Posts Tagged ‘dreamwork’

Serial dreams

Many people report recurring dreams, but these are of two types. One is the dream that recurs much the same in every feature. The other – serial dreams – are those that slowly change and evolve. Serial dreams might be about something like learning to fly in a long series of dreams; or exploring territory or a house that you only slowly penetrate. Sometimes they are about a relationship in which developmental changes occur.

Such dreams usually reflect changing attitudes and skills in yourself. For instance a man who was confronting his own fears concerning sex, experienced a series of dreams in which he at first had difficulty getting close to and loving a woman. The dreams evolved into ones in which he satisfying made love.

The theme of these serial dreams usually gives a clue to the area of your personality the changes refer to. Common themes are gaining of confidence; learning skill in relationships; developing courage to go beyond usual boundaries of anxiety and thus take risks such as starting your own business; discovering latent potential in yourself. See: recurring dreams; Series of dreams – working with.

Series of dreams – working with

Looking at a series of our dreams often gives us insight into aspects of ourselves that considering a single dream does not. For instance there may be a theme running through the dreams, or a character or animal. So noting the changes in the dream series in regard to the animal or person, gives information about what changes are occurring in connection with that aspect of our life.

To helpfully work with a series of dreams you can use the techniques described in

Techniques for Exploring your Dreams and Secrets of Power dreaming.

Something else that is useful is to define what difficulties, barriers or fears appear in the series and consider or imagine by visualising, ways of dealing with the problem. Also, look back on your dreams and life to see if you have met this problem in the past successfully. If you have, define how you dealt with it and see if this will work with the present dream situation.

Word analysis of dreams

People often look at the main word in their dream, look it up, and leave it at that. But usually a dream has a main theme and several other images, people, animals or things are mentioned.

I will give an example 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. It is important to realise that the dream and its images are a story, not in words but in images with which we have personal associations with. So write down by each word the basic meaning that appeals to you – i.e. makes sense to you.

Houses – Other people. Raining – emotions, release of feelings. Hot Water – Strong emotions or facing difficult situations, such as social criticism. Fence or wall also suggests social barriers, the attitudes and feelings people express to keep others at a distance, to keep a separation between those of different social, religious or economic class. Farmyard – This usually has to do with your relationship with your natural urges, the basic drives, such as sex, survival, social hierarchy, parenthood, the down to earth side of yourself.

If we put them together into a story form, we have: I was in an environment with other people and was in hot water facing a difficult situation such as social criticism. I was also in other people’s space and felt that their fences, their attitudes and social difference were there to keep me out. But in returning to my natural feelings I felt at ease again

Making a story of it is an important step, and through you will probably even see what the message of your dream is. But in doing this with his dream, Ted took it further by adding his own associations and ended up with the following. But it is important for you to see what your 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.’ See Working with associations

Ted arrived at 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 people’s 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 felt warm feelings for, 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. But 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 all because of the criticism – hot water. 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. I also realised that the woman who attempted to damage my reputation had probably never had love or warm physical contact that was not directly sexual. Many people see any physical contact between a man and woman as having sexual overtones, probably because that is their own view of sexual relationship

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 one’s drive and motivation in the entry on car. But it is helpful to add what personal feelings one has about one’s car. Try imagining what the absence in one’s life of the car, or house, or symbol etc., would mean.

Another way to gain quick insight into your dream is to take the keywords and fill in the gaps.

To illustrate this we can use the following dream:

Example: I meet an acquaintance who tells me she is sick. I suggest ways that might help her. As I speak I become aware that others are listening and coming nearer. I apologise and say that I appear to be preaching, but they say, ‘Please go on we want to listen.’ As I continue I find that a rostrum has formed and lifted me two steps higher.

To use the technique of ‘keywords’ on this dream you would need to write down the most important words in the dream. Doing this you might arrive at the words – I meet an acquaintance – sick – I might help – as I speak – others are listening – I apologise – I appear to be preaching – I find a rostrum.

For the next step you ask yourself what you have recently met with in yourself or in life that might link with each of those words. It is something you are acquainted with, and that has to do with not feeling well, whole or satisfied with your life.

So you would ask yourself what you are acquainted with to do with not feeling at your best.

The word ‘help’ suggests you have information that will be useful. What is it?

You apologise for yourself, suggesting degrading what you know. How are you doing that in your life?

Preaching comes next. Have you been giving advice? If so, what is it, and is it relevant to you too?

And lastly, can you listen to your own advice given from a rostrum – higher level of viewpoint?

Having arrived at some associations with the major words in the dream, you next put them together in a way that explains some of the insights or ideas you arrived at. Filling in the gaps between the words you might therefore arrive at something like this:

“I have lately become aware of the feeling that I am ill at ease with myself. This connects with my lack of confidence about how I feel when talking with other people. The strange thing is that I know how to help myself with this. I was talking with a friend the other day, and the advice I gave them about something similar really applies to me. What I need to do is to stop apologising for myself and positively use what I know will help. I can see from the dream that I have a lot to share with other people, so I don’t need to feel I am preaching.”

What you arrive at using this keyword method will give you an excellent overview of your dream. It will take some practice, but persist and you will get very useful results.

The Keyboard Condition

Learning to allow our Dream Creator freedom to express

The keyboard condition is something that enables us to enter the unconscious and our wider awareness. It is something we have to learn to get into the deeps of our Inner World/unconscious. To do it we need to imagine our body and mind is now like a keyboard and the keys of our body and mind are no longer fixed but are capable of even gentle touches playing the keys. This is a way to allow your huge self to be able to wake you up to a new world.

Whenever we dream all our voluntary muscles are paralysed. That is fine while we are dreaming, but if we become slightly awake or lucid we are often scared that we have lost control. Such fear of loss of control shows how out of touch with our unconscious or sleep self, so we fight for control. Yet our sleep or core self is what keeps us alive, and because of the often ridiculous things we tend to believe or live by, our core self has to regularly – whenever we sleep – takes full control to balance our life again. So we have two levels of will, our Awake Self Aware Will, and our our Life Will. The life will not only continue to beat your heart and keep you alive, it can express as spontaneous movements, and creates in our dreams all that happens while we enter our dream state. See You Are a Dual Being – Life’s Little Secrets – The Waking Lucid Dream – Waking Awareness Versus Unconscious – Jesse Watkins

We need to ‘hang loose’. So apart from attitudes, the first step of practice is to learn a form of relaxation in which our body has dropped unnecessary tension, and is like a keyboard ready to be played.

I find it helps if we create something of this feeling consciously, holding our body, our emotions, our sexuality, mind and memories as if they were keys upon which the inner dramatist can play. In a sense we are seeking to create a condition similar to sleep. As we fall asleep we let go of our control over what we think, what we do with our body, and what we fantasy. Our ‘I’, our decision making self has relaxed and left the stage free for the dream maker to create its realisations. So in approaching our Core we need to take on a similar relaxed state without actually going to sleep. Dreams are not as healing as allowing the dream process to work consciously, mostly because we do not consciously co-operate and agree with the dreams. It therefore does not integrate as fully with our waking self. See devil

Once when I was teaching this approach to a group of Quakers, a man assured me that if we gave our being so openly the devil would enter us and possess us. But such fears show that the ‘devil’ has already claimed the man, otherwise he would be secure in himself, but in fact he has given control to thoughts and opinions to fear.

Many people can easily hang loose, and so spontaneous waking dreams occurs freely. But in case this is not so, there are some things we can do to learn it. These are tools we can use which can help us define what it feels like to allow our body and mind to be loose enough for spontaneous expression. As such they need not be used once that is learnt.

1] This is a simple and enjoyable technique which gives a direct experience of spontaneous movement. You need to stand about a foot away from a wall, side on. Start with your right side. You are going to lift your right arm sideways, but because you are near the wall you will only manage to lift it part of the way. So when the back of your hand touches the wall, press it hard against the wall as if trying to complete the movement of lifting the arm. Using a reasonable amount of effort stay with the hand pressing against the wall for about thirty seconds. Then move so you face away from the wall, and with eyes closed relax your arm and be aware of what happens. Try it before reading on, and use the left arm afterwards.

What we have done is to attempt to make a movement. Because the wall prevented this, the body was not able to complete the movement you asked it to make. Therefore a muscular charge built up in the deltoid muscle. When you stepped away from the wall the arm, if relaxed, was then free to complete the movement. So possibly your arm rose from your side as if weightless, thus discharging its energy. Some people need several tries before they can find the right body feeling to allow the arm its movement. It is easy to prevent it moving because the impulse is quite a subtle one. The point of the exercise however, is to learn a relationship with oneself in which the subtle impulse can express. The movement the arm makes, and how it feels to experience an unwilled movement, is so similar to waking dreams, we are thus provided with an experimental experience of the real thing. Therefore it is helpful either to practice the technique until you can do it, or use it a number of times to establish your relationship with the feeling of it. This sense of allowing movement can then be used in coex itself. Of course use the left arm also.

2] For the next technique you need to work with a partner. One person needs to be the ‘subject’ and the other the ‘helper’. The subject can stand or lie down, and the helper should take their hands. The subject should close their eyes and be in a ‘hang loose’ feeling. The helper should give the subject a few moments to feel relaxed in the situation, then start slowly moving their arms in random movements. If there is noticeable tension or resistance to their arms being moved, the helper should attempt to help the subject be aware of such tensions or points of resistance. Sometimes the arms are so tense they will stay in any position they are placed. Then it is easy enough to point out to the subject how they are tensing their arms. Otherwise, perhaps the helper can manage to have the subject feel the areas where resistance occurs, and have them learn to go along with the movements with less effort. This is the aim of this technique. One is helping the subject feel what it is like to have their body moved by someone/something other than their own directions. In other word drop the massive controls we have over all aspects of our conscious life. As this is a learning process, this may need some practice.

In some cases it will be noticed if you are the helper, that the subject is trying to help you make the movements of the arms. If so, while still moving their arms in a random way, gradually lessen your direction and let them take the lead. If you do this slowly the person will feel you are still directing the movements of their arms. As this point is reached, take your hands away gently and encourage the subject to let their hands and arms explore their own movements. This is a gentle and effective way for some people to be led into the experience of inner directed movement. Once they are making their own movements, with the attitude that ‘you’ are doing it, they have effectively learnt how to allow spontaneous fantasy to take place.

In her article on waking dreaming that appeared in Harpers and Queen, Leslie Kenton describes a woman’s experience who was led into this by the above method. She says, “I watched one woman who was using the technique for the first time, lie quietly breathing. She then found that her hands began to move gently as though she was exploring the texture and quality of space near her body. Crisp encouraged her to go with these fine movements.

Gradually they developed into larger stroking gestures in the air around her. Her imaging facilities came into play as the physical movements continued and she sensed that she was in what she later described as a kind of womb. But instead of being dark it was permeated with light, immensely safe and beautiful. Then gradually her torso and shoulders began to move as well until slowly she emerged from this extraordinary womb world into clear air and more light. She began to weep quietly, stunned by the power and the beauty of an experience which had come quite spontaneously from within her. When she later began to try and make sense of the imagery which accompanied the movements she realised that her own feeling sense [which until then she had not even been aware of] had created for her a physical expression of the particular life situation she was in at the moment. She was on the verge of a new beginning as far as her work was concerned, and had been feeling rather unsettled and anxious about it. She found this experience enormously helpful because it made her realise that the career changes she had planned had not been motivated by some capricious wish but were very much in line with the direction her deepest self was leading her. She also discovered that she has a feeling sense which she can experience for herself and that if she listens to it, it will express a summary of her life situation at any particular time or help her work through whatever blocks or tensions she experiences.” See Methods of Awakening – Arm Circling Meditation

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

The Magical Dream Machine

We all dream every night, so we each have what could be called a Magical Dream Machine.

To gain a feeling of this, imagine yourself entering one of those game machine areas where youngsters can ride a motorbike, or ski down a slope. But instead of a simulation of a car, you discover a large machine that you can climb into and become completely enclosed. When you close the door, contacts link onto your body and head in the complete darkness. It is quiet as all the external sounds disappear, and you relax your hold on your body and senses. Your whole experience of yourself shifts as the external world melts away, along with your awareness of your body. That is sleep.

But now – in the darkness a light glimmers. Gradually it takes shape. The shape of a person is suggested. In the time that follows he or she evolves form, moves, and you have full sensory experience. You are totally involved, with all your emotions and sexual responses. Changes occur and you love, fight, fear, murder or bring to life again the person, who can become an animal, a devil, God or a bodiless voice lost in a sombre countryside. Your experiences are totally real, and you move through heaven and hell, despair and joy, darkness and light. Scenes from your past can be revisited – or totally new experiences can be felt so clearly, you are enriched. That is a dream.

Seeing Is Not Believing

If you had been in such a machine, and on coming out of the total involvement of these moving experiences, you were told you had created it all yourself – that on the black screen you had, out of your fears, habits, secret longings and passion; out of your immense store of memories; with your unbelievable range of feelings and creativity – you had given form to urges and processes in your body and made this rich world of experience, what would you feel? Would you disclaim responsibility? Would you consider it meaningless? Would you realise what amazing creativity and potential you have?

In your dreams you create such a world and such experiences. But perhaps you have not taken time to consider the wonder of your creative process in dreams. Every night you create a new drama. You conjure out of your own being the people, the creatures, the surroundings of your dream. Then you give life to what you create – not only life but purpose and drama. You are a supreme dramatist, playwright, actor and actress. You are the great Creator – in your dreams. Considering this, have you ever wondered why that enormous creativity does not flow into your waking life? You can see that some people have that creativity and are enriched by it personally and financially. Why not you?

But what is the REAL world?

In considering how you reply to this, remember a few well-known facts about how you encounter the so-called ‘real’ world of waking life. Firstly, when you look at an object such as an orange or apple, remember that although you have the sense of seeing what colour and texture the fruit has, in fact all you are seeing is reflected light. You never see the actual colour of the object.

Also, as far as texture is concerned, this is a mystery to you. Texture depends entirely on what you approach the fruit with. If it is an electron microscope, then the texture is one of shifting swirling atoms and subatomic particles. If you were tiny the apple would have a very different appearance than it does to you at your present size. Also, remember that you never actually know what the apple feels like or looks like directly. Your eye takes in streams of light that are translated into nervous impulses transmitted along the optic nerve. In the brain these nerve impulses are again translated into an image that enables you to have some relationship with an apparently external world. In the same way the nerve endings on your fingers transmit signals that are translated into sensation.

Similarly the television picture you watch on a screen is translated from signals the TV set is sensitive to and changes into pictures, colour and sound. The signals are not in themselves images, colour or sound. So, like the TV, the world you feel so sure you are seeing and experiencing, is one your brain has created in order to enable you to deal with survival. Even so it is a translation of ‘the world’ that has been shaped by evolution and its limited needs. You only respond to very narrow wavebands of light and sound for instance. So you do not know much of what is actually going on in the world anyway. Your eye, as a lens produces an upside down image of your surroundings, and this is ‘corrected’ to help you move around more easily.

Considering that you only experience a virtual reality of the external world created by your brain – and that is itself limited to a tiny fraction of what is actually surrounding you – you cannot take seriously your perceptions of the world or people. There are so many radiations, energies, and depth upon depth of texture in the cosmos and objects around us, that in effect we are blind and deaf. See Inner World

You Are the Creator

So it is true to say that you live in a world, in conceptions of yourself and your surroundings that are a self-created virtual reality. You could just as correctly be asked the question of whether you accept that you create all you experience in regard to the objective world, as you could of the magical dream machine.

However, we are discussing dreams, but remember that what is said could equally as well refer to your waking life.

So, your dreams are a magical place in that you have the ability in them to create a totally real world. Do you discount them? Do you see that you create your own world of experience in them? If you do, have you wondered why you may have a propensity for creating what you do? Or why, with such creative potential, you might still lack self-confidence? Just as you create your surroundings in dreams, you also create the psychological and sensory world you live in. Understanding your dreams can help you to clarify why you at times create what does not satisfy you, and how to generate a whole new world of experience. You can take charge of your creativity and ride with it instead of being at its mercy. Such power, after all, can as easily produce misery and ill health as pleasure and ability – unless you learn to direct it. Such creativity can lead you into hell, or create a heaven.

A few magic words to remember to say to yourself – “I have the magical power of creation. So I can create a hell for myself or a heaven. I have immense ranges of ability and problem solving. So here I go in believing in myself!”

Amazing Storehouse of the Mind

Although you constantly use the huge storehouse of memory and developed skills in your everyday life, you may usually fail to recognise what you are doing, and what a miracle it is. As an example, you now hold in store millions of bits of information. By asking you a simple question such as ‘What is your present home address?’ I can call to conscious awareness a minute part of the information lying unconscious. If I were to present you with a bicycle, or you were dropped in deep water, the skill of cycling or swimming could also emerge from latency if you had previously learned those skills.

Apart from these aspects of your immense storage of information, there is also the possibility that by the right series of questions or experience, you could arrive at a creative synthesis of information already held. In other words something not previously held in memory could arise by putting together old ideas or experiences. With the right stimulus, in the same way you could bring to expression potential within you that is at the moment lying dormant.

While we dream we have a very full access to the storehouse of our experience. If we learn to use the dream process we can more capably use the riches of what usually lies unconscious like treasures at the bottom of the ocean. There is a natural process of putting together the separate pieces of your experience into creative new combinations. All of this can be accessed by exploring the treasures held in your dreams and the dream process. See Using Your Intuition; Clicking On

Mind Watching

Because of the many nature films shown on television we are now used to the idea of mature and intelligent adults spending days or years watching the behaviour of animals such as hyenas or chimpanzees. In her book In The Shadow of Man, Jane Von Lawick Goodall explains how, by watching chimpanzees and taking note of her observations, radical new insight into the behaviour of chimpanzees arose. She didn’t think beforehand what she expected to find, but simply observed and put together the information that arose. For instance on several occasions she saw the chimpanzees kill another animal and eat its flesh. The knowledge that chimpanzees were meat eaters was entirely new.

In a similar way, by observing dreams and laying bare the emotions and associated ideas and memories you have with your dream imagery, you gradually define your personality, its strengths and weaknesses, in a depth you had never managed previously. I have called this mind watching, but it covers every aspect of human nature, not simply the intellect or thinking. See Self Help

This mind watching through observation of your dreams first presents information about your personal experiences and memories and how they influenced your growth and influence present responses. Gradually the information arising from such watching leads beyond your present boundaries of self. It shows in many cases how your unique self has arisen from, and has indissoluble links with your forebears, with your culture, with the past as a whole, and with the cosmos itself. It leads from yourself to the edge of the known, and perhaps helps you take a few steps beyond that edge into the unknown, to create new understanding, and enter new dimensions of experience.

Remember that you are probably one of the millions of humans suffering amnesia. If you doubt this ask yourself why you do not remember your childhood. No doubt you have also forgotten your life as a baby. You fail to remember your life in the womb. Perhaps, more importantly, you have also forgotten your link with the rest of the cosmos. In fact you are an amnesiac, and by ‘dream watching’ your memory can gradually be restored. It takes time and perseverance, but gradually the time line of your existence will be filled with detail.

This mind watching also gradually reveals to you the many aspects of your mind’s working, and with such insight may come the growing ability to use these facets of yourself. Not only may you discover great vistas of personal memory, but also the roots of your creativity, the subtle senses of your emotions and unconscious, and the treasures of experience you have gathered.

The Path To Take

There are many methods you can use to discover the enormous content within your dreams. For instance look at the following features and explore them to discover what works best for you: Introduction to DreamWatching; The AmplificationMethod – PeerDream Group – Active Imagination.

Another method that can be used with great benefit if you are a person who meditates, is as follows:

The meditation method of dream understanding rests on the function of memory. The aim is to hold the dream in mind, and at the same time hold the question of what are the activities, passions, memories or pains in you that have formed the dream?

You hold this question in the same way that you hold any question – such as the one asked above about your address. Do not strive, and do not struggle to arrive at an answer. Simply sit and WATCH the dark space of your mind and feelings. Take note of whatever memories, feelings and fantasies arise.

It helps to think of your being as a keyboard that your unconscious knowledge and intuitions can play upon. Holding your self stiffly, in mind or body blocks this mobility. See the passage on using the body in dream work for further information.

This may not be a quick method. So be patient, even when nothing seems to be happening. The mind is a wonderfully responsive thing, and will attempt to present what you are seeking. But at first perhaps only stray memories or feelings will arise. Also, the insight might require you to feel something deeply, so be ready for that and let it happen if you can.

Over a period of days gradually more and more will arise, and it is worth the time spent in the exploration. But do not be content with airy-fairy insight. Do not make the dream a platitude or a cliché. Dreams are powerful expressions of your down to earth, here and now self. You will know if you have arrived at insight because it will be deeply moving and clarify areas of your life that were previously obscure.

It is important to consider what you have received and weigh it against practical observation. See if there is something you can learn from it and apply. Test it wherever practical. Do not be afraid to doubt it and try it against the world. If you are not accessing the best in yourself you need to know it. This avoids the trap of wanting your intuitions about your dream to be true at any cost. The intuitions arising from the meditation method are a valid way of gaining information, just as your senses are, or your ability to read. But your senses and your ability to read can also be ways in which false information is taken in. So your discrimination is needed when using your intuition, as it is in everyday life. The more you use it the more sharp your faculty will become. But discrimination must not act as a source of doubt that blocks your ability to receive spontaneous information.

The Hidden Buttons in the Machine

One of the things we take for granted in our experience of the world is that there are many possibilities hidden in nature that nature itself does not express. For instance lightning is one of the few ways nature expresses electricity. But as a species we have learned there are many other possibilities for the use of electricity. By directing it in various ways we can produce heat, light, sound, power to move things, and pictures as we see on the television, PC monitor or in the cinema.

This applies also to our own body and personality. The example we can use here is the drive towards sex. This has developed in us through millions of years of evolution in the process of reproduction. This gradual development has formed organs and traits, such as courting behaviour, that lead directly toward an attempt to plant the seeds or receive the seeds to reproduce.

In our own culture we largely accept this except where there is psychological trauma that may prevent a normal expression of sexual drive. We have the unconscious concept that there is no other possibility. This is rather like looking at lightning and saying, “Well, that’s how nature does it, and that is the only possible way it can be experienced.” But some other cultures have looked upon the sexual drive in a similar way that we have looked upon electricity. They have explored its possibilities.

To explain what they found, and its relevance to what is being said about your personal potential, we need to remember that in nature the electricity in the lightning simply earths itself. All that tremendous energy flows into the earth. What we have learned to do is to put something in between the flow, such as an electric fire or a television set. In this way the flow back to earth produces many different phenomena. New potentials of the electricity are manifest.

Although this is an analogy, we could say the same thing about human sexuality. The discharge of feelings and body fluids in sexual orgasm and ejaculation are like the flowing back to earth. Nature does its thing and the energy is gone. In most human sexuality today there is not even the possibility of reproduction. What other cultures have developed is the concept of this as energy. They say that this energy is potentially many other things than physical reproduction. So they divert the energy into the body toward the brain, rather than out of the body to be earthed. The results of this when successful are extended functions of the brain and senses.

The techniques and teachings lying behind yoga are fundamentally about recognising the potentials lying dormant in you and learning to use them. The eastern cultures, far more than is true in the West, have developed techniques to extend possibilities of human life. See Kundalini

Bringing this back to the “Magical Dream Machine”, once we recognise the enormous creative potential we have, and that we can see active in our dreams, we can begin to realise we are only at the foothills of the possibilities open to us. For a start, millions of tonnes of drugs are taken each year to deal with depression. Yet here we each are, capable of creating a full surround virtual reality, with extraordinary people and creatures, but we are still victims of our own feelings and fears. Isn’t that strange? Isn’t that a tragedy? See – Avoid Being Victims; Life’s Little Secrets; Archetype of the Paradigm –

Take the journey! Learn how your magical dream machine works. Find out which buttons you unconsciously press to create heaven and which buttons you press to create hell! Create your own music. Create your own life!

Exploring your dreams – Steps in Deeper Understanding

Example of understanding your dreams – Help to unravel that wonderful background of information in your dreams – Introduction to features that can guide you – Learning to explore dreams – The many things dreams are can show you

Many people see dreams as nothing more than fanciful, but dreams are more than dreams. If you think of dreams as similar to an icon on your computer desktop, you can arrive at a fuller insight. This is because each dream image holds enormous data, emotional response, and created patterns of behaviour. So in considering any dream image you need to remember you are in touch with a full surround databank of fantastic information about you, your past and your possibilities through the dimension of dreams. You can interact with this information by exploring it in the right way.

Example of understanding your dreams

As an example I was recently asked by a man who had given no thought to dreams how on earth you could extract any meaning from them. He was wearing a fairly old T-shirt, so I said, “OK, let’s imagine you dreamt of your T-shirt, what would you make of that?”

After a while he said, “I don’t know that I would make anything of it.”

My response was to say, “Right, but now tell me where you bought the T-shirt, and what memories it has for you.” Whereupon he told me very full memories of being abroad, and that the shirt was part of those memories, and he wasn’t prepared to say what they were as they were so personal.

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

Help to unravel that wonderful background of information in your dreams

This is why Dream Dictionary, a revolutionary new app that is something I hope can help you unravel that wonderful background of information in your dreams. Dream Dictionary contains an entire library of searchable terms that you’ll be able to reference anywhere you have your cell phone with you. A world where we know more about ourselves through our dreams would undoubtedly bring a better life-skills to us all

Dream Dictionary contains an entire library of searchable terms that you’ll be able to reference anywhere you have your cell/mobile phone with you.

You can find a number of ways to can gain further insight into your dreams through the following features. Firstly by typing in what you what to find in the search. Then you can search the incredible riches of the Dream Encylopedia. Some suggestions have been placed in order to give graded instruction.

Introduction to features that can guide you

Magical dream machine – Key words – Language and dreams – Emotions and moods

Learning to explore dreams

Dream Processing – Peer Dream Exploration – Talking As – Acting on Your Dream – Animals As Dream Figures – Characters and People in Your Dreams – House in Your Dreams – Power Dreaming – Your Guru the Dream – Here is an audio example of Tony exploring a dream: Conversation.

The many things dreams are can show you

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.

The Trackless Way and Growth

Any serious and prolonged exploration of your inner world, yourself or dreams will lead to pronounced changes. Carl Jung called this psychic growth. He used the word psychic to refer to the psyche, meaning the whole realm of personal awareness and experience. Such psychic growth is natural and in most areas occurs spontaneously, how it does when we move from babyhood to childhood, childhood to adolescence. And of course, such changes are seldom purely psychic or psychological. They usually run parallel to physical change as well.

Many of these changes from one level of maturity to another are quite difficult. As with adolescence, the emerging trends often make it feel as if all that one is at the time is dying or being lost. What is emerging is unknown. It has never been experience before and so can even be felt as threatening. Such shifts through the levels of possible maturity are at the very core of human experience. Although our attention may largely be claimed by exterior factors such as relationships, education, the struggle toward achievement for success in one form or another, in many ways these are far less important than the processes of psychic growth that underlie any exterior event or participation in it. I believe that the great myths and religions of the world are in great part dramatisations, often in deeply symbolic form, of these huge transformations we face or are capable of. This may explain why religions and myths claim so much attention over such long periods of time. After all, the heroes and heroines of such myths are confronting, and giving examples of, meeting and dealing with the great dramas and trials of human experience.

Somehow I stood upon the Mount,
Standing upon the edge,
Looking into the abyss.
Turning, I gazed back
Upon the way I had come.
I could see
The ruined churches and mosques,
The libraries and schools,
Where people forever searched
Through the river of books,
Or the spoken word.
I called to them
As loudly as I could,
“Why are you searching
For the Real
In all these frozen words?
Why wander through
The never-ending labyrinth
Of emotions, thoughts and beliefs?
For they are like
Photographs of the Real,
Capturing only moments,
Fragments of it?”
And I could see
The people in those labyrinths,
Setting up the photographs
Those words engraved
Like holy icons.
They fought over them,
As if their photograph
Held in its fragment
More of the Real
Than any other –
Or sold them,
Like treasures,
One to another.
And I, turning to the abyss,
Emerged from my chrysalis,
Broke open the cocoon
Of words and beliefs
I had formed about me,
Spread my wings and flew,
Melting into the abyss.

Although, as already said, much of this psychic change is spontaneous, some of it has to be faced consciously, decisively and with personal cooperation and effort. The possibility is that of the stages of growth that the race has already met and successfully dealt with en masse, is now passed through largely without personal effort. But the frontiers of human maturity still call upon us in a different way. Two of these challenges are particularly relevant in present times, and comparatively few of us have successfully passed through them. This means that they are new ground, and although we have the literary and artistic records from other individuals who have faced these challenges already, they are still difficult.

The two that I have in mind are what might be called in mythological terms, the cleansing of the Aegean stables, and the entrance upon the Trackless Way — or what is sometimes called the Mountain Path.

The cleansing of the stables refers to consciously meeting and transforming the many influences, such as childhood traumas and inherited behavioural patterns, that block, twist and pervert the expression of our true potential. This is an area, often associated with psychotherapy in its various forms, which has a huge amount of literature dealing with it, along with countless practitioners. But any individual can undertake this journey without recourse to such professionals.

Example: Dreamt I was living in a mountain village in France or Switzerland. A group of us, like a yoga class group, were together doing something. I remember Margaret Strange in particular. Now I was cycling through steep hills; a bit like a cycle race, but not any road or track. It was hard going sometimes. I had to descend to gain speed to cycle over the crest of some hills.

Next, I was in a room with other people. They were the cyclists. One of my wheels had broken, apparently a new wheel was supposed to be in the room, which was like a spares store. I looked in a cupboard on the left of the room, but although other people’s wheels were there, I couldn’t find mine.

“This dream gives an excellent example of how wheels represent so much. The dreamer Roberto explored his dream and says, “This dream showed me what is now happening within the group I am involved in. It shows the things occurring at the heights of my awareness – in the mountain village. These things are not apparent at the everyday, valley, level of awareness.

The dream shows me aiding the group, but the last part of the dream shows my difficult journey along the trackless way – shown by cycling along a way without road or track. Remember that way was trodden by you long ago in other lives, I received that from a life I lived in France as a past existence. This next part of your life journey will be the remembering of what was already accomplished. But there comes even within this dream the meeting with difficulties.”

The second area, the entrance upon the Trackless Way, is much less represented in our times. This is strange, because the psychic growth that often comes about from transforming the traumas and behavioural patterns mentioned, leads to a meeting with the trackless way, or what in Christian literature is known as The Cloud of Unknowing or in Buddhist literature is often called, the Void.

In brief, meeting this new level of possible maturity involves the dropping away of the rigid self-images, personal defences, and unbending belief systems that are such a large part of earlier levels of maturity. For instance, for many of us our sense of self is almost entirely to do with our physical appearance, gender, and social standing. Perhaps it also relates strongly to the amount of money we have been able to command or accumulate. A self-image based on such factors is incredibly vulnerable. In the New Testament we are told not to build our house upon the sands. A foundation of sand does not resist change. Neither does a self-image based upon our physical appearance, changing so radically as it does with the ageing process.

The meeting with the Trackless Way is an introduction to the core of self. It is a meeting with a self that is formless, that is essentially without gender, that is not limited by concepts of time and space, that knows itself as an integral part of what lies behind the cosmos. In meeting such enormity, such freedom, a freedom that is or maybe at first disturbing. It may feel as if everything is being taken, or might be taken, away from us. For some the entrance is marked by an experience of death, this is either a deeply psychological experience, or for some an actual near death experience. For this is how it feels for many of us, that our ego, our self, is dying. See Core Self

Characters or People in Dreams

Harry Bosma, who produces the best selling Alchera dream interpretation software, says of the characters in your dreams:

“There must have been some dreams that made you wonder why a known person appeared in them. This is especially puzzling if you haven’t seen that person for years. I experience this all the time. Everyone I ever met in my life keeps showing up in my dreams. I can’t blame day residue for it. If somebody appears in my dream, there has to be a special reason for it.

“I’ve been entering characters in my symbol book for a long time. Let me introduce you to a few. There’s Peter, one of my strongest helpers. He showed up riding on a horse in my ‘Cracking The Ice’ dream. Riding the horse he managed to crack the ice on a small lake, something I was unable to do on my own. I had to think for a while before I understood exactly why he appeared in my dream. Peter went to the same elementary school as I. One thing I eventually remembered about him was his inventiveness. This led me to realise that I use the appearance of Peter in a dream as a clue to consider whether I need to think of a more ingenious approach to an issue I am confronting.

There’s Frits, whose role I only recently got to understand. I could never see any pattern in the dreams he appeared in. Frits is a high school acquaintance, somebody who was often around, even though we weren’t really friends. I never fully understood it at the time. But it recently hit me that he was especially around when I was rebelling against the boredom of high school. He was having fun whenever I broke the rules, or did something else exciting. With that insight, looking back at the dreams, there is a pattern. Whenever my behaviour in a dream is more active than usual, he is around. He is the part of me that is having fun, because I’m not aware that I’m having fun myself.”

Inner Characters: An important thing to remember to understand your dream characters/people is that usually we are not dreaming about that actual person but a living image of them formed by your memories, impressions, events lived with them and even your intuitions about them. Such memories are living parts of us and influence us inwardly, so we put them in our dreams.

Apart from defining how you see one of your dream characters, and what relationship you have had to them in the past, as Harry suggests, it helps to simply consider how you feel about them, what of their characteristics are most important or noticeable to you? But occasionally it isn’t what you see in their character, but what you feel about them that is important. For instance a person who has frequently appeared in my dreams is a woman called Ann. I felt a lot of sexual attraction to Ann – although she may have felt nothing for me – and she appears in my dreams whenever loving feelings or closeness are being dealt with.

So, if we really examine ourselves, we have a really wonderful ability to express as a huge range of different types, as shown in our dreams, the master/mistress of drama and expression.

A man I used to work for, Leo, has appeared in dreams where a problem regarding outer activity was concerned. So Leo represents for me ways of dealing with difficulties I face in the world. He is the confidence and courage I have innately to meet things constructively.

But many characters in dreams are not people you have ever met or known, not even characters from films, plays or books. So you can’t look back on them and ask yourself what you observed or felt about them. In such cases it is most helpful to imagine yourself as that character and describe who you are, exactly as you are and how you act in the dream – as the dream character. As an example of this, one character in a dream, an old man, was dying. He was nobody I knew. When I imagined myself as him and described what I felt, and what was happening to me as him, it was clear he represented the experience I was facing at the time. I was letting my old life, a phase of my life, my old self, die. This was difficult but it was happening, and the dream helped me clarify what I was facing. See Being the Person or Thing

One of the most helpful ways to find the qualities of a dream character is to give them a name. For instance you might basically feel that a man you have seen or know slightly seems a practical outwardly capable person. So you could give him the name of Mr. Practical. Mr Practical therefore is your ability in dealing with everyday life, or outward activities. There could also be Mr Sexy, Miss How Do I Look, and so on. Naming characters gets easier if you stand in their role imaginatively as described above.

But remember that a word in a sentence changes meaning, even subtly, as it is placed in a different context. The word light, for instance, can be used by saying, “I switched on the light.” Or we can say, “I felt very light-hearted.” Or even, “There was no light.”

Each of these brings about a different sense of surroundings or events. Similarly, the context of a character in your dream may change what you have defined of his or her qualities. So you must look to the context to get the final understanding as to what you dream character indicates in that particular dream. See Context/Theme

A person who appeared in many of my dreams was a woman named Su. My relationship with Su was one in which I had been trying to learn to love her without being possessive or grasping. So in my dreams she always depicted my attempts to love in that way, or my attempts to learn a fuller love.

In one dream Su is shown paddling an inflatable dingy to a local town, where I am going to meet her. But there were difficulties about this. At the time of the dream I was dealing with a lot of people in very direct relationships, and Su in this dream shows that I still haven’t ‘met’ or integrated the ability to love without grasping or wanting to posses. The difficulty in the dream suggests that I find it difficult to express this more open love.

In a later dream, experienced just after I had led a weekend activity, I dreamt Su was visiting or with us. But she didn’t look like Su at all, being dark, indecisive and a weaker personality. I was talking with her, or just with her, when I realised that Mike (a close friend) was upstairs with my wife. He had arrived back from America. I wanted him to meet Su. I wanted to hug him, but I also wanted Su to see me do this. So although I hug him with love, there was also something of the purposely done thing about it.

Here Su is actually with me, in my house, so this is an entirely different context than with the previous dream. This shows a fuller integration with unconditional love. But the part at the end where I hope Su will see me ‘loving’ Mike points out that I am still moved by desires for acclaim and public attention.

So to summarise, consider each character and discover what qualities, faults, weaknesses or strength they depict for you. Give them a name, as this helps you remember their quality. But look to the context of the dream to find the detailed and changing expression of what the character depicts. See Autonomous Complex; Sub Personalities

Example: Then I slowly became aware of a deeper sense of the discomfort. It was a feeling of being stuck in one place and not being able to move. It wasn’t anything to do with moving physically but was as an awareness. It felt awful and I tried to move but couldn’t. The only way of describing it was as if we are all made out of the same stuff – as an example concrete – and as such we filled all space. So the little space I filled could not move because all around was filled by others. I felt really stuck and wondered what I could do, but there seemed no way out of it. Yet I could not believe this was really how things were.

Most of this was spontaneous thoughts and movement through the experience, so that was how I was led to thinking about my cousin Sid again, and his situation of being constantly linked with his mother even after he died. Then I realised that I was linked with Rita in a similar way, and in feeling that I realised that I could move in at least two positions – me and Rita – because of the loving connection I felt.

Then came a flood of realisation, every person I had loved or experienced was another position I could be in; and then I knew all the animals I had loved and even people I had a casual relationship with. But there was even more because in dreams and sessions I had become or encountered amazing things, people, creatures, the alien beings and others. I knew then that I was FREE to go anywhere and be almost anything, because their life pattern was now part of me. Then with a rush of wonder, I realised that the more people and creatures I loved or had experience of, the bigger I became.

Couple: Depending on the context of the couple in the dream, they can represent the dreamers parents and the family situation and environment at the age of the couple portrayed; if the dreamer has been married, can depict the dreamer’s marriage situation at the age of the couple; hopes for a relationship; possible outcomes of a relationship; friendship; partnership; some sort of relationship.

Dead people: The influence those people still have in your life – i.e. you are still influenced by them, or your relationship with them, even though they are dead. Feelings about death. Many people are often unaware of the massive experience they take in during a relationship and how it interacts with them when we love someone. In other words the memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. So this needs to be recognised in understanding Dreams about Dead People and also Dreaming about a person I have left

Group of people: A group of people, as in Ivor’s dream below, can depict how one meets the pressure of social norms; public opinion. See: crowd.

Large crowds: Enormous involvement of self in an issue; ones relationship or feelings about the social environment one lives in; in groups we have a feeling of being looked at or on view – how we relate to that may be depicted by what we are doing in the dream group. See: party; roles.

People from our past: Considering that the major part of our learning and experience occur in relationship to other people, such learning and experience can be represented by characters from the past. For instance a first boyfriend in a dream would depict all the emotions and struggles we met in that relationship, and what we learned from it or took away from it in terms of fears. Therefore dreaming often of people we knew in the past would suggest the past experiences or lessons are very active at the moment, or we are reviewing those areas of our life. A woman who had emigrated to Britain from a very different cultural background frequently dreamt, even twenty years afterwards, of people she knew in her native country. This shows her still very much in contact with her own cultural values and experiences.

Because you have taken in millions of bit of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with someone and they are what makes you the person you are. The memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event.

Several people in a dream suggest: Not feeling lonely; involvement of many aspects of oneself in what is being dreamt about; social ability.

As social relationship is one of the most important factors outside of personal survival – and survival depends upon it – such dreams help us to clarify our individual contact with society. Human beings have an unconscious but highly developed sense of the psychological social environment. Ivor’s dream shows something we are all involved in – how we are relating to humans collectively. Are we in conflict with group behaviour and direction; do we conform, but perhaps have conflict with our individual drives; do we find a way between the opposites? Much of our response is laid down in childhood and remains unconscious unless we review it.

Example: ‘Walking alone through a small town. I was heading for a place that a group of people, in a street parallel to mine, were also heading for. A person from the group tried to persuade me that the RIGHT way to get to the place was along the street the group was walking. I knew the street did not matter, only the general direction. The person was quite disturbed by my independence. It made him or her feel uncertain to have their leader apparently questioned. I felt uncertain too for a moment.’ Ivor S.

In some dreams, a group of people represent what is meant by the word God. This may sound unlikely, but the unconscious, because it is highly capable of synthesis, often looks at humanity as a whole. Collectively humanity has vast creative and destructive powers that intimately affect us as individuals. Collectively it has performed miracles that looked at as an individual, appear impossible. How could a little human being build the great pyramid, or a space shuttle? The Bible echoes this concept in such phrases as ‘Whatever you do to the least of one of these, you do to me.’

Example: ‘I was outdoors with a group of people acting as leader. We were in the middle of a war situation with bullets playing around us. Maybe aeroplanes were also attacking. I was leading the group from cover to cover, avoiding the bullets. Paul W.

Despite feeling attacked, either by external events, or from inner conflicts, Paul is using leadership skills to deal with his own fears and tendencies. If a friend told us he had just had an argument with his wife and was going to leave her, we might sit down and counsel them by listening and helping them to sort out the hurt feelings from their long term wishes. We might point out they had felt this way before but it passed – in other words give feedback they had missed. In a similar way, our various emotions and drives often need this sort of skill employed by ourselves. This unifies us, leading to coping skills as in Paul’s dream.

Useful Questions and Hints:

If they are people I know do I understand what I associate with them?

Do I recognise what I feel about society?

What have my parents left in me?

See – Being the Person or Thing – The Conjuring Trick – Working with associations – Releasing Your Inner Genius

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Tony Crisp