Posts Tagged ‘Dream Encyclopedia’

Interpretation Of Dreams – The Influence Of

Although mind and body may be a total unity, and the separation in language merely a convenience, despite its unity our being has a number of interacting systems within the unity. The action of the heart on the other systems is obvious, and the influence of emotions on the organs is also becoming obvious. What is not so well established is the importance of the feedback occurring when we gain insight into our own functioning through understanding a dream. Although our being is already a self regulating system, the ability to turn consciousness inwards to make clear aspects of unconscious function, appears to increase the efficiency of self regulation. This is shown in the first example in lizards and snakes where David’s long standing neck pain goes through insight into its cause. In this way we might be seen as a conscious organism which not only reprograms mental patterns or habits, but to some extent can renovate or change body efficiency as well. See: analysis of dreams; Introduction; processing dreams; interpreting dreams – Once you understand a dream its images can be seen as a clear expression of personal information. For instance a woman dreamt she was standing alone on a plateau and she could see two worlds hanging in the sky. In talking about the dream she said her husband had died and she had met another man. This new man was very different to herself and her past husband. The world he lived in was new to her and she was cautious. This helped her to see she had the choice between two worlds, and her dream was simply illustrating her situation – she was alone, on a plateau facing choices.

From this point of view dreams are not strange or coded. They are not trying to hide information, but express it in much the same way we use imagery in our everyday speech. In the above example ‘worlds’ is the imagery used. But it might also be ‘that was a close shave’ – ‘barking up the wrong tree’ – ‘got the sack’ – etc.

Dreams also use other things that we take for granted as everyday parts of our mental life. Word play and puns for example, and the drama we understand so easily in films and plays, but say we are mystified by in our dreams. Such dream statements as ‘I was in a dark and lonely house’ – ‘The dark water moved slowly between the stones’ – ‘It was a beautiful bright sunny day and I was in a children’s playground’ are immediately understandable as expressions of mood.

What may confuse us in looking at dreams, especially our own, is these factors are used all at once, and all put into imagery. Even so, if we look at them as if they were all a sort of mime, where speech may occur, but the main message is expressed by dramatic mood, substitution of an image for words, word play and puns in image form, then we can begin to grasp what the dream is communicating.

A very simplified way of understanding your dreams is to disregard the imagery. Look at what feelings are involved and see if you can recognise the glimmers of such feelings in everyday life. If you can, then go back to the dream. Consider what the drama portrays, and see what comment it makes on the everyday events the feelings are connected with. See: analysis of dreams; language and dreams; interpretation of dreams – influence of; processing dreams.

Interpretation Of Dreams – Some Factors That Are Involved

The Dream Mystery Explored

 The method of interpretation dealt with in the last chapter is basic to all dream analysis as currently known. It can be summed up as remembering the dream; recording of dream; listing of symbols; and association of ideas. It was also seen that symbols must be interpreted in their right context, or can even be understood because of that context; which is rather like arriving at the meaning of an unknown word because of the way it is used in a sentence. Several other things were mentioned or hinted at while the dreams were being analysed. Some of these are so important or helpful, that they will now be further explained.

Main Phases Of The Dream

If we look at the structure of the last dream analysed, we see that it can be split into four main phases. These are (1) episode with the dwarf, (2) being saved by the couple and directed to London, (3) wandering, (4) the search for refreshment. In any long and difficult dream, especially where little or no associations or information have been forthcoming, it is worth breaking the dream into its phases. When this has been done, instead of associating ideas with the symbols, see whether the phases have any meaning. In the case of the last dream, we would have something like this:

(1) Episode with Dwarf I am captured and stripped. Do I feel imprisoned or restrained by anything? What has frightened me or uncovered phases of my life I wasn’t aware of or had kept covered or hidden before?

(2) Being saved by the couple and directed to London If I can find any sense of being imprisoned or captured, how did I deal with it? How did I ‘save’ myself from it? Having dealt with my restraint, what did the ideas or emotions I had used indicate I should do?

(3) Wandering Presumably, I could not accept this direction, and was left in a quandary, fearful of a possible blackness – depression. Is there any indication of this? Has there been a wandering or dithering over some decision?

(4) Search for Refreshment This suggests a need for some refreshing experience. A thirst for something – a hunger – but a doubt about the cost in effort. Has there been a desire for a ‘refreshing’ change – a hunger for something to satisfy my feelings? Is there a doubt about what we will have to sacrifice or give up in exchange?

It can be seen that dealing with the dream in this way is an enormous help in asking oneself the right questions. As previously suggested, when dealing with our own dreams, we have to be both patient and analyst. But not all dreams are as easily broken into the different parts. Some dreams cannot be segmented in this way, while others have far less phases. The next dream is an example of the latter.

‘I had gone to Sheila’s and Uncle Frank’s house at Spearing Road. They had promised I could have a room there, but I found all the rooms occupied and people were sleeping on the floor instead of in beds. Seeing there was no room I turned away and the next thing I knew I was in a train; it had rather luxurious blue leather seats but again was almost full. It contained, as far as I could see, all ladies, and I explained to them that I had been promised sleeping accommodation. Even while I was explaining this and expecting to occupy a length of three seats, I could see they had as much right there as I, and I took the single seat offered still protesting that we were promised sleeping room.

This dream can only be broken into two, or at the most, three parts. That is, the house, the train and possibly, accepting the seat. If this is set out as was the previous dream, we have a clearer idea what the dream is about.

The House – Searching for living space in a childhood setting. Found ‘no room’ – What have I been looking for in childhood attitudes? Was the ‘promise’ of childhood unfulfilled?

The Train – Exorbitant expectations, annoyance at the fact that these high expectations cannot be fulfilled. This in a setting of getting somewhere-train. Have my expectations in getting somewhere not been as great as hoped for?

The Single Seat – Grudging acceptance of practical offer. Can I see anything of this in real life?

The whole idea of using this method is to take the general events, implications and settings of a dream, and use these as a reference for asking oneself questions.

THE DREAM SEQUENCE

One of the things that is often overlooked in dreams is what we might call the ‘because factor’. This factor is fairly noticeable when once pointed out, but difficult to see until much dream interpretation has been done. The ‘because factor’ also applies in our everyday life, and can be seen when we say, ‘I was waiting for a bus and began to talk to a stranger who was also waiting. Our conversation became so interesting, that after a few minutes we went and sat in a restaurant, letting the bus go, because we had so much in common. Before he went he gave me his card because he wanted me to contact him again. I could see from what we had spoken about, that he was thinking of offering me a job in his firm. But I never followed it up because I didn’t think I could fill the post.’

If we look into this, we see that important events occur, directions followed, decisions taken, all because. The word ‘because’ in fact hides all our background, our feelings, our predisposing urges and thoughts. The word ‘disposition’ can in fact be used to sum up what lurks behind the because factor. A little thought will show that history is made up of this ‘disposition’, acting through the because factor.

I hope this doesn’t sound mysterious or complicated. This is such an important thing to understand. Our whole life, the events and outcome of it, rest upon it. Our life is what it is because of what we are – our disposition. We take an offer or reject it because of this. We succeed or fail in life because of the same factor – ourselves. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars/But in ourselves, that we be underlings.’ When understood, we can see that every move we make in life is conditioned by subtle feelings of fear or pleasure, pride or love. At every decision we are directed by intangible hopes, despairs, conflicts and ideals. So, dreams also, arise out of the because factor.

Two dreams illustrate this. ‘I was waiting for a visitor. Suddenly the man I had been expecting came round to the back window and peeped in. I didn’t see him clearly, but took an immediate aversion to him and refused to let him in.’

Here we see that something ‘waited’ for by the dreamer, when it actually arrives, is not admitted due to feelings of aversion. It is not admitted because of aversion.

A clearer example is this. ‘I was surrounded by a thick wall of briars, beyond which were wild animals. I was trapped and couldn’t get out. I wondered what to do. Suddenly I noticed a hole in the ground. I looked in and saw it was a tunnel. I was just about to explore it as a way of escape, when I saw a dirty animal-like man looking up at me. I drew back from the tunnel in disgust and woke up.

Here we see that the dreamer is trapped by his own tangle of problems, and destructive instinctive urges. A possible way out is shown in the tunnel of unconscious exploration (i.e. discovering one’s hidden contents), but the dreamer, on looking within, sees an undeveloped and repulsive part of himself which disgusts him. It is because of this disgust that he cannot get out through the tunnel. The whole dream revolves around that point. It is also because of this inability to explore further due to disgust, that the dream ends. The dream is showing that it is the feelings of disgust that are keeping him trapped in his unpromising situation. In real life, he is stuck in the middle of painful experiences because of his own feelings of disgust about a part of his nature. Thus, the because factor in dreams is very important, and is the central point in numerous dreams.

DREAM SERIES

If we fail to understand an individual dream, light can often be thrown upon its meaning by looking at the dreams that precede and follow it. In this way one sees that the symbols are used in a gradually evolving manner. A dream series of evolving symbols is also one of the most striking proofs that dreams are not mere nonsense. The dreams that follow were all dreamt within about a month.

(1) ‘Visit to M. Very nice house, high on the cliffs overlooking the sea. M. and others their usual welcoming selves. Met other pleasant friendly people, but we had to go down the hill to meet them and then some of them pointed out another way up the hill to another beautiful view, and came along to show us the way, which M. actually knew, but didn’t want to spoil their pleasure in showing me. A few of those in M.’s house were not quite as nice as I had believed from M.’s description, but I liked them anyway.

Here we start off with a house overlooking the sea – a state of looking over one’s hidden contents, one’s unconscious. Or we might – say the dreamer is ‘overlooking’ certain things about herself. These things she has overlooked begin to become known in the people, -parts of herself, that were not quite as nice as she had believed.

(2) ‘Met uncle George. Then he and I and a few relatives and friends went on to a small boat and began a journey. I didn’t know where we were going but others did, and it was such a new and pleasant experience for me that I didn’t bother to ask. As it grew dusk a strange but pleasant and friendly woman, who was obviously familiar with the boat, came and closed the curtains and put the light on, so that we could be comfortable during the night.’

Just previous to dream number one, the dreamer had begun, with the help of a friend who knew a little about interpretation, to analyse her own dreams. So we see that from ‘overlooking’ the sea she has quickly gone on a sea voyage. The dream sums up her situation wonderfully, ‘I didn’t know where we were going, but – others did.’ She didn’t at the time realise where the interpretations and dreams would lead her. Also, the sea is now much closer, and night is coming. That is, darkness and the unconscious are already making themselves felt, for the night sea journey is a classical dream of the exploration of one’s unconscious contents, as with Jonah and the whale.

(3) ‘Found myself in a place where I could go swimming every morning.’

Already she is beginning to enter the water, or her inner life.

(4) ‘Went into a church with someone who pointed out that I was facing the wrong way. I turned round and saw a bigger and lighter altar at the other end.’

Having begun to contact her inner life via swimming, immersing in it, she sees that her attitude to religion or her own innermost feelings had been wrong. This she corrects.

(5) ‘I was involved in a revolution. Everything around was collapsing, but I don’t remember being frightened.’

All her old ideas are being either revolutionised, or are collapsing.

(6) ‘I found myself being led in a particular direction by friendly pleasant people, who yet knew that on arrival I was to be executed. I had an immature woman of about twenty-five with me, and the same fate awaited her. I took her hand and tried to convey love and courage and to protect her from all her fears by behaving in a light-hearted manner.

As her old ideas collapse, her old self is to die. Also the immature twenty-five year-old part that still lives on in her is to die.

(7) ‘I found myself entering a tunnel where I encountered a rather frightening little animal, but we passed each other as he went out and I went in. Then I met a larger animal with the same results. Later I met a third, a real monster, rather like a 60ft caterpillar with a lion’s head and fore feet. I did not like the encounter as I continued to walk on the left side of the tunnel, into ever deepening darkness, and he passed me on the way out. Somehow I felt that Doctor (a friend and adviser) would not have been in the least afraid, and I borrowed his courage, and woke about half-way along this monster.’

Having been ready to die to her old way of life, she can begin the descent into her unconscious contents in earnest. The two frightening animals are two fears that come up and out. The third one is too big a fear to completely pass by at this time; and its shape shows its possible sexual nature.

Here, in just seven dreams, with very inadequate comments, can be seen how the symbols evolve as the dreamer discovers her real inner nature. The ‘overlooked’ sea becomes travelled upon. The coming darkness on the boat develops into the ‘deepening darkness’ of the tunnel; while each dream shows a development on the inward journey the dreamer was undertaking. Such a series need not be about the inward journey, however, but about commercial undertakings, health, ambitions, or even answers to intellectual queries.

These seven dreams were taken from about twice that many, dreamed during the period. The selection was based on how we can understand past dreams by seeing them in context with others occurring. The important point being that one might dream of looking at the sea for years, but never enter it. Then, with a change of ‘disposition’, a series of swimming and diving dreams take place. In interpreting our dreams in this way, we have to watch for similar symbols in changed conditions. The sea and darkness are obvious in the series. Also the crowd of people leading her, representative of her own desires to understand herself. The interpretation is arrived at by analysing the situations the dreamer finds herself in, and how the symbols change. Thus a seed seen in one dream, and a plant just growing in another, suggest growth and development. A person scorned in one dream, and loved in another, would be a change of attitude and relationship.

These three methods, the Main Phase – the Because Factor, and the Series method, all help us to see the underlying meaning of the dream through looking at the dream as a whole. Particular symbols are not worked on in the same way as in the associated ideas method. It is the relationships the dream suggests that arouse questions. In turn, these questions themselves clarify the dream for us, and help us analyse our experience to see if the dream explains or explores it. As we advance in ability to deal with our dreams, these various methods are called upon and used as required.

 

Healing And Therapeutic Action Of Dreams

There is a long tradition of using dreams as a base for both physical and psychological healing. One of the earliest recorded incidents of such healing is when Pharaoh’s ‘spirit was troubled; and he sent for all the magicians of Egypt and all its wise men; and Pharaoh told them his dream, but there was none who could interpret it.’ Then Joseph revealed the meaning of the dream and so the healing of Pharaoh’s troubled mind took place Genesis 41. The Greek Temples of Asclepius were devoted to using dreams as a base for healing of body and mind. See: Greece (ancient) dream beliefs. The Iroquois Amerindians used a social form of dream therapy also. See: Iroquoian dream cult. The dream process was used much more widely throughout history in such practices as Pentecostal Christianity; Shaktipat Yoga in India, and Anton Mesmer’s groups. See: compensation theory; movements during sleep; yoga and dreams.

Sigmund Freud pioneered the modern approach to the use of dreams in therapy, but many different approaches have developed since his work. Examples of the therapeutic action of gaining insight into dreams are to be found in the entries on abreaction; recurring dreams; reptiles. The entry on processing dreams gives information about personally using a dream to gain insight and healing. See also: the dream as meeting place.

A feature which people who use their dreams as a therapeutic tool mention again and again, is how dreams empower them. Many of us have an unconscious feeling that any important healing work regarding our body and mind can only be undertaken and directed by an expert. The expert might be a doctor, a psychiatrist or psychotherapist, or even an osteopath. Witnessing the result of their own dream process, even if helped by an expert, people feel in touch with a wonderful internal process which is working actively for their own good. One woman, who had worked on her dream with the help of a non expert friend , said, ‘It gave me great confidence in my own internal process. I realised there was something powerful in myself working for my own good. It was a feeling of co-operating with life.’ One is frequently amazed by one’s own resources of wisdom, penetrating insight, and sense of connection with life, as met in dream work. This is how dreams play a part in helping one toward wholeness and balance. The growing awareness of one’s central view of things, which is so wide, piercing, and often humorous, brings developing self respect as the saga of one’s dreams unfold.

We might think of healing dreams being about or relating to the cure of physical problems or of the emotional and psychological difficulties we face in our everyday life. In fact those issues that are dealt with, especially in the early part of our involvement in and exploration of our dreams. But we would miss one of the immense possibilities of personal wholeness if we left it at that.

Carl Jung said that any prolonged relationship with one’s dreams shows that they form what he called a meander. This is defined as meaning a winding or circular path. But Jung referred to it in connection with the wonderful illustrations found in the hand written Bibles of the past. Some of the capital letters were formed by what appeared to be a doodle, but one that formed an elegant and ornate letter.

What Jung was pointing out was that the course of our dreams seems to wander here and there, but overall it begins to form a picture that covers an immense landscape. This is perhaps something like having a jigsaw puzzle that we gradually build into a comprehensive scene. But using this as an analogy of our dreams, we would only be given one piece of the jigsaw at a time. So gradually, one piece at a time, we would build the picture. Only slowly would we see the connections between the chunks of imagery that we begin to build.

At first our dreams usually deal with the housework of the present. The tangles and pains of childhood and infancy, piece by piece, emerge into awareness to be known and integrated. Maybe the questions facing us in our important relationships, creativity and work, become the focus for many of our dreams. But if we persevere, if we gradually undo the powerful walls of preconception we may have built about who we are; if we remove the rigid belief systems that perhaps we use as a form of security; if we begin to recognise that as an individual we are an integral part of life on this earth and in the universe, then the puzzle of self we are building into a picture widens magnificently.

Our identity, our personality, that we felt to be so separate, independent and perhaps isolated, now begins to be seen as having links, flowing connections, of living energy with the far past, and with everything existing around us.

This recognition of our life as being part of the continuum that is the universe itself, and the flow of life on earth, brings about the most wonderful aspect of healing that we could find. We recognise in it the pearl of great price, the holy grail that human beings have sought throughout the centuries. And it is a goal that is within our reach. That healing is not denied us. All it takes his perseverance, courage, and love.

Perhaps we have to learn those on the way, but they are not beyond us.

Example: I was in a Quaker meeting. A man, Desmond, came in and sat on my right, a few chairs away. Almost immediately he stood up and came to me, obviously moved by spirit. He placed his right hand on my face, just in front of my right ear. As he did so I realised he was giving me healing for an ear condition I had not previously been aware of. He told me I had been eating too much. He also said the condition had arisen principally from an infected tooth.

The dreamer had in fact got a tooth condition and so the dream was very relevant.

There may be no hint of this, however, if a person simply records their dreams without attempting to find a deeply felt contact with their contents. It is in the searching for associated feelings and ideas, that the work of integrating the many strands of one’s life begins. Gradually one weaves, through a co-operative action with the dream process, a greater unification of the dark and the light, the painful and transcendent in one’s nature. The result is an extraordinary process of education. See: Second example in creativity and problem solving in dreams; yoga and dreams; Summing Up

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History Of Dreaming

Based on the beliefs of early cultures such as the Australian Aborigines and the Kalahari Bushmen, we can be certain dreams were an important part of the life of early human beings. The earliest know record of dreams is recorded in the epic poem Gilgamesh, which is 4000 years old. The text includes an account of a series of dreams.

From the earliest ages in mankind’s shrouded history, dreams have been a source of wonder and speculation, inspiration and fear. This chapter deals with some of the explanations men have given for why and how one dreams. It must be understood, however, that these various accounts are put here, not because they are necessarily correct accounts of dreaming, but simply to give a ‘background’ of information on the dream.

The most ancient peoples, whether separated by seas, geographical barriers, or culture, usually had in common an enormous respect for dreams. Many early societies had a very dualistic philosophy regarding life. That is, they believed that their life was divided into two distinct aspects. One aspect was their everyday physical world, the world of the body. The other was the world of sleep, dreams, visions and death. In sleep, early man believed that one’s soul, or consciousness left one’s body, and travelled the sleep world, the world of dreams. This dream world was very real to them, so real in fact that many felt that the dream world was more real than the physical world. For instance, if a man dreamt that his wife had slept with another man, it was not simply shrugged off as ‘only a dream’ but was taken very seriously. See Inner World

J. A. Hadfield, in his book Dreams and Nightmares humorously says the ‘modern instance is that of a young wife who dreamt that her husband was making love to a blonde and was furious. Being reminded that it was only a dream, she replied, “Yes! But if he does that sort of thing in my dream, what will he do in his own?”‘

In the dream world of early man, it was stated that one’s soul could travel to distant places in the real world, could experience or know one’s innermost feelings, could contact and converse with the dead, or meet the gods and spirits, or see God. We cannot simply dismiss these beliefs as valueless, because modern research and investigation is now concerning itself with a serious inquiry into all these possibilities.

In these early societies, where such beliefs were a part of life itself, youths of both sexes were helped to establish their maturity by initiations which often used or sought dreams. At such times, the young girl or boy would go to some lonely spot where they would fast and await a sign, by dream or vision (i.e. waking dream) that gave them a clue to their direction in life. To give an actual case, written down by Father Lalemant, a Jesuit:

At the age of about sixteen, a youth went alone to a place where he fasted for sixteen days. At the end of this time he suddenly heard a voice in the sky saying, ‘Take care of this man, and let him end his fast.’ Then he saw an old man of great beauty come down from the sky. The old man came to him, looking at him kindly, and said, ‘Have courage, I will take care of thy life. It is a fortunate thing for thee to have taken me for thy master. None of the demons who haunt these countries will have any power to harm thee. One day thou wilt see thine hair as white as mine. Thou wilt have four children, the first two and last will be males, and the third will be a girl, after that thy wife will hold the relation of a sister to thee.’ As he finished speaking the old man offered him a raw piece of human flesh to eat. When the boy turned his head away in horror, the old man then offered him a piece of bear’s fat, saying, ‘Eat this then.’ After eating it, the old man disappeared, but came again at crucial periods in the person’s life. At manhood he did have four children, as described. After the fourth, ‘a certain infirmity compelled him to continence. He also lived to an old age, thus having white hair, and as the eating of bear fat symbolised, became a gifted hunter with a second sight for finding game.

The man himself felt that had he eaten the human flesh in the vision, he would have been a warrior instead.

So we see that such initiatory dreams fulfilled many functions. Not only did they affirm the dreamer of a ‘spirit’ protector, giving him confidence to leave the physical protection of his mother and father, but also gave his most fitting employment as hunter, and the main events of his life. With such knowledge, he could approach life more confidently.

An even more complete idea of how early societies related to their dreams is given by M. L. von Franz in her article The Process of Individuation in the book Man and His Symbols, by Carl G. Jung. Writing about the ‘self’ as the inner centre to all our experience, she says:

‘This inner centre is realised in exceptionally pure unspoiled form by the Naskapi Indians, who still exist in the forests of the Labrador peninsula. These simple people are hunters who live in isolated family groups, so far from one another that they have not been able to evolve tribal customs or collective religious beliefs and ceremonies. In his lifelong solitude the Naskapi hunter has to rely on his own inner voices and unconscious revelations; he has no religious teachers who tell him what he should believe, no rituals, festivals or customs to help him along. In his basic view of life, the soul of man is simply an ‘Inner companion’, whom he calls ‘My friend’ or ‘Mista peo’, meaning ‘Great Man’. Mista peo dwells in the heart and is immortal; in the moment of death, or just before, he leaves the individual, and later reincarnates himself in another being.

‘Those Naskapi who pay attention to their dreams and who try to find their meaning and test their truth can enter into a greater connection with the Great Man. He favours such people and sends them more and better dreams. Thus the major obligation of an individual Naskapi is to follow the instructions given by his dreams, and then to give permanent form to their contents in art. Lies and dishonesty drive the Great Man away from one’s inner realm, whereas generosity and love of one’s neighbours and of animals attract him and give him life. Dreams give the Naskapi complete ability to find his way in life, not only in the inner world but also in the outer world of nature. They help him to foretell the weather and give him invaluable guidance in his hunting, upon which his life depends…. Just as the Naskapi have noticed that a person who is receptive to the Great Man gets better and more helpful dreams, we could add that the inborn Great Man becomes more real within the receptive person than in those who neglect him. Such a person also becomes a more complete human being.”

Although possibly not as unspoilt as the Naskapi beliefs, those of the Seneca Indians are worthy of note. The Jesuits began preaching to these Indians in 1668. Father Fremin wrote much about their ideas, although in a slightly critical vein, saying, ‘The Iroquois have, properly speaking, only a single Divinity – the dream. … The Tsonnontonens (Seneca) are more attached to this superstition than to any other.’

Father Ragueneau, in 1649, described the beliefs behind their so called superstition as follows. ‘In addition to the desires which we generally have that are free, or at least voluntary in us, and which arise from a previous knowledge of some goodness that we imagine to exist in the thing desired, the Hurons believe that our souls have other desires, which are, as it were, inborn and concealed. These, they say, come from the depths of the soul, not through any knowledge.

‘Now they believe that our soul makes these desires known by means of dreams, which are its language. Accordingly, when these desires are accomplished, it is satisfied; but, on the contrary, if it be not granted what it desires, it becomes angry … often it revolts against the body, causing various diseases, and even death….’

The Indian tribes mentioned often had a sort of social psychiatry in which dreamers were allowed to live out their hidden (unconscious) desires that were threatening health and well being. Thus a dreamer would be allowed sexual freedoms with others; unlawful actions; objects desired; or feasts, etc.; although these peoples as a society were usually modest and shy, and chastity and marital fidelity were public ideals.

Thus we see in the beliefs of the ‘backward’ Indians, ideas that took our civilised societies three hundred years longer to arrive at. Admittedly, our psychiatrist’s couch and enormous mental institutions take the place of the more public ‘acting out’ of hidden desires. Nevertheless, mentally or emotionally induced illnesses were recognised and treated. So we see that early man recognised conscious and unconscious parts of self. They realised that dreams expressed these ‘hidden’ desires, often in a symbolic form, enabling us to deal with them before they produced sickness.

Turning to more recent sources of dream beliefs, it is distressing to see how less, instead of more, understanding is expressed. Most of the ancient world, including the Far East, believed that dreams were sent by gods or spirits, shrines for incubating dreams also existed (and still do) in the Far East. Japanese emperors, searching for solutions to political problems, incubated their dreams at a Shinto temple at Usa on the southern island of Kyushu. The emperor’s palace also contained a ‘dream-hall’, with an incubation bed made of polished Stone.

But they do not seem to have worked out such a clear conception as the North American Indians.   Aristotle, for instance, writes on the idea that dreams arise from movements in the body, saying, ‘The conclusion to be drawn from all these facts is that the dream is a sort of image and that it is produced during sleep, for the appearances manifest themselves when our senses are free. But not every image that manifests itself in sleep is a dream. For, sometimes, certain persons perceive in a certain manner in their sleep both sounds and light, both savours and contacts, but faintly and as if from afar. In fact, people who have seen in their sleep what was, according to them, the light of a lamp, realised immediately after waking that it was the light of a lamp; and people who have heard cocks crowing, or dogs barking, have recognised them clearly on waking. … But the images that come from the movement of sensible impressions, when one is sound asleep, that is a dream.’

In the Aesculapius dream temples, the dreams were said to be invoked by the god, whose symbol was also a serpent. Thus a childless woman, going to the temple to secure fertility, dreamt that the god approached her followed by a snake. The snake then entered her sexually. After the dream, and within the year, she had two sons. Sometimes the person would dream that they had been made well and would awake to find the dream accomplished. The rooms in which patients slept were occupied by snakes of a harmless variety also. This, along with the necessary rites and purifications, set the patient in the right frame of mind and emotion, to receive a healing dream.

Such dream induction by a particular setting and rites is very similar to the more ancient practices of fasting and waiting for the initiating dream, Similar, that is, in the sense of seeking a particular type of dream at a particular time and place. See Incubating Dreams

Islamic traditions also have a rite called Istiqara, where the participant repeats a particular prayer, said to have been given by Mohammed, enabling one to dream the answer to a problem. This was used in recent years by Dr. Mossadegh. The resulting dream was of a being who told Dr Mossadegh to make all haste in efforts to nationalise Iranian Oil. As Dr Mossadegh was convalescing from illness, this was difficult. Also the political climate at that time regarding the nationalisation of oil seemed hopeless. Some months later, however, due to Dr Mossadegh’s continued efforts, Iranian Oil was in fact nationalised.

In the Bible, there are many references to dreams. The history changing dreams of Pharaoh about the fat and thin kine, along with New Testament dreams, are taken to be given by God, or angels. In the dream of Peter, where the unclean animals are let down in a sheet, and Pharaoh’s dream, we see clearly symbolic dreams, the meaning of which is arrived at through insight.

At other places, we find mention of God’s intervention in our dream life. Thus in Genesis 20:3, we read, ‘But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him, Behold, thou art but a dead man, for the woman which thou hast taken; for she is a man’s wife.’ Later, in Job 33: IS, it says, ‘In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed, then he (God) openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction, that he may withdraw a man from his purpose, and hide pride from man.

In the Indian Yoga teachings, they mention four states of consciousness, that is, waking – dreaming – dreamless sleep – superconsciousness. Although, as in Patanjali’s Aphorism’s mention is made of dreams as a subject for meditation, Yoga practitioners seek to become aware at the dreamless and superconscious levels. That is, they seek to get behind the images of dreams to that which is conscious of them, i.e. the Self, the basic part of our being. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead one sees a detailed commentary on how to become liberated from inner images analogous to dreams. This too, we must consider as one of the aims of a modern dream investigator.

Turning to more modern concepts of dreams and dreaming, one finds, largely, a slide into a materialistic attitude. For instance there was for long the opinion that dreams were caused by a late, heavy meal, or eating highly stimulating foods. One could call this the ‘indigestion’ theory.

Some experimentation was also undertaken in the realm of dreams produced by outside influences. Thus, a number of people have slept and been exposed to drops of water, ticking, sounds, scents, bells, electrical brain stimuli and even hypnotic suggestion. All of these produced dreams in some way explaining the stimulus. For instance, Alexandre Arnoux writes how, when in a rest camp, he dreamt that the Germans had sent over a poisonous gas smelling of quinces. He awoke gasping for breath, only to see that his friend had just entered the room eating a quince. Another writer, Massey, on having water dropped on his face, dreamt he was in Italy, drinking wine and perspiring heavily. In the case of the electrical probe to the brain, particular memories were evoked, clear and distinct.

Another popular theory is that dreams are the uncontrolled wanderings of the sleeping mind. This theory sees the images of dreams as occurring due to the natural psychological law of association of ideas. Thus, as we drift into sleep, we may be entertaining the idea of a bicycle. The idea bicycle associates with journey, journey with someone we wish to see, this with fear of their not being there to welcome us, which links with our walking alone, etc.

J. A. Hadfield, in his excellent book Dreams and Nightmares, lists all these ideas and more. He points out that each of these ideas is true as far as it goes, but none of them explain all factors about dreams. Recent experiments have shown that even outside stimulus does not produce the dream, it merely enters into its images. Nor is a dream merely past memories, as a dream often uses images in unique formation, and we have to ask ourselves what has reshaped the images of our memory. In the dream of Arnoux, for instance, the smell of quince definitely enters into the dream, but if we are honest, we have to admit that an interior fear and terror is also expressive in the dream, and can thus be used as a means of self analysis.

The internally produced dream theory of Aristotle has proved itself, however, at least partially true. Observations of dreams has shown a number of times how a person may dream of a particular part of his body due to sickness in that area. Armaud de Villeneuve, for instance, dreamt that a dog bit his leg. A few days later a cancerous growth became visible on the same spot. A Swiss poet, Gessner, dreamt that a snake bit him in the left side, and shortly afterwards developed a malignant tumour there, The great many experiences of this nature are explained on the grounds that during sleep we are more sensitive to inner disturbances than in waking. As with dreams woven around outside stimuli, the inner irritations of developing sickness can announce themselves in the images of our dreams. However, due to the claims of mystics, and the present tentative findings of parapsychology concerning the possibility that human consciousness exists outside of the body, or for one person to know or receive the thoughts and feelings of another, it seems likely that it is not only subtle sensations in the body that may stimulate dream images. We can therefore say that some of the causes may be physical sensations from within or outside the body-moods, fears, desires or pressures, etc., existing in the personality of the sleeper, such as unconscious realisation of ideas, levels of being and new states of mind, and stimuli from other minds.

Before we progress to the great dream authorities of the twentieth century it will be illuminating to quickly look at the ideas expressed by an American of the nineteenth century. I use the word illuminating, as here is a man who expressed the idea of evolution to the world some years before Darwin published his works. This man was Dr Andrew Jackson Davis, born in 1826. In 1850 (nine years before Darwin’s work) he wrote and published The Great Harmonia, in which we read:

The progressive development of the animal kingdom up to man may be traced from its very beginnings, when – as the result of a marriage between the highest forms and essences in the vegetable kingdom – there arose the first form of animal life – the inferior order of radiata. At a later era the pisces was followed by that of the birds. The marsupial was next, and then the mammalian. The primary change from this last into inferior types of human organism is so easy that the anatomical and physiological transformation is scarcely perceptible. (Not that evolution is unique to our culture. Jalaludin Rumi, a thirteenth century mystic, clearly wrote of it.)

Excuse my enthusiasm in quoting something that seemingly has nothing to do with dreams. I feel, however, that ‘dream historians’ have overlooked a great mind in A. J. Davis, and the quote is a reference to his qualifications, this being felt necessary as his source of information is psychic rather than scientific. That is, through his unique ability, he was able to explore the interior of his own being consciously. So his remarks on evolution arose from information he obtained from what might be called a dream state. Davis called it ‘The Superior Condition’. However, here are his remarks and theory on sleep and dreams.

“Sleep is that mode by which the fatigued soul withdraws partially from the physical organism and gathers inwardly for purposes of recuperation. At the same time it remains sufficiently within them to inspire the involuntary systems with constant motion, that they may fulfil their respective functions. The place into which it (soul-consciousness) retires is the most interior portions of the viscera and the deepest recesses of the sensorium. The superior brain or cerebrum yields up its powers to the cerebellum and this resigns in turn to the medulla spinalis. During the period of natural rest the cerebellum never sleeps, and in the waking hours the cerebrum is in constant activity, guiding and controlling the organisation.

“The spirit (energising principle), when (we are) asleep, moves with the greatest precision through the whole organic domain, but especially the inner chambers the sensorium and the ganglionic and lymphatic batteries of the visceral system.

“The phenomena of dreams are controlled by established laws which may be applied to education and the development of mind. Properly speaking there is no such condition as absolute suspension of consciousness, only of external powers of memory. When the mind passes into a coma, the spirit takes up the thread of previous interior experiences. The mind has two memories, one of the body and the world without, the other a more inward scroll, on the deepest folds of which are registered those experiences which the soul has obtained from the world within. The significance of dreams depends upon their nature and derivation…. Even in prophetic warnings, the soul does its own work almost invariably, by extending its sensiferous faculties towards the future, and thus perceiving those events which laws of cause and effect are certain to develop.

” … Owing to wrong living and intemperance (in amount and quality of food), no one enjoys perfect slumber except for exceedingly brief periods; but when experienced in its fullness, and when the soul is resigned to the will of God through recognition of Nature’s laws, the individual is then on the confines of the other life. True sleep is a temporary death of the body and a rest of the soul. It is distinguished from imperfect slumber by the absence of all ordinary dreaming.”

Davis also gives very practical hints, although general, in understanding dreams.

“It follows that dreaming deserves investigation as a precursor and accompaniment of disease. Lively dreams are in general a sign of attenuated excitement of the nervous system. Soft or vapourish dreams denote slight cerebral irritation, or alternatively, a favourable crisis in nervous fevers. Frightful dreams betoken a determination of arterial blood to the head. Dreams about blood and red objects, houses and ships on fire, imps, demons, etc., indicate an inflammatory condition of the semi-intellectual and perceptive faculties of the cerebrum. Dreams about water, rain, floods, deluges often characterise diseased mucous membranes and dropsy. Dreams in which a person sees any portion of his own body, especially in a suffering state, point to disturbances in that area. So also dreams of food, feasts and so forth are usually traceable to impaired digestive functions. This explanation of a certain class of dream does not pose as a solution of all such mental phenomena.”

He goes on to say that such interpretation is only dealing with physical relationships. His main theme, however, is how to obtain ‘great’ or ‘spiritual’ dreams.

“In those (dreams) which emanate from the world of spirits, it is a fact that spiritual dreams only occur in a state of perfect slumber. The will and faculties of thought must be in a state of complete quiescence. … Such influences cannot enter when the front brain (intellect, will) is at all positive. Perfect slumber is nigh unto death. The higher departments of mind are not occupied by thought, the holy elements of feeling are stilled; the front brain or cerebrum is a tranquil domain; there is no sentinel at the gate of the brain but the vigilant cerebellum. The mind is then ready for a high order of dream.”

Leaving the Poughkeepsie Seer, as Davis was called, we turn to another more recent seer, Edgar Cayce of Virginia Beach. As early as 1925 Edgar Cayce was already interpreting dreams from a viewpoint free of fixed sexual or intellectually psychological attitudes. He must rate, along with leaders of this more open attitude such as J. A. Hadfield, and Leslie Weatherhead, as one of those who brought the dream ‘home’ to the public. Some of his pupils would like to claim him as the beginner of such attitudes, but J. A. Hadfield, from the point of psychology, and Weatherhead from a Christian viewpoint, had already given long years of public service before 1925. Nevertheless, the work of Cayce has directed the attention of thousands to their dream life. The groups organised to work on their dreams, in their collective numbers, probably outweigh the work of the others.

Possibly Cayce’s attitude to dreams may be summed up by this statement he made from a deep sleep/trance state:

“These (dreams), as we see, may be used to the edification of the entity into that of how spiritual laws are manifested in the physical world.”

All such statements about dreams, and the countless other subjects he mentioned, were spoken from a trance or sleep state similar to that of Davis. This is rather like listening in to what the unconscious mind says about itself. In another such statement, he says that through a study of dreams, a person, may gain the more perfect understanding and knowledge of those forces that go to make up the real existence – the underlying meaning of life – and what it’s good for – if the entity would but comprehend the conditions being manifested.

Cayce taught, like others, that dreams reflect activities in the body, in the emotions, mind and general attitudes of a person. But his main point was that the dream helps the individual understand his relationship with the whole, with Life or God. He said, in 1923:

“Forget not that it has been said correctly that the Creator, the Gods and the God of the Universe, speak to man through his individual self. Man approaches the more intimate conditions of that field of the inner self when the conscious self is at rest in sleep or slumber, at which time more of the inner forces are taken into consideration and studied by the individual, not someone else. It is each individual’s job, if he will study to show himself approved by God, to understand his individual condition, his individual position in relation to others, his individual manifestation, through his individual receiving of messages from the higher forces themselves, through dreams.”

Shane Miller in his article ‘Working With Dreams as Recommended by the Cayce Readings’, says:

“The Cayce premise states in effect that anyone, whether psychically gifted or not, who will record his dreams in an attitude of prayerful persistence can, in time, bring about a complete restoration of the dream faculty. (The dream faculty at present seems to be the remains of a long disused and discredited function of the higher mind.) … any dream which has a certain story content or mood, particularly if it is in colour, should be studied; and that is the complete premise which, if faithfully followed can bring about a new dimension into the experience of anyone who will keep everlastingly at it!”

In this sense a dream can be a message from the Highest, expressed in the symbolic language of the unconscious. So in looking at a dream, we may be reading a letter from God. That is, a correspondence between the universal forces that have formed us, and the individual that in being formed calls itself ‘I’. A conversation then, between God and I.

Obviously, the word ‘God’ for many has repugnant religious undertones from which they shy away. They may therefore miss some of the important ideas Cayce has presented. Possibly this other theory, which is a synthesis of several liberal ideas on dreams will be more attractive.

“Consciousness is the result of various energies combining as our being. Yet consciousness, if studied carefully does not, in a peculiar way, rely upon the factors that give it expression. For instance, we are shown in modern brain operations, that only when the small area of the brain, the thalamus, is removed, does one lose consciousness. The other large areas can be cut off or damaged without the person ‘losing’ consciousness. This seems to suggest that consciousness is due to the thalamus, allied to the body. But from the information in other experiments, this seems to give a false idea. It would be better to say that the thalamus enables consciousness to express. In the same way, an electric fire allows electricity to express some of its potential. If one removes the thalamus, or the fire from the circuit, it has not removed consciousness or electricity, merely takes away their vehicle of expression.”

From this viewpoint we can think of consciousness as always existing, but not necessarily expressing all of its potential. This would give us an entirely new concept of sleep. For sleep would be the partial withdrawing of consciousness from the organs of its expression, and a sinking into its most basic levels of existence. Thus the individual, in sleep, would sink into the primordial level of being that existed even prior to his or her birth. For if consciousness is what I think it is, it, like the electricity, is a principle of nature, and pre-exists the apparatus through which it realises itself in the physical world. Thus, a dream may well be the reaction expressed in images, of the conscious aspect of self meeting its primordial and eternal aspect in nature. The dream would then remind us of the spark between two electrical charges of different potential as they touch and become balanced. A dream would express the ‘difference’ between the individual and his source. From it one may understand how he relates to the whole.

The words of Nietzsche add yet another dimension to this attitude. In Human, all too Human, he wrote:

“I hold that as man now still reasons in dreams, so men reasoned also when awake through thousands of years. … This ancient element in human nature still manifests itself in our dreams, for it is the foundation upon which the higher reason has developed and still develops in every individual; the dream carries us back into remote conditions of human culture, and provides a ready means of understanding them.”

As already mentioned, J. A. Hadfield has done much through his life work and books, to bring understanding of inner experience to the ordinary person. His own view on dreams is summed up as follows:

“According to what we shall call the Biological Theory of dreams, the function of dreams is that by means of reproducing the unsolved experiences of life, they work towards a solution of these problems.”

Firstly – Dreams stand in the place of experience. Thus by making us relive the experiences and difficulties of the day in imagination they relieve us of the necessity of going through the actual experience by trial and error and thus save us many a disaster. … It is obvious, therefore, that dreams serve the same purpose as ideational processes, much as we exercise in normal thought in waking life.

Also – Every individual has potentialities in his nature, all of which are not merely seeking their own individual ends, but each and all of which subserve the functions of the personality as a whole. But in the course of life many of these potentialities become repressed. In analytic treatment we attempt to release these repressed emotions, and direct them to the uses of life for which they were intended, and so make the personality whole. But dreams were attempting the same thing long before analytic treatment was thought of, and therefore dreams also, by releasing repressed experiences and emotions, are striving to solve these problems and to restore the personality to efficient functioning as a whole.

Turning at last to Freud and Jung, an attempt will be made to synthesise their particular standpoint regarding dreams. Starting with Freud, we cannot properly understand his statements without an understanding of Libido. To take an image from an earlier statement, we can think of libido as the energy behind our living process. If we think of the body as an efficient machine, then perhaps libido could be thought of as the electricity or power that works the machine. Not only does this energy emerge as motion and function, but it also lies behind our instincts, emotions, sexual drive, desire for social standing and recognition, our intellectual curiosity, and all the other aspects of life. Thinking of libido as a stream of energy, flowing out via our sexual, intellectual, emotional and other activities, we see, in the full expression of this energy, psychological health. However, if some of this energy, on entering our sexual activity is not released, it causes inner pressures we call neuroses, or a complex. (For the energy may be expressed morbidly or in an unacceptable manner as in homosexuality.)

For Freud, the dream is a wish fulfillment of these hidden desires which he maintained were usually of a sexual nature. The dream in this sense, is a method of making conscious unacceptable desires. Thus, if one wished to be rid of one’s father, or to sleep with one’s mother, but could not express either of these even in speech, because of the forbidden nature of such, one could do so in a dream. However, due to the fact that such desires arouse deep guilt feelings, we may not wish to openly express them even in a dream. Thus the dream both expresses and disguises the desires all at once. For instance, Freud considered that to dream of having sexual intercourse with an old woman, was a disguised dream concerning one’s mother. Or putting a key in a lock symbolises sexual intercourse.

So far we see that the Seneca Indians held much the same views. Similarly they believed dreams had a latent and manifest content; that is, a hidden, or difficult to understand meaning behind the obvious events in the dream. Also, Freud maintained that all dreams are potentially understandable. They all arise from some cause, and if understood this cause becomes revealed. That is not to say, of course, that all dreams are understood.

Originally, Freud maintained that dreams were all wish fulfilments of hidden urges relating to our sexual nature. Later this was widened to include wish fulfilments of repressed aggressiveness.

Jung, following upon Freud and Adler’s work, maintained that the ‘dream shows in what direction the unconscious is leading’ the dreamer. Also, he says, ‘In dream interpretation we ask what conscious attitude does the dream compensate.’ Thus, dreams for Jung, point to the fact that the processes in man’s consciousness that he is unaware of, attempt to fulfil or realise themselves in a particular direction. A plant for instance, has hidden within it the possibility of stem, leaves, flower and seeds. These it attempts to produce. Similarly, a man has the possibility of further extensions of consciousness, of realisation, of abilities and desires which may be held back by conscious attitudes. For instance, a man may have latent artistic abilities which are held back from ‘flowering’ due to his conscious insistence on purely logical and money-making activities.

In this case, the dream may portray the man doing irrational things, because it compensates for his ‘Oh so logical’ conscious attitude. Also Jung began the direction of looking to dreams as a search for one’s wholeness – not only sexually, but in all functions. Our sexual drives, our urge for power and social position, our intellectual curiosity, our innate desire to understand ourselves, and relate harmoniously to others and life around us, are all dealt with in dreams.

In Man and His Symbols, Jung talks of God in a way not found in other branches of psychiatry.

“Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions I always think of the rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days while nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: ‘Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.'”

This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of the unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not yet his total psyche (self).

Perhaps in the end, we can see that none of these views need be discarded. As one writer has remarked, several men all looking at the same landscape may all describe, and even ‘sense’ it differently. A geologist would see it differently to an artist, who in turn would feel about it differently to a farmer, and so on. In sleep, we may approach some inner landscape that represents our wholeness – the latent qualities of our own being. The wonderful thing is that our dream is our own. It uses our own symbols, our own emotions, our own understanding, our own possibilities. With these it paints a truly personal wonder we call a dream. Surely this is worth understanding? For an explanation of the way dreams form and arise see Functions of dreams

See: analysis of dreams; Egyptian (ancient) dream beliefs; yoga and dreams; Buddhism and dreams; myths legends and fairy tales in dreams; religion and dreams; Christianity and dreams; Islamic dream traditions; Hebrew/Jewish Dream Beliefs.

The House In Your Dream

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

Although you cannot see it, your mind, along with your beliefs, has a particular structure or form. If the shape of your mind could be built into a three dimensional model, such as a house, you would probably be able to see that your mind has as unique a shape as your fingerprints. But at the same time there would be features of your mental ‘house’ that were very much the same as most of the people within your own culture. If there were a museum of the mind you would see in it that the human mind has altered its shape in an evolutionary fashion just as the human body has. The model of minds of even a few centuries ago would have a much larger area devoted to religious feelings and thoughts. The area dealing with personal identity would be much larger in the modern mind.

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

For instance how old do you feel the house is – and in stating its age, does that connect in any way with your own age and time of birth? If so how?

If the age differs from your own age, what period of time or your life does it coincide with and what relevance has that to you? The style of the house may also suggest something of your attitude to life. As you explore the house in general look for connections to any aspect or period of your life.

Does the house seem to be much older than you are? If so what are your impressions of it and what it contains? What is your relationship with it and are you searching for or finding something in it? Or perhaps this is about an event, a relationship, or an influence you can feel in connection with the house. Try to define the influence or whatever you experience, and see if you can notice how that is active or influencing your current life. If the age differs from your own age, what period of time or your life does it coincide with and what relevance has that to you?

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

Is it a strong house, or are there weaknesses; and what style of house is it? In other words what does the dream house suggest about those things?

If possible write down your response to these questions so you build up information as we go along. For instance any weakness in the house needs to be seen as difficulties you have and of course strengths as signs of ability to cope with life

Is it a strong house, or are there weaknesses?  What is the condition of the house, its state of repair?

Is the house well built or weak in some areas. If weak what areas and what can you gather from that? If it is well built, does it reflect any particular skills or strengths you have and does your personality and inner life reflect those skills or lack of them?

Any weakness in the house may represent difficulties you are facing – and of course strengths are signs of your ability to cope with life. Does this link in any way with either your health, or the condition of your inner or outer life? What is it saying about you?

Is it a house you have never known before – a house new to you?

This is a situation you have not known before, an experience new to you. So it could represent a different way of seeing or relating to yourself.

In the dream how are you relating to the house?

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

If the house is weak in some areas, examine these areas to see what you can gather from them.  If it is well built, does it reflect any particular skills or strengths you have and does your personality and inner life reflect those skills or lack of them? Is the house showing you some aspect of your life that is calling out for attention/maintenance/repair?

Is this a house you once lived in, or does it remind you of such a house or dwelling?

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

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

In the dream how are you relating to the house? Are you arriving, leaving, repairing it, pulling it down, or exploring it?

Whatever you are doing, or in whatever way you are relating to the house, what does that suggest about what you are doing to your body, your personality, or your way of life? For instance if leaving, are you leaving a way of life behind? If renovating, what attitudes or part of you are you changing?

Does the house give you an impression of great age?

Is it older than you are? If so what are your impressions of it and what it contains? What is your relationship with it and are you searching for or finding something in it? Or perhaps this is about an event, a relationship, or an influence you can feel in connection with the house. Try to define the influence or whatever you experience, and see if you can notice how that is active or influencing your current life.

Does this house belong to somebody else and how are you relating to this house?

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

Consider how you are relating to this house, your movements and feelings here. Are you comfortable here, are there aspects of the house that you would like to change? Is the house familiar, or are you drawn to explore further? What feelings does it evoke? Are you coming or going? Sometimes such a house can represent a new or different way of living or situation in life.

What social status does the house suggest?

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

Has a new area of the house been discovered?

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

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

Now see if you can summarise your responses to see what they suggest of the things you are meeting, feeling or growing into at the moment.

Is this a house you once lived in, or knew well?

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

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

Was a ghost involved in the dream?

This usually about something that happened there, or a childood event that caused fear, and the memory is still hauntung you. See if you can feel the feelings and ask yourself what caused them.

Now see if you can summarise your responses to see what they suggest of the things you are meeting, feeling or growing into at the moment.

Hallucinations Visions and Hallucinogens

I had experience of working therapeutically and in exploring ones hidden depths with LSD and primarily with psilocybin. At that time it was talked about as only for dropouts. Yet at that time it was also licensed for therapeutic use, and I experienced it with R. D. Laing. But now it is part of todays world and big businesses are funding it and researching with it. See https://compasspathways.com/ for an entry into the future.

Drugs such as LSD, cannabis, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote and opium, can produce hallucinations. That is because they allow the dream process to break through into consciousness with less intervention. If this occurs without warning it can be very disturbing. The very real dangers are that unconscious content, which in ordinary dreaming breaks through a threshold in a regulated way, emerges with less regulation, and without the safety factor of calling it a dream. Fears, paranoid feelings, past traumas, can emerge into the consciousness of an individual who has no skill in handling such forces. See Shaman

Because the propensity of the unconscious is to create images, an area of emotion might emerge as an image such as the devil. Such images and the power they contain, not being integrated in a proper therapeutic setting, may haunt the individual, perhaps for years. Even at a much milder level, elements of the unconscious will emerge and disrupt the persons ability to appraise reality and make judgements. Unacknowledged fears may lead the drug user to rationalise their reasons for avoiding social activity or the world of work. See Waking Lucid Dream

Because such drugs can produce what people often term hallucinations, they can be experienced through any of the senses singly, or all of them together. So one might have an hallucinatory smell or sound. To understand hallucinations, which are quite common without any use of drugs such as alcohol, LSD, or cannabis, one must remember that everyone has the natural ability to produce such images. One of the definitions of a dream according to Freud is its hallucinatory quality. While asleep we can create full sensory, vocal, motor and emotional experience in our dream. While dreaming we usually accept what we experience as real. An hallucination is an experience of a ‘dream’ occurring while we have our eyes open. The voices heard, people seen, smells smelt, although appearing to be outside of us, are no more exterior than the things and images of our dreams. With this information one can understand that much classed as psychic phenomena, psychedelic and religious experience is an encounter with the dream process. That does not, of course, deny its importance.

Example: ‘I dream insects are dropping either on me from the ceiling of our bedroom, or crawling over my pillow. My long-suffering husband is always woken when I sit bolt upright in bed my eyes wide open and my arm pointing at the ceiling. I try to brush them off. I can still see them – spiders or wood lice. I am now well aware it is a dream. But no matter how hard I stare the insects are there in perfect detail. I am not frightened, but wish it would go away.’ Sue D.

Sue’s dream only became an hallucination when she opened her eyes and continued to see the insects in perfect clarity.

There are probably many reasons why Sue should experience a hallucination and her husband not. One might be that powerful drives and emotions might be pushing for attention in her life. Some of the primary drives are the reproductive drive; urge toward independence; pressure to meet unconscious emotions and past trauma and fears – any of which, in order to achieve their ends, can produce hallucinations. An hallucination is therefore not an ‘illusion’ but a means of giving information from deeper levels of self.

Many people have hallucinations and find them a great addition to their senses and their understanding if themselves and the world. But a great number of people who experience them are terrified and experience a mental breakdown. I want to make clear that when they express so devastatingly, it is because the person has  lived with tremendous tensions and conflicts and has never learned to deal with them, so enormous inner pressure builds up and they burst through one’s defences like a dam bursting and a flood occurs. See Relax

Given such names as mediumship or mystical insight, in some cultures or individuals, the ability to hallucinate is often rewarded socially.

Example: I waded into the lake and suddenly realised that something strange was happening. Visions occurred stronger and stronger the further one went into the lake. I also realised that all the others had been in the lake and immersed in the visions. As I pressed on I knew that most people became so involved in the visions they lost grip of their purpose to walk on. I had the visions, but found I could maintain the decision to go forward – i.e. most people lost sight of physical surroundings and became absorbed in the visions. I somehow had an ability of seeing the visions and the physical world, of working in the physical world, at the same time. The end was a vision on my right of a huge and splendid mountain range, with snow. It shone with light. I knew it represented eternity. Yet I pressed on to get the water. I felt I would from now on always have a vision of the mountains with me, along with the wonderful feelings it produced.

 Example: “When Leary exclaimed that the experience of the mushrooms had changed his world, he was not exaggerating. Nearly everyone who has taken the psychedelics will grant the same. The psychedelic experience will certainly be qualified and regulated; it may prove too dangerous for general use; other and better ways to the mind may be found. But nothing on earth can contradict or minimize the opportunity it offers to explore the very citadel of meaning, the human mind.” Quoted from LSD Psychotherapy.

Example: Her constant wetting herself, which had been with her every day for several years, stopped after the second LSD session, a very violent one, in which she became disoriented and called continually for her mother. But then she went on to a great deal of  character change. She had been a thoroughly dull and boring person, a narrowly moralistic, unimaginative child. She stank of urine most of the time. She was a “straight A” student in school. During treatment she changed so that everyone, relatives and friends, as well as her mother and herself, noticed it. It wasn’t so much “spectacular” as it was profound and convincing. She was by no means free of problems, but became so free and creative and so much more outgoing and generous, that it was clear her behavior was springing from something spontaneous within herself.

If you are going to use such drugs you should either be raised in a culture holding information about their use, or at least educate yourself in how the dreamworld works, and learn to explore your dreams before taking the big plunge.

See: Healing Cancer Using Magic Mushrooms – LSD Psychotherapy –  Shaman –  What we Need to Remember About Us – Life’s Little Secrets – out of body experience – Integration – meeting oneself

Carmine from USA says – Do we really need researchers to tell us about the effects of these substances? Surely many tribes/civilisations throughout the world have told us of these things for centuries. How clever these scientists have been to report other peoples findings and claim that they have “discovered” these properties. People have used these substances since well before any documented evidence and in the past they have been derided as being dangerous and unpredictable  by ‘reaserchers’. Now, we have suddenly discovered that they could be useful. One word – Leary. Another word – imprisonment. Are we gonna arrest these researchers and treat them in the way Leary was? Nothing new, just another example of standing on the shoulders of giants. In the year 2013 isn’t it a bit embarrassing that we’re still paying no attention to wisdom that has been handed down to us for many, many years?

See: Answer to Critics; Talking with the dead; esp and dreams; out of body experience.

A real treat is to see Fantastic Fungi – Playback – Netflix

Healing Action Within Dreams

Although this feature starts by dealing with very physical processes, it is in fact about a very important and little understood natural process. It is, as far as my own understanding has allowed me to penetrate, the process by which the very highest in human life expresses itself into the mental, emotional and physical. I believe it should be understood by all people dealing children and adults in knowing who and what they are and what they are capable of.

If the self regulatory processes of your being ceased its 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. For adequate functioning our blood pressure needs to be at about 110 to 120 (i.e. it displaces 110 millimetres of mercury). It can drop to 7080 before a critical situation arises in which tissue may die because blood is not reaching it. If we lose a lot of blood, even as much as 30 or 40 percent, the self-regulatory process maintains adequate blood pressure by constricting the blood vessels. This action is controlled by a part of the brain. If that brain area is injured or destroyed, other centres take control. If they arc eliminated, ganglia in the sympathetic nervous system direct the action. If they too are eliminated the walls of the arteries and veins themselves regulate their own activity.

Keeping balance during change – dealing with stress

Such functions are usually listed under the heading ‘homeostasis’. The word means to ‘keep level or balanced during change’. The ball cock in a toilet is an excellent example of mechanical homeostasis. As soon as we flush the toilet the ball-cock descends allowing water to pour into the cistern. When the water reaches a certain height the water entering is stopped, thus a level is maintained despite change. To quote from Anthony’s Textbook of Anatomy and Physiology (Mosby), The principle of homeostasis is one of the most fundamental of all physiological principles. It may be stated in this way: the body must maintain relative constancy of its chemicals and processes in order to survive. Or stated even more briefly: health ad survival depend upon the body’s maintaining or quickly restoring homeostasis.

In 1885 the Belgian physiologist Leon Fredericq described it this way:

The living being is an agency of such sort that each disturbing influence induces by itself the calling forth of compensatory activity to neutralise or repair the disturbance. The higher in the scale of living beings, the more numerous, the more perfect and the more complicated do these regulatory activities become. They tend to free the organism completely from the unfavourable influences and changes occurring in the environment.

In 1900 Charles Richet a French physiologist went further by saying:

The living being is stable. It must be so in order not to be destroyed, dissolved or disintegrated by the colossal forces, often adverse, which surround it. By an apparent contradiction it maintains its stability only if it is excitable and capable of modifying itself according to external stimuli and adjusting its responses to the stimulation. In a sense it is stable because it is modifiable the slight instability is the necessary condition for the true stability of the organism.

The wisdom of the body

In 1933 Walter B. Cannon published his remarkable book The Wisdom Of The Body (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.). Through his years of research and experiment he added enormously to the understanding of physiological homeostasis. He points out that the self regulatory process not only has to adapt the body to outer influences, “There is also resistances to disturbance from within. For example the heat produced in maximal muscular effort, continued for twenty minutes, would be so great that, if it were not properly dissipated, it would cause some of the albuminous substances of the body to become stiff, like a hard boiled egg”. He points out that such processes are not originally given naturally, but are slowly developed by organisms as they evolve. Thus the frog cannot prevent free evaporation of water from its body, so cannot be long free of its home pond. Nor can it effectively regulate its temperature, so becomes torpid and sluggish in cold weather.

This helps in understanding what Fredericq meant in saying the “regulatory agencies. . . free the organism completely from the unfavourable influences and changes occurring in the environment.” Obviously this is only partly true, and humans have much greater freedom from environment than the frog. Nevertheless we cannot survive in anything except small changes of temperature, outside or inside, but must use special equipment in, what is for us, extreme heat and cold. Also, in the airlessness of space, and while submerged in water, we must again use special ‘clothing’. These things we create by our mental ingenuity. Therefore, we can say that self-regulation is not a fixed ability, and our conscious use of intelligence and experience are also aspects of the homeostatic process. Through expanding our ability to adapt to outer and inner environments we have expanding freedom. If our ability to adapt lessens, then our freedom lessens also.

Learning to keep balance in a changing world

This learning process even takes place in such major homeostatic features as heat control and regulation of blood sugar level. During this century it was found that for quite a long period after birth babies have little control of temperature regulation. When exposed to cold their temperature drops with hardly any reaction to prevent it, rather like a frog. There are also much greater swings in a baby’s blood sugar level than in an adult. The baby only gradually ‘learns’ to respond to these new features of inner and outer change after the steady temperature and blood sugar of its prenatal life in the internal sea of its mother.

We could perhaps say the baby learned such regulation unconsciously, or without conscious deliberation. In order to gain greater ‘freedom’ though, even the baby is faced by the need to learn. The unconscious wisdom which enables it to learn complicated bodily adaptations also operates in adults and in other ways. Walter Cannon describes this as follows:

Many years ago Murphy and I observed with X rays a curious phenomena after the first part of the small intestine (the duodenum) had been cut across and sewed together again. Although peristaltic waves were passing routinely over the stomach, the sphincter at the outlet (the pyloric sphincter) held tight against them, and only after about five hours did it relax and permit the gastric contents to enter the injured gut. The interest here lies in the relation of the delay to the process of healing; according to surgical observation, about four hours are required after an intestinal suture for a plastic exudate to form and make a tight joint. It was after the proper time had elapsed for that process to come to completion, therefore, that the chyme from the stomach was allowed to advance. Similar results were obtained when the section and suture were made further along the alimentary canal.

Such unconscious though purposeful activities are expressions of this inner wisdom our being has, and are all part of our self-regulatory process. The urge to eat and drink, to work, play and learn, the longing to hold someone and be held, to make love; to sleep and wake, are all ways we keep the balance of our nature. If any of these are severely curtailed our nature may become unbalanced and even crippled in its ability to freely extend itself in reasonable freedom.

The enormous drive to grow

Caron Kent adds to the usually mentioned instincts what he sees as one of the most fundamental the urge to grow. From conception onwards this urge is powerfully manifest. From conception until birth the growing organism increases its weight alone up to 27 million times. So it is an energetic urge, but also one which brings detailed control over the miracle of forming a living human body. This comes about by stage after stage of formative forces acting in the construction of our being. As an egg and sperm we are tiny single celled creatures. The next two stages of development as the cells increase in size and number resembles the activities found in many simple living things such as plants. The twenty day old embryo develops four brachial grooves, which in the embryo of a fish grow into gills. At this point the formative forces which produce a fish are active, as were the formative forces of a plant at an earlier stage. These are then supplanted by forces which bring about features of the mammalian upright animal we are. As one textbook states, “A human is not constructed like a modern office building, as cheaply and efficiently as possible. . .but rather like an ancient historic edifice to which wings and sections were added at different times and which was not modernised until it was almost completed.”

If we recall Richet’s statement 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, unless we are capable of releasing confidence we will remain paralysed. 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 well being than someone who can let themselves cry uncontrollably for a while.

It is partly this ability to have a wide range of choices or opposites available to us that makes human survival and self-regulation more efficient than in other animals. In Africa for instance, herds of deer are being driven from the open grasslands because of human use of the land. The instincts of the deer lead them to always seek survival on the open plains, because this has always been their habitat. It is ‘natural’ for them to hide from enemies on the plain. But on the plains they are killed, and it would be better for their survival to hide in the forested areas. To manage that, however, they would have to be capable of suppressing their instinctive ‘natural’ drive, and acting in a new way.

New areas of the brain had to be developed

Perhaps human beings faced a similar conflict in the past. When forests dwindled their only chance of survival was in open country which was an ‘unnatural’ habitat for them. So to survive they had to deny their instinctive inner urge. Perhaps this is where the idea of original sin arose, when humans denied the voice of God/instinct within them. However it happened, humans can now question their own drives and evaluate them against survival and achievement. They thereby have extended their homeostatic functions. Ling and Buckman, in their book Lysergic Acid and Ritalin in The Treatment of Neurosis, say:

“New areas of the brain had to be developed not only to integrate, but also to inhibit primitive survival oriented impulses and to enable them to store stimuli to act on them later. It is this ability to defer action and to act in a purposeful and objective rather than instinctive way that distinguishes the well integrated adult from the child, the primitive from the neurotic.”

Ron Hubbard looked at human beings as if they were an engineering problem. Although this gives a different view from someone like Jung, it does have a lot of helpful information. Writing about the human computer, which he calls the Analyser, Hubbard describes it as capable of computing on any problem and arriving at a correct conclusion if the information it has is sound. It can work extremely quickly and can handle large numbers of problems simultaneously, as occurs when we drive a car. It can re-evaluate its past memories and conclusions, and come to new conclusions. It has a nearly infinite memory bank. It is self determining and does not need an outside operator. It is also self-regulating and avoids, through estimating probable outcomes, future damage. Through the senses it contacts the objective world, and has a sense of self. Its memories arc stored in time sequence, with full colour, movement, sound, smell, feeling, and self awareness. It has the faculty of imagination to enable it to compute on probabilities or create new survival aids. It is also portable.

Hubbard recognised that anyone with a healthy body who did not have brain damage through injury or surgery, had all the above abilities. Nevertheless, despite the fact the human computer is self-regulating, Hubbard had to admit that with all its faculties, the computer was frequently ill or malfunctioning. Experimenting with hypnosis on a patient who was colour blind and could not remember sounds or images, Hubbard found the person could be relaxed to a point where the problems disappeared. At this level the person could think clearly, had no colour blindness, had consideration for his wife, all of which were usually missing, but were again absent on the patient’s return to ‘normal’ consciousness. So Hubbard’s conclusion from this and other experiments was that underneath the functional aberrations was a whole and healthy person. This left the question though as to how the aberrations got into the computer.

Further experiment showed that any sort of aberration such as stuttering, hallucinations, phobias, compulsions, schizophrenia, fears, hysterical blindness, paralysis, could all be brought about in healthy hypnotic subjects simply by suggesting it. Such suggestions as: “When you awake you will not be able to hear/feel anything in your arm/ remember who you are. You will be sick every time you eat an apple/frightened when you get near women/etc,” brought about the aberration it described. With hypnosis however, the suggested deafness or fear faded fairly quickly, simply because the ‘human computer’ is self-regulating. So what causes the aberrations which haunt people for years to stay in place?

Do you have a held down 7?

Hubbard’s work led him to see that the non-hypnotic aberrations get in from the outside world. The only reasons aberrations could stay in place in the human computer would be if, unlike general experience, their causative experience had got past the Analyser, could not be recalled, and so could not be re-evaluated. He gives the example of an adding machine which works perfectly unless we hold down the number seven. When the seven is held down all future calculations are wrong. The machine then seems insane. Allow the seven up and sanity returns, just as it does when the hypnotic suggestion is removed. In his book ‘Dianetics – The Evolution of A Science’, Hubbard explains what he discovered to be the cause of the ‘held down seven’. It was PAIN. During a painful life experience such as an accident or frightening surgical operation in childhood, our analyser is knocked out of operation. A lump of experience enters us unassessed. It is not our analyser which operates when we put our hand on a hot stove, crash in a car, fall under a blow from dad, or feel the agony of mum apparently having deserted us. It is the reactive or instinctive mind.

Our memory is a full experience of sound, sight, emotions and pain! Once we have felt the pain of being burnt, next time our hand gets even near such heat an automatic action pulls our body away. The same happens with emotional pain. To pull away is reactive and seems necessary for survival. So we automatically pull away not only from painful and frightening things in the outer world, but also from any part of our inner memory and feelings which are painful or frightening. Pulling our consciousness away from a memory means we cannot recall or evaluate and integrate it. We may remember the event, but when it comes to recalling the painful emotions and fears we pull back. Therefore many areas of vitally important experience, decisions and thoughts connected with it, wisdom learned from it, are HELD DOWN SEVENS.

Also, suggestions may have entered the memory at the same time. If a man is involved in a car accident, and during it someone shouts “DON’T MOVE!”, this is just as active as any hypnotic suggestion. Because it is held back from the self-regulating activity of remembrance and evaluation though, it can remain active. Therefore the man may literally not move, not take chances in life, always be worried something is going to hurt him.

Hubbard called these moments of painful unevaluated experience ‘engrams’. These not only caused aberrations in the person but were also contagious. They lead to an acting out of our pain on our children or others. A mother lost a baby and nearly died. Her pain and fear are now engrams. This leads her to irrational behaviour. So when her daughter shows affection for boyfriends mother hits or threatens her because of her own fear of pregnancy. Her daughter grows up with a fear of sex. Some such reactive behaviour is passed on for generation after generation unless it is re-evaluated. Wilhelm Reich called it the THE EMOTIONAL PLAGUE. War, political murder, religious carnage, social discrimination, go on through the centuries despite human ability to reason and see them as evils. As Reich says, “If you live in a cellar too long, you will hate the sunshine.” There can be no real change in individual and social conditions at an emotional and feeling level unless individuals agree to re-evaluate their own unconscious pains, longings and values.

In Europe and the U.S.A. today so many babies are battered to death that infants have a high probability of being battered rather than being sick from normal causes. Also, parents who have not re-evaluated the pains of several wars have passed their aberrations to children who now are themselves raising families. This means more individual and social sickness, which in turn means more broken homes, which produces more children who will pass on their own pain.

It goes on and on. To stop it we need, as adults with egos, to learn how to extend our self-regulating process. We need to do this with awareness of our natural avoidance of pain and fear. As Von Franz says in Man and His Symbols, we “must get rid of purposive and wishful aims. The ego must be able to listen.”

What will happen then? The pieces of experience that have been ‘held down’ can be released for integration and understanding. This can only occur if we let ourselves ‘experience’ what is released. During reactive behaviour we are seldom coolly intellectual. Most of what occurs is deeply emotional or physical. Therefore to calmly have an intellectual view of the experience is not enough. To experience it is to feel its deeply emotional or physical quality.

Homeostasis Dreams and the Unconscious

It is easy for us to understand many of the physiological processes of self-regulation, but our culture is sadly lacking in understanding how deeply self-regulation penetrates our psychology and the processes of the mind.

Doctors and therapists who supervised LSD sessions in the 1960’s, noted the conflict between the two reactions of defence/control and surrender. They felt this conflict may be the source of the severe anxiety experienced by some people as they face their own internal traumas. The conflict is sometimes resolved by a collapse of the ego defences, and the subject then feels a terrible sense of disintegration. This is usually experienced as a distortion of the body image (the physical awareness of self), so that the patient feels his flesh is falling away from his bones, that time and space have disintegrated, that he is nothing but a sound or a colour or an emotion. This is called ‘depersonalisation,’ and it may seem to the patient that he has gone completely mad or even died.

Somewhere within the total personality, however, there appears to be a continuing integrative force (self-regulation); though an individual may be overwhelmed by the LSD experience, some part of his mind still seems to observe, evaluate, comment, and even attempt to integrate this otherwise hidden material with the knowledge of conscious life. This may disappear for brief periods, when the fear of insanity or death supervenes, but for most of the time it is clearly at work. No one knows what type of ‘thinking’ this may be. It appears to be different both from ‘reality thinking’ and ‘autistic thinking,’ from the patterns of conscious thought and the imagery of fantasy, a kind of bridge between two types of mental process. Lawrence Lessing, in a Fortune article on recent sleep research, has written: ‘At the same time recent evidence shows that there may well be a second, lower level of dreaming extending down even into deep sleep, consisting largely of abstract thoughts or isolated symbols, much harder to recall than the generally vivid, active imagery of rapid-eye-movement dreaming.’ (Abstracted from Dreams and Dreaming by Norman Mackenzie.)

Although the massive experimental and experiential entrance into the usually hidden facets of human awareness provided by LSD psychotherapy confirmed and deepened the insight and understanding of the basic tenets Freud had proposed, other processes were revealed that Freud had never mentioned. One of these Grof called COEX Systems. He defined this as a collection or nexus of memories. These linked memories and associated fantasies when experienced express particular situations or problems in the person meeting them. What was seen in people’s experience of this was that as one COEX system spontaneously arose and was dealt with the next would be waiting in line and present itself without any technique or therapeutic pressure. W. V. Caldwell says of this, “During the course of therapy, emotional complexes present themselves one after another, as though waiting in line for release. There is seldom any hiatus between the solution of the old and the appearance of the new.”

This spontaneous presentation of new material to deal with, and the actual automatic healing process occurring as the old memories and emotions are met, is a very clear example of the self-regulatory process. The problems we hold within us are lined up waiting to be dealt with. Our being is all the time trying to present these to our awareness for us to integrate. It does this in any way that is possible, and as soon as something unblocks the resistances holding this back, the healing process can begin.

Jung, Hadfield and several other dream researchers believe the dream process is one of the main self-regulatory processes in the psyche. See Man and His Symbols, Jung – Dreams and Nightmares, Hadfield – Mind and Movement, Liberating The Body; Crisp. This means that the process underlying dream production helps keep psychological balance, just as homeostasis keeps body functions balanced by producing perspiration when hot, shivering when cold, and the almost miraculous minutiae of internal changes. Despite self-regulation or homeostasis being an obvious and fundamental process in the body, in nature and the cosmos as a whole, it still appears difficult for many people investigating the mind to accept a similar function psychologically.

In his book Dreams and Nightmares, (Pelican 1954) J. A. Hadfield puts forward what he calls a Biological Theory of Dreams. He says the function of dreams is that by reproducing difficult or unsolved life situations or experiences, the dream aids towards a solving or resolution of the problems. He gives the example of a man climbing a cliff who slips fractionally. He then may dream of actually falling and waking terrified. Subsequently the dream recurs, but in each the dreamer tries out a different behaviour, such as clasping for a branch, until he manages to act appropriately to avert the disaster. Hadfield sums up by saying dreams stand in the place of experience. They make us relive areas of anxious or difficult experience. They thus help problem solving. But they not only look back at past behaviour, they act just like thinking in considering future plans and needs.

Morrison’s findings with animal dreams, (see movements during sleep) opens the possibility that practising and developing skills and strategies may be the function dreams performed in early animal forms. They may enable us to economically learn from experience, and to play with experience in untidy or irrational ways. This ‘untidiness’ enables experience to be juxtapositioned in so many ways, useful new behaviour could arise from the occasional creative juxtapositioning. See: Evans, Christopher.

Dr. J. A. Hadfield, in his book Dreams and Nightmares (Penguin) describes this process as follows:

If a branch of a tree is cut, new shoots spring out; if you injure your hand, all the forces of the blood are mobilised until that wound is healed and you are made whole. It is a law of nature. So it is psychologically: every individual has potentialities in his nature, all of which are not merely seeking their own individual ends, but each and all of which serve the functions of the personality as a whole. Our personality as a whole, like every organism, is working towards its own fulfilment.

Hadfield connects this even more directly with the overall self-regulatory physical processes in saying:

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 violent dreams from which we wake with a start. But by this means, the balance of our personality is restored.’ The difference between Jung is that Hadfield is saying the dream is not merely ‘compensating’ for something the conscious personality is doing but is being purposive in pushing toward healing or growth. As with the physical process of self-regulation, which overall supports growth and stability, this psychological process in dreams appears to have much the same function.

To make this psychological self-regulatory process more understandable, let us remember some of the main physiological processes. Richet said ‘instability is the necessary condition for true stability, and our being must be able to modify itself in relationship to the external stimuli. In a very simplistic sense this means that if we are overcome by fear we must be capable of feeling courage to compensate. Without this compensation we remain paralysed with fear. If our psyche is not ‘unstable’ or mobile enough, this compensatory release cannot occur.

Freud and Jung join the Discussion

Freud showed modern man that apart from their everyday waking life, they also had an obscure or hidden inner life taking place unconsciously. He showed that people had tendencies or desires they would not admit even to themselves. These desires or impulses were held back or repressed from conscious recognition and expression, and dreams portrayed some of these hidden longings or traumas. These longings were mostly childhood urges that were natural at the time, and expressive of the stage of development the child was going through. They had never been fulfilled because the child had gained the impression from adults that such things were either wrong, would cause people to withdraw love or support, or were very injurious. As an example, a mother might withdraw love every time the child sucked its thumb, or be terribly shocked on finding the child masturbating. Thus, the drives to gain pleasure in the thumb, or to fulfil the need to release a sexual tension, would be repressed. As further growth can only arise out of the fulfilled activity of early growth processes, and as such drives are parts of physical and psychological growth, further growth is thereby blocked. Dreams would show, by the energy drive – to masturbate – and the factor that blocked it – the fear of disapproval or being unwhole. The self-regulatory process of energy release is thereby stopped, and degrees of illness in body and soul would be experienced.

Freud also brought to light that the emotions of an earlier injury, such as being nearly drowned , or bitten by a dog, or being beaten or unloved by a parent, could be repressed and cause present illness or neurotic behaviour. But Freud never seemed to clearly express the self-regulatory aspect of the unconscious processes such as dreams. As Caron Kent says, “In Freudian analysis the emphasis is still placed on the ego and its conflicts. It is held that the ego is in conflict with its instincts or some other obscure forces. That the unconscious itself was a spontaneous source from which the ego as well as the organism unfolded, was not conceived. Freud did not see that before man can say “I am” – “I will” – “I think” – he has to grow, to breath, to digest and to metabolise. The mysterious force in our being is the growth force.”

In modern times, Jung has been the great explorer of this side of human nature in regard to the unconscious, and Wilhelm Reich in regard to the body. Through long years of study, Jung showed that dreams do not simply express the conflict between our conscious self and our instincts. They are also an expression, capable of being recognised by consciousness, of the wisdom underlying our existence. The wisdom that forms a baby, that holds the stomach sphincter closed while the intestine heals, that unfolds human personality, pre-exists our ego. This wisdom, expressing as it does in the growth forces, and the self-regulatory process of everyday life, lies deeper than our personal awareness, existed before it, and communicates with it. It is from this source the compensatory and growth forces of our being emerge, and if we have cut them off, our ability to meet our inner and outer life, our freedom, is diminished.

This deep centre of our being, from which our body, its structure, its functioning and our conscious ego or soul arise, Jung named the ‘Self’. In past ages it has been called Spirit or Atman. Writing of this, and the way dreams express it, Von Franz says in Man and His Symbols (Aldus)

Thus our dream life creates a meandering pattern in which, individual strands or tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. If one watches this meandering design over a long period of time, one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth – the process of individuation.

Gradually a wider and more mature personality emerges and, by degrees becomes effective and even visible to others. Since this psychic growth cannot be brought about by conscious effort of will power, but happens involuntarily and naturally, it is in dreams frequently symbolised by the tree whose slow, powerful, involuntary growth fulfils a definite pattern.

But this creative nucleus of the psychic growth – the Self – can only come into play when the ego gets rid of purposive and wishful aims, and tries to go to a deeper, more basic form of existence. The ego must be able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any desire or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth.

Von Franz, here explaining the Jungian attitude, expresses one polarity of our relationship with our own source – that of surrender to it. Other schools express the other polarity of making the ego so strong and defended it can dominate its source and instincts. There is a middle way, but before commenting on this, what has been said of body and soul is brought into clear relief by recent research into sleep and dreams. It was found that “every normal adult and child over a certain, as yet undetermined, but very tender, age, have hallucinatory experiences of dreaming, as a regular, repetitive concomitant of natural sleep.” That is, every person tested, dreams in cycles throughout sleep.

“This nightly pattern is as universal as sleep – and as regular as the motions of the planetary bodies. At first one falls into a deep dreamless sleep. After about sixty or seventy minutes there is a rising up toward waking consciousness and one dreams for about nine minute. Down into dreamless sleep again, but not as deep. After ninety minutes, up toward waking consciousness again, and about nineteen minutes of dreaming. Now a shallower trough of dreamless sleep for another ninety minutes, up, and this time twenty four minutes dreaming. Down, and up after ninety minutes for twenty-eight minutes. The fifth period of dreaming then continues until fully waking. People who were woken as dreams began, and thus were prevented from dreaming, after a few days showed signs of mental’ and physical breakdown.

There are several important points to note regarding these findings about the psychological process of self-regulation or homeostasis. For instance, Freud made it quite plain that many contents of the unconscious cannot, or do not, easily rise into awareness. Therefore such things as sexual urges were symbolised in dreams instead of being directly felt. This means that even while asleep and dreaming the process of repression or control continues. So although there is an attempt, on the part of one’s unconscious processes, to deal with conflicts, to release and integrate past trauma, there is an opposition to this through repression and the avoidance of pain. As Ron Hubbard puts it, we have a held down 7.

Because of this, the conscious decision to face our own internal contents has to be made. This decision must include being ready to meet pain, disorientation, and the distorted feelings that arise from past trauma. Even with such a decision the journey is still not an easy one, for the release does not then occur spontaneously. We still have to persist, because at each step we are, as Freud puts it, resisting our own move toward health.

You can sail the seas of a stormy life

Dr. Oliver Sacks worked with the drug L. Dopa with patients who had lain in a coma-like state for years. This led them to wake and once more consciously face the world of objective and subjective experience. He says of these ‘awakenings’ “all the operations in coming to terms with oneself and the world, in face of continual changes in both, are subsumed in Claud Bernard’s fundamental concept of ‘homeostasis’ . . . We have to recognise homeostatic endeavours at all levels of being, from molecular and cellular to social and cultural, all in infinite relation to each other.”

His patients, often severely diseased physically and emotionally, sometimes managed, he says, to become astute and expert navigators, steering themselves through seas of trouble which would have caused less expert patients to founder on the spot. “Thus some patients with severe illnesses got well and remained so, and some less ill never managed. They had obviously learned or not learned to work with their own nature.”

He goes on to say that we must concede the possibility that nature, and, therefore, human nature, has an almost limitless ability to reorganise itself at chemical, cellular and hormonal levels. This is seen in action where, with the ‘will to get well’ patients inexplicably recover from the most serious of illnesses. “One must allow,” he writes “with surprise, with delight, that such things happen. Health goes deeper than any disease.”

Opening the Doors to the Self

So far it has been pointed out that the self-regulatory process is fundamental in body and mind. It has also been shown that we may unconsciously resist the action of that because of the pain or disorientation it might temporarily cause in its healing action. Dreams have been described as one of the main processes of self-regulation in the psyche, but once again, their action of healing can be resisted. Physiologically the process of vomiting is a self-regulatory process, ridding the body of poisons or harmful bacteria. Psychologically, powerful spontaneous body movements and emotions are also ways the self-regulatory process deals with harmful experience. Because this is so important, it is helpful to understand something of its action.

As almost anybody can observe, sometimes during sleep and dreaming, we call out, or our body moves expressive of what is happening in the dream. Adrian Morrison at the University of Pennsylvania, uncovered some interesting information in connection with this. Usually, in animals and humans, a small area of the pons in the brain prevents our muscular system from responding to signals from the brain while we are dreaming. If this were not so we would make full body movements while asleep as we do in the dream. As it happens, only a tiny fraction of these movements break through, except for the rapid eye movement of dreaming. But Morrison noticed that in mammals in which the pons is damaged, full body movements are made during REM sleep.

Although this has already been described elsewhere in the book, because of its importance I repeat that this shows not only can the dream process create a spontaneous fantasy or experience we call a dream, not only can it invest the dream with deeply felt emotions or creative ideas, it also expresses as full body movement. Such body activities are prevented by the pons from being expressed except perhaps in small jerks or movements. Nevertheless, speech, walking, dancing, fighting and making love, are all frequent dream subjects.

So human beings have at least two centres that can direct body processes. We are used to making conscious decisions about walking or moving our hands, but few of us suspect that another part of our being outside our conscious volition is capable and practised in making full body movements and expressing in complex speech.

I believe that by letting things happen without criticism or interference, we can actually allow the dream process to break through into waking life and express in full body movements, speech, a dramatic theme, and deeply felt emotions. We begin to be aware of things that usually happen to our psyche only while we sleep. Our consciousness is expanded to the point where it includes a realm of experience that is in many ways different from our waking world. In quite a real sense we begin to ‘wake up’ in what was sleep. We start to become explorers of the unconscious. As exciting as that is, it might not have much point, apart from a novelty, if it were not for the many possibilities the awakening holds.

Many therapeutic approaches completely overlook this fundamental process of self-healing through physical movement. Neither Freud nor Jung really dealt with this. Only Reich and the approaches emerging from him fully appreciated it. Yet many traumatic experiences, from birth through to medical operations, are deeply physical. Tensions in our body do no simply melt away. Often the desires, anger and movements that are linked with the original episode need to be expressed and released in some way. Apart from that, body and mind are not separate. They are intimately meshed, and what needs to be felt with one is expressed with the other.

Ancient cultures all recognised this, and many of them developed techniques in which an environment in which this could occur were developed. We are not simply a body, nor simply a mind. We are not simply a creature of time and death, but also a creature of those aspects of the universe that lie beyond time and space. So when a therapist only talks and debates with us, they are only dealing with thinking. You need an acknowledgement of your body and your spirit to become whole. Accept nothing less.

Therefore, the opening to this process of self-regulation takes you into and through the jungle of your inner fears and strengths. But more important than anything else, it opens you to the influence of the transcendent principle that is at your core. That transcendent influence leads you into becoming a new being.

Summary

• Self-regulation is fundamental to all cosmic activities and life forms.
• In humans it acts both at a physical and a psychological level.
• It assures survival.
• It is partly a spontaneous process and is partly learned.
• Most self-regulation occurs unconsciously, and learning to cooperate with its action is a learned skill.
• Such skill enlarges ones possibilities.
• Vomiting and digestion are functions of physical self-regulation.
• The rising into consciousness of emotions and experience for integration and re-evaluation are functions of psychological self-regulation.
• The process of self regulation is constantly attempting to present past traumas and ‘held down 7’s’ for integration and healing. However, there are forces of resistance to this active in us, and these have to be overcome if we are to succeed in becoming whole.
• Pain and such feelings as fear and guilt frequently cause us to prevent experience and emotions from emerging into consciousness.
• Freud showed that if a person is afraid of sexual feelings their sexuality is repressed even in their dreams.
• Such deeply repressed feelings cause psychological and physical tension and illness.
• Allowing spontaneous body and feeling fantasy allows the emotions and experience held in the unconscious to be released, evaluated and integrated.
• At points where fear or pain usually block the process one can decisively allow the self-regulatory process to continue.
• Because this allows previously unrealised experience to be known, an enlargement of our personal self awareness occurs.

Forgiveness As a Power Source

Forgiveness may sometimes be mistaken for an action taken through weakness, or as an act of “goodness” or Christian sentiment. But when understood, forgiveness has the power to transform us, and change the future we are creating out of our attitudes and actions.

As an example of this, some years ago life events led me to face a very painful experience. My wife was living abroad for a while and I did not know when she was coming back. This triggered the release in me of a terror I had kept buried since the age of three. At that time my mother, at the doctor’s suggestion, had sent me away to a convalescent hospital because my health was poor. Unfortunately, because my grandmother had been my prime carer, and had died before I had reached the age of two, I had already experienced great loss. This had left me open to the fear of abandonment. Being at the hospital released this terror that I had been abandoned.

Meeting that terror again in my late 40s was almost more than I could bear. Although the feeling was originally connected with my mother, as usually happens, whoever we love becomes the target for such fears. In meeting these awful feelings, I traced the origin of them back to the events mentioned. But the terrific anger I felt to my mother at exposing me to such unbearable emotions, also spilled over onto my wife.

The anger did not abate and it became obvious that unless I could forgive my mother, I would ruin my marriage with my anger.

It was difficult to find this forgiveness because I felt that what my mother had done was unforgivable. Of course none of this was neatly rational. The feelings were burning beyond reason, and could not be rationalised away. But I could not ignore the fact that this was not, in the end, about my mother, but about myself. My continued anger was ruining my life. So for my own sake I had to sincerely forgive my mother. This was not a fast change, and it was not easy. But it did release me from the crippling effects of the anger. And some effects of non-forgiveness in these situations are quite subtle. One might, for instance, avoid success in one’s life so that those close to you could never feel the pleasure or relaxation of that.

However, forgiveness sometimes has a much more profound significance. I believe that our primal life difficulties, such as mine connected with abandonment, actually have their roots in the long past. It may be easy for us to recognise that my terror can be traced back to the events mentioned in this lifetime. From this we can say, “Yes, the fears he faced as an adult were caused by the loss of his grandmother. And his mother’s decision to put him in the hospital restimulated that fear.”

However, if we can agree that we can trace things back to causative events, why can’t we also say, the original events also had causes? For instance, my mother did other things later in my life to deepen my terror of abandonment. Why?

From the viewpoint of modern genetics, it is understandable that a present day sickness in an individual’s life may be the result of events from generations ago. We understand that the gene pool from which our own physical body arises, has had negative and positive features added to it over tens of thousands of years. Therefore our present physical, and to some extent psychological, situation, arises out of events in the long past. If we can understand this, then we might also understand and accept that besides a gene pool, there is also a behavioural pool out of which a great deal of human behaviour arises. This is particularly evident in comparing different cultures where certain types of behaviour are passed on for thousands of years.

Some people think of this in terms of past lives. But we can also think of it simply as past events that influence our present life experience as causative factors. So, because it is easier to explain, I will create a scenario using the imagery of past lives.

Supposing in the far past I had hurt and abandoned a child. Supposing the child I had hurt in that previous lifetime is my mother in this lifetime, and she has never forgiven me for what I did. In other words, the actions generated by the past hurt are causative factors, are active and alive in the life of my mother, and are therefore influencing her. In this present life, my mother is in a position of power, and I am the vulnerable child now. So, from whatever it was in her deep unconscious that influenced her actions, she still wishes to hurt me, and did so several times.

I am presenting this as a speculation because I wish to present you with an idea, a viewpoint.

So, if you can follow this example simply as a possibility, what would have happened if I could not have forgiven my mother when I discovered the origins of my terror? Instead of ending the cycle of revenge, the hurt and anger could have been stored deep in me, generating more causative factors in the future. Those causative factors would have flowed into my life in the future, or influenced another life to perpetuate the hurt. And where or when would that end?

Also, the misery would spread out into the lives of those around me — to my wife for instance. Ripples upon ripples, and the world has enough waves of vengeance and bitterness riding through it already.

I wonder what the origins of your own hurt are. Where did they begin, and where will they end? Forgiveness can be the power that cancels them from further influence in your life.

The act of forgiveness has stages. The first is to recognise that the pain, or lack of inner peace, is arising from a withheld feeling or grudge. Was it Robbie Burns who said we can nurse a grudge to keep it warm?

Such withheld feelings may be on any scale. It may, for instance, be about a misunderstanding between you and a partner or friend. This can usually be dealt with by careful communication, and sharing of information or feelings. Then the difficulty is melted away or let go of.

But sometimes communication doesn’t help. It may in fact lead to argument or a deepening of the hurt or misunderstanding. Then we have to deal with it alone. Also some situations are difficult to really understand, and are not clear-cut. We may struggle for years to understand or come to terms with why a marital breakdown occurred; why someone we trusted betrayed us; why a situation suddenly changed. We might never reach understanding without a very open and honest communication with the person or persons involved. Sometimes people do not really know their motives — so even such communication would not help.

We are therefore left with our own distress and feelings of hurt, and what we will do with them. Even if we can see and admit what stress they cause, and damage they do, it is often not possible to simply let go of them. Such strong feelings, rooted in real pain, have a life and will of their own. If, in the manner of dreams, such feelings took on an identity of their own, and stood before you as a person, they might simply say, “No” to any suggestion of letting go the anger or hurt. Then there is nothing to be gained by fighting with such a secondary character in yourself.

The Empty Chair technique can be a great help if such a resistance exists. But before we look at ways of using that, a couple of examples may show how difficult forgiveness can sometimes be, and what a change can be made when it is found.

The process that lies behind dreams continually attempts to bring a state of balance or peace within us. But it can only do this if we can allow ourselves to experience a wide range of feelings, and to let go of the grudges or pains we have been holding on to. Stephanie, whose dream this is, tells us that it is only when she allowed forgiveness into our life that real change could occur.

She says, I was lying in my bed and a man was beside me. Gradually he got older and older until he was dead. Then he became a skeleton in bed beside me. I felt horrible. When I woke there was still some difficult feelings but these went. I realised that things, emotions, troubling me for ages, had all been cleared. Previously at church the vicar had talked about the healing of forgiveness, and in some way this had happened while I was dreaming. Now, quite a time after the dream, I am still in the state of ease.

The next dream shows how a solution can be sought and found in a dream. The woman, May, had suffered years of emotional misery and alienation from her family.

She says, “Because of this, when I was down to absolute rock bottom emotionally, I consulted a hypnotherapist who explained that hypnosis was used only as a last resort. I went to her once a week for over a year. I was treated under psychotherapy, and I had to write down my dreams every day. Through this I recognised my areas of problems, and in time my problems lessened. However, I had to travel seventy miles altogether for each visit, and with petrol becoming more expensive I gave up the consultations. All the same, I felt I hadn’t really reached the real root of the trouble. I delved into my known past, but not my unknown past. Consequently, after about six months I drifted back into my old depression and aggressive dreams and nightmares.

“I always seemed to be searching for the lost years. My real mother died when I was nineteen months old and my sister was one month. In the same week my Dad was called up for the War. Unable to get anyone to look after two young children, Dad paid a woman to look after me, while my sister was adopted by an aunt and uncle. My father re-married when I was seven, and I have two half brothers and one half sister. As I grew up none of my family would let me speak about the past, making it a taboo subject. Because of this I used to fall out with them on and off. I am now forty three, and when my father died five years ago, I got in such a rage, telling my family I was never one of them, and now that Dad was dead I had no family. The guilt and depression I felt about this was what led me to go to the hypnotherapist.

“This year, in January, forty one years from the day my own mother died, my stepmother died. This sent me into such agonising emotions I had to give up my job, and was near to a nervous breakdown. However, on the nineteenth of March I had this dream.

“My son had a spray which made him very small. He was able to speak to and see various small characters and Walt Disney people. He sprayed me so I could see the characters too. He found a tiny friend, a girl of his own age. He was so small – insect size – that when he crossed a road with his friends he got trodden on. I had a terrible feeling of loss. Then my son laughed and said, ‘We are all okay. We are too small for anyone to hurt us.’

“My son sprayed other members of the family and I began to have the feeling I knew the answer to my years of depression and guilt. Then we were walking down a sunny promenade. I saw my father sitting on a bench. I hesitated, feeling I could not go to him. My son told me not to worry. He said, ‘If you can’t love your father I will love you both as son and Father. If you are too silly as grown ups to see it doesn’t matter about all the past, I’ll make up the love to you.’ The little girl with him went to my father and said the same thing. Then my father and I both laughed and went to each other, thinking how silly we had been all those years. We both got the feeling of forgiveness and saw how we had wasted all those years because we didn’t have the simple love of a child.

“My father had then been sprayed and could see the characters, who all began to dance. On the beach nearby were my stepsister and stepbrother and wife, sun-bathing in the warmth. Instead of my usual pit feeling I felt playful and kicked some sand over them. I had the wonderful feeling of happiness and floating. I told them the story, and said the answer was so simple. Forgive each other, love and forget the past and look to the future. I felt it was a miracle, and knew it was the answer to finding peace with my family, living and deceased. And as the dream ended there was a crescendo of moving music. All the Disney characters were there, with pairs of birds in nests all around in trees. They had little comic notices hung outside such as ‘Goodnight’, ‘God Bless’, ‘Don’t Snore.’

“Since the dream, six months ago, I have become reconciled with most of my family, though I doubt if they can understand the reasoning behind it. I now have this wonderful feeling of well-being. ‘Though life still has its difficulties.’”

May’s dream shows how one does not necessarily have to interpret the symbols to find healing or understanding. The dream itself is clear enough to understand directly. Also the dream actually gives May the direct experience of what it feels like to forgive, to feel the warmth of love, and to look forward instead of back. She had developed the habit from a year of psychotherapy, of looking within herself for answers, and expecting help from her dreams. So those things are important.

This last dream shows the funny side of what we are doing when we hold on to rigid self-righteousness, and thereby avoid forgiveness.

Some time ago I had a dream that illustrates this situation. In the dream I stood facing myself. The second me stood above on something, and was condemning me for not being as good a father as I might have been. Meanwhile I stood below begging forgiveness for all the wrong things I had done, and feeling terribly guilty and an awful failure. But gradually the funny side of the situation struck me, and I called out to the second me, ‘Come down from there, you fool. You’re only me condemning myself and making me a failure.’

When I woke from the dream I could see how true the dream was, and what a destructive habit I had. If I projected the feeling of being a second-rate father, my children would feel it and believe they were second-rate children.

Many of us in fact have such a voice, which stands superior, creating less creativity and depression.

Part of the wonder of dreams is that through them the unconscious activities in us are made conscious. Our self-destructive habits are brought to light, the whisperings of our fears are heard and dealt with.

Therefore, by expecting help and an experience of forgiveness to occur in your dreams you may be able to bring it about. However, if this does not occur, you can use the Empty Chair technique.

For this, you will need two chairs place opposite each other and fairly close. Before you start you need to define what hurt, or what anger you are going to deal with, and to what person the anger or grudge is directed.

When you have done this, and you have set the scene, you sit in one of the chairs. You now imagine your feelings of anger or hurt in the form of a person sitting opposite you. Give them a name if you can.

Now ask them what they are upset or hurt about. Then sit in what was the empty chair and take on the role of the hurt character. Do not attempt to be the two aspects of yourself at the same time. If you want to comment on something that has been said by the first character, move back to the other chair.

As the hurt character, do not edit or repressed what you feel. You can be as angry, vocal and emotional as you like. Nobody is going to get hurt, because nobody is there to hear or receive what is expressed except yourself.

For example, as the hurt character I might say, “There’s no way I am going to forgive them. Bugger me, they did it in cold blood! If you forgive somebody like that, they could easily creep back into your favour and do it again!”

As yourself, you could reply to this as, “There is a difference between forgiving and forgetting. Nobody is asking you to forget. That would be silly because you would not have learned from the event. What I am asking you is what you feel, and what damage your feelings are creating in our life?”

Allow your imagination and creative fantasy to take part in this conversation. If you get stuck, wait for inspiration. Perhaps remind the hurt and unforgiving character that what they are doing is creating difficulties for both of you. If necessary, come back to this several times until you feel a real shift and sense that forgiveness has happened.

So, to sum up, look to your dreams for help in resolving the pains and anger that may arise because you cannot forgive.

Be ready to feel things you may not have faced before, as Stephanie did in her dream.

Confront yourself with the negative effects that lack of forgiveness is producing in your life.

Be patient with yourself. Sometimes these shifts take time, and perhaps occasionally need events to push you into the change.

The Collective Unconscious

Some thinkers, like Jung and Sheldrake, see individual human consciousness like an island in a huge ocean in which there are countless other islands. Above the surface of the water – waking self-awareness – there is a sense of separate existence, with definite boundaries where the shore meets the sea. Beneath the surface however, one island is connected to all other islands. The land stretches away under the waves and rises here and there into other islands. So, it is thought, personal awareness, beneath our everyday consciousness, shades off into a connection with a collective unconscious we all share. Through this connection we may be able to arrive at insights into other people otherwise denied to us.

In recent years there has been a lot of research very strongly suggesting that the quantum level of the universe is such a universal memory and consciousness. See Physics – new physics and the mind

Jung describes the collective unconscious as the ‘inherited potentialities of human imagination. It is the all controlling deposit of ancestral experiences from untold millions of years, the echo of prehistoric world events to which each century adds an infinitesimal small amount of variation and differentiation. These primordial images are the most ancient, universal, and deep thoughts of mankind.’

However, such ideas have been stated long before Jung and modern psychology. Eastern philosophy has talked of the akasha, the fundamental substance that holds in it memory of all that has happened. In Western occultism levels of awareness have been defined for hundreds of years. At the end of the 19th century Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke wrote about Cosmic Consciousness that was described as having the same universality as the collective unconscious.

A lucid experience describes this very clearly:

Now it seemed as if my awareness went beyond the frontier. This was a very visual experience. I was seeing a vast desert and I knew this represented immense periods of time, perhaps what we call eternity. So it could be called the Desert of Eternity. Here and there in the desert were huge rock formations, a little bit like what one sees in Monument Valley in Arizona. But these rock formations were not plain or slightly coloured rock. Also they were immense. They had the appearance of massive mosaics – brightly coloured mosaics. But the mosaics did not form illustrations or patterns. However, some pieces of the mosaics were larger than others. And each piece might be in itself multicoloured and a sort of miniature pictograph.

As I looked at these massive formations I understood that they had been carved or created through events in the passage of time. Each mosaic, each part of the overall mosaic, had been formed by enormous creative acts, or by long-standing actions. So these latter were like ideograms or archetypes. So, for instance, mother creatures have cared for, fought for, died for their young. This pattern of behaviour has been so enormously potent and perhaps we can use the word successful, that it has created, shaped aspects of eternity. It has left its pattern, its artwork, on time itself. Thus eternity honours that pattern by giving it a place in the very structure of itself. No one being created such a mosaic in the formations. Such a mosaic was large and had in it the essence of all the lives that formed it.

So the rock formations and the mosaics on them represented influences that will flow into the future. They were sources of power or influence that shaped the phenomenal world. They were the body under the coat so to speak. See Archetypes – Links to

This explains some forms of intuition, as one person’s mind is said to connect to all others beneath the surface in the unconscious. In this way, questions or inquiry about a particular person will draw information pertaining to them from the enormous collective unconscious. In fact Einstein said that “Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust – we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper”. So our individual consciousness is rather an outcrop of a huge and ancient collective consciousness.

Edgar Cayce discovered in his adulthood, that he could put himself at will into the state of mind in which he could tap this unconscious reservoir of knowledge. Because he could diagnose people’s illness without examining them, his work was supported by doctors. Investigators of psychology and philosophy also sought him, and he dictated 14 million words while in this state of wider awareness. His findings suggest that we all have this ability to tap the wealth of unconscious information – truly a collective unconscious – but few of us can bring it to waking awareness. His biography, There is a River, and Seer Out of Season, are astonishing and inspiring books to read. See: Edgar Cayce.

We see this markedly in animals that are largely instinctive. Birds have no present memory of how to fly or build a nest, yet when the time comes they draw on something that enables them to express the collective experience of their species.

I am a Child of the Universe

If this connection is a fundamental part of everybody’s life, the waters of self and the waters of the ocean are not separated. Jung called this universal consciousness the collective unconscious. Other cultures have given it other names – the ocean of Brahm for instance in Hinduism. Within Buddhism there is also the phrase, ‘the dewdrop slips into the shining sea’. Australian Aborigines call it The Dreamtime.

The image of the dewdrop slipping into the ocean illustrates the individual becoming aware of melting the boundaries of their personal awareness, and becoming aware of the ocean of sentience within which they exist.

When we first begin to ‘hear the voice of God’ again – i.e. feel the immense power of the collective unconscious, the foundation of our awareness – we are often afraid, even terrified, as the story of Adam and Eve depicts. The fear arises because whether we admit it or not, we feel we might be swallowed up, be lost in the immensity. Basically it is a fear of death. See What Happens When I Die?

 Reaching the shore of consciousness

Looking back at the psychological history of humanity, at their emergence of identity out of an animal level of awareness, all consciousness was originally merged, as it were, in a great ocean or pool. At that point no creature had crawled out of that pool. Nothing had arrived at self-awareness. No sense of separateness or identity had emerged. Then out of that ocean onto the shore of self-awareness, perhaps for moments only at first, a daring creature crawled and said – ‘I am’. Doing so they left a mark – footprints, two stones rolled together, scratches on a rock, a cave painting. And those creatures still in the ocean looked out upon others and wondered, until a spark was struck in them too. Perhaps struggling for a closer view they emerged and gasping also exclaimed – I am – and added another rock.

So the ocean is the world of sleep, babyhood, life of the nameless herd, consciousness immersed completely in the streams of instinct, reproduction, eating, sleeping and the senses, the collective unconsciousness. But the shore is the pathway of consciousness, the spoken word, art, drama, music, education and questioning enquiry. We all take this path if today we can say ‘I am’! We too, in our infancy, emerged from the collective consciousness. We too were gained a soul, an identity, when we were given a name and speech. You too stepped out of the great waters of life – and will meet them again at death. See Programmed 

As already quoted, Jung describes this as the ‘inherited potentialities of human imagination. It is the all controlling deposit of ancestral experiences from untold millions of years, the echo of prehistoric world events to which each century adds an infinitesimal small amount of variation and differentiation. These primordial images are the most ancient, universal, and deep thoughts of mankind.’

What this means in practical terms is that through our dreams, or through any of the ways people access this immense reservoir of human experience, we can find patterns of behaviour – archetypes – and whole memories of people who have lived through and found solutions to the problems we face, or defined the understanding we are seeking. Also, Cayce found actual details of medicines and techniques that had been used successfully in the past and were part of the memory within the collective unconscious.

In trying to present this to sceptical colleagues and intellectuals and scientists of his time, Jung tried to explain his observation of a strata of being in which individual minds have their collective origin in a genetic way. This seems unlikely, and Rupert Sheldrake sees it as a mental phenomena. Dr Maurice Bucke called it Cosmic Consciousness. J. B. Priestley saw it as ‘the flame of life’ which synthesised the experience of all living things and held within itself the essentials of all lives. If we think of it as a vast collective memory of all that has existed, then we can say the life of Edgar Cayce exhibited a working relationship with it.

Such a collective level of mind would explain many things, such as telepathy, so called out of body experiences, life after death, which have always been puzzling because it is difficult to explain them using presently known beliefs. Mostly this difficulty has been because our language and the concepts arising from it insist of a duality of mind and body. However, researches into the nature of fundamental particles – quantum – show us that such divisions do not exist, except in our limited sensory view of the world.

For more information See: Quantum Physics; Levels of Awareness – Levels of the Brain – Consciousness – The Brain Mind Split;  Cayce, Edgar; archetype of the self; religion and dreams; sea; Dimensions of Human Experience

Black Magic, Evil and Dreams

Although thorough investigation of claimed injury or death attributed to black magic has shown the real cause to be malicious aggression or murder, scientific research into the deaths of people who were said to have died as the result of a curse or a voodoo ritual, has shown the victims to have died of fear.

Death through fear is fairly common, and is reported by some doctors in connection with surgical operations, especially in the past. In 1887 Dr. Crile had watched helpless as his friend, William Lyndman died of shock after amputation of both legs. My uncle also died of the shock of losing his arm. My uncle, like William had lost little blood, and no vital organs were injured. Crile went on to develop anaesthesia and blood transfusion to counteract death through shock. But some forms of shock appeared to be outside any physical cause. In 1898 Crile was on an army transporter off Cuba and examined a young officer who was delirious with fear due to facing his first battle. He was as deep in shock as if his legs had been crushed by a wagon as William Lyndman’s had. This led Crile to become interested in exopthalmic goitre, an illness which produces a similar type of anxiety condition. Despite the use of anaesthetics, no one had successfully operated on such a goitre condition. Every patient died. Crile discovered why when he attempted such an operation in 1905.

While under anaesthesia the patients heart rate rose to 218 and the body temperature rose to a dangerous level. Despite no physical injury or infection, the patient died that night with a temperature of 109.6 F. Crile realised from his previous observations that it was fear which had killed the patient. Therefore he told his next patient, a young woman who needed the goitre operation, that he was going to give her a simple inhalation treatment. When she breathed in the anaesthetic, she therefore thought she was having a ‘treatment’ not an operation. She was the first person to survive the operation for exopthalmic goitre. Crile called it “stealing the goitre”, and was so impressed by the influence of emotion on the body he constantly stressed the importance of self control, and taught that calmness is strength.

Crile’s experience illustrates what can occur through threat of a curse or black magic. In our dreams we often portray something we deeply fear as an evil influence or person, or as an awful monster or ghost. Such fears usually relate to our own urges, such as anger or sexuality, but can be about any urge or thought that we have been led to feel is not permissible, or downright evil. A demonic figure or environment might also be connected with very early babyhood experiences. The pain of birth is often depicted as hell or demonic influence in our dream symbolism. On exploring dreams that have a very evident evil force or devil in them, what is discovered is that the ‘evil’ is actually the person’s own repressed or hurt sexuality or urges. See: evil; witchcraft; The Con About Evil.

Because the unconscious will use any belief system or cultural symbols we have absorbed to express a theme, the powerful images of witches or evil characters we see on films or in fiction are often used to depict important experiences. For example a dream in which a spell or curse is placed on one can portray the influence a painful experience has left on ones emotions. If you had been deeply hurt while in your mother’s arms, your unconscious would equate pain with being held close by a woman. This ‘cross wiring’ of associations could meaningfully be portrayed as a ‘spell’ which makes one feel frightened in the apparently loving situation. See Victims; Dream Like a Computer Game; spell.