Examples of Transforming Dreams

Example: I was in awful pain for years, and eventually recognised the cause of it. I had left my wife and children and married again, and was in agony. That is until I saw the cause – the culture and people I grew up with were all sure and believed that I was a failure as a father and husband. That I was not following the rules of the crowd and so was of no account as a person. Those habits of beliefs were eating away at me. So much so I dreamt I was walking along the roof of a university building carrying a bag with a dissected body in it and the head of the body in my other hand. In exploring the dream I realise that the body was me. I had cut my self in pieces trying to find a way out of my pain. But then as I explored further I saw the causes of what I had done – the habits that we all take as normal; the pain in relationships; the fear of death and the agony of losing someone – and so on and on and on. They are all there and can be shifted.

The exploration of the dream led to me trying to understand the head in my dream. When I looked at the head, Wendy had been saying I was a masochistic. I just felt such labels didn’t help. Love was like breathing. I couldn’t, didn’t want to, stop loving either my children or Hyone. As long as I could, I would suffer the pain the conflict produced.

I had a strong fantasy of the head coming alive it was me and what I had done to myself, torn my body and head apart trying to find a solution. Then I saw flesh on its cheeks. Then it was like a native mask made of various things, and feathers. The feathers predominated in the fantasy. The mask kept breaking up, leaving only a few feathers, as if it or I were all nothing. I remember saying – “There is not even a mask, it’s just a few feathers!”

With enormous certainty I realised that there was no cure for my sickness and I had struggled in vain. It was a tremendous blow – and I gave up. I mean I gave up hope, everything, and simple lay there.

Then I had a vision of one feather tied to a twig by piece of wool, blowing in the wind – a feather blowing in the wind. This was very stable and persistent in the fantasy. Everything resolved back to the feather blowing in the wind. It seemed like a Red Indian symbol, perhaps tied to the suspended body of the dead, but I could not understand.

Then it came to me that I had to listen in deep stillness – not think, not seek to understand, not struggle, just listen. My whole being entered into silence, gently listening as one might listen to the rain falling on a lake. Then suddenly it was known – the feather blowing in the wind – the sound of one hand clapping – the essence of human existence. Open against the sky – emptiness – enormity. I was healed.

It was an experience of enlightenment, and through I saw that me, my personality, had been built by a society with so many rules, taboos, regulations, and I had been released and was a new being. The old me had fallen away, the new me was free. See Martial Art of the Mind

Example 1: I was walking up the several flights of stairs to get to the attic room. I was holding a small dog in my arms – one of those rather flat nosed toy dogs.

When I arrived at the attic I put the dog down. But now the attic was empty and dark. I could feel my hair stand on end and my skin ‘crawling’. Actually I feel it all again as I write this. The feeling arose because there was an unformed dark shape creeping around at the far end of the room. The dog was really afraid and came into my arms.

Then the dark creature leapt at me, transforming into a massive mouth with huge fangs and awful demonic face. Immediately I leapt at it in the same way and smashed against its face with my own huge fangs. This utterly disarmed it because it had felt, in its primitive way, to terrify me. It surprised me too that I could so immediately transform into a monster when necessary.

Then I approached the dark form, back in its original condition, trying to find out what it was and why I had met it in that way. Gradually I experienced its situation. It had originally been a human being, but had gradually lost its humanness and become this slinking darkness. I was slowly able to help it realise that it could once more take the path to become human if it wanted to. Then it asked me how that could be done. I told it that first of all it had to come out of this dark and empty place to mix with people. The human environment created a different surrounding and influence that would penetrate it and help it to change. It also asked me how I knew about its condition and how I could transform into its own monstrous form. I told it I had once experienced that condition, and that’s how I knew it was possible to come out of it.

 

Example 2: Had a very unusual dream last night. I was in an outdoor environment. It seemed a bit dark, or maybe morbid is the right word. I was with other people but none of them stood out to remain in memory. There was a definite awareness though of being near to a place that was haunted, and that a man was in trouble in the haunted place.

I decided to go and see if I could sort out the problem. I walked down a slope to where the centre of the haunting existed. It was an open space with an old    double-decker    bus in it. The only person on the bus was a middle-aged man who was sitting on the top deck leaning out of a window on the right hand side of the bus. I stood beneath him and looked up. He was staring in a glazed way and didn’t see me. I could see and feel that he was being hit by fantasies or hallucinations by whatever was the source of the haunting. This invasion of his mind was grabbing his attention so fully that he wasn’t aware of his surrounding or of me. I was sure that if he went any deeper into this mind stuff he wouldn’t be able to pull out. I waved my hand in his line of vision and banged my hand on the bus to make a noise and get his attention. At first it didn’t seem as if I would bring him out of it, but after a while he looked at me.

I shouted at him to pull out. I said that he had a wife and some more years of his life to live, so why lose himself into this entrancement. This didn’t seem to grab him so I shouted again and said that he would eventually slip into this empty mind world anyway – at death – so why not live with his wife the remaining years of his life. I was sure that if he lost awareness he would let himself starve.

I was aware that what he desired was to slip away into the void, into the awareness of the one life in which he lost any awareness of self. But I banged and shouted and he became more ‘present’. I then felt I had to confront whatever was the source of the powerful ‘haunting’ that was pulling him into the inner mind. I turned away from the man and saw just to my right a short distance from the bus an animal that was the ‘haunter’. It was a mammal of no particular type – a bit like a mixture of dog, rat and guinea pig. It seemed very ordinary and tame, and stood looking at me. I walked toward it and stretched out my hand. It was a tan colour with short fur and gave a feeling of being okay to approach, so I touched it to stroke. This was okay and I was thinking there was no problem when the creature leapt at my throat in a flash of movement and ripped my throat out.

This sounds disturbing but I simply observed this and thought to myself that stroking and trying to be friendly was no way of dealing with this thing. It was as if I was in command of the imagery in that I simply formed another body. The only way that felt as if I might deal with the creature was to have the meditative state of holding on to the nothingness that was my centre, and not feeling panic at it’s attacks. In fact apart from the gory imagery, there was nothing to be frightened of, as the creature was only attacking my dream image of myself. As I wasn’t identified with this, it couldn’t hurt me. That was the end of the dream.

Example 3: On going indoors the man, now as a police inspector, led me down to the basement, and pointing to the corner of the room (that I had used as a darkroom) asked me how, “That got there?”

I forget what it was, but felt unjustly accused. The inspector got two toughs to hold me and was going to drill my teeth out with a hand drill, and beat me. I was terrified and fought back, kicking one in the testicles, but could not break away.

Then I feigned madness and regression to childhood to avoid further torture. Seeing this, one of them led me away to a house to kill me. I set upon him and knocked him out, took his gun, thought of killing him, but did not.

Being free, I wondered what to do. Where to go to get away. Go back with the gun, or what? Suddenly I thought I had better go back and hand myself over again. In a flash, as soon as this was decided, I saw through the whole set-up. The thugs felt that they were part of a huge crime organisation, worldwide in scope. Like the war underground resistance, no section that knew other than their leader. But in fact their leader had no higher authority than himself. So I went back, gave them the gun. They rushed me but I made no effort to struggle. This shocked them far more deeply than any attempt to escape. I then explained that I was no longer afraid, because I saw how petty and futile they were. This broke their power and the dream finished.

The dreamer had begun to realise that the only power the ‘enemy’ had over him was fear. Without fear there was nothing that could hurt him, and so their plan to kill him was of no use. For in our mental world our images are not like real life, because our mind or dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen, so that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so, all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind. 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 think of or dream of.