The Discovery of Dreams
In this section are given real practical methods of understanding your dreams. This is not like an intellectual interpretation of your dreams but a real meeting. It is the difference between reading a description of a person and actually meeting them in a deep relationship. These are given for use only if you wish to use them, otherwise there is the dictionary that is also very useful. To start with here are some things to remember about dreaming. They have been gathered from a long involvement with dreams. But you can move directly on to Using the Dictionary.
Dreams are a magical mirror in which your innermost hopes, longings, fears/terrors and genius are made real. They are made real as external environments, people, animals and relationships. It is as if all your deepest feelings, hopes, fear and wonder are projected outward onto a multidimensional screen. It is a world of virtual reality that you feel is real. Unfortunately this wonderful virtual reality world is usually felt as dealing with other people, as externals, like something that can damage us, or something like the Devil that can possess us.
But the greatest truth I have found in exploring dreams – not interpreting them – is that we are alone with ourselves in the world of our dream. If we can acknowledge and admit that our terrors we dream are actually our past hurts that we have not faced presenting themselves for us to heal; that the ghosts and demons that can rampage about our night are embodiments of our fears; that our wonderful visions and insights are an expression of our own infinite potential, then we can walk a pathway to finding what we really are. Audio Introduction to Exploring a Dream
- Dreams are virtual realities that we create in our sleep. Even the wonderful dreams of God and angels are an external virtual reality, and mirror of our own inner immensity and our enormous variety. Unfortunately people either accept them as externally real, or as fantasy. But they are reflections of your potential, that cannot be seen in your daily life that is so dominated by your physical senses and hungers and fears.
- See The Magical Dream Machine. So the images and fears we experience in our dreams are projection upon the vast screen of our mind. They are all projections from you. Running from them is like trying to escape from yourself.
- In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender. Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as dreams.
- While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we sleep our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will takes over when we sleep. See Sleep Paralysis
- This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where – See ESP in Dreams; Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind.
- This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We are partly split in half because we are often opposed to what our Life Will in us wants. So the only way to express what is good for us is in dreams when our conscious will is largely passive.
- Life Will created your body and pre-existed you as a person you know today. It was working in you prior to your ability to speak or know in the way you do now. But of course it has fantastic wisdom and skills, as can be seen in animals.
- Life, if you look around you at Life’s creature, they can take any form. So Life itself is without form. In fact the recent advances in quantum physics suggest that what gives us existence is beyond space and time – beyond understanding.
- So dreams do not come from the human unconscious, but from the formless origins of Life – our Core Self. To express in a way that is understandable to us as a person with limited understanding, dreams use all the common imagery and ideas. So people who say that dreams are a mish mash of common everyday events are mistaken. See LifeStream; Levels of Awareness in Sleeping and Waking; .
- Our core self can be explained by realising that we are all dependent on the universe. We often feel that the universe is way beyond our understanding, but a few simple facts may help. The first is that the universe as we know it began with what had been called the Big Bang. But before that there was a situation prior to the creation of time and space. That situation is very much like the experience of Edgar Cayce who had an awareness reaching beyond time and space. See God and the Big Bang are the Same Thing
- Irish physicist John Stewart Bell put forward a quantum theorem that has revolutionised the way reality is considered. In brief, the theorem states that when two sub-microscopic particles are split and moved to a distance from each other, the action on, or of, particle ‘A’, is instantaneously reproduced with particle ‘B’. This interaction does not rely on any known link or communication and is considered to stand above normal physical laws of nature, as it is faster than light. Prior to such findings it was thought nothing could transcend the speed of light. Nick Herbert, in an interview published in High Frontiers writes: ‘THERE ARE LOTS OF THINGS that are being kept from the public as far as the subjects of physics and consciousness are concerned. Bell’s Theorem was proved in 1964, and it is still not taught in physics classes, and you don’t hear it on your science news programs. A theorem is a proof, and no one has found a flaw in this theorem. It’s such a simple proof that a high school kid can understand it. So physicists can understand it. They have various ways of trying to ignore it, but it can’t be refuted because it’s so simple.’
Our Core self is that amazing part of us existing beyond time and space, and was within us from the start of our universe.
- In the world of dreams our most intimate fears and longings are given an exterior life of their own in the form of the people, objects and places of our dream. Therefore our sexual drive may be shown as a person and how we relate to them; or given shape and colour as an object; or given mood as a scene. Our feeling of ambition might thus be portrayed as a business person in our dream – our changing emotions as the sea or a river; while the present relationship we have with our ambition or emotions is expressed in the events or plot of the dream.
- 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.
- In dreams, what ever moves away from you in our dreams is going out of your awareness or even life; and whatever moves toward us is emerging into consciousness. Whatever it is that is coming toward us is giving us something whether it is energy, insight, or a frightening dream that is trying to shock us to wake up and clear out the inner mess we are in. The fact we give it a frightening image is because we are brought up to be scared of ourselves and to not trust Life/Core. If you know the tenets of the AA, you will see that is what they are about – to trust Life.
- Most people are frightened of life. I see this in so many dreams sent to me. They do not trust themselves to the powerful action of Life flowing through them. See Life’s Little Secrets.
- We have been brain washed to believe that our existence depends upon nothing but accidental events, the survival of the fittest, the chemical and biological mechanical actions. Yet every time I have gone deeply into my ‘unconscious’ and yet maintained awareness, I have found a wonderful power of Life there.
- So if your dreams frighten you, I want to say you are frightened of something wonderful that could have grown you and enlarged your experience of yourself. The thing that was full of fear was your own fear put into an image, and yet was a wonderful gift that you avoided receiving.
- I too was full of fears and often woke up screaming. Then I learned to trust Life. It is like learning to swim. So please go back into your dream and let the fearful thing be fully experienced instead of waking up in fear. Then it will unveil itself as a thing of light and love.