space and what is usually called ‘reality’. So come with me into another world in which thoughts create your environment, and imagination is a tool with which you can create it. So most people who enter it usually create a world much like the physical world they are so familiar with – people with bodies, gender, up and down, houses and no connection between people except through words and body signals. Pretty boring when you know your way around the many dimensions you exist in. But their dream world is frightening or intriguing because it is so totally unlike ‘real’ life.

Travel with me into the world of directly knowing another person without the use of words or even a body; to an experience of the Earth and its wonderful tides and energies beyond the knowing we have through our eyes and physical senses; come with me into the vast sea of knowledge where all that has lived is known and recorded. Or into the depths of your own past and ancestors, the evolution of you.

Inception is an adventure in this first level – people with bodies, a fixed gender, up and down, houses and no connection between people except though words or signals. In the dream world we create our environment and it is plastic, able to shift with our thoughts and intentions. Having been able to explore lucid dreaming, I know from experience that is only the first level – the ordinary world of seeing objects in a new setting. So if you think this is weird, there are worlds beyond that are so much more  wonderful, but this film doesn’t show them. It doesn’t suggest that our only limitation is our own ability, our own conceptions of who and what we are. Our growth is to move beyond what we have known and what we believe.

Having seen the video of Inception, and myself moved beyond the image level, I know there is more to lucid dreaming.

Lucid Means Awareness

Being lucid in a dream is the extraordinary experience of knowing you have carried something of waking awareness into sleep. In the lucid state you can make decisions and do thing that in ordinary dreaming are not possible. Our dreams take us into realms of extraordinary experience in which we are still largely unaware.  In lucid dreaming we wake up in what is usually a dark, unconscious world.  Or in the midst of a dream we realise the situation and relate to the dream in a new and dynamic way. Because you are conscious you have entered the world of the unconscious with all its wonders and strangeness.

To make comparisons, in waking life you have to work at something to create it – in the lucid state you can immediately create in the virtual reality of dreams. In waking you have limited memory – in lucidity you have full recall. In waking life you have a sexual orientation through your body – in lucidity you can be any gender. In waking life you only have the three dimensional experience via the senses – and the senses are notoriously limited, and so in lucidity you can be in worlds with little or no form. In other words in waking life you live in enormous limitations – in lucidity you enter a world of freedom, only limited by your imagination or concepts. You can fly effortlessly or even transfer immediately to any part of the earth or beyond.

But lucidity is different to sleep and dreams. Sleep is a strange country.  In it we largely lose our sense of self.  Or dreams take us into a new worlds of experience in which we are still largely unaware.  But throughout history there have been individuals who have described a different meeting with sleep. They wake up in what is usually a dark, unconscious world.  Or in the midst of a dream they realise the situation and relate to the dream in a new and dynamic way. Then they can explore this new territory.

In becoming lucid you not only enter into the world of sleep, with all its possibilities of extended memory, creativity and healing, but you also discover a world of experience that is beyond the limitations of waking life. Imagine what it is like to reach for creative ideas and find them; to create a world around you that brings peace; to be able to practice new skills or improve old ones with expert tuition; or to be able to follow your curiosity off in almost any direction, with full access to whatever you have read or learned in the past. Also, you are able to live these things, not just think them. You can explore love and relationship with a wonderful sensitivity, or even step beyond the usual barriers of time and space – or experiencing yourself in a variety of roles or different periods of time.

In lucidity, not only do you begin to touch the enormous potential latent within you, but you also release something of that potential into your waking life. So lucid dreaming is not a Disneyland of ephemeral entertainments, it can be the doorway to real personal growth and adventure.

To sum this up, the unconscious is:

The mass of your memories remain unconscious unless called upon, and even may remain hidden or what we call ‘forgotten’. In this case forgotten means unconscious. Here is an example of this from a lucid dream I had.

I was surprised that with the huge instrument like a euphonium I could play a tune rather than simply an accompaniment. All the while I was intrigued how another piece of music would suggest itself, and then I could remember it note for note. I realised that the playing wasn’t difficult because I was dreaming, so that didn’t amaze me. But the memory of the music, pieces that I do not often remember or sing, was startling. It demonstrated to me how easily the memory works when we are in this state.

The unconscious is the master of all our body functions, which remain ‘unconscious’. For instance one of my early lucid experiences was of waking up while deep in sleep, and realising I was in my body examining it. This was extraordinary as I could see the inner workings of my lungs. I had some sort of infection at the time and I could see the way my body was healing it. It was like watching plant circulation dealing with the illness. Then I was examining my neck and I could see I had a problem there that if it continued could lead to serious illness. The problem was of having an attitude of being very rigid in my opinions. This caused a poor energy flow between my trunk and head. Seeing this, a situation I was previously unconscious of, I was able to grow beyond it.

The outer world we take to be the ultimate reality is in fact an externalisation of the forces of the universe, or Life, that are largely unknown and unsensed, and so are – that word again – unconscious.

When you become lucid in sleep you carry the bright torch of personal awareness into the depths of your body and mind, into the unconscious. This is a frontier only a few people have crossed.  Like the frontiers of sea and sky that past generations overcame, the frontier of awareness holds enormous treasures and benefits.  However, unlike the frontiers presented by the exploration of the oceans and space, the crossing of this frontier is open to us all. To wake fully in sleep and dreams is one of the most amazing experiences and adventures you can have. Climbing a mountain or travelling to wild places is exciting and interesting, but discovering your roots and exploring the depths of your mind and heart are life changing. Even the techniques leading to lucidity bring life transforming change in your everyday life. 

The Way to the New Land

So, how do we enter into and move around in the great waters of our inner life?

The first steps are in learning how to allow things to happen spontaneously. The dream itself occurs because you have surrendered control as you slipped into sleep. The dream is a spontaneous expression of something other than your conscious will or thoughts. To enter the world of the dream you need to learn how to do that consciously. Learning how to let go of your goals, your conscious thoughts and desires, your will, is the first skill needed.

If you consider what happens when you go to sleep, you completely let go of the world, your activities, your thoughts and feelings. Then your thoughts and feelings start to flow in their own way, being moved from a deeper level than your conscious decisions. It is worth examining your experience of this and trying to reproduce it while you are alert and awake. Dreams do not communicate with words or intellectual discussion, and if you cannot allow the spontaneous your dreams will not be able to communicate with you.

I tend to call this the keyboard condition and have described it elsewhere in various ways. The first steps in learning the keyboard condition are to hold your body, your emotions, your sexuality, your mind, memories and imagination as if they were keys upon which the inner dream maker can play. As you fall asleep you let go of your control over what you think, what you do with your body, and what you fantasy. Your I, your decision making self has relaxed and left the stage free for the dream maker to create its dramas. So, in beginning to access the deeper possibilities of your dreams you need to take on a similar relaxed state without actually losing awareness. In this way you are holding your body free to move spontaneously; you are letting go of any control or resistances you might have in connection with your emotions; you are relinquishing your thoughts and goals, and you are leaving the stage free for your imagination all to be able to respond to something other than your conscious will and ready to be moved spontaneously.

Remember that when you dream you often experience very powerful emotions, you move, you run, you make love, and more than anything else you experience an enormous variety of situations or environments. To enter into these, to gather what they depict about yourself and your deeply unconscious life processes and mind, you cannot simply analyse or think about them. You need to experience them.

Learning to be capable of being moved like that for most people takes practice. Two simple techniques enable you to do this. The first I call ‘self watching’ and the second one is ‘carving in space’.

Self Watching

This is one of the most important skills we can learn, not only in regard to entering into our dreams; it is also a doorway into many other possibilities in your life.

It is most helpful if you can practice this skill with a partner who will listen without comment. Their quietness is important. It is so easy to simply sit and have a conversation or for the listening person simply to tell you what they think about what you are saying, and that is not the aim of this exercise. Having a partner who will listen without comment focuses your attention. It is an enormous aid, and you can take it in turns to be the person using the process.

You need to sit somewhere you can be reasonably relaxed and undisturbed for at least fifteen minutes. Then, as far as you are able take on the keyboard condition. In other words agree with yourself that you are not unconsciously telling your body it must be still. You are leaving your body open to move, to stretch, or do whatever comes to you spontaneously. It means being ready to experience your emotions, memories or imagination in any way they arrive spontaneously.

Then, with eyes closed, turn your attention onto yourself. Perhaps imagine that your body is like a television screen and you are simply watching what images and drama appear on it. So start by being aware of what sensations, feelings, tensions, or discomforts are apparent throughout your body. Describe them to your partner or to yourself if you have no partner. I mean by this actually speak aloud what you feel and observe, even if you are alone. This focuses your attention enormously. You are not aiming to reach any goal, so simply observe and gradually observe what is flitting through your thoughts, what feeling state you are in and watch the changes that occur as you continue your observation. As any shift occurs describe it.

Remember that you are not attempting to reach any particular goal of feelings or attitude. You are simply observing and describing what you can see. Here is an example of somebody using this technique. As you can see they move gradually from general observations of what they are experiencing to a particular theme, that of relationship. This is often what happens. Certain directions are taken spontaneously and feelings or memories arise that take you in a particular direction.

As I turn my attention to the screen of my body the first thing I notice is that my mouth is quite tense. I am almost biting my lip, so I relax that tension. And then I notice that the rest of my body has tensions that are unnecessary and I relax them. Now a feeling is occurring in the upper part of my body, almost as if a heavy cloud were shifting from my head and there is a sense of opening, or perhaps something like walking out of a small room into the open air and experiencing the bigness of the sky. It is a nice feeling. Now I get the urge to move my head by turning it side to side, almost as if I am exercising my neck. My whole body gets involved in this now and I shift my position for one that feels more open and comfortable. Now it seems as if I am simply listening. I am feeling as if I’m going to open. I am opening. These words come to me spontaneously and I speak them. But I don’t know what they mean yet. Now I yawn. I am looking at something that isn’t very clear and it is about the way I relate to women. That’s how it seems. I am feeling as if I’m trying to open. I’m not sure why. It’s all to do with being independent. I don’t want to get involved in somebody else’s needs and desires. I can see I feel that a close relationship means becoming beholden to someone. It’s nothing that I can’t deal with.

One of the important points of this technique is to help you develop awareness of the subtle feelings, shift of feelings, physical sensations, and urges that arise when you give yourself that sort of attention. If this is difficult for you at first it is helpful to think of someone you love or something that is beautiful. It can be a pet, an object, a person or a place. As you hold this in mind notice what change of feelings occur. Notice how your body feels as you hold in mind what you have chosen that is beautiful.

When you have observed this, change what you are thinking about to something else, something that is ugly or that you don’t like. Again notice the difference in what you are feeling and the sensations in your body, and even what memories or images arise.

What you can learn from this is that every thought you hold, everything you see in the external world, produces a corresponding shift within yourself and the way your body feels. This awareness can then be applied to exploring a dream and entering into its drama. Once you have learned to give yourself that awareness and notice what is going on within you, you can then hold in mind the drama or imagery of the dream and observe how your being responds, what it is telling you spontaneously about the dream. Ask the question, “What is my dream depicting to me?” Or take a particular character or part of your dream and ask what aspect of your life or insight it depicts.

Carving in Space

The second exercise is a wonderful way of extending this ability. It brings the body more fully into play, and begins the process of allowing a full keyboard condition to be used. It enables you to watch what can arise spontaneously, and how creative you are if you simply let go and allow things to happen.

For this exercise you need sufficient floor space to move easily, or even lie full length if necessary. It also helps to have loose clothing. Then you stand in the middle of your floor space giving yourself time to explore what you feel and experience.

Start by slowly circling your arms. Take the arms above the head, down the sides of the body with the arms fully extended. Then take your arms upward crossing the front of the trunk. In the full movement the hands are then forming wide circles that cross the front of your body.

Now, as you are circling your arms with eyes closed, bring your awareness to the shape your hands are making in space. As you become aware of the shapes the handsor finger tips are carving in space, watch what feelings you have as to how your hands and arms would like to move. Give yourself permission to doodle, to make any sort of shapes your feelings or body incline you to. Allow any sort of posture or movement, as active or quiet as you like. Allow sounds to accompany the movements if there is an urge to, and allow whatever feelings accompany them.

Hold the attitude that what you are doing doesn’t have to make sense. Nor does it have to comply with what other people might expect of you. Realise that you are allowing another part of yourself, perhaps a non verbal part, or a facet unknown to the rational mind, to express. With a non critical watching attitude, relax and let your body and feeling sense direct what happens. There is no need to fiercely concentrate in order to wipe the mind clear of other influences. But you may need to relax the part of the mind that always needs to know beforehand what you are going to do.

This is not like creative dance in which you might feel you must produce something pleasing for others to watch. With this exercise you need an open area in which your inner being can express in its own way. Movements and feelings have a chance to unfold outside of rational criticism and the demands of everyday life.

Give yourself at least twenty minutes in which to explore what spontaneous movements and feelings emerge. Below is a summary of what may happen in this practice.

1. Although the movements may at first appear haphazard and irrational, if you allow them to continue without criticism, they usually express – perhaps only over a period of several sessions – a particular theme or point.
2. Like a dream, the theme or drama often symbolises your life situation, or something within you, such as the remaining emotions or attitudes from past experience, or a creative realisation. Or the movements may be expressive of your body’s own need to release energy or mobilise itself and its urges.
3. There are obvious stages or depths to the experience. Movement is often the first. Feelings and fantasy then often combine with the movement in expressing as a mime of some sort. Only with a few people do they occur without each other. If met in the right way the movements, fantasy and sounds can lead, through the mime, to insight into what is being expressed. In other words the symbolic movements, if that is what they are, can give way to rational understanding. This is not because one has thought out a plausible explanation for what happens. It is because your critical, conscious mind has watched the spontaneous working of what usually only occurs in sleep and unconsciousness. This gives automatic feedback to the unconscious mind and it can speed up its processing and problem solving. A communication thus takes place between the unconscious and conscious mind.
4. When you reach a stage that you can easily allow spontaneous movement, along with sound and perhaps feelings, you can dispense with the arm circling to start you off. You will find that if you simply stand in the keyboard condition ready to let your body express what is within you it will begin.

The exercise is a way of entering into the usually unconscious processes of your being and working with them. Usually the only way we let go so fully and allow the spontaneous action of our inner nature is when we sleep and dream. But in this way you can open to your core while awake.

The Power Search

What was said above about the symbolic movements or mime giving way to rational understanding is incredibly important. Understanding it gives the key to real dream penetration. The idea also holds within it the kernel of what happens when we successfully enter into a dream. The symbols unfold their meaning enabling us to arrive at an understanding that we can verbalise. This becomes understandable in what follows.

First though, the above techniques need to be practised until you feel easy with them and can experience real spontaneous emergence of your own inner life, and have learned to accept and allow it easily. Once this has happened you can move on to the real business of entering a dream.

The exercises have started the process during which a flow of communication occurs between your unconscious and your observing conscious mind. At first you are simply observing, and maybe what occurs is highly symbolic. For instance the images that occur while you are in the process of self observation, any movements that you make or feelings that arise might not be understandable. The same is true of what happens in the arm circling exercise. Spontaneous movements, sounds or themes might emerge. They certainly will if you are successfully using the technique. But that is a halfway position. Your unconscious expresses itself in mime, imagery, symbolic drama, irrational sounds, and in any other way in which it can begin the process of bringing to consciousness things that have in themselves never been verbalised, and have never been consciously experienced before. The first stage for this is perhaps in spontaneous movements or irrational sounds. The next stage is that a theme, mime, or symbolic drama is expressed. This needs to be worked with. It needs to be recognised for what it is — symbolic. The communication now needs to be in two directions.

At the heart of the process is the way the memory functions. Every day we use the process of memory countless times. We might seek a telephone number, an address, a word to use in conversation, and the very act of seeking it brings it into awareness from dark unconsciousness. When the piece of information we seek comes into mind we usually have a very strong feeling of recognition. In fact if you are observing the process carefully you will see that a scanning goes on that sorts through many bits of information until it arrives at the right piece. Once you understand that clearly then you can use the process in a slightly different way.

So, the techniques that I have outlined above and suggested you to practice are leading up to this — you start with a fairly clear dream. To begin with it is best to use a dream in which the imagery is impressive and clear. You then take one of the images and explore it by asking what the meaning of it is, and opening as in the keyboard condition, allowing whatever spontaneous feelings, memories or body movements arise. At times very strong feelings will come in this way also.

If you have not practised the self observation and the carving in space, you may feel that this is a pointless exercise as nothing will arise. It is only through practice that you can stand on the edge of your unconscious, so to speak, drop in the question and be aware of the response from within.

The response is very similar to what happens when you seek parts of your memory in everyday life, except that the pathways to normal everyday memory have already been formed. What you are seeking in the dream has never been made conscious before and so you have to approach patiently. Maybe you will not even arrive at any clear insights the first time. But with persistence gradually more and more understanding will arise. When it does, it does not come from an intellectual analysis or thinking about the dream. It comes because something emerges that you can actually witnessed and see, like a mist clearing while you’re standing on a hill so that you can clearly see the landscape below. You don’t need to think about that you can directly observe to experience it.

When something arises that you do not understand you communicate with your unconscious by saying, “I don’t understand this. What does it mean? Please clarify this.”

This two-way communication gradually develops as you practice so that you learn to penetrate beyond the symbols of your dreams, or the spontaneous mimes, sounds or images that arise as you spontaneously open to your dream imagery.

Do not be satisfied with explanations that you give to the imagery by consciously analysing the dream or jumping to conclusions about what a mime or fantasy means. When insight arrives it will clearly explain and link with your everyday life, your history and how it connects with the imagery of the dream. You will discover something new about yourself that you didn’t understand before, something that you can explain to somebody else and they can also see it clearly.

That is the way to your central self. See: Dream Processing

The Healing Experience

In searching for relief from misery I tried many different things, relaxation, yoga, meditation , fasting, and diet among them. They promised to be helpful but something was missing that I only began to uncover when I started teaching relaxation/surrender. Some of those classes I taught were huge back in the sixties and seventies. To help people I would wander around the class and lift an arm or leg of some of those lying quietly relaxed. I lifted the limb to let the person have an enhanced awareness of their relaxed condition. What amazed me was that often the arm or leg was so rigid with tension it was hard to move. If I let go the limb would remain suspended. On asking the person how they felt they would say, ‘Fine. Really relaxed.’ They didn’t know they were carrying enormous tensions.

Are you relaxing or suppressing?  

It took me a while to realise what that indicated. You could relax surface muscles and feelings, but a mass of tensions were unconscious. Later I learned that such tensions had often arisen from difficult or traumatic past experiences, still locked in the body and emotions. By using relaxation techniques such as dropping the tension of the voluntary muscles or meditating on positive things, those inner tensions were being pushed back into the unconscious – undealt with. When left at that point, relaxation and meditation were a method of suppression and control, not of healing.

With shock I realised this was true of many things that were supposed to be helpful, such as meditation and positive thinking. What they often did was to calm surface feelings by controlling thoughts and body. They did not deal with the real difficulties that had been pushed into the unconscious. Their purpose was to quieten the conscious mind and the voluntary movements of the body, not release unconscious tensions.

I went on an almost fanatical search for what could be done to change that – to release the unconscious problems. The clue was, as Richet says, that ‘the slight instability is the necessary condition for the true stability of the organism.’ I gradually realised that to really adjust to the many knocks and changes we meet in life, our body and mind need to be capable of a type of ‘instability’. It needs to be able to move, to express freely, and to respond automatically or spontaneously. Yet all our cultural training and habits are about control and suppression. Governments also sometimes give huge threats to the people if they do not conform. All in all, we have in many ways been trained to be sick – as I was myself. And, amazingly, my doctor, to deal with depression and physical but undiagnosble pains, was telling me to take a drug, a tranquiliser, to maintain the status quo.

To deal with it is something we need to experience, not something we are taught. The simplest way of describing it is to say it is a process of allowing parts of ourselves to express that in everyday life may never have had opportunity to declare themselves. It is about surrendering our personal egoistic control, and trusting that our Life Process knows how to bring us to wholeness once we yield to It.

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” — T.S. Eliot

“Do nothing, but let things happen.” Carl Jung

In most social settings we usually restrain everything except what may be acceptable to others, expedient in the situation, or judged as correct. This means that we may not give ourselves the freedom elsewhere to allow our own creative imagination – our body, our real self  to discharge tension through movement – experience our intuitive process – and our full range of feeling responses. In this way we gradually diminish ourselves, blocking out much of ourselves that is not of immediate use in everyday affairs. We may in fact diminish our relationship with Life itself.

Later, I found in the writings of Carl Jung and J. A. Hadfield information about how this self-regulatory action also works in the psyche. Jung stated that the psyche is self regulatory. He said that if internal tensions can be allowed to be conscious, then something will happen internally to resolve the conflict.

As for how we can enable this to happen, Jung’s student Marie von Franz says that we ‘must get rid of purposive and wishful aims. The ego must be able to listen.’ Jung also encouraged his clients to allow spontaneous movement. Quoting from my book Mind and Movement Jung says, “In most cases the results of these efforts are not very encouraging at first. Moreover, the way of getting at the fantasies is individually different… oftentimes the hands alone can fantasy; they model or draw figures that are quite foreign to the conscious.

“These exercises must be continued until the cramp in the conscious is released, or, in other words, until one can let things happen; which was the immediate goal of the exercise.”

 I gradually found a way through dreams, and also using T. S. Elliot’s advice to, “… be still and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing;”

Then having sat for months dropping my aims and beliefs, one night after going to the toilet, I was just getting back into my bed and I heard a disembodied voice say to me, “You have asked how God touches the human soul. Now watch closely.” A couple of days later, having realised all that, I got together with two friends – Michael Tanner and Sheila Johns – to experiment with how to allow this process of self-regulation to express. How did you give your being freedom to express spontaneously so it could rid itself of what it held unconsciously? How did you allow it to re-balance itself when it has been knocked out of balance?

We started our experiments with yoga postures and movements. But instead of pushing our body into a particular given position, we tried to listen to see what our body wanted to do; what posture or movement our own internal feelings led us to. Then sitting with my friends one day in our experimental group I started to shake. I thought I must be cold so restrained the shaking. But at our next meeting it started again, and this time I was wearing a warm jersey, and in no way felt nervous, so pulled slightly apart from my friends and let myself really shake.

What happened was incredible. My body and my emotions discharged the whole experience of having my tonsils out as a six year old. My head pulled back, my mouth clamped open and my arms were in the position of being strapped to my side. Perhaps I had not been fully anaesthetised – I don’t know. What I do know is that I had carried that enormous tension and shock inside me from six until I was thirty five.

Up until that day I had experienced a powerful neck tension that I had tried again and again to ‘relax’ away. My being didn’t need to relax, it needed to discharge in powerful tension, physical struggles and emotion. After this ’shaking’ experience there was never again a tension in my neck, a tension that had been caused by trying to pull away from the surgeon cutting my throat. However, it was not simply a physical tension it released. Powerful emotions were also discharged, ones that had created difficult responses to everyday life.

That was an amazing experience, and from there on I could allow the process to continue its work on me. Gradually it ‘discharged’ the other things from childhood, and another medical operation, that had thrown my body and mind out of balance. I realised slowly that to allow a real meeting with God, first a cleaning process has to occur and all one’s previously unconscious traumas, angers, hurts and twisted feelings needed to be brought ot awareness.

But it didn’t stop at clearing out difficult past experiences, its process went on to expansion of awareness and growth – it moved toward making me more than I had been. All of that came about by allowing my being to express spontaneously without my conscious intervention, by allowing spontaneous movement and sounds, by surrendering or offering my body, sexual self, me emotions and mind to the Life that had brought me forth; to the unknown of myself and trusting it.

Example: “At first I found it difficult to let go enough for my body to freely express. When I did learn to do this my movements were very strong. At the time I was lying on my bed because my movements had started from quietness and stillness. They became so strong I fell off the bed at one point. My impression was that without realising it I had been holding back enormous amounts of my own energy. It was when I let the energy out that I could achieve a new experience of myself. It is like having a dimmer switch on a light in an internal room, and all the time you have it just glimmering, and the room looks dark and dismal. Then one day you turn the power up and the whole room is transformed. All the colours glow, and features not seen before stand out.”

Life’s simple secrets are that your being knows how to deal with the things you carry in you that have harmed you, creating despair, emotional darkness and even physical pain. The process of life in you is also part of the life on this planet. It can read the signs of change and will ready you if you let it.

I Had Been In That Direction A Thousand Times

And It Always Led to Self Destruction

Example: I suffered torment for years, messing up my life, until a dream showed me what I had been doing. I had thought the pain and misery was from some earlier trauma but could not find one. And the dream showed me that it wasn’t a trauma but cultural programming that said that I was a bad father and also a bad husband, both true from a certain viewpoint.

How can We Talk to the Dead and They can Talk With Us?

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 bodyless experience while serving in the RAF in Germany . I had fallen asleep and 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. I 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. See https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encycl…/out-of-body-experiences/

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”.

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 or 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 be aware of thoughts.

Diving into the Death World
While I worked as a psychotherapist for twenty years I witnessed several ordinary people convincingly talk to and with their so called dead.

To say or believe, “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, for at this level our thoughts are things.

A woman’s dream explained, “All you need to do is to imagine your son and talk to him, explaining. 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 with what we think and feel. Also that at the level of thoughts we create huge difficulties by. 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. See https://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/https-dreamhawk-com-inner-life-inner-world-makesinner/  – https://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/…

Example: “For a start, you are making a mistake by going to his grave to be near him, because your son isn’t buried there. It is only his body, which is like shell that can be outgrown. And why do you muddy the water by crying about him instead of being quiet and communicate with him. When we die we go into a very different experience of being, one that gives an enormously enlarged opportunity to them. Unlike older cultures we are not taught how to listen to our loved dead. Also people expect the dead to talk to them as if they were alive – making physical sounds. But the dead contact us though feelings and thoughts, and unless we are quiet enough to listen we cannot hear them. But  obviously you feel something is trying to be communicated, so listen to the spontaneous feelings that arise as you listen to your son.”

Here’s is a method you can use to communicate with the loved dead. But you need to be able to move beyond rigid beliefs or thinking into imagination. Imagination changes the shape of the world, penetrates its external solidity to transform its shape and its events into innumerable fresh experiences. Imagination sees the wonderful possibilities in a piece of rock, or some coloured earth, and with them creates art. Imagination discovered the submarine and the motor car long before scientific endeavour developed the technology to manufacture them. Even people who appear to lack this divine power while awake, can in dreams spread wings of fancy and find ingenious dramatic creation while they sleep. See https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclo…/secrets-power-dreaming/

So sit quietly in a situation where you will not be disturbed, and to start with imagine you are in the presence of the person you wish to communicate with and want to say to them things you have held back from saying because you thought they were ‘dead and gone’ or whatever was holding you back. So now you have the chance to really speak and tell them. Really let it all out with any feeling as well.

If you have spoken in this way, you will have felt you were really communicated with that person so now you can listen to their reply – not in external sounds but in spontaneous words that trickle into your mind – remember the dead have no physical body but are alive as mental awareness, consciousness, so can communicate in that way. Now if you are ‘in the mode’ you can carry on a conversation with them. See https://dreamhawk.com/body-and-mind/the-keyboard-condition/

Here is a conversation I experienced with a dead friend:

“So, during a break in my cooking duties I walked up to that wonderful view over the ocean, above Wildpear Beach in Devon, where Shaun’s ashes were scattered and tried to listen to Shaun, so I asked him what he could tell me about what was happening to me because I felt lost. The words that came flowing into my awareness were, “I can see that you are going through a period of rapid growth. Because of this, by the end of the year, you will take a new direction. It will be like looking along a new road that you have never previously taken – quite a new direction for you.”

Because I was wondering whether I was making all this up I thought that what had been said might be one of those generalisations that you could never be quite sure whether it was true or not. But then Shaun went on to say, “When that change comes you are going to meet somebody who will be part of the new direction, she is waiting for you to meet her. She has been waiting for some time. In fact, she is here with me now.”

That really made me sit up, and so I immediately broke into the conversation and said, “If I am going to meet her, how can she be with you, you’re dead!”

That didn’t faze him at all. He said, “She is here because where she lives in the world she’s asleep. While she’s asleep and dreaming she can be wherever she likes.”

Later I did meet somebody who changed the direction of my life. Her name is Dakota, and she would have been asleep in her part of the world at the time I was talking with Shaun. She had been trying to meet me.

To understand that you need to realise that many modern physicists, working with the information arising in experiments with quantum theory, tell us that our view of the world is based upon our blindness, and is very limited, and through its limitation, unreal. Yet this view we take to be the REAL universe. For instance we are only able to see a tiny fraction of the visible spectrum of light and as small amount of audible sound, so we are almost blind and deaf to the world around us. Obviously my dog had much greater sense impression and responded wonderfully.

The famous physicist Bohm defines this problem by saying that there are two orders in our experience of the world around us. There is the “explicate” order and the “implicate” order of the physical universe. He defines the explicate order as the impressions of the world gained via our senses and the interpretations the brain places on these impressions. These impressions and the brain’s interpretations – based on millions of years of evolutionary experience and input – lead to a view that we each have separate minds in isolated bodies. The implicate order is the universe as it is when we move beyond the limitations of the senses and the brain’s evolutionary programs. Then we begin to see the universe as a single indivisible whole and ourselves as intricately part of that whole. Time and space are transcended. David Bohm, goes as far as to say that all things in our observable universe are inextricable linked. Nothing has separate existence.

Not only can we – if we stop living in our rational mind – meet the dead, but also the living in the same way as explained above.

Ancestors – The Importance Of

A distinct and overall realisation arose out of the many memories and impressions; it was that my father was expressing a particular type of caution in all his dealings with other people. I saw this as keeping who he was secret – keeping his head down.

As I saw this in my father it hit me with great power that this attitude had passed to me, and although I expressed it in a different way, I had inherited it with equal strength. Why? And, how?

The perception that was taking place was not like my normal thinking. It comprehensively gathered memories and put them together in a way that made patterns and themes stand out. So as the process of insight was taking place I saw just how the urge to keep my head down, not stand out in the crowd, not get involved with people, had influenced my actions. For a start I had never voted in my life. This was because I could never identify with groups pushing for power. I had avoided everyday social activity, although relationships with individuals were not threatening.

Now I started seeing how this attitude had passed to me so strongly. My thought, as I witnessed the flow of memories, was that perhaps such information was genetic, because my father had never talked to me much at all. He had certainly never urged me to keep out of the limelight – to keep my head down, and until now I hadn’t been aware that he had been doing it himself, so it wasn’t simply conscious emulation. I can only say that I ‘saw’ how it had happened. What I mean is that through the still flowing memory and feelings it was as if I could actually look into the heart of things and see how they worked. The insight I achieved was that we as humans, like other mammals, in our earliest years particularly, still learn like most mammals do, and that is not verbal at all. A massive amount of information is absorbed from our parents without any effort or awareness. 

What I realised is that just as a fox cub ‘learns’ how to hunt from its parents, so we absorb the deeply etched survival strategies of our parents simply by being around them. If genes come into it anywhere, they perhaps create the reflex response that instinctively draws in the survival tactics that perhaps even our parents themselves have never really been aware they live by. In doing this the higher animals learn what cannot be passed on as instinct, what is not ‘hard wired’ into them. This holds in it a tremendous advantage because ‘hard wiring’ takes a long time. Through this faster method we learn what to be afraid of, what to eat, how to hunt, because the lessons learned by pain through many generations are exhibited in our parents behaviour in dealing with events. The experiments with apes in Japan, where Imo the macaque ape learned the ability to wash sweet potatoes to remove sand grains, show how this was passed on from this one female to the whole group, and then to subsequent young macaques, and illustrates how survival information is passed on non verbally for generations. An important aspect of this is that whatever of such information is held in the present generation, it is an accumulation of skills and responses learned over many generations, and is the fundamental survival strategies of that particular family or group line. (5)

Massacre in Italy

I go on to say:

 The degree of this was staggering to me. It led me to wonder just where my father had got the information from, and although this was obvious from my own perception of where I had received the messages from, the resulting experience profoundly moved and impressed me. It taught me things about myself I don’t think I could have learned in any other way. A floodgate of impressions rushed into my awareness at such a pace I can only record the main ones.

Suddenly my mind let the power of the messages my father had carried and passed to me speak, as if they were alive. I experienced what appeared to be a direct connection with my far ancestors. This may sound strange, but my father had, as it were, handed me a recording. He and I had been impressed with the cover and it had led us to live in a particular way. But now I had put the recording on the player and the ancient originators expressed their own message.

Obviously this is only an analogy to convey the experience, but in some way the message played out in me from centuries back. From it I learned that my forebears had lived in Italy during a period of great religious and political tension. The pressures to conform had been enormous. Not only were my ancestors told to believe in a particular sort of God, but also to accept leadership from people they had no respect for. If they did not live this belief and submit to it they were killed or rejected by the community they had been born into. In their own words I heard them saying to me something like ‘The worst was they did not kill us, but they cut our vine at the roots. They burnt our land and they killed our children. If you want your sons to live, teach them not to hold their head up, but to keep their eyes on the ground.’

And out of that trauma the message had been passed to me many generations later. It was survival. I was still living it, but perhaps it was time to reappraise.

The Great Women in my Family Line

Weaning

Because of circumstances we may not have been able to satisfy all our babyhood needs – we may have been weaned earlier than we wanted; our need for attention may have been unsatisfied or we felt rejected or unwanted – and these are shown as a baby in our dreams.

Dreams, such as the example below, show how we sense the need of this part of us to be cared for and nourished. If some of these earliest needs are not met in some way, the development of our enthusiasm, our pleasure and ability to be involved and self-giving, may be diminished, giving rise to dreams suggesting the need for nourishment. See: Inner Baby and Child

Hindu and African babies have always enjoyed demand feeding. They are seldom far from their mother’s side, and whenever they begin to fret, their mothers nurse them. It was only after my return to live in a block of flats in London that I realized how infrequently one hears a baby crying in India, how frequently in Britain.

I have already suggested that the early weaning of our babies may he responsible for the slight bias towards pessimism which colours our outlook. Among the Hindus whom I studied; the opposite bias prevailed, they seemed to live in constant expectation of a stroke of good fortune. Each new acquaintance was scanned hopefully as if he might be the agent of their material and spiritual salvation; and in spite of many disappointments, these hopes would rise again. Quoted from Lysergic Acid & Ritalin In the treatment of  Neurosis  

Example: ‘I have my own baby who is lying in a cot in a bedroom looking very weak and pathetic with eyes closed. I know that he or she is getting weaker and weaker through lack of food and care. In fact, the baby seems to be dying. The feelings of guilt are terrible because I know it is my responsibility to do something to make it well. I keep saying to myself I must go and feed that baby – but I don’t. I just keep worrying and feeling guilty.’ J. C.

Example: When I was about four years old I was looked after by an elderly woman while my mother went to work. One day I was in the house and the woman’s’ daughter came in. I stood watching her as she was in the dining room. Then I saw something that has remained in me forever. The daughter had a split up the side of her blouse, and through the split I could see her firm bare breast. Seeing it I felt an enormous hunger that filled my stomach, chest and mouth. I wanted to go to that breast and cuddle and suckle it.

At these deep levels of fantasy and desire, one has to recognise that the first sexual experience and sexual desire – hopefully – is at mothers breast. At a certain stage of development the emotional bond and cuddling is more important.

Nothing Can Hurt or Kill You While Dreaming

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 like an image like on a cinema screen, so that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so, all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind. In the early days of moving pictures, a film was shown of a train coming fast toward them; the viewers all fled in terror, fearing the train would crush them. That is exactly the same response if you are terrified of any thing you dream of. See Masters of Nightmares

You cannot be killed in a dream. All you can experience is the anguish and perhaps fear of dying, but in dreams you cannot die – or drown, or burn or any other threatening thing. We make the mistake of taking our very real values from our outer life into our inner life of dreams.

 Example: I was getting ready to leave and this dark haired guy told me I couldn’t leave, I felt scared and was going to leave anyways, he pulled out a pistol and shot me in the stomach, I fell down, but there was no blood. The thoughts in my head was, “OH NO”. Next thing I remember is that I was still on the floor in the same place and I got up and I remembered being shot but I didn’t seem to have any pain or blood and was moving normally etc. I started looking for a way to leave I was sneaking around trying not to get noticed so that I could get out of there w/o the shooter guy seeing me.

The interesting thing in the example is that even though she could see no hurt came from being shot, yet she was still scared of the guy with the shooter. And it is overcoming such fears that can release you from terror and hurts that haunt us.

Weave Weaving

In general, it may indicate that you are creating a new approach or realisation by weaving together past ideas or realisation and arriving at a new insight, probably by working at it.

For instance, the Norse legend of how the weaving of flax was taught to humans by a goddess is almost certainly a description of a waking dream experienced by the person who invented weaving. Unable to reason because at the time in our evolutioin we had not developed the reaspning mind, many still haven’t, but having already noticed the separate pieces of information, such as the flax growing, then rotting to reveal its fibres, the person’s unconscious formed a new gestalt (something that is made of many parts and yet is somehow more than or different from the combination of its parts), maybe with the help of seeing woven baskets. So, the person, while awake, experienced a vivid ‘dream’ or image thought process, in which the new idea is expressed as a goddess showing point by point how to weave flax.

The important point is that everything we see and deal with, every person, every imagined scene, has such a background of feelings and perhaps memories. It is exactly this background of feelings and information that the dream weaves its story from. It is these associations we gather that are the language of our dreams. To understand them you need to become aware of the usually unconscious feeling responses you have in connection with everything, place, person and animal you fill your dreams with. For you are the weaver.

Your life includes a thousand hopes, countless pleasures, and pains beyond memory. Your life is not even your own, but a vast wonderful weaving of many others into your being. Even the animals and landscapes, the houses you have loved or feared are intricately a part of you.

The culture we live in weaves itself into who and what we become. A child born in today’s world will be influenced by the extraordinary number of chemicals and additives, medicines and drugs, alcohol and nicotine, that are part and parcel of life today. They are all factors that go into the make up of who the person is and becomes. They are the chemicals in the ‘paint’ of personality.

Actresses and Actors

Evil Spirits Devils & Demons

The world ancient people’s lived in was one filled with spirits and demons, gods and goddesses, good and evil forces.

The many intangibles they were surrounded by, the immense uncertainties they faced, were quite usefully called spirits – invisible/mysterious yet potent powers that could act upon one for good or ill.

Spirits were invisible forces that could influence you or kill you. Today we call these same invisible forces bacteria or viruses and have ways to deal with them. But unfortunately we have taken the word spirits too often to mean something evil can hurt us. We can see that in the past we were attacked by illness/ bad spirits, but today’s evil spirits we haven’t yet recognised as our own huge anxieties, illness creating fears, stresses, emotional disasters in love, as the great evils that are attacking us.

But this view should not be seen a superstitious or from ignorance. The words devil and spirit simply meant an unseen and powerful force. Before the invention of the microscope disease was in fact an ‘unseen force’ that could kill you. The devil was a destructive force and spirits could be helpful or destructive. We discovered that people could be helped or even healed by what we now call placebos. The magic rituals and amulets were just that.

Such misunderstandings arose about many such ancient beliefs. For example, not eating pork, the need to have the males circumcised and also the warning not to touch dead bodies. Today we have proof why these were all taboo subjects. The pork is or was very evident, for if pork were not cooked at a great temperature the bascteria and viruses within it caused great illnesses. So such taboos arose out of everyday observation as the other taboos.

Touching the dead or ill we understand now because nurses and doctors wear rubber gloves and masks as protection against the evil of disease.

That’s how serious we are about dealing with disease – fully protected in both directions – giving and receiving.

Many ‘religious’ beliefs were created by living close together in small communities were people could watch the whole lives of several generations, and there where those who were geniuses of there time and took note of things. Such information was passed on to those who wanted to learn and so it was seen what effects arose form certain behaviours. So circumcision arose because it was seen that less illness was experienced or transmitted by circumcised males. This was brought to a head in Africa where men were seen to pass AIDs on to their sexual partners, and it was seen that circumcised males were not doing it so much. So, African authorities set up centres for males to be circumcised to stop the spread of the disease.

Such folk wisdom was seen as so important because of its truth that it became holy.

Whirlpool

This may depict an inner state that is unbalanced in some way, a vortex of feelings or psychic energies that can draw you into difficulties in relating to everyday life. It can also be a force drawing you into your core self and new perceptions.

Example: They have always been a large part of my life…I have had some strange dreams that I have no idea where they came from…since I could remember I had a reoccurring dream every night…used to dream I was falling into a sand whirlpool, face down.  Being in Arizona I never experienced that.  I would wake up at the point where I felt afraid.  One night I decided to try to stop the dream and went through the whirlpool and ended up in a different country and time.  I’m sure you have heard many of things but that one was very strange. Magda.

Magda learned one of the great secrets of our dream life – nothing can hurt you in your dreams so don’t fight or struggle against what the dream is trying to show you. When she stopped struglling she was taken to a completely new experience – drawing you into your core self and new perceptions.

Example: I looked around for a stone to throw into the water for my dog Tramp to swim after but could only find a tiny piece of bark. I threw it in, wondering whether Tramp would follow it. He leapt in. When the bark hit the water, it looked as if the water had been hit by a bomb. The impact area then turned into a whirlpool, Tramp was dragged beneath the surface by the current. The path I was on had become a narrow wall and I stood on it wondering whether to dive in to rescue Tramp, but I couldn’t even see him. Eventually I noticed him about a foot beneath the water trying to swim to the side. I reached in and was just able to catch hold of his hair and drag him out. I put him on my shoulder and carried him along the wall to the churchyard where land was above water.

The dream is about my early attempts to breakthrough to what has been called the psychic world – ones inner or unconscious life. My dog is my instinctive reactiions that are new to me and so are swept away by powerful emotional responses. But as I am learning I recognise that those reactions are jst under the surface and manage to bring them to my awareness.

Pen and Pencil

Desire to communicate; occasionally male genitals because of shape.

Taking pen to paper: It suggests an urge to express your creativity or to communicate an idea for you to remember. It also could be a motivation to communicate something important to others or someone.

Example: I brought my daughter into an attic and it was filled with the most brilliant coloured art supplies, paints, pencils, paper etc. and I said to her, this is all for you.  Then I woke up and couldn’t wait to start clearing out all the clutter. I’ve been working all day!! TK

Example: The famous visionary artist William Blake’s waking life and dreaming life were closely intermingled. How highly he valued dreams is suggested by the titles of some of his works, such as Queen Katherine’s Dream and Oh, How 1 Dreamt of Things Impossible. His most specific acknowledgement of the inspiration he received from his dreams is found in a pencil portrait showing the facial details of The Man Who Taught Blake Painting in His Dreams.