Posts Tagged ‘dream interpretation’

Example 13 – Dreams of Hell

I had a weird dream last night. I dreamt that someone I know (an old family friend of my parents) had purchased a new house, which was not yet furnished. But the house is apparently possessed by the Devil. I do not remember if the house was already possessed, or the possession occurred post the purchase of the house. In the day time some other people and me (who I know but cannot seem to recall) have been called into the house to analyze the situation. The house is well lit and the setting is daytime. Each time I speak the word Devil or Satan, the lights of the house switch off automatically on their own. Someone else says the words and the same flickering of the lights happen. The discussion happening in the dream is that the Devil can hear us and “he” doesn’t like being talked about or plans made to get rid of it. (he)

Well, I decide in consultation with the people and in my thoughts in the dream to perform an exorcism on the house. I chant some prayers for the house to be cleansed. (These are Hindu prayers, and parts of Psalm 99 from the Bible). Then the details get hazy and I can’t remember. The dream becomes lucid again and I find myself standing with some friends in front of a life-size rectangular mirror which has been kept against the wall, facing us upright on the floor.

The friends pose in front of the mirror just for fun and they tell me to join them. When I stand in front of the mirror, I cast no reflection on it. But my friends do. So I hear myself say that “The devil is doing this to the mirror cos I am fighting to get rid of him.” After that small holes start appearing on the walls all over the house, much like the holes made by the tee of the golf balls. The dream ends then. I woke up and it was 5.30 am.

Throughout the dream, I was not afraid even one bit of trying to challenge the devil or in my entire thought process. Rather my attitude was somewhat cocky or neutral. In my mind it was like ” yeah yeah, let’s see what all you can do”. This is not how I am in real life. I deeply believe in God and the Higher Powers, and there is a certain respect for all forces which lie beyond our general comprehension. This is also includes those which lie outside the parlance of science and maybe are also negative. But this does not imply that I respect Satan. It also does not imply that I would like to abuse or criticize any force or power that is contrary to what I believe in.

 

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The Devil attacked a woman. He was invisible. The woman turned black as he raped her. She didn’t die. At this point I woke and went to the toilet. On returning to bed I continued the dream, particularly wondering what I was in conflict with in the image of the Devil. I found it disturbing and frightening to be confronted by such a powerful opponent. Partly because of the rape, I realised it was repressed sexuality. I then approached the ‘black’ woman with tenderness and this transformed the Devil into available sexual or emotional energy. I tried this again and again. Each time it worked, and I could observe the Devil was my sexual warmth and love that had become negative through restraint.’ Neil V

 

 

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Little red devils entered this boy’s dream:

“I saw many little red devils who began to press me deep into the ground. Deep in the earth I met the king of the devils. He frightened me and in seeking to escape I noticed an elevator on the right.”

That dream left such an impression on the boy that he carried the memory of it into his adult life. Although the dream may have been stimulated by an adult’s careless remark about “the devil in you” or “the devil will get you,” it still was meaningful; for dreams, said Cayce, may be interpreted on more than one level. In the dream, the earth is the boy’s own body, or his own unconscious. This is where he will meet both the king of the devils and his assistants. The boy’s being pressed deeper into the earth by the devils in order to meet the king of the devils symbolizes the pressures and temptations of life that force us to meet ourselves in order to develop latent abilities. The elevator to the right indicates that there is always a way of escape from temptations or devils—and that is the right way; for the only devil we have to fear is ourselves.

Example 12

A way of finding out what your dream means by using the questions included in some dictionary entries.

 

Hi Tony,

Deborah –  Sorry for the delay! Here are my responses:

Tony – What feelings are connected with my dream animal – fear, anger, love, wisdom

– and in what way is that entering my life?

Deborah – Annoyance and a sense of invasion. In the dream the skunk had made its nest in a one-room house which I had found and rented. When I moved in I was very inspired by and in love with my beautiful new home–until I realized there was a skunk already living there. I think it is related to my anxiety about searching for a living space and also about my new job. In the past I have found myself in many “ideal” situations only to be let down later by unsettling realizations about the circumstances.

Tony – Is this an animal I know in life – if so what are my feelings or experience

of it?

Deborah – A couple of years ago I lived in an apartment on the second floor. A skunk had a made its nest on the ground outside, directly below the bedroom window. In the summer in Los Angeles with no air conditioning and the windows open, there were some terrible nights. That’s the only skunk experience I have had and it was pretty bad.

Tony – What is the dream animal doing, and metaphorically, what is that suggesting?

Deborah – The skunk had made its nest on the perch of a window about 12′ feet up, where I couldn’t reach. It could go in and out of the window, like a doggy door, but in the dream I only remember being inside this one-room house, which had a very high ceiling–maybe 30 feet. The skunk wasn’t bothering me, it was just living there, doing it’s own thing. I suppose it had access to an outside world and heights which I wasn’t visiting, however I was so inspired by the beautiful space and the soaring ceilings I didn’t desire any more than to be left alone there.

Tony – Is the animal asking anything of you, or seeking something?

Deborah – The skunk didn’t seem to notice me or care that I was there. It seemed busy with it’s own little agenda.

Tony – If you feel repulsed or resentful, describe what about.

Deborah – I did feel very resentful, like the skunk had invaded my territory. This is an odd feeling when I think about it, since the skunk was living there first and had more of a right to feel invaded. But I suppose I felt that I had finally found the perfect place to live in and the skunk was just ruining the whole experience.

Tony – Is there any hint of danger or hurt in the dream?

Deborah – The skunk was not dangerous or actively aggressive. In fact it seemed to have almost a nice personality. But I knew that being a skunk it would at some point cause trouble and put up a stink ( and I suppose the pun is intended).

Alright, I hope that is helpful! Would love to hear your insights into dream skunks!

best, Deborah

Introduction – Your Dream Interpreter

Tony Crisp

Introduction Dreams are one of the most extraordinary experiences any of us can have. This is why they have fascinated men and women in every culture throughout the ages. The roots of our own culture show that we are no exception to this. The Old and New Testament are full of dreams and dreaming, such as that of Pharaoh and of the warning dreams experienced by Joseph. (1) In our own times an enormous amount of experiment into the nature and meaning of dreams and sleep has taken place. This has occurred both in the laboratory and in the testing bed of everyday experience of tens of thousands of men, women and children, along with the professionals dealing with human problems. A vast amount has been learned, showing that dreams are more profoundly revealing of transformative insights and self-understanding than even the ancient cultures realised. This flood of new understanding has shown that dreams are not mysterious jumbles of random images, but arise from the innate mental and physical processes of life within us. They express the unconscious wisdom that enabled and sustains the growth and health of your body and mind. This enormous experiment and research have also defined ways that each of us can learn to understand the dramatic and graphic language of our dreams. What are dreams? As with any area of thought, there are a wide variety of views as to what dreams are and what function they play in life. But if we attempt to find a synthesis of these ancient and modern views, it is that dreams are an expression of the most fundamental processes of life in us reaching toward awareness. Creatures have dreamt for millions of years prior to human emergence, and in their dreaming we see the biological life of our planet arriving at its own kind of consciousness, but achieving it in a very different way than we know in our waking life. It is like a huge pool of collective awareness that never knows itself as any one thing, but is the experience of all living creatures. The Psychiatrist Carl Jung gave it the name of the Collective Unconscious. The Australian aborigines called it The Dreamtime, and recognised that all creatures emerge from it, and pass back into it in sleep and dreams. The aborigines call it the ‘all-at-once’ time instead of the ‘one-thing-after-another’ time. Whether we want to see this fundamental level of awareness as instinct, as holy, or as a collective unconscious, this fundamental part of us has the experience of millions of years. It has within it the essence of all human experience, from all cultures. Not only is this pool of collective experience ancient, holding all patterns of relationship already developed, but also it is always changing, always forming new possibilities from gathered experience. In our waking state we have built an image of who we are. We frequently really believe we are the person that image creates. What you touch in your dreams is the person you can be beyond those limitations and concepts. Dreams open to you this possibility of vastly extending your own experience, and finding wholeness and a connection with your roots. (2) Dreams are more than random images Countless experiments have shown that each of us dream about four or five times each night. While we dream our voluntary muscles no longer respond to our attempts to move, and our eyes move rapidly under closed eyelids. Our muscles are paralysed in this way because, if they were not, we would actually run around or act out what we are dreaming. Animals in which the brain area that blocks such impulses has been damaged live out their dream in movement. It can then be seen they are practising their basic life skills such as hunting or survival tactics. But dreams do not simply extend your experience and allow you to practice your future actions; they express all the other functions of the human mind and spirit, reaching beyond the limits of waking awareness and your senses. Dreams solve problems; they reflect the state of health of your body and mind; they reach into your past and often access your earliest memories and responses; they are an expression of the self-regulating process of your body and your mind; dreams express your deepest creative ability and reach into new views and possibilities; they are a safe area to directly experience, and therefore practice, having a baby, getting married, dying and exploring the unknown. Dreams reveal to you what you fail to see about yourself while awake. They show what you miss realising about the world around you, and the directions you are taking in life. They unveil things that usually lie beyond the boundaries of your five senses. But their information is sometimes obscured in apparently strange drama or feelings. Fortunately men and women throughout the ages, and especially in recent times, have clarified ways of extracting information from even the most obscure of dreams. Using these techniques enables you to gain insights that can transform the way you live and experience yourself. (3) It allows you to release old tensions and hurts. More than anything else it starts to unveil your immense potential. Link Back to Chapter Headings Notes (1) See Genesis 40:007 to 41:49 – and Mathew 1:20 and 2:11 (2) It would spoil the flow of the ideas to quote all references to support the statements made. However, the stated view of the dream and what lies behind it can be further explored in such books as: The section by Marie L. von Franz ‘The Process of Individuation’, in Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung. There is a River – The Story of Edgar Cayce, by Thomas Sugrue. Cosmic Consciousness – A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind by Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke. The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra. Supernature by Lyall Watson. The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. Collision With The Infinite by Suzanne Vega. (3) The word insight is used purposely. It is defined as ‘the capacity to discern the true nature of a situation; penetration. The act or outcome of grasping the inward or hidden nature of things or of perceiving in an intuitive manner.’

Dreaming a New Life

Surviving Tomorrow

Part Three

Tony Crisp

Forty years ago, during my twenties, I fell in love with a beautiful woman, she was intelligent, from a well placed family, lovely figure, and she wanted to be my partner. But there was a problem. I was married with three children. The result – conflict.

I struggled for months to restrain my passion for my new love. My fear, barely recognised at the time, was that if I let go my control my marriage would be smashed by what I would do, and so would my children. So I allowed myself no hand holding, no kissing, and definitely no sex.

The stress of restraint was such that travelling to work one day, and thus nearer to my new love, I suddenly found it hard to breathe, and a continuous ache in my chest began its entrance into my life that lasted for years. Medical examination showed there was nothing physically wrong. My doctor told me I had been working too hard and suggested I take a tranquiliser. The thought of surviving emotionally using something that deadened the way I responded to life didn’t appeal to me. So I started a quest for healing to deal with the chest pain and the depression that arose in what felt like a loveless life.

The search for healing led me on a long journey of discovery. During that quest my ‘New Love’ married someone else and we are still friends years later. My quest has been successful, and many treasure uncovered. One of the most precious of these, and one of the healing tools in meeting what I was facing, was my discovery of the world of dreams.

This new relationship with dreams started very slowly. Most experts at that time were saying you needed to interpret a dream – remember this was the sixties. Interpretation was fine for ideas, for thinking clever thoughts, but it made not one jot of difference to my pain or depression. Fortunately, as I have so often heard since, I hadn’t been exposed to the idea that depression was incurable. So my affliction of physical pain and my affliction of depression were like touchstones telling me what didn’t work. But those touchstones, when I moved on from interpretation to exploration of dreams, showed me that dreams worked – really worked.

The way dreams worked for me wasn’t by thinking about them or analysing them. They worked when I used them as a doorway to enter a deeper previously unknown dimension of myself. I have at times likened this to lifting up the floorboards or going into the cellar, and discovering what foundations the house of my personality is built on, and how all the apparatus of life is wired up. Once I learned to enter that place in myself, usually called ‘the unconscious’, I could begin to see what circuitry had created the depression, and what cross wiring had brought about the psychosomatic chest pain. It took work, but I could gradually restructure myself and correct the circuitry. In that way I saw that the chest pain had arisen because the enormous amount of emotional and sexual energy I had restrained had turned inward. Instead of a positive loving expression of passionate feelings it became personally destructive, like a knife wound. My depression had different causes. It was like a projector putting a distorted picture on a screen. The energy or light of my fundamental core self had blockages or filters put in the way of the light flow. In more direct terms events in my earliest years had led me to block off the full flow of my feelings, desires and anger – the full me. The shadows the blockages caused were what I experienced as depression. As the blockages were removed the depression faded.

In this exploration of my inner structure I saw that some things were cross circuited. My ability to love, for instance, had been damaged early in my life, setting up vulnerability in my emotions – my chest. So when the big challenge came regarding love the vulnerability became an open wound. Some things we carry go deep, and this one had level upon level.

Because of these powerful life changes, my observation over many years is that dreaming is vital for survival and health. I believe dreams arise from the very core process that gives us life and preserves health. Our core processes are an expression of life itself. They may be largely unconscious, but that doesn’t mean they cannot flow into our awareness. As with animals that move, and even experience bodily changes with the seasons without having a conscious mind, or watching the news on TV, I believe we also, at our deepest levels, are linked with changes the earth and heavens move through. The process behind dreams is always trying to get us ready for such changes to help us move with what is happening.

In past cultures life was often extremely difficult. In the Inuit (Eskimos) tribes for instance, the elderly knew that if there was a bad winter when food was short they would need to walk out into the frozen night to die, so the younger in the family could survive. Such tribal people often used their dreams to help them hunt in the right place to avoid such starvation. We may not need to go out with a bow to hunt our food, but when we face the unknown, the outreach dreams can give us, the depth of understanding of our life situation, are still often more helpful than any everyday skill we may have acquired.

I need to repeat some of that because it is not a popular statement supported by most of the scientific community. Dreams arise from the process that gives you life. They are part and parcel of the action in you that spontaneously makes you breathe faster when you run, or perspire when you are hot. They are an expression of the process that constantly regulates your body and mind in its attempts to keep you functioning.i But mere functioning and survival isn’t enough. The process goes beyond rebuilding and clearing out past trauma and pains in order to become healthier. The action of life in us presses to grow, to expand, to thrive and become more than we are at the moment. Beyond that too, dreams are often a helicopter ride surveying our life situation. From that wider perspective we can see possible dead end directions, traffic jams of delay, and ways we can take to meet our needs. Survival is not enough! We need to thrive and move with the times.

Dreams hold a mirror for us to look in. In the mirror we see what we have created of the life and love that flows through us. For in dreams we see the beauty or the tragedy, of what we have formed with our gift of life. The mirror of dreams is a way of checking the heights and depths of our being, seeing if all is working well, and in that way we can see how true we have been to what we know within us is our best.

In the mirror of my dreams I was shown clearly what I had done to the love that was innate in me, and how I had badly used enormous energies within me. Being able to see those things I could heal the damage I had unwittingly caused myself, or that had resulted from childhood experiences. An easier love became possible, as well as a greater flow of my creative potential.

Recently I asked other people to write and tell me how they survived great change or difficulties in their life. Sandra, one of the people who replied, wrote:

Through my dreams I have met perhaps the most devastating events in my life, creating both loss and change. Also, my dreams created the ability to really see, know and love.

For years I had a recurring dream/nightmare of not being able to open my eyes. They were stuck shut and no matter what I did I couldn’t open them. Eventually, in large part due to my dreams, I learned what I was unable to open my eyes to. For over 40 years I had lived my life unaware of my childhood. I had very few memories of home and family, but knew it was a life of poverty and parental abuse, and I was always aware of these things. But at some point I began dreaming of things I had not been aware of, things that I eventually learned indicated sexual abuse. – Sandra

What may be the most important fact here is that through her dreams and her efforts to understand them, Sandra was able to see and know what she had previously been blind to. In her case it was the painful and abusive facts of her childhood. Such hidden experiences are the ‘circuits’ as I called them above, that produce the most awful effects in our waking everyday life. But dreams also open our eyes to creative and extended dimensions of ourselves we might otherwise remain unconscious of.

Dreams encompass the largest and the smallest. They portray to us everything from the health and well being of the cells in our body, to our unconscious impressions and intuitions about the people around us, the society and world we live in, and the meaning of our existence. They bring to our limited everyday personality its connection with the hugeness lying under the surface of who we presently know ourselves to be.

As an example of this, a man I was working with told me that he had dreamt he was walking with a long-standing friend. They came to a river. The friend crossed the river but the dreamer could not cross and woke very disturbed. He found later that the friend who appeared in the dream had died at the time he had dreamt of the river crossing. The dream not only showed him that deep within himself he knew his friend had died, even though consciously he was unaware of it, but it also told him that the friend, in ‘crossing the river’ of death, walked on into another form of life. Without the correct awareness of his friend’s death, the information about life continuing would not have been so impressive. That is just a tiny instance of how subtle dreams are.

As children we have all had dreams, not perhaps the dreams of the night. But the ‘dreams’ of childhood, whether of the day or the night, are often direct expressions of core potential and wisdom. Such dreams impelled us toward something or away from something. As the years passed, those dreams may have become covered by the debris of experiences, opinions of other people and events. And you know inside yourself what it is like to live in the absence of those dreams, the emptiness left when you have lost that light, that urgent guide toward the future. For they held in them the passions and loves that give meaning and purpose to each day. Those dreams may have been pushed into the night, and to find again that bright guiding light, you can open the door of the night to allow your dreams into your waking.

So, is it enough to dream without being aware of what is implied by your dreams? Well, is it enough to love without giving that love to others? Is it enough to create without making that creation real in the world? Is it enough to want a child without bearing it? It takes our own movement toward what is offered from within to bring it fully into being. Our dreams are also an invitation to live in worlds beyond our present imagination, but an invitation that you might neglect.

Exploring your dreams

Dreams are a language, a language that frequently appears foreign. This is because the dream is seldom in words. It expresses itself in images and drama, and really we understand that, otherwise we would not get such a kick from films and theatre. So the first step is to wonder what your dream is expressing in its drama and its action. What is taking place? Is it love, anger, avoidance, building something, or a relationship? Whatever it is put a name to it.

The following dream was told me by Lorraine during a phone-in I did on London Broadcasting Company.

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

If we put words to what is dramatised in Lorraine’s dream we can say:

• Lorraine is doing her mother’s bidding.
• She is restricted in her freedom.
• She tries to get family attention.
• She is shown as being left out of family life. What we have done here is to simply say what was happening in the dream. So if this were your dream you would need to ask yourself if you feel, or truly are, restricted by your emotional connection with your mother. And does that indicate that despite trying to gain your family’s attention you still feel ignored? So the aim is to see how the drama relates to, expresses and unfolds, what is being met in your life. Then you need to be ready to look at that.Dreams seldom if ever merely reflect the events of what is felt or experienced in our waking life. What they do is to use the imagery and feelings of our life to describe something we probably have not been aware of, or even are avoiding acknowledging about ourselves. So once the dream drama is clarified, it is worth thinking about what it suggests. If this is difficult talk it over with a friend.In Lorraine’s case, whether the things shown in her dream are happening in reality, the fact is that her dream shows her feeling ignored, chained, and that she is attempting to please. So the next thing for Lorraine to consider is what she wants to do about the situation that will give her maximum satisfaction. This can be explored by imagining herself back in the dream and exploring various alternative outcomes.What this means is that in imagination she needs to alter the dream in any way that satisfies. With your own dream you would need to experiment with it, play with it, until you find a fuller sense of self expression or well being.

  It is very important to note whether any anger or hostility is in the dream that is not fully expressed; or if there are resistances as you try to alter the dream. If there are emotions not fully expressed, imagine a full expression of the anger or other feelings. Because anger, hostility, or even love is sometimes socially taboo we often restrain it, even in our dreams. In expressing it in your imagination you are not in any way doing anything socially wrong. The aim is to imagine or even act it out physically without in any way doing it to others in the real world. Restrained feelings and desire can damage us internally, and also tend to leak out anyway into the way we relate to others. So it is really healing to acknowledge, express them, and understand their roots.

  It may be that as this is practised more independence, anger, creativity or love is openly expressed in subsequent dreams. This is healthy, allowing such feelings to be vented and redirected into satisfying ways, and not turned inwards on oneself in a way

  that damages health. In doing this do not ignore any sense of resistance, pleasure or anxiety. Satisfaction occurs only as we learn to be aware of and integrate resistances and anxieties into what we express. This is a very powerful process, so don’t underestimate it. ii

  If there are resistances to changing the dream, these show there is a difference in what you want, and what you feel unconsciously, or what your core self wishes. If you can, relate to any feelings of resistance as if they are sources or voices of realisation and information. Do not push them aside, but let them unfold to see if you can understand where they are arising from and what their message is. Only then can you move on, having cleared a blockage within you.

  Being your dream

  No computer, however amazing, can yet do what you do in creating a dream. While you sleep you produce a living being such as a dream character that you can have a conversation with. In creating such a character, complete with background, you draw spontaneously on huge areas of your experience or memories – and of course your immense creativity. Think how much technology and staff it takes to create a film cartoon. Yet you do it each night and perhaps think nothing of it!

  Behind each dream image lie enormous data, emotional responses and patterns of behaviour you may be unaware of. So remember that when entering into a dream, you are in a full surround virtual reality databank of fantastic information. You can tap that information just as you would with any person, by asking questions and prodding for a response. Even the trees and animals in your dreams are also enormous reservoirs of information, linking back perhaps infinitely with your potential, creativity and past experiences.

  One of the easiest ways to access this vast information is to imagine yourself as one of your dream characters or objects. This may sound strange, and something you may not have done before, but it allows you to explore, rather than just think about, the huge and wonderful world of your dreams.

  It doesn’t matter if the character you choose to ‘be’ is someone known or not, or whether they are young or old. The character needs to be treated as an aspect of your dream, and not as if they were the living person you might know in waking life. The same applies to something like a tree, dog or place.

  To ‘be’ the person or thing, you need to sit quietly, close your eyes, take a few moment to relax and be aware of what you are feeling and what body sensations you have. You do this because your body, feelings and thoughts are your computer screen that will respond to or show you what is emerging. They are the monitor on which you will feel, see or know things about your dream. So when you are ready, imagine yourself as the character or thing. Really get into it. Be inside the dream person’s body. See what it feels like to be them, that shape, that temperament, having that viewpoint on life.

  If you don’t get this immediately, try going in and out of the body of the person or the object slowly, and note the difference in what you feel and what you sense as them, and then back as you. Once you are in the person or thing describe who or what you are – in the dream remember, not as an outside person or thing – and what you are doing, seeing or feeling in the dream. Do the same if you are an object.

  This takes practice, and you need to let yourself go a bit to play at it. It doesn’t have to be serious, because if you hit important things you cannot help them really grabbing your attention and sticking.

  To go more deeply into this, as you take on being the person or thing and have finished describing yourself, notice what you are feeling in yourself. Give attention to what changes occur as you watch what is arising in your body, your feelings and imagination. This is a bit like watching a blank television screen, waiting for something to show. Watch until something relevant or promising starts to arise then observe it as it grows. After that, see how it explains you more fully, or helps you make clearer decisions about what you are dealing with.

  I am talking to myself and getting great answers!

  An example of this is given in the following description of David exploring a dream in which he sees an elderly couple in a flying summer house, rather like a big kite.

  I was a bit anxious about working with the group as I hadn’t opened myself to them before. As I started though I felt okay and there were no hesitations. I told the dream and felt changes in my body and feeling state. I felt happy and laughing, and also a rising up feeling, an opening.

  It was suggested that I be the flying summer house. So I imagined myself as the structure and this was a lovely feeling. I described myself as being well-built, built with skill and with strong material. Until recently I had been well fastened to the ground and a house. But I had felt filled with a lightness that had lifted me up. I had broken the connections that used to hold me anchored. There was something I felt deep in me about this that I wanted to communicate. It felt like a powerful feeling and at first came out only as a loud cry.

  Before I could explore that someone asked me what had enabled me to fly. Because my feelings were now flowing I immediately felt it as something generated by the couple. It was love, a sort of love that wasn’t locked onto one person, one place. It was a love that had the sort of easy, laughing eccentricity of the couple. At this point I began to feel a lot of emotion. It was very powerful, to do with the beauty of being free and mobile and uplifted. The emotion was because a lot of my life I had been so trapped, and this new me that was emerging, breaking loose of old restraints, was wonderful to experience.

  Carol asked me what it was like to be the couple, or something about the couple. I immediately identified with the man, saying something like – I am an old man. I have learned to love this one woman. Through the years of difficulty I have found my love for this woman. Through the changes of age I have found love, and the love has gradually changed me. It led to the death of love. But in its place something is growing. Something that is a finer love, a touch of the spirit. This was at the same time incredibly beautiful and painful. So much so at the beginning I could hardly breathe. Energy was pouring through me and my body was shaking and my breath going through many changes of pace as I felt my ability to love breaking away from old restraints.

  As can be seen, David was deeply and passionately experiencing his dream. Not only did this clarify for him the changes going on in his life and relationships, but it also let loose feelings and energy that was, in itself, a force for growth.

  That old dream about my T-shirt

  There is something else that can help in understanding how to explore a dream. While at a business meeting with a web designer who was thinking of producing a site based on my book Dream Dictionary, he jokingly said, ‘Yes, but how can anyone know what their dream is about? It’s all guesswork isn’t it?’

  He had on a rather faded T-shirt with a design on it. So I asked him what he thought it would mean if he dreamt about his T-shirt. He said he didn’t think it would mean anything. The next question I asked was where did he get the T-shirt and what memories were attached to it. He became very quiet and serious and wouldn’t really talk about it other than saying he got it in Los Angeles and a lot happened to him there. And whatever it was he wouldn’t tell me was what his T-shirt would have been commenting on in the supposed dream.

  We have feelings, thoughts, memories or passions attached to every single thing we encounter, every object, every person, every place, and every creature, real or imagined. Even if it is boredom or disinterest it is still an association, a feeling, like a word in a dictionary, that your dreams might need to use at some time to express something. Most of the time, as with the web designer, we are unaware of what associations and emotions we have attached to the things around us and that appear in our dreams. We can sometimes generalise about such dream objects as a fork used to dig – thus there are valid dream dictionaries – but very often the associations are uniquely ours. That is why the technique of ‘being’ the person or thing is given. It helps to uncover those hidden associations and feelings.

  To get behind the images of the people, objects, places and creatures of your dreams to find what your usually unconscious associations are with them, is to unveil an amazing wealth of information about yourself and what you know about people and the world, but might not have let come to the surface. It isn’t that the associations in themselves are revelatory, it is how the dream weaves them into something new and insightful that is astonishing. But even that is only the beginning. Like the hidden depth of an iceberg, an enormous amount of passionate feelings or sometimes pain lie under the associations and the dream theme. It is only when you can allow yourself to experience these intense pleasures and pains, these wonderful storms of insight and revelation, that you really meet your dreams. Then you also really meet yourself and realise what a really big, deep, amazing person you are.

  To unveil this underbelly of the dream is to open a door into a vast world. If you enter that world by allowing emotional and physical responses to what is discovered; if you let all that touch and work in you, you will be greatly enlarged. You will grow beyond who you were. So let the unveiling begin. It will unfold insights and talents that enable you to more confidently meet what changes life and the future bring. In fact it may well make you one of the architects of those changes.

  Bon voyage.

  Below is a summary of the many different aspects of self and functions dreams can express:

  • An expression of what is happening in the physical body. Some doctors consider dreams to show signs of illness long before they are evident in other ways. Women frequently know they are pregnant very early on through sleep awareness in a dream.
  • A way of balancing the physiological and psychological activities in us. When a person is deprived of dreaming in experiments, some degree of breakdown in mind and body occurs. This type of dreaming can often be a safety valve releasing tension and emotion not allowed in waking life – thus nightmares.
  • An enormously original source of insight and information. Dreams tap our memory, our experience, and scan information held unconsciously to form new insights from old experience. Dreams often present summaries or details of experience we have been unable to access consciously. Sometimes this is as early as life in the womb.
  • A means of compensating for failure or deprivation in everyday life, and thereby enabling us to carry on despite setbacks and difficulties. They are a means of expressing the otherwise unacknowledged aspects of oneself. Such dreams are a move toward wholeness.
  • A response to a conscious question or problem. This is sometimes used purposely to gain help, and is called ‘dream incubation’. The person clarifies a question then ‘sleeps on it’ watching for a dream response.
  • In dreams we may be integrating new experience with what we have already gathered and digested. In this way our abilities, such as social skills, are practised or gradually upgraded.
  • Dreams often stand in place of actual experience. So through dreams we may experiment with new experience or practice things we have not yet done externally. For instance many young women dream in detail of giving birth. This function of what might be called ‘imagination’ is tremendously undervalued, but is a foundation upon which survival is built.
  • A means of exercise for the psyche or soul. Just as the body will become sick if not moved and stressed, so the mind and emotions need stimulus and exercise. Dreams fulfil this need if it is not happening externally.
  • An expression of human supersenses. Humans have an unconscious ability to read body language – so they can assess other humans very quickly. Humans have an unimaginable ability to absorb information, not simply from books, but from everyday events. With it they constantly arrive at new insights and realisations. Humans frequently correctly predict the future – not out of a bizarre ability, but from the information gathered about the present. All these abilities and more show in our dreams.

  • A means of solving problems, or formulating creative ideas, both in our personal life, and also in relationships and work. Many people have produced highly creative work directly from dreams.

  • A presentation in symbols of past traumatic experience. If met this can lead to deep psychological healing. Such dreams are therefore an attempt on the part of our spontaneous inner processes to bring about healing change.
  • In the widest sense nearly all dreams act as a process of growth or a move toward maturing. Some dreams are very obviously presenting internal forces or dimensions of experience that might lead the conscious personality toward a greater balance and inclusiveness.
  • A way of reaching beyond the known world of experience and presenting intimations from the unknown. Many people have dreams in which ESP, out of the body experiences, and knowledge transcending time and space occur. This type of dream may indicate a link between the present person and people who had lived in the distant past; or between the dreamer and all existing life. Some of these dreams present powerful insights into how the human personality may arise out of processes in nature that precede our personal existence – language and inherited family tendencies for instance. They thus deal with the spiritual aspects of human nature. This extension of awareness often gives us experience of what is called ‘the meaning of life’. Out of it we become enriched and strengthened through personal experience rather than book reading.

A creative relationship with your dreams

If certain things are seen clearly from the beginning, then you can understand your dreams in a practical and useful way.

Firstly, you as a person are a tiny spark of consciousness, a little bit of self awareness riding an incredibly ancient animal you call your body. Remember that your body has formed from cells and genetic information that has gradually developed over millions of years. It holds that information in itself unconsciously.

If you are unclear about that take time to recognise that as a personality you are almost totally unaware of what is taking place in your body right now. You are not aware as personal experience of the huge history of evolutionary changes your being has gone through in order to become you. You perhaps have little conscious insight into the massive background of social, religious and family influences that go together to enable you to function as an individual and a social entity. Your self consciousness may not include awareness of how your present personality was shaped out of those influences. Maybe you do not know what the major life lessons are that confront you, or what your innate genius and passions are.

In general you are barely awake to who you are! But that is not unusual, most of us are in the same boat. Only here and there does an individual wake up and shine with light, love and creativity.

If you can accept that you are barely aware of your body and all you carry within you, that is still only part of it. You also exist in the midst of an incredible universe, a universe that we know most intimately in the processes of nature in and on our planet Earth. And how much of that interrelationship that you have with this planet and the universe are you aware of?

I am not asking you about philosophical speculations or beautiful poetry of idealism. I am asking about your day to day relationship with all that is around you and of which you are an integral part.

Is This Relevant to You?

If you think that is not a relevant question – not relevant that is to your daily life as a mother, worker, lover, student, business person – then stop for a moment and realise that without the universe you do not exist. You have no existence outside of it. You only exist as a totally embedded part of it. If you have no awareness of a life giving and sustaining relationship with it, aren’t you missing something?

Perhaps you are also missing an awareness of the intricate web of language, ideas, perceptions and drives that have meshed into what you are as a person. In some ways this is like owning a wonderful car or computer, and not knowing how it functions or how to use it well.

Remember that without the bacteria in your gut you will not adequately digest your food. Without the constant flow of food, water and air you will not exist. That flow depoends not on farmers and industrialists, but on the intricate web of bacteria, soil organisms, plant and animal life on this planet. And all that depends on the energy pouring from the sun as it dies. Like a love affair in progress, the sun and the earth together have given birth to us.

Okay, if you have come this far, let us take the next step. Sleep!

Your tiny spark of self awareness, existing as it does in the midst of this huge area of living processes that we call the universe, Earth, your body, the language and culture you express through, regularly slips back into its primal level of existence that we call sleep. In sleep we become completely unconscious – or at least, most of us do. Maybe at most we remember an occasional dream. Some people don’t even capture that. Their sleep is a period of total unconsciousness.

But for some that is not the case. They remember their dreams. Perhaps they even carry awareness into the world of sleep. In recent times this awareness of what is usually an unconscious world has been called lucidity, and if the lucidity occurs within a dream we call it lucid dreaming.

What remembering a dream and lucidity does is to extend your self awareness beyond the usual limitations and boundaries of waking life, and allow you to become more aware of the biological, sociological, racial and universal background, or underpinning, of your existence.

Take time with this because it is about something amazing that we all share. In dreaming or becoming lucid you are experiencing something of the usually hidden world of your body, of your mind, of your whole biological past, and life in you that lies beyond the frontier of your personal awareness.

Introduction to Dream Watching

Let’s get straight to the point

Dreams are one of natures miracles, not the result of a wandering mind in sleep. A dream is an interface between the deepest part of you and your conscious personality.

Life existed quite capably for millions of years before the self-aware human personality came on the scene. In all that time the ancestors of the modern human being survived without having a rational mind to reason with, or self consciousness to ask such questions as ‘What do I do about this?’ Nevertheless survival strategies were still developed in their unconscious intelligence. Dreams express this unconscious wisdom that was developed in humans and animals through millennia.

Life’s age old unconscious processes are still the major part of our being, yet we seldom consciously meet them – except in dreams. As our physical and psychological health depend upon a reasonable co-operation between the spontaneous processes of life and our conscious decisions and actions, the encounter in dreams is vital.

This is not about a belief, such as a belief in God. Remember that dreams arise, your existence arises, from a process you may label in some way but barely know about. You do not have to believe in your existence. You are convinced of it because you exist.

Do you think you know everything about whatever it is that causes you to exist? For instance although we now know a great deal about life processes in biological science, that science still sees Life as a mystery. Can you take that attitude to your own origins? Can you accept that at the base of your being is a mystery?

Try this simple approach to get closer to this. Sit quietly where you will not be disturbed for a minute or so. Close your eyes, become aware of your breathing, then put your hand under your clothes so you can feel your heart beating.

There you have it. The conscious you is touching and directly experiencing in a quiet moment how that mystery we call life is right there in every moment of your being spontaneously giving you existence. You are touching the unconscious. You can feel it moving right under your hand. You know it is not your conscious will, knowledge or beliefs that are pulsing that beautiful movement. Right now life is breathing you and beating your heart. And that is just the very evident surface signs of what it is doing. Feel it! Do you really fully understand that? Isn’t that an amazing miracle and mystery? Wouldn’t it be wise and wonderful to get to know that mystery directly and more fully?

If you feel you know all that the mystery can do, and all of it possibilities think for a moment. Dreams can do things that we cannot do while awake. they can move our body, feelings and mind while asleep. Our dreams cause our body to be paralysed and another level of us takes over. That other level is a much bigger and able part of us – call it the unconscious, spirit or core self, it doesn’t matter. Dreams are part of that mystery. They are a way it speaks to us from our depths.

Dreams cannot be defined under any one heading. Like human beings, they are enormously varied in what they express. Just as one cannot say the human mind is simply a system of memory, one cannot say dreams are just the reflection of experienced events. The mind also deals with problem solving, predicting outcomes of action, playing with possibilities via imagination, creating the new out of old material, replaying disturbing events in order to find ways of meeting them constructively. Dreams, being the mental phenomena they are, deal with all of these issues and more. The following definitions give the main functions observable in dreams.

Dreams are:-

• An expression of what is happening in the physical body. Some doctors consider dreams to show signs of illness long before they are evident in other ways. Women frequently know they are pregnant very early on through sleep awareness in a dream.

• A link between the sleeping mind and what is occurring externally. For instance, a person may be falling out of bed and dream of flying or falling.

• A way of balancing the physiological and psychological activities in us. When a person is deprived of dreaming in experiments, a breakdown in mind and body quickly occurs. See: Life’s Little Secrets

• An enormously original source of insight and information. Dreams tap our memory, our experience, and scan information held in our unconscious to form new insights from old experience. Dreams often present to us summaries or details of experience we have been unable to access consciously. Sometimes this is as early as life in the womb.

• A dream image is an expression of a dimension or aspect of your mind or awareness. What this means is that we are as an aware person not simply one thing. We have various ‘programs’ running at the same time. If you are standing you are running a ‘balance’ program that you learnt with difficulty as a child. At the same time you might be running a language program and also a vision program. See Levels (Brain)

• A means of compensating for failure or deprivation in everyday life, and as a means of expressing the otherwise unacknowledged aspects of oneself. Such dreams are a move toward wholeness. See

• In dreams we may be integrating new experience with what we have already gathered and digested. In this way our abilities, such as social skills, are gradually upgraded. See: – Dreams are Like a Computer Game

• Dreams often stand in place of actual experience. So through dreams we may experiment with new experience or practice things we have not yet done externally. For instance many young women dream in detail of giving birth. See A Woman’s Creative Power

• A means of exercise for the psyche or soul. Just as the body will become sick if not moved and stressed, so the mind and emotions need stimulus and exercise. Dreams fulfill this need.

• An expression of human supersenses. Humans have an unconscious ability to read body language – so they can assess other humans very quickly. See Talking with Dead

• A means of solving problems, or formulating creative ideas, both in our personal life, and also in relationships and work. Many people have produced highly creative work directly from dreams.

• A presentation in symbols of past traumatic experience. If met this can lead to deep psychological healing. Such dreams are therefore an attempt on the part of our spontaneous inner processes to bring about healing change. See: People’s Experience of LifeStream

• In the widest sense nearly all dreams act as a process of growth or a move toward maturing. Some dreams are very obviously presenting internal forces or dimensions of experience that might lead the conscious personality toward a greater balance and inclusiveness.

• A way of reaching beyond the known world of experience and presenting intimations from the unknown. Many people have dreams in which ESP, out of the body experiences, and knowledge transcending time and space occur. See: Edgar Cayce.

Dreams are like any other language – if you don’t understand it, the sounds or words appear to have no meaning at all.

So learn something about the way dreams use symbols as language. Read Language and Dreams.

If you want to, you can look up your dream symbols in the Online Dream Interpreter. But that may not give you enough depth of understanding. However, the many links below give you access to direct ways of understanding your dreams and amplifying anything you gain from the online dream dictionary. Interpretation is only an intellectual thing, it doesn’t get to the depth of feeling dreams contain. You can can only make that journey through actually diving into your own dreams. If you can do that a door opens to wonderland. I mean it!

Dreams often show us what the events we witness around us are leading to. See: Vision in the River of Dreams; Groundswell; ESP in Dreams.; Prophecy.

Dreams have structures and dimensions you will not see unless you know how to look for them. When you know how to recognise these it gives you an almost immediate insight into your dreams. To understand and use these structures read – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams; and What we Need to Remember About Us.

One of the greatest ways of exploring your dreams is working with a partner. To learn this read Peer Dream Work. This  the way to go on the journey to wonderland. Here is an audio example of Tony working the Peer Dream Work way: Dream Exploration.

Dreams are worth taking time with, so look at Creative Relationship with Dreams.

Some of the best general guides you can have are the books Dream Dictionary and Your Dream Interpreter. Not only do they have a full list of dream symbols, but they tell you how to work with your dreams, their feelings and drama. Buy Dream Dictionary from Amazon UK or from Amazon USA Buy Your Dream Interpreter from Amazon UK or from Amazon USA There is also The New Dream Dictionary in eBook format HERE

Dream Understanding

An example will be used to show how to arrive at a dream’s meaning from use of the Dream Dictionary entries. It is important to first write the dream down as fully as possible. Don’t stint on the use of words. Be descriptive. Then take the very opening scene of the dream and look it up in the appropriate entry.

Example: I was standing in the back garden of a house – one of a row of terraced houses. Each garden was fenced and ran down to a large drainage ditch. It seemed to be raining and water was filling the drainage ditch. The water was backing up into the gardens because something was blocking the ditch. It started rising up my legs. It was quite hot. I realised this was because hot water was running out of the baths and sinks in the houses. I felt I must get out of the gardens. Not only because of the water, but because of how people might feel if they saw me in their garden. I managed to find a way into a farm yard where I felt relaxed.’ Ted F.

The first scene here is Garden. On a piece of paper separate to the dream, write Garden, with space for notes to be put beside it. The entry on Garden in the Dictionary says – Your garden dream often reveals what you are doing with your latent possibilities. It is pointing out whether you have cultivated your abilities, or buried them. A garden is sometimes a place of love in a dream. In which case it can denote what is growing or dying in your relationship. Another garden theme is connected with activities we do in the garden, like pets we keep, or work done.

The words Houses – Raining – Hot water – Fences – Farmyard need to be looked up and relevant comments written down next to each word. In doing this with his dream, Ted ended up with the following. But it is important for you to see what you feelings are and whether any of what is said applies to you. It doesn’t matter if the entry on garden doesn’t contain what is said in your dream. Instead you can say, ‘None of those things apply, but the entry has made me remember my dream garden is a place of pain where a terrible incident happened to me.’

But Ted had other associations and wrote:

GARDEN – The growth and changes occurring in my life at present.

ROW OF HOUSES – Other people.

RAINING – Depressed feelings or difficulties; emotions which take away enthusiasm and act as a barrier to action; tears and emotional release – an outpouring; other peoples emotions ‘raining’ on me.

HOT WATER – Emotions. In the Idioms is ‘hot water’ suggesting I have got myself in trouble.

FENCES – Social boundaries.

FARMYARD – Where my natural drives such as sexuality, parenthood, love or fellowship, are cared for or expressed.

When Ted added his own associations to this the dream became fully understandable to him and read like this:

I am going through a lot of changes at the moment – the garden. These are to do with allowing myself to have a warm but non sexual relationship with women. I have always been too dragged along by my sexuality in the past. Just a few days before the dream I was in a ‘growth’ group. I had made friends with a woman there, Susan, who I was warm with, but not sexually. The group work required some close physical contact, and I and another man worked with Susan. It seemed to me to go without complications. A while afterwards a woman in the group came to me and with evident emotion, said I had made love publicly to my lover, meaning Susan. I had certainly been physically close to her and had felt at ease, but the viewpoint and feelings of the woman’s accusations, coupled with her threat to expose me to the authority figure in the group, bowled me over. This is the hot water in the dream. The fences are the boundaries people erect between their personal life and what is socially acceptable. For some days, up until understanding the dream, I felt really blocked up emotionally – the blocked drainage ditch. I cut off any friendship toward Susan. When I realised that in the Farmyard – the acceptance of natural feelings without neat little boundaries – I could feel at peace, I was able to allow my natural warmth again.

After writing the comments next to each dream image or setting, add any personal memories, feelings or associations, as Ted has. Put down anything which amplifies what has been dreamt. For instance a car is said to be ones drive and motivation in the entry on car. But it is helpful to add what personal feelings one has about ones car. Try imagining what the absence in ones life of the car, or house, etc., would mean.

A friend recently told me the absence of her car would mean loss of independence. So this was her personal association.

See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

Dream Interpretation – Example Two

When we sleep and dream we enter a completely different realm of experience than when we are awake. It would be foolish to try to breathe under water in the physical world, but in dreams this is not only possible but lots of dreamers do it. In dreams we can fly. We can make love to men or women as we please, without fear of social or physical consequences. While dreaming we can die over and over. The dead can be reborn, and the world around us can be changed simply by changing our attitude. A monster pursuing us one moment can in an instant become a warm friend because we changed our fear to love.

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

A dream portrays a part of us, such as our ambition, as being exterior to us, because a thought or an emotion is something we experience, not something we are. By showing our urges or fears as people or places exterior to us, our dreams are able to portray the strange fact that while, for instance, the love we have for another person is intimately our own, we may find such a feeling difficult to bear, as when one is married and falls in love with someone else. While we dream, the subtleties of such dilemmas are given dramatic form. To observe our dilemma as if we were watching it as a play, has very real advantages. The different factors of our situation, such as our feelings for our marriage partner, our love of the new person, and social pressures such as our family’s reactions, might all be shown as different people or things in the dream.

We can therefore not only experience these as separate from our central self, but we define in the dream’s action how we relate to them. Most important, we can EXPLORE SAFELY the possible ways of living within, or changing the factors involved.

The two following dreams illustrate how dreams exteriorise your feelings or parts of you.

Years ago I lost my first husband at twenty nine. I had the same dream continually of being in a phone box trying to contact him, not understanding why he had left me. He died of cancer. Later I remarried and this husband died of a heart attack. Once again the same dream came back so much.

The woman’s desire to be with him continues year after year. This same part of her cannot understand why he died. We might put such feelings into words as, ‘But what had he done to die so young? Why should it happen to me twice?’ We can also assume that her desire to understand these questions, which is what contacting her husband represents, is expressed in the dream as the telephone. The dream process has dramatised her situation and inner feelings – given them form and made them experiential. Looking at this dream helps us see how an image, such as the telephone, performs exactly the same sort of function as a spoken word, although in a different way. Namely, it puts such feelings and thoughts ouside’ her where she can look at them more clearly. That the woman’s questions remain, that her problem is unsolved, is apparent from the fact she does NOT make contact on the telephone, and does not find peace. Understanding her dream shows her the importance of the questions she continually asks herself, and the need to release the emotions behind them. With this she could be free of the dream.

In the following dream there is no need for analysis. The word analysis suggests giving our own thoughts or opinions to the dream. However, processing the dream as describe in Dream Processing and Peer Dream Group, is a way of extraction information which leads to insight. With this particular dream, all it needs is a few facts brought to it to make clear what information it holds. The dream is that of a young woman, Mrs C. L.

It is a bright sunny day. I am walking across a large concrete car park. It is empty except for a huge trailer from a truck. It has BOOTS written on the side, and stands high off the ground. Being 4’ 9’ tall myself I decide to walk underneath. As I am half way the trailer starts to be lowered on top of me. I try to shout but cannot. I get onto my hands and knees and the trailer still kept coming down. I am now lying on my stomach, convinced it is going to crush me. Then it suddenly stops a couple of inches from my head. I wake feeling terrible.

The dream is interesting, although the information it holds may at first not be obvious. But with a minimum of processing the dream information will become clear. The first technique of processing the dream is to recognise some of the key words within it. These are I AM WALKING – I TRY TO SHOUT – CONVINCED IT IS GOING TO CRUSH ME. The reason these are key statements is because the dreamer is saying ‘I am walking’ – ‘I try to shout’ – ‘I …am convinced’. See Key Words.

This form of processing has not added anything to the dream. It has simply drawn attention to the information already there in the dreamer’s description of her experience – this is why it is useful to write the dream out fully. If we add a little more information which the dreamer herself connects with the dream, then it becomes even clearer. Mrs C. L. says, ‘I work for BOOTS the chemist. The employees at the shop I work in were told at the beginning of the year that Boots are selling our shop. When that happens I will be made redundant. We were supposed to finish on May 26th. It is now the end of July. The deal fell through so we are now just left hanging indefinitely until a new buyer comes along. I feel very unsettled as I can’t make any plans for the future.’

Having read these comments, it would be difficult not to see the dream as relating to the woman’s work situation, and to her strong anxiety connected with it. She herself says – through her dream – she is ‘convinced it – the situation – is going to crush’ her. She also feels her strong emotions about this – expressed in her attempt to shout – are not being expressed or ‘heard’. From just this one dream, we can be forgiven if we assume that dreams may express in dramatic form our feeling reaction to the circumstances of our everyday life. Taking this dream as information, Mrs. C. L. could see she is feeling crushed by the situation, yet not stating her feelings loudly enough to be heard. She might therefore speak to the manager to clarify the situation for herself.

This exteriorisation of internal feelings is clear in the above dreams. Dreams might do this because they frequently portray intimate parts of ourselves which have never been made fully conscious or verbalised. Put in another way, because some parts of our feelings may never have been consciously felt or recognised, they cannot be grasped by us as a thinking or perceiving being. We cannot see them with our eyes, touch them with fingers, or smell them, let alone think about them. After all, they are unknown and formless. But a dream can portray what has not yet been put into words or organised into conscious thought by portraying it in images and drama. Being able to ‘think’ in story form, about subtle areas of our experience, is a great additional faculty when added to our other modes of gaining information and insight. In this way dreams are able to bring to our notice, areas of our being which might otherwise never be known. The dream is thus another SENSE ORGAN, looking into areas we might not have any other way of examining.

Dialogue With a Dream Character or Object

Every part of a dream, whether an object, person or animal, is alive with our own intelligence. Each part has been created out of ourselves in some way, and depicts some area of our own total being. We can therefore talk with them. Such dialogue is of great importance and very revealing.

As I wrote in my book, Lucid Dreaming:

No computer, however amazing, can yet do what your mind does in creating a dream. It produces a living being such as a dream character that can have a conversation with you, and in doing so draw spontaneously from huge areas of your experience or memories. Behind the image lies enormous data, emotional response and created patterns of behaviour. So the main thing to remember at this level is that you are in a full surround databank of fantastic information. You can tap this information just as you would with any person, by asking questions and prodding for a response. But, even the trees and animals in your dreams are also enormous reservoirs of information, linking back perhaps infinitely with your potential and experience.

To do this, imagine yourself as one of the characters, animals or objects in your dream. It may help at first to have two chairs – one empty and one you are sitting in. The character or object of your dream is in the empty chair. When you are ready to be that character move from your chair, sit in the empty chair and speak as that character. You really need to let that character speak without any editing. So in the case of your dream, if it is a person you cannot see who is a hidden person, you could say, “I don’t really want to be known, because I like to hide my activity of getting you to feel like you might find out my real motives.”

A quick way of understanding your dream is to realise that the images in our dreams are just emotions, thoughts, fears. traumas, ideas and feeling projecting out of you and appearing as images, people or scenes outside you on the screen of your mind. If you draw back the imagews of your dream to make them a part and become them in your imagination, you might then discover what they represent about you. This is so simple that many people fail to try it, and instead try ‘thinking’ about their dream’. I have found that many people feel sqeemish abouit doing this – but your dreams do it all the time.

If it is difficult to get rid of the image, then take the image into you again – after all it was projected out of you, so taking it back into you by imaging you are it introduces you to whatever caused it. Imagine yourself becoming the image. For more information about doing this see Being the Person or Thing

So after you have imagined yourself as the person, care ot thing and felt what was the feeling underneath it, ask yourself, “When have I felt this before – even years ago? What is the feeling about and what part does it play in my  life?”

That is only an example so let yourself speak freely.

Be playful and curious in doing this. Question the character, and when you move to that role, let whatever your feelings are as that character motivate what you say and do. Exploring your dream in this way unfolds a great deal of information that would otherwise remain unconscious. It also enables you to make real changes in unconscious attitudes or habits, as you are literally dialoguing with areas of character patterning or programming, and can change them.

Example: When I spoke as the new born baby of my dream I really felt as if this was me, newly born. I had had a difficult birth and my reaction was that I wanted nothing to do with life. I wanted to stay curled up like an egg, not getting involved in the exterior world.

The adult observing me could see how this aspect of my inner life had led me to be withdrawn from social activity all my life, so I explained this to the baby me, saying – I need you to be ready to meet the world. You are a part of me and if you continue to withdraw I lack the enthusiasm to get involved with other people.

Back as the baby I felt totally vulnerable and didn’t want to take any risks – No I don’t want to come out of the egg.

As the adult again I said – Look, if you remain curled up this is more of a gamble than actually getting out and taking risks in life. Just lying there anything can get you. I had watched a documentary of baby turtles hurry to the sea, and some of them got  eaten by seagulls.

The view of the seagulls really really got to me as the baby. I could see that simply lying there was more dangerous than being still. I felt a change in me and a readiness to begin the journey of meeting life outside the womb.

This change really made a difference to my everyday activities. A lifelong habit of being introverted gradually dropped away. Trevor P.

Obviously it is important to use this a few times to really feel confident in it. Also do not feel as if you have to be guarded or careful about saying what is  important or ‘true’. None of that matters because only what really connects with you is of any use, the rest you can let go of. In the example of the new born baby, it was what was really felt in the role, and what made a difference that was important.

 

 

 

Compensation Theory of Dreaming

Jung, Hadfield and several other dream researchers believe the dream process is linked with homeostasis or self-regulation – the sort of self-regulation indicated in the observations of MacKenzie, 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. See: biological dream theory;computers and dreams; self-regulation dreams and fantasy; movements during sleep; science sleep and dreams; sleep walking; LifeStream; People’s Experience of LifeStream; Opening to Life

All our lives we try to achieve a balance of the contradictory opposites within us, and whether in our egos we succeed or fail, every function claimed by the ego is balanced by its opposite in the subconscious. Only in the fusion of infancy, or of sexual orgasm, or in religious ecstasy do we escape the psychic wound of division.

Put bluntly, dreams are said to compensate for conscious attitudes and personality traits. So the coldly intellectual man would have dreams expressive of feelings and the irrational as part of a compensatory process. The ascetic might dream of sensuous pleasures, and the lonely unloved child dream of affection and comfort. But this is only the most basic aspect of compensation and is demonstrated in the example below.

Somewhere within the total personality, however, there appears to be a continuing integrative force; though an individual may be overwhelmed by their life experience, some part of one’s 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 fears or pain occurs, 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.’

Example: In his book Psychology in Service of The Soul, Leslie Weatherhead tells the story of a little girl who while on a visit to a zoo was given a coin to get a small chocolate bar from a vending machine. She eagerly asked for more coins to obtain all the bars in the machine. The mother refused. The next morning the girl said she dreamt her mother had come into her bedroom and thrown a lot of chocolate bars under her bed.

Jung’s view of compensation was far more inclusive however. He quotes, as an example the dream of an elderly general he met while sitting opposite him on a train journey. The general told Jung that he had dreamt he was on parade with younger officers while being inspected by the commander in chief. On reaching the general the commander asked him to define beauty. This surprised the general as he expected to be asked technical questions regarding his service. He was embarrassed and could not give a clear answer. The commander in chief then asked a young major the same question and received a clearer answer. The general experienced feelings of failure and his grief woke him. Jung’s questioning led the general to realise that the young major who successfully answered the query about beauty actually looked just like himself when he was that age and a major. Further questioning led to the information that at that age the general had been interested in art, but the pressure of work and the rigidity of the military life had eroded the interest. Jung goes on to suggest that the dream in his late life was helping to compensate for the one sided development necessitated by his army career. The dream in fact reminded the general of this neglected side of himself.

This concept of wholeness, linked with the Self, which such compensatory dreams connect with is best seen in the collection of many years dreams by an individual undertaking their own personal journey to self acceptance and integration. Through an overview of dreams gained in this way, the two aspects of compensation become much more clearly drawn. The dream work, aimed at meeting the neglected or hurt parts of oneself, opens the way to more pronounced compensation. A man who was investigating a feeling of lack in regard to his marriage, gives the following account.

Example: As I was exploring my feeling I suddenly began to change direction and realised that from the very earliest period of my life I had certain filters in place that influenced incoming sensory information. This had come about because I noticed how critical I was of our next-door – upstairs – neighbours, and in examining it saw that I had filters to search all information for danger. This burst open in intense feelings and awareness of being a ‘weak chick’. A powerful internal struggle and something like an ‘oh God no!’ feeling accompanied it. I then experienced what it was like to be a premature baby and so weak. Being born two months prematurely had thrown my infant self into a high state of anxious survival where everything was felt as a potential danger. So my filters were examining everything for danger. Everything that moved or made a noise was a potential threat to my existence.

At first with laughter, then with pain I saw that this had made me suspicious of my own mother. I had not fitted the ‘norm’ in terms of size, strength or behaviour, so not only had I lived with a ‘danger alert’ process going all the time, but also with the realisation I was not up to scratch. Instead of the full term child who is more adjusted to the environment I had emerged still in a condition adjusted to the womb. My psychological state was also, I felt, quite different, a sort of experience of the death world, the world before birth and after death.

Society, I felt, has a sort of labelling or measuring system. It has emerged out of biological criteria of survival and fitness, and is largely unconscious. People haven’t even acknowledged they are acting under such drives. ‘My genes are best, and everybody else’s are abnormal. But only the best of mine are going to get through’. Out of this I sensed that mothers who have children who are not ‘the best’ suffer a great internal struggle about their child. Part of them cries out, ‘That is no child of mine!’

So the people who are not seen as ‘fit’ are not given social rewards, starting with such rewards as recognition and warmth from ones own parents, and escalating from there into recognition and rewards from social groups and organisations. I personally felt as if I were not seen as fit for several reasons. My premature birth led me to be slightly less robust, and also my mixed cultural background during a time of war made me less fit. I didn’t have the right label attached. Christy D.

As can be seen, Christy feels himself much less capable and accepted by his mother than someone who has had a normal birth. He feels his premature birth left him always paces behind those born full term. He sums this up by saying:

Example: Due to constantly searching for something I had lost too soon – the security of my mother’s womb – due to feeling I never bonded with my mother, I had felt agonised most of my life that I couldn’t be an ordinary husband emotionally and sexually. I pushed and pushed to see if I could grow to this ordinariness and finally felt that I had arrived, only to find that I was too late. Not only had my wife entered the menopause and lost interest in a sexual relationship, but also my children had grown up and I had lost the huge satisfaction of being with them as youngsters. So here I am in my late fifties without a sexual relationship and without the loving contact of youngsters.

The gaps in Christy’s life are obvious, and the urge or need to compensate is also plain to see. In fact Christy has an experience that he describes as follows:

Example: I realised that because I had always felt inadequate in a certain degree, I had used religion as a means of compensation. Suddenly I saw the need for hero figures to use for compensatory purposes for individuals and groups. The person may not be able to live out some aspect of their life. They may not get a sexual partner; they may not get recognition in their work; perhaps people treat them as of no account. For some people an actual physical disability stops them from living out their life fully. The hero/ine figure is then used as an image that has several functions.

For instance nuns in a convent will not live out their ability to get married or have a child. The figure of Christ is used as a compensatory symbol for this in that they marry Christ and their passion is through meditation on his being. In this way people use a hero/ine figure to compensate for what is missing in their own life. They can live their unlived soul through the passion of Christ for instance.

The figure such as Christ represents our own wholeness and complete potential. To compensate for our own unlived areas we look to this figure and have a taste of what we are not expressing outwardly through identifying with the hero/ine. Meditations on the figure might produce great feelings of love, pain, wonder, and recognition – in fact whatever is missing in everyday relationships. The Christian festivals appear to be a way of living out via the image of Christ the passions of life that we might not meet in our everyday life. The birth, the struggle, the love, the death, can all be partaken of. We can share the passionate experience of living in this way, even though in our own actual life we might not be able to live such a passionate and eventful existence. And I suppose television does this for many people today.

At first I had a strong feeling this sort of compensation was used by people who are inadequate in some way, a path for the weak, and a path that I had taken myself. This suggested by inference that I was less capable of living a full life than most. I had a sneering feeling about how people use this as a crutch, but then realised I was judging once more. ‘I need a kick in the arse. I’ve got an ability to see, but I put all these judgements on things.’

As I looked at the situation more fully though I saw that in fact nobody lives a complete life. No one is completely whole, expressing every aspect of their potential. So in fact we all relate in some way to the Christ or other such figures who represents, or in some way ARE the total potential of human existence; a mighty example of what human life can achieve.

Now I came face to face with Christ. I felt knocked over emotionally by it. It was an experience of meeting the most amazing creature or being one could imagine. I stood in front of a god, something that totally transcended human existence. Gods are often depicted as having some great power of destruction or creativity. They might be like a human being magnified many times, with loves and hates, huge powers, throwing lightning bolts and so on. My experience didn’t show Christ as anything like this. The transcendence was in the manner of Christ’s consciousness. Here was a being with no real power in a worldly sense. This being hadn’t created the world and couldn’t influence world history through power.

The consciousness, the being of Christ, existed by a form of love so magnificent I could barely look upon it. If love is the right word, this love penetrated every living thing and absorbed their most intimate life experience. The Christ took in every aspect of existence without any judgement whatsoever. This was its life and sustenance. So one could say this wondrous creature was a sort of parasite living off the energy of life forms. But this is only a part of what I experienced. Through total acceptance it took in all. It took every tiny memory of each individual. But in return, if we can share its immense passion it offers us its own life that compared with our own is eternal.

I experienced that not only does one inherit the gift of eternal life through identification with Christ, but also we share the awareness of all life forms. Through this we participate in the life and passion of all beings present and past. As I met this I was on my knees as it were because I couldn’t help loving this wondrous being. I couldn’t help feeling my own smallness. I wanted to lose myself in this being and be washed through by its radiance and hugeness. To be in its presence was the most amazing thing. If you can imagine standing before a cosmic being that had arrived from some other galaxy, and was millions of years old, perhaps ageless, had no physical form except our own teeming lives, radiated love so much that you were engulfed in it, and simply by being in its presence shared its magnificent awareness, this might give some idea. Christy D.

Christy acknowledges his own need for compensation due to feelings of inadequacy. But he goes beyond this to see that each of us are in some measure incomplete and compensation in its largest sense is about finding awareness of the wholeness underlying our own life.

The description of compensation above is an example of something functional. To be able to survive crushing life experience is a real achievement, not an imagined one, and is therefore functional. Using an image to evoke hope and motivation doesn’t make it less of an achievement. The process of compensation also links with patterns of love and strength actually lived by others. They are then patterns remaining in the collective experience of humanity and can be accessed. When we touch these powerful racial memories we may clothe them in the image of our cultural hero or saviour.

To be clear about this, the power that is found is a release of our own potential emerging from our core self. So in this sense the compenstaory image is a graphic presentation of our own innate potential. This emerges from our unconscious clothed in whatever imagery or ideas we can accept or allow, as do dreams. It can also be evoked by using such images in a compensatory way.

See: – LifeStream; biological dream theory; self-regulation dreams and fantasy; movements during sleep; People’s Experience of LifeStream; Introduction to Dreams