Posts Tagged ‘sleep’

The New Dream Dictionary

The New Dream Dictionary

On the 11th of April 2013 I published a revised version of The New Dream Dictionary. It is a much fuller and comprehensive book and is wonderful and full of information. It is not the Dream Dictionary Ultimate that I am in the middle of working on, but was produced for the US cell phones. Please note: The New Dream Dictionary is currently unavailable, pending re-working (June 2017)

RECURRING DREAMS and their significance NIGHTMARES – what they reveal and how to banish them OUT OF BODY EXPERIENCES – Giving real insight into the subject RELATIONSHIPS – what your dreams are telling you PSYCHIC AND PROPHETIC DREAMS – Tells you what they are WORK – are you following the right career path? Your dreams will tell. FAMILY – how to resolve old hurts and gain new perspectives PROBLEM SOLVING – in your dreams – how to carry the solutions into real life GAINING INSIGHT – into your own behaviour and that of others MAXIMIZING HEALTH – recognize healing foods, danger signs and more. See what is happening in your body, in your mind, and in your most guarded self and intuitions…. Discover what your style of dreaming (color, smell, setting, and other key elements) say about you. It’s all here, and more, in the ultimate guide to your world of dreams.

 

“I’ve been using Mr Crisp’s book for years and find it invaluable in my quest to understand my dreams better. Unlike many other books which seek to tell you what your dreams mean, Crisp guides you through interpreting your dreams as individual and personal stories about your own psyche.”

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Life and Death – Chapter Links

Life and Death was a series of features written for and published in Yoga and Health.

I had experience in the many fields of thought about death, such as Christian Beliefs, Spiritualism, Yoga, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Buddhism, the Scientific Viewpoint and everyday experience. I had personal experience of out of body travel, and felt in a good place to be able to present these chapters.

These series, with additional material, are publishes in ebook format,

under the title Dreaming about Death.

Links to Chapters

1 – Nothing is Permanent – Except Change

2 – Spiritualism and Heaven

3 – The Mystery of Sleep and Death

4 – Heaven and Hell

5 – Sit Down You’re Rockin The Boat

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!

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.

 

 

 

God and Dreams

God in a dream can depict several things: it can point to a set of emotions you use to deal with anxiety – i.e. our own belief that a higher power is in charge, so therefore you are okay in the world and are not responsible – maybe a way to lessen self responsibility. God can represent a parent image from early infancy, or a set of moral or philosophical beliefs you hold. In some dreams, because of personal feelings or beliefs, God depicts self judgement on your behavior or value – or something/someone you worship. In dreams of positive and uplifting experience, God can indicate a feeling of connection with humanity, an expression of the fundamental creative/destructive process in yourself, or an experience of your living interaction or relationship with all beings and the universe.

So to dream of God might be an expression of your religious feelings or emotional feelings about God. But it is helpful to remember that if you have strong feelings for a friend, or think about them and feel uplifted or moved, the feelings in no way are that friend. They are only about that friend. So in most cases, when someone tells us they were moved by God, they are usually meaning they were moved by feelings or ideas they experienced about God.

Jung says that while the Catholic Church admits of dreams sent by God, most theologians make little attempt to understand dreams in relationship to God.

God can also depict processes in you that can be enormously transformative. Seen in a very practical way, if a person believes there is nothing in life that stands beyond their present situation and weakness, they might never open to the possibility of healing change. Even if God is only an idea, opening to the influence of that idea allows the action within oneself of an enormous enlargement of functions such as self-healing, widening of awareness, and reaching beyond ones previous limitations and boundaries.

In some dreams however, one has an experience almost as if there is no separation between what is sensed as God, and oneself. This formless, often emotionless experience, may be thought of as an opening to your fundamental and core self. The following dream illustrates this full experience of God as ones fundamental self.

Example: I thought about the dream that I had about L., the dream was that L. had a very red face and told me that she was pregnant. But I didn’t think that I could have made her pregnant and I told her so. She then changed her mind and said, ‘OK then I’m not pregnant’.

In working on the dream I imagined becoming L. I entered into her pregnant body and felt her sexuality and understood the dream. She had offered herself to me, her sexuality and her body but I hadn’t recognised it, I didn’t see it and so she withdrew. L. wants another child and she had offered herself to me but I couldn’t give myself to her. I had never given myself before. In the dream I felt I was not responsible for her pregnancy, and that represents the denial of my own sexuality and of all that results from it.

This is when I entered into the house of God. At first I saw the image of a huge cathedral or church with a magnificent domed roof and I knew that I was in the house of God. I felt the utopia. I felt like I have never felt before, so very good, so excellent. I knew all things. I didn’t have to read the bible or any kind of teachings because the answers are all here in the presence of God. In this state I could ask any question and know the answer. I knew God, yet I was God because there was no separation. Neal C.

The archetypal image of God, when investigated as in the above dream, often reveals itself to be an underlying sense that our core self is in some way life itself, the creative impulse of life. We find that the mystery that created the universe is at the core of us. This unconscious realisation that within us is the Creator, that the holy essense of life itself is expressing through us as our own being, is often so difficult to accept that it is usually projected outward to form an external God. We approach this external God as if it is something distinct from us. Yet again and again, when people delve deeply into themselves they arrive at the realisation – I AM THAT I AM.

Of course this doesn’t refer to ones personality, but to the essence of life that causes you to exist and can flow out into what you do and who you are. If it is taken personally then it can become a sort of mental confusion.

Also, the powerful emotions we sometimes experience about God may well be connected with our tremendous childhood need for love and approval from parents. But equally as likely is that the immense feelings we have about meeting God in a dream, may express the wonder and perhaps terror we experience in meeting the enormity of realising that our fundamental self is the Creator. As the ego melts and realises itself as the One Great Life, undifferentiated, there can no longer be a sense of real separation.

However, the dream God can be many things, and the next exploration of God in dreams shows a very different aspect of it.

When I explored the emotions that had surfaced in recent dreams about God, I came across something totally unexpected. I had decided I would treat the image of God like a dream image, and ‘get inside it’, find out what was behind it. When I managed to do this I found with amazement that my desperate need for my father’s love, a love he found difficult to express, had been transported into my internal sense of God.

At this point I suddenly saw that my urge for God is actually the urge for my father’s love. My unsatisfied urge to receive love from my father, became a power to create an image of a loving God, an image of a cosmic father who can love – and from this inner creation I can get the love I need. I created a loving God because that was my need. But others may create an avenging God to deal with their feelings of guilt; or a mysterious beautiful ever present God to deal with a sense of parental loss, and so on. The image takes the place of real human love – a second best. I saw also that it is much more honest to say – not God loves me – but I am touching the love within myself. I have become the father. I am the God. I have dared to take on the role of father and God.

This makes sense and links with what has been said about the fundamental creative core in ourselves when we express it in a different way. You are always the hero of your own life. You are the central character of your own drama of experience. You are the one facing life and death, love and despair. As such you are the deed doer, the hero or fallen god, especially when the dream is portraying dramatic life events.

To make what has been said about God clearer in practical language we can look at the universe we exist in. Without the universe we do not exist. We can therefore say all we experience, all that we are, has arisen out of the processes of the universe.

Taken a step further, the universe as we experience it, as far as we understand through scientific investigation, did not originally exist in its present form. Originally there existed something very difficult to reason about because there was no time or space or physical matter as we now know it. Time and space, and the material universe came about after the big bang. So originally there was, or still is according to quantum physics, a timeless and spaceless existence.

An aspect of this that is often overlooked is that one condition died to give rise to another. This death and birth are repeated everywhere in what we can see in our universe. The sun is dying as it radiates its energy, and this allows life on our planet.

However we conceive of it, the coming into being of the universe was an incredibly creative process. If we consider what we know about the universe, this creativity, this death and rebirth is still going on everywhere. It is an everyday human experience. It is what underlies every aspect of our own existence.

Example: I witnessed a conversation between a man and a woman, and the man says, “Religion; that’s surely a direction for failures and people who can’t really cope with facing reality.”

And the woman he is accusing of this inability to face reality says, “You poor person! Is your mind or awareness so tiny that you have never realised the forces and processes of your own body are beyond anything you understand? Can’t you see that your very existence is brought about by things so far beyond your knowledge that it is only a statement of your impoverishment to suggest religion is an expression of some sort of smallness and failure. Have you never understood that? Have you not seen that religion is not only an acknowledgement of what we fail to understand and yet depend upon, but it is also an opening to it, a willingness to relate to it? It can also be something far more even than that. It is can be an active loving relationship. And such love is an exchange, a sharing, a way of merging one with another. It is an exchange – a sharing of bodily fluids – the very substance of life. Is that something you are afraid of?”

As expressions of the universe, that creativity, that creative leap into being from a timeless and spaceless existence is fundamantal in your own life. You and I are an expression of it. And what is found in dreams and in deep self enquiry is that if you dig deep enough into yourself, you come to an encounter with that timeless and spaceless core. You discover that what created the universe, whatever name you want to give it, is at the core of you too. And that core is eternal and enormously creative. You are enormously creative – if you touch your core.

Below are two more examples of dreaming about God, or ones core self.

I felt myself to be a primitive tribal male. Suddenly I encountered a force – or what I saw as an immense being. This being I felt was a god or God, but looking back it wasn’t an all encompassing being, so was more like a god, or an aspect of God. My visual impression of it though, was of something so huge yet visible, that I was at first terrified of it, and so were my ‘people’. If one can imagine an immense skyscraper rising into the clouds and beyond, yet not a building but a living being, that was my view of it. This being I knew as the All Shaper. It was the power that gave form or shape to everything. As such it could influence the shape one had become through the errors of history or the deeds of ones family or oneself. The pristine shape or matrix which guides the cells to form organs could be restored.

There was a problem however. This being was terrifying and beyond the gods of my people. To stand before it or acknowledge it was akin to transgressing all the lore of the tribe, all its customs. So not only was the All Shaper something more than we had known before and so threatening to our – and my – world view, but also to take it as ones god was to break with all the tribal traditions and to stand apart and different to ones whole tribe. Christopher.

Before I went to sleep that night I focused on the question -Who am I, really?

The dream was vivid, and still gives me shivers to this day. I dreamed that I looked up and there was this incredible star that was emanating points of light in the sky. It got brighter and brighter and the bottom-most point reached down to where I was and transported me up to the star. The points of light came out from the centre in all directions, and I found myself on the end of one of the horizontal points.

A wonderful (female) voice spoke to me and said this is who you are, and I had the strong sense of being located at the end of the horizontal light bar. Then she said and this is who you are and carried (transported in some way) me to the next bar of light, where I saw another version (incarnation?) of myself (in a different time and place, although I knew that the essence of this version of me was really me). She continued transporting me from bar to bar where I experienced myself in many different versions in the past, present, and future. I had different skills and interests that were the focal point of each version of myself–a musician in one, a farmer in another.

Some of the versions were females, although I experienced the same sense of self in all of them. Then she returned me to the horizontal bar of my current self and said to me that all of this is who I am, but that now she was going to show me who I really am. Then she drew me into the centre of the star (light, energy source) where I merged with her and could see each of the emanating points of light as manifestations of a single source or spirit. It was one of the most incredible feelings of being integrated and whole that I’ve ever experienced, and I basked in the feeling for a while just absorbing and soaking it in. Then she returned me to myself (with a cosmic wink) and I slept peacefully for the rest of the night. Ever since then I haven’t felt the need to ask who or what I am, and I’ve seen my various abilities and struggles in life in a totally new way. C.A.

When Einstein gave lectures at numerous US universities, the recurring question that students asked him was:

– Do you believe in God?

And he always answered:

– I believe in the God of Spinoza.

I hope this gem of history, serves you as much as it does me:

Baruch de Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher considered one of the three great rationalists of the 17th century philosophy, along with the French Descartes.

Here’s some of him.

This is the God of nature of Spinoza:

God would have said:

Stop praying and punching yourself in the chest!

What I want you to do is go out into the world and enjoy your life.

I want you to enjoy, sing, have fun and enjoy everything I’ve made for you.

Stop going to those dark, cold temples that you built yourself and say they are my house!

My house is in the mountains, in the woods, rivers, lakes, beaches. That’s where I live and there I express my love for you.

Stop blaming me for your miserable life; I never told you there was anything wrong with you or that you were a sinner, or that your sexuality was a bad thing!

Sex is a gift I have given you and with which you can express your love, your ecstasy, your joy. So don’t blame me for everything they made you believe.

Stop reading alleged sacred scriptures that have nothing to do with me. If you can’t read me in a sunrise, in a landscape, in the look of your friends, in your son’s eyes…

➤ you will find me in no book!

Trust me and stop asking me. Will you tell me how to do my job?

Stop being so scared of me. I do not judge you, or criticize you, nor get angry, or bother, or punishment. I am pure love.

Stop asking for forgiveness, there’s nothing to forgive. If I made you… I filled you with passions, limitations, pleasures, feelings, needs, inconsistencies… free will. How can I blame you if you respond to something I put in you? How can I punish you for being the way you are, if I’m the one who made you Do you think I could create a place to burn all my children who behave badly for the rest of eternity?

What kind of god can do that?

Forget any kind of commandments, any kind of laws; those are wiles to manipulate you, to control you, that only create guilt in you.

Respect your peers and don’t do what you don’t want for yourself. All I ask is that you pay attention in your life, that your alert is your guide.

My beloved, this life is not a test, not a step, not a step in the way, not a rehearsal, nor a prelude to paradise. This life is the only thing here and now and all you need.

I have set you absolutely free, no prizes or punishments, no sins or virtues, no one carries a marker, no one keeps a record.

You are absolutely free to create in your life heaven or hell.

➤ I could tell you if there’s anything after this life but I can give you a tip. Live as if there is no. As if this is your only chance to enjoy, to love, to exist.

So, if there’s nothing, then you will have enjoyed the opportunity I gave you. And if there is, rest assured that I won’t ask if you behaved right or wrong, I’ll ask. Did you like it? Did you have fun? What did you enjoy the most? What did you learn?…

Stop believing in me; believing is assuming, guessing, imagining. I don’t want you to believe in me, I want you to feel in you. I want you to feel me in you when you kiss your beloved, when you tuck your little girl, when you caress your dog, when you bathe in the sea.

Stop praising me, what kind of egomaniac God do you think I am?

I’m bored being praised, I’m tired of being thanked. Feeling grateful? Prove it by taking care of you, your health, your relationships, the world. Feeling looked at, shocked?… Express your joy! That’s the way to praise me.

Stop complicating things and repeating as a parakeet what you’ve been taught about me.

The only thing for sure is that you are here, that you are alive, that this world is full of wonders.

What do you need more miracles for? Why so many explanations?

➤ I you look for me outside, you won’t find me. Find me inside… there I am beating on you.

Spinoza.

See: the archetype of the self; bible -dreams and symbols; religion and dreams. See also: individuation.

Forgiveness As a Power Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Energy, Sex and Dreams

Dreams depict this in a variety of ways. It might be shown as electricity, as something flowing, like water, or as a house. But one of the frequently used symbols is the snake. In fact many ancient cultures used the snake or serpent and even the dragon in their religious symbols to illustrate how we relate to the huge process and energy of life, but a modern symbol of it is electricity.

So, instead of using the word energy, we could use the word potential, in its latent and expressed form. Personal potential, and the part your sexual feelings play in your life, becomes clearer in the way dreams use images of the snake, electricity and water.

A good example of this is the way electricity exists in a house. First, we have the supply of electricity into the house. The wires carrying the supply to the house are not in themselves the electricity. The current is invisible, but it has great potential for good or harm. So we usually deal with it carefully, and have means of controlling it via insulation, fuses and switches. When the electricity is wired into the house, its potential can be expressed in a huge variety of ways. It can manifest as heat, light, and power to move or do things, such as with a drill or vacuum cleaner. It can produce sound or images as with television, and can, via programs for the computer, manifest in almost magical ways, storing and retrieving huge amounts of information and manipulating it.

Limitless Potential

The usefulness of this image of the house with its electricity is that we can use it as an analogy of energy in your own life. Your potential can express as cellular activity, or physical movement. You can experience it as sexual drive and its pleasure and pain, as emotions, as sight, hearing, sensation, smell and taste. You can express it as thinking, and vocalising in speech or singing, or as the creation of a personal virtual reality, as you do in fantasy and dreams. Some psychic experiences even suggest that part of your potential is to extend your awareness over huge distances, or gain penetrating insight into another person’s state of mind or body. But all these are expressions of it, and are not IT. See Edgar Cayce; Dimensions of Your Experience

As with electricity, your potential is probably limitless, and depends upon the state of body and mind you use to approach and express it. In connection with this, something interesting happened the first time I slept in the same bed as my wife Hyone. She fell asleep quickly, and I noticed there was a great struggle with her breathing through her nose. My impression from listening was that as she started breathing in, a tension occurred in her nose, closing it in some way. This led to a gasping sound as air was forced into her closed mouth.

While she still slept I spoke to her quietly, suggesting that the muscles in her nose and face would relax. I repeated this a few times and Hyone’s breathing became easy and normal. Seeing that she responded so well, I decided to try something else. So I quietly suggested that her whole body would drop unnecessary tensions, and emotional and mental stress would melt away. I went on to say that this would open all the doors of her being, allowing cleansing and healing throughout.

There was no apparent response to this, so I lay quietly ready to sleep. But suddenly, about eight minutes later, Hyone woke, almost with a jerk, and said enthusiastically, “I just had the most amazing dream.” 

In the dream Hyone had been with her mother and sisters in a garden at the back of a house. Hyone was lying in the sun relaxing. As she relaxed she felt a wave of energy flow up her body to her head. Then, wave after wave moved up her body, giving her tremendous pleasure and feelings of well-being. But the waves got stronger and stronger, and she was frightened they would overwhelm her, and at that point she woke.

This is a very important dream because we know what prompted it, and therefore exactly what the symbols refer to. We can also see that Hyone’s energy potential, released as a healing influence, was felt as threatening when it became intense. Also, Hyone doesn’t symbolise her potential as electricity or a snake, but experiences it directly as waves of pleasure.

The Power of Life or Death

There is no suggestion in Hyone’s dream that the enormous energy flow she was experiencing would harm her. It was felt as healing and life enhancing. But we need to remember there is also a negative facet of our potential, and we need to avoid becoming a victim of it. In the following two dreams this is shown clearly. See Reaction to the unconscious

Example: I am in overalls working in a house. I am kneeling on the floor. The house is not familiar to me. In some way I had hold of, or was connected with, a large electric cable. The cable was live with electricity, and it touched my right shoulder. The effect was excruciating and shocking pain. The most intense memory is of struggling to pull the cable away from myself, fighting to stay conscious against the terrible current lashing through me. I screamed out for my mother, who I was sure was in the building somewhere, to switch off the electricity. I knew I only had a little time because I could not survive that current long. I have a vague sense that the current stopped, and then the current and struggle started again. Steve.

The second dream uses the image of the snake.

Example: I am quietly lying in bed, alone at night. I see a snake slithering toward me. It comes across the bed and bites me in the region of the heart. I manage to pull it off and suck out the poison. Jane.

Both the dreams portray a dangerous situation. We know that touching an uninsulated electrical supply wire can kill. We know that snakebite can be dangerous or fatal. But what are these dreams saying about human potential being so dangerous? But the electricity in the dream was found by the dreamer to be his own powerful energy turned inwards, short-circuited by what he felt to be the criticism, the rejection, non-understanding of his two last women partners. “I felt that I had tried and tried, while preserving my own integrity, to live in the way they wanted me to. But this felt as if it was an enormous self-denial at times. It was a self-denial that created this almost death dealing introversion of energy.”

But sex is not a universal impulse, but is determined by the energy we take in by foo and air. Experimental “starvation” was the physical condition in some other studies which made it clear the link between food and sexusl impulse.. In an investigation reported in 1919, the subjects were two groups of twelve young men. One group had their usual caloric content reduced by one-third or one-half for a period of four months, and the other group was maintained on an even lower caloric level for three weeks. Of the twenty-four men, twenty-two reported a decrease in sexual interest, sixteen claimed a decrease in nocturnal emissions, and none of them claimed recall of any sexual dreams. 43 In a 1948 study involving thirty-six male conscientious objectors, the subjects maintained a good diet for three months (about thirty-five hundred calories), a markedly reduced diet of less than sixteen hundred calories for six months, and then a rehabilitative diet for three months. The men lost about one-quarter of their body weight during the starvation period. Sex feelings and expression were virtually extinguished” in all but a few subjects. One subject declared, “I have no more sexual feeling than a sick oyster.” According to the investigators, nocturnal emissions were absent or greatly reduced and sex dreams also were greatly reduced in number and intensity.

Looking back to where the possibilities of human potential were listed, among the descriptions were thinking, fantasy, and emotions. The dangerous aspect of these is that if someone you sincerely believed was a doctor examined you and told you he or she had discovered signs of a terminal illness, you would experience all the anxieties and emotions connected with that information, even if the statement was not true. Such anxieties and emotions, even though based on a lie, could cause an illness through anxiety and stress. The point being made is that whatever negative idea you believe to be true, produces the accompanying negative emotions. Also, whatever negative emotions, such as resentment, guilt, anger or fear are generated, by whatever cause, they poison your system. Jane’s dream of the snake illustrates this. Jane had experienced feelings of resentment, anger and betrayal, in connection with her husband. Her emotional energy has the potential to be expressed in any form, but perhaps because of the betrayal, Jane was feeling anger and resentment, and the dream shows this poisoning her. However, at the time of the dream, Jane is making changes in her lifestyle and relationships that are not only stopping the poisonous emotions (she had actually experienced a breakdown and had been on antidepressants), she was also drawing out the poison from her heart. See Avoid Being Victims – Emotions_mood

Your Emotional and Physical Energy

The first dream of the electricity depicts this even more dramatically. The dreamer, Steve, feels he will die if he cannot stop the electricity. In exploring his dream, Steve felt the electricity illustrated how his enormous emotional and physical energy was being turned back on himself. Steve expressed a lot of his love through work, supporting and helping others. But in his relationship he had felt deeply criticised. And through this criticism had been holding back his flow of love. In other words his energy was being interiorised, turned back on itself. This is depicted as the electricity flowing into his body. Steve realised from the dream that he must not allow past or present criticisms to cause him to hold back his positive flow of life and love.

The damage such in-turned or negative emotions can do is enormous. Many years ago a woman who could hardly walk came to stay with my wife and I. She hobbled along using two sticks. Within a week, without any treatment, she could walk normally. She told us with great enthusiasm that she now knew what had caused her illness. Three years previously her son had married and had asked if he and his new wife could lodge in his parent’s house for a few weeks while they looked for a house of their own. His mother felt resentful that he and his wife had stayed for years and made no effort to move out. But being a Christian woman she kept her feelings to herself. She ended the story by saying, “Being on holiday away from the situation has allowed me to be free of the resentment, and this has healed my legs. So I know what I am going to do when I get home. I am going to tell my son and his wife to pack their things and move out.”

Understanding this energy and the personal misery we can create with it if we do not understand how it works, is fundamental to a satisfying life. It is strange, considering this, that it is deemed more important in school to teach children how to write, how to add and subtract, perhaps to learn the religious beliefs of those around them, rather than how to deal with their own being. Using the analogy of a car to represent yourself, it is like learning the history and make of the car and motor vehicles; learning to calculate how many miles per gallon of fuel the car might do; learning the different types of motor vehicles – but developing no understanding at all of how the accelerator, the clutch, the brake are used to control your speed and direction. Even as adults few of us learn how to handle the vehicle of our body, mind and spirit with any great skill. It is not something that is well understood or practised in western culture.

Example: In observing and thinking about this as it happened, I thought it might be some childhood trait or habit I was dealing with, or even childhood obstinacy of some sort. But it gradually developed into the circling arm movements, accompanied by the, “Yes. No.” The yes and the no coincided with the direction of the energy flow upwards or downwards.

There was a part also where I was saying, “I am. I am my life.” This has been a theme that occurred occasionally for some time. I took it simply to be a very general statement.

I was still wondering what this was about and so asked the process to help me understand. Gradually it became clear that the yes and no was a switch. For instance, life energy can be expressed in any number of ways. It can be movement, sexuality, thought, emotion, writing, swimming, and so on. The direction, or the way we direct, our energy, comes about through the yes/no action. Perhaps we do it unconsciously, but we are always applying the switch of yes or no to direct each movement, each action, each thought even

Example: Then the throat pain became unbearable. I investigated it and I became aware of doom. If I didn’t fight it, doom would take over. I was weary of fighting it so I let doom take over and sank into the doom and it was then that I found myself at the foot of the great being and total acceptance of my life. Spontaneously, before I knew it I was offering everything as a sacrifice, including past mistakes and cock-ups, and that I had to do this.

And then there were the images again of clefts: the earth, female genitals, undersea-ocean crusts opening and something, as yet formless, emerging. This, I suspect, is my creativity in the world.

To be aware in more detail how a dream can portray, not simply the mishandling of this energy, but also the life effects it has on a person, the following dream and the dreamer’s comments are helpful. The dream and comments were written by a man in his late forties who, as a child, was placed in an orphanage, despite his parents still being alive.

 Example: Seeing an overall view of dreams has gradually led me from a goal oriented view of life and human beings, to one that can be called Repertoire. By this I mean that often we are led to believe that if we achieve a certain position or place we will find satisfaction – this is goal orientation which influences large numbers of people. Dreams suggest that there is no goal, but rather a fuller meeting with all the facets of oneself. One person may live largely in an experience of their genital drive; another in their emotions; someone else through their religious feelings; another in their anxieties, mind, etc. The discovery of these different aspects of oneself leads to enormous flexibility and satisfaction. Each time another ‘room’ of ones being is opened to access, your repertoire is increased, and another area of pleasure and creativity emerges.

The Pain of Being a Child

Example: Dreamt I was standing on a street somewhere in the city of London watching an old-fashioned phone box. It was a weekend and all was quiet. The door of the phone box is open and on the floor are a variety of bones. At first I think they are from an animal, but quickly see they are human. A man enters the box to make a call. Suddenly three or four savage dogs attack, ripping him to pieces.

I worked with this dream. To begin with I felt a knotted feeling in my stomach. In exploring this by focussing my attention inwards and allowing spontaneous imagery and emotions, I found a lump that I had kept deep within that no one could touch or ever has. I split the lump and two halves of a walnut appeared. There was a picture of my mother in one half and my father in the other, as they were when I was a child. As I looked, the two halves crumpled into dust.

This was the secret I have carried since childhood, that unlike the other children in the orphanage I had parents. Yet I too was left. The emotions came to the surface and I really cried. After this wave passed I was left in a very passive state. I then saw myself go into the telephone box and try to make the call to reconnect with my parents. Again another shock. There was nobody to connect with. So once again the realisation came that I am an orphan. This brought another great wave of emotion that tore me apart.

I then turned toward the dogs as they came at me. I began to feel the sickness that I have always experienced in sessions, but I just shrugged and let the feeling wash over me. It felt like I have always ended up in hell by that route, and I realised afterwards that hell is hell and will never be anything else. I felt there was something deeper, so I kept to a centre line, trying to reach it. Again there was no feeling, so I turned toward the God dream that I had when my friend Rob was with me. The look of total love for me in God’s eyes gave me the strength to trust my own process. I then experienced God holding my hand and telling me to surrender and allow myself to die.

Then the crisis broke through, and there I was in the kid’s home as my father was leaving. I saw myself, or I should say my being, go out to him. I felt that if I loved him he wouldn’t leave my sister and me. Then he left, and I felt split in half between him and my mother, creating a schism in which I was left with a personality on either side. Schizophrenia is the word that covers this state. I felt what I would call the primal scream emerge from my being. Then I was through. I saw the dogs as my anxieties that have taken up two thirds of my energy through my life, constantly tearing me apart. I also saw that as a kid I didn’t have enough information to redirect the energy elsewhere. Kevin K.

Kevin graphically describes to us a shock and pain that split his developing personality as a child. That split and its accompanying pain directed Kevin’s potential energy into almost constant anxiety, and into feelings that he was not loved and was not lovable. In his dream the telephone depicted his attempt to reconnect the split halves of himself and to attempt to find the love he so wanted from his parents. And the dogs are his own energy turned against himself through anxiety. The dogs, his emotional energy, could have been caring and supportive. This is true of Jane’s dream of the snake also. The snake is simply potential energy. It can be poisonous or protective depending upon how we unconsciously direct it. If there are difficulties in learning how to transform the poisonous into the supportive, they lie in making conscious the unconscious factors that direct the energy. In exploring his dream, Kevin was doing exactly that. He became aware of the split in his personality. He saw how the pain created fear of abandonment, and how that fear in turn created continual anxiety. Kevin describes something of feelings that he continually lived with in the following.

Example: I have been observing that I become very upset if I am left alone for more than five minutes. Either I return to my head and experience images of me killing someone, or else I breakdown in tears. I have very little energy to really converse with people, and when quiet I choke down my feelings. I am currently feeling sorry for myself, not self-pity, just sad that a child has had to endure such pain and suffering, worse in some ways that it is myself. I have also realised that although I have stepped out of the telephone box, I am still standing alone in an empty street. It does not surprise me why I have always needed to keep a connection with several women; this feeling of isolation, and anxiety has ruled my life. I also feel that I have destroyed a lot of my relationships through these problems. 

What Fear Can Do

In the early years of being a parent, my wife and I lived in a two-bedroom house. Our three young children slept in one bedroom, my wife and I in the other. At that time I was also running a part time book business. Because it was quite a small house with little cupboard space, I used a cupboard in the children’s bedroom to store new books. Much of the work I did with the books was done in the evenings when the children were in bed. Unfortunately this meant entering the children’s bedroom while they were asleep, and with a small torch searching for books I needed. Quite quickly it became apparent that one of my children showed signs of terror each time I entered the room. From his point of view all that was visible was a small light accompanied by shuffling sounds. I realised that he believed I was some sort of strange or ghostly creature coming into his bedroom. Of course, with this belief, he was terrified.

As soon as I understood this, I waited for darkness and entered the room with my torch. I could hear my small son’s sharp intake of breath and feel his sense his terror. Then I gently spoke, explaining that I was in the room looking for a book, and I switched the light on so he could assure himself of this truth. The terror never reappeared.

I explain this because Kevin’s fears, locked in the darkness of his unconscious childhood experiences, were acting upon him like my son’s terror of a ghostly presence. Kevin had no insight into where his enormous anxieties were arising from. Therefore he could not dismiss them or deal with them. However, in understanding their source, when they arose he could remind himself that they come from childhood pain, and being a grown man he can now care for himself.

Recently, while in a waiting room, I read an article in Eve Magazine about women who work as psychologists in prisons with men with violent behaviour. A statement in the feature remained with me. The psychologist being interviewed said that without exception each of the prisoners had a history of being abused or treated with violence as children. We may have escaped such a horrific upbringing, but each of us have lesser degrees of violence in our history in some way. It is these that twist our energy into self-destruction, violent behaviour, or inner pain.

This is deeply important. Often the redirection of our emotional energy cannot take place until we are assured of certain things about what causes our energy to become an attacking force. This shift in the way one relates to one’s own potential energy is illustrated in the following two dreams. They occurred several years apart to Trevor, a man who through most of his life struggled with low self-esteem and anxiety.

The Deadly and the Healing Snake

Example: I dreamt I was walking over the hills near where I live. There were worms about that were snakes in the grass. They became poisonous snakes, only visible by their rapid movements. I had to keep a penetrating look out in case one attempted to bite and poison me. Several times I stamped on them until I broke them in half to kill them. Then my dog, who was also trying to protect me, got bitten. I thought he would die, but he slowly turned into a wildcat. I knew I had to get well away from him before the transformation was completed or else he would attack me, but if I was well away, there was no danger. Trevor.

The dream gives a very clear picture of the situation we meet when feelings pull us down into depression, or we feel threatened by them. Fear, aggression, a sense of danger, are all exhibited in the dream. It is obvious too, especially at the end of the dream that Trevor feels he must distance himself from his emotions because they might attack him. In the next dream Trevor moves towards a completely different relationship with the snakes, and therefore with himself.

Example: Last night I dreamt I was outdoors walking through open ground, like gardens. I was with others and we frequently came across large snakes that we reacted to us as if they were venomous. Then I came across a lot of them in long grass and they swarmed onto me. I froze, terrified that if I made a move I would be fatally bitten. But they just swarmed over my body and got under my clothes without harming me. Gradually I relaxed and slowly began to move about with the snakes still on me. They started to feel like a built-in defence system that would attack anyone who was aggressive to me. At one point several large and aggressive dogs walked past me. They turned as if thinking about attacking, then appeared to sense the snakes and ran off cowed. As time passed the snakes became part of my body. Trevor.

What was a drain on Trevor’s ability to deal with the world, and something he had to protect himself against, is shown in the dream as a new found strength. Knowing Trevor, I can see these changes have actually become observable in his daily life.

In such features as peer dream group; Techniques for Exploring your Dreams; A Master Class in Dreams; and Life’s Little Secrets, I have explained in detail how to explore your dreams and move toward personal transformation. Therefore I will not repeat those instructions here. Instead, I will move on to explore something of what dreams reveal about love and sexuality.

For this study I am using a collection of seven thousand dreams. Unfortunately this collection does not include any appreciable number of dreams from young children and teenagers, nor from homosexuals. Therefore I am not able to explore what dreams say about those areas of sexuality.

Nevertheless, the subject is enormous, and looking at a few dreams will help to begin the definition of this. The first dream is from a man in his 40s.

Example: I was sitting with a group of young people mostly girls. There was one in particular about 14 with long dark hair. I noticed that she kept looking over at me. When I returned the look I could see she wanted to be near me. I felt all right about this but realised that it would involve sex in a way that society could not handle, and so I sat calmly and let the feeling pass over me. Dan.

Dan’s dream illustrates a number of issues that relate to or influence how we deal with sexual urges. The basic theme of the dream is that Dan would like to have sex with a young girl. In his waking life there was opportunity for this, but Dan never followed through in that direction. In his dream Dan is saying that society could not deal with him having sex with a 14 year-old girl. But in our dreams we can do what we wish without harm, without social repercussions. We all know this, and yet we inject our waking difficulties, morals, and rules into our dream life. So Dan is struggling not with what society could handle, but with what he could handle in dealing with other people.

The other obvious factor in the dream is that Dan is exploring sexual feelings that he might not easily admit to himself while awake. The next example shows another side to this.

 

Your Dreams Are a Safe Place in Which to Love

Example: A young girl kept coming up to me and placing my hand upon her breast. She was just developing her breasts, and they felt so very beautiful. Les.

In this dream Les is not holding back from being involved with the young girl. The dream, any dream, is a full surround experience of virtual reality. While in the dream it usually seems totally real to us. So as far as Les is concerned, while he is dreaming, he is actually experiencing what it would be like if a young girl came up to him and put his hands on her developing breasts. This means that dreams are a wonderful gymnasium of the soul, a place where we can play, experiment, try new things, in fact allow ourselves areas of experience that we or others might forbid in waking life. The next dream shows this even more vividly. At the time of her dream Heather’s husband was frequently avoiding any sexual relationship with her. However Heather does not have any reservations about allowing herself the pleasure of her own feelings.

Example: I was with a dark, curly haired man. He was very brown, could have been a native, but he didn’t feel strange to me. We were making love, I was very aware of the pleasure in my lower body. It was very slippy-slidy and wet. There was enjoyment for both of us. Very intense body feelings with a childlike quality, not passion – but pleasure and joy in my vagina. Heather.

Although this is not yet obvious, the recognition that your dreams are a safe area in which to allow any experience, ties indirectly with what has been said above about the negative and positive aspects of personal energy. The next dream, experienced by Heather’s husband, shows this very clearly.

Example: I was in a farmyard watching a bull loose in the yard. There were cows in the field beyond a wooden fence. The bull saw the cows and smashed through the fence. It then charged the first cow to mount it, but so terrible was its energy and emotion that it could not expressed as sex. It smashed the cow aside as it had done the fence. Then it rushed the next and tossed it over its head, charging and smashing the next. Meanwhile I climbed into somebody’s garden trying to get out of the district. Peter.

Peter had grown up in a Christian culture that, at the time, looked upon sex as something not to be spoken about. Underlying that attitude was that restraining sex was somehow a spiritual discipline. Also, while in his early teens, Peter’s mother had pushed a strong fear into him that sex could kill you. She probably did this because tuberculosis was a killer disease at the time, a strong sex drive was one of the signs of the illness, and she was scared that Peter had caught TB. Consequently Peter avoided sex until overwhelmed by his own desires. In fact it took most of his adult life to find normal loving and sexual feelings.

Sex Can Also be a Pain in the Arse

Peter’s dream suggests that his restrained sexuality transforms into destructive anger. It also shows him running away from, or trying to avoid, this side of himself. Peter often experienced sexual fantasies, and desires for women other than his wife – and that because fantasy sex never became real – so he could both avoid it and experience it at the same time. But there is no sign of this in his dream, so the dream is not a wish fulfilment. It is not a way that he can fulfil his desires without actually having sex. The dream points out to Peter what he doesn’t want to see. Namely, that he is damaging himself, and those around him are suffering from his irritability and anger. Importantly, the dream reminds us of something seen in many dreams, that repressed sexual energy can transform into anger, or even murderous rage.

So, our dreams can be an area where we can freely explore any manner of experience. They can be a way of looking at and trying to resolve a conflict, such as Dan is doing in his dream of the young girl, where his desire for her conflicts with his feelings about what society permits. Our dreams can also be a mirror showing us the problems, the sickness or the beauty we hold within us. Heather’s dream shows her as a healthy passionate woman who is at ease with her own feelings and desires. Peter’s dream depicts him as avoiding the enormous conflict and destruction taking place within himself and in his own life. Yet, innate in Peter’s dream is the possibility of healing. By showing the harm that is being done, Peter’s dream is also pointing out how such harm could be avoided.

Through working with his dreams, Peter did in fact transform his relationship with the bull, and therefore with his sexuality. This is clearly seen in the following two dreams. The first one still shows his battle with himself.

Example: I climbed up a wire fence, like those around tennis courts. The bull came and reared up after me. Having a thick piece of oak in my hand, I brought it down full on the bull’s nose, knocking it down. Peter.

In the next dream, the aspects of Peters conflicts are shown together – his mother, the bull and the cow. The dream occurred some years after the two quoted above, and after much personal work with his dreams.

Example: I and two other people, a man and woman, are entering a field. It is a field in which I used to play as a child. We enter through a gate that borders a wide verge near a road, and the field rises in a fairly steep hill. The woman, who it seems now to be my mother, is leading a magnificent bull by a halter. We are going to introduce it to the cows already in the fields. Once we are through the gate, which is left open, my mother halts because she thinks the bull is resisting her and it will be difficult to lead uphill. I point out that it is not resisting her it is just walking slowly. So she walks on and the bull follows willingly. She then drops the halter to give the bull freedom. I am now above the bull slightly further up the hill. Looking down I see how beautiful the bull is. It is young, not too bulky, but obviously powerful and streamlined. I realise it has unusual features in the shape of its head, and think this will pass on genetically. As I watch, the bull lowers its head to the grass, which is lush and green, and pushes its nose deep to smell. I feel it is absorbing this new territory and becoming at one with its surroundings. It is beautiful and moving to watch. I sense I am watching a wild and live creature being moved by deeply wise and instinctive urges.

The bull then turns to the left, where a cow is visible. The halter is still hanging from its neck, so to prevent it being hindered I approach it to remove the halter. I am careful because its horns are long and splendid. I notice that the very tips of the horns are delicately carved in a simple curved design. I manage to pull the halter off and the bull sees the cow. It responds, its whole body indicating a change. I particularly notice or see its tail. This appears to be stretched out on the ground as if the bull is lying down with tail pointing backwards. As I watch I see ripples of movement in the tail, surging and pulsing. I have the impression of deep impulses of life surging in the body of the bull. The cow at first does not want the bull. There is some memory of the cow running for the open gate, but it doesn’t go out. It is unnecessary anxiety.

This is a wonderful dream and shows an enormous deepening of Peter’s personality. Instead of his conflict with his own sexuality, he now sees it as “deep impulses of life surging” through his own being. He also describes his sexuality as “deeply wise and instinctive”. The dream is so rich a very long commentary could be written about it.

Because the subject of dreams and sexuality is so huge, we can only deal with some aspects of it in this feature. But something that is fundamental and important is that of gender as dealt with in dreams. The following dream is very direct in its presentation of this. I was sent this dream while working for UK Teletext.

Example: I have several recurring dreams, but all have a common theme. I am always a young woman of about thirty years of age, and always doing mundane things such as shopping or picking up the kids from school. I know what this female ‘me’ looks like. I see her reflection in shop windows. Why am I always changing sex when I dream? Bernard – a concerned Chap! 

I Don’t Know if I’m a Man or a Woman!

Unfortunately some of our cultural values lead us to believe that if we are male and have feelings of being female it must mean we are gay. Also, that if we are female and have feelings of being male it must suggest we are butch or a lesbian. Dreams suggest something quite different, and can meaningfully explain some of the situations we find ourselves in as a human being. The next dream clarifies this point.

Example: I was giving an exercise class in a small field. It was sunny and everybody was spread out, seated on blankets, some stripped to the waist. I was only wearing my brief underpants. Somehow, in one of the exercises my pants came right off. Nobody noticed, not even myself, until I was seated with knee up, heal in groin. Then looking down I noticed my legs were very smooth skinned and I had female sex organs. There was no pubic hair at all. Making a joke of the situation I told the class to look the other way while I put my pants on. As I was putting them on a couple of the women did not look away and I noticed I now had male sex organs again. After this the class had lost its centre of interest. I had found a pair of my class trousers washed and sun dried on a wall, and put them on. I did this because I had put on an old pair of my swimming trunks over my pants, but they were split. A man in the class said that he felt bad because he had few clothes on. There was an atmosphere of shame because of sex or the body, so I told him to put his shirt on. Bob.

The message of this dream is that Bob has the characteristics of both genders. It suggests that psychologically Bob is basically male, especially in a relationship with a woman (a couple of the women did not look away and I noticed I now had male sex organs again). This is not something that Bob at first finds easy to look at about himself. This is shown by Bob trying to cover himself up again, and where the man in the class says he feels bad because he has few clothes on. As the dreaming Bob says, “There was an atmosphere of shame because of sex or the body.” But this is a cultural view Bob had taken in, and is not innate. Later dreams in this series show Bob accepting and loving his female characteristics. The following dream is an example of this.

Example: I am in love with a woman who is not from this planet. The love is so complete we literally swap minds or souls. So now I have all that she is inside me, and she has all of what I am inside her. This, I feel, will gradually merge into the rest of me and will extend all that I am capable of. Bob.

If we look back to what was said about energy, and remember that at base our psychobiological energy is pure potential, this ties in with what is emerging about how our dreams see our gender. Our energy can express as anything, creative or destructive. Also, within ourselves, we can be anything, any gender, any age, and any disposition.

This may at first seem to be an exaggeration. But if you have kept a record of your dreams over a period of years you will see the extraordinary number of people, of creatures, of places and situations you create while you sleep. For instance, Bob actually felt what it was like to be totally loved by a woman, and to have his being merged with hers in his dream. We could argue with this and say, yes but that is just a dream, and has nothing to do with reality, with waking life. But if you have that viewpoint, it is just an assumption you make based on what you have experienced so far. From those assumptions would you think that the following dream and its events were real? See Archetype of the Animus and Archetype of the Anima

 

You Are More Than You Dare to Believe

Example: I was in what looked like huge white ribs. In the ribs was a big heart beating. Beyond that was my homeopath. I could hardly breath, struggling to live. I could hear the heart beating, but as I listened I could also hear another heart beating. It seemed to me it was my sister’s heart connected to my own invisibly. The homeopath came forward and stretching open the ribs, reached into them, took hold of the invisible heart – it was like a shadow behind the other heart – and pulled it out. Immediately I could breath again and felt I was whole.

In everyday life my sister and I have been incredibly linked, even to the point of having cramps at night on the same nights, though living in different parts of the world. I had become ill recently out of this connection, but as soon as I had this dream I was well again, but my sister became ill. She has just been diagnosed as HIV positive and is dying.

Many other such dreams could be quoted, but would that convince you? It is enough if the idea has been planted so there is the possibility of future experience proving or disproving this to you.

The point being stressed is not that you can physically become anything or anybody – although that is not beyond the realms of possibility. However, within yourself you are formless, and can take on an unimaginable number of forms. You are in fact doing this each night in your dreams when you create a whole new surrounding environment, new characters, and new experiences. If you can grasp this, if you can recognise that your fundamental energy is simply potential, perhaps infinite potential, and that the personality you take to be so formed, and so immutably you, then you can shift and change and roam through babyhood, through gender, through all manner of experience. You will begin to drop away your limitations and explore a strange new limitless world. You will in fact have touched your spirit.

Whatever name you give to that enormous potential underlying your existence, whether you call it Life, Chaos, God, The Mystery, it is the source of your physical existence. We struggle with words, with concepts, when we approach that Mystery. Even the words used here, such as energy and potential, are simply attempts to define something that in the end is more than the words we use to describe it. We struggle to understand how we can to be. With great passion and one pointedness we have learned some of the secrets, as in recognition of DNA and the genetic code. But if you have followed what has been said above, dreams lead us beyond forms, beyond definitions. They cut suggest that the flow of energy that you call your sexual drive and your urge to parenthood, does not in the end belong to you. Yes, you can restrain it, deny it, completely give yourself over to it, or even attempt to wash your hands of it. You can add quality or brutality to the way it is expressed. But in the end it is like a river that flows on, and passes through you.

And isn’t love like that too? Do you ever possess it? Dreams suggest that the painful love so many of our cultural love songs mention arises out of our attempts to control or possess this natural flow, this wonder that is not ours to possess. We relate to it so personally.

See Ages of Love – Dimensions of Human Experience – Near death experience – Unconscious – Inner World – Learning to Love

 

Dreams – The Magic Mirror of Yourself

Every one of us dream.

Whether we remember or not, each time we sleep we create an apparently real world out of our remembered impressions, habits and emotions. As the stage managers of our inner theatres, we have the most abundant props, costumes and backdrops imaginable. Yet, because a dream is our own creation, no part of it, no emotion contained in it, no flight of fancy portrayed, is other than oneself. Even when we dream vividly of another person, such as the man in our life, the dream personality is made up of our own impressions, memories of them, hopes and feelings. Most people are often totally unaware of the experience they take in and how it interacts with them when we live with someone. See Inner People 

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. 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. Your dreams tend to put all that in the image of the past person when you are dealing with the influences left in you from the relationship. Please read this wonderful example, it will show how much we take in from those we love or lived with.

Your dreams are a magic mirror that reflects nothing but your own beliefs, worries, fears, wisdom and even genius. To do this it creates characters, situations and drama that are all  reflections of your own inner world. All the images and drama, along with the emotions you feel are simply you looking at yourself. Most of it we do not recognise because we are so blind to our failings and of course our wonder.

If you are afraid of your own emotions, your fears, or are locked into particular beliefs, then you are certainly a victim of them, you are powerless. But if you recognise them as simply your own feelings reflected as imagery they are simply you becoming the master of your own inner world. It is the best lesson you can learn – in dreams and in life.

What do you see in the mirror of your dreams?

See Martial Art of the Mind; Man in your Dream – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Habits – Edgar Cayce

 

Dream Symbols – What Do They Mean

By John Hodgson

Readers sometimes ask why the Dream Dictionary gives so many possible meanings for the imagery we find in dreams, and why many of the meanings are tentative and depend on the context of the specific dream. Old-fashioned dream dictionaries often give each symbol an exact meaning, and it would be reassuring – but misleading – to suggest that this is the way dreams work. But dream signs and symbols operate in the same way as signs and symbols in waking life. Their meaning depends on the way they are put together by the dreamer. Each of us combines signs and symbols in our own way, and it is by understanding this that we can come to an understanding of a dream.

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was the first person to study systematically the way in which signs work. He called this new study semiotics, or the study of signs. He postulated that experiencing the world is a matter of interpreting a language, or code. It is easy to see this in terms of traffic lights, where we obviously have to learn the meaning of red and green. De Saussure, however, went further, and suggested that everything we experience is a series of signs that we learn to “read”. The expression on our partner’s face, the clothes our neighbour wears, the shape of the door on a building – all these are a language. De Saussure prophesised that, just as we have a grammar of spoken and written language, it would eventually be possible to construct a grammar of signs, of which conventional language would be only a sub-set.

This has not come to pass, and it seems unlikely that it will ever happen. This is because de Saussure assumed that each sign has one essential meaning: what is sometimes called its denotation. Thus we all know a barking domestic animal denotes a dog. Yet, as Roland Barthes pointed out, in many cases the most important meanings of a sign are its connotations – the cluster of meanings that any sign has. These meanings are partly socially constructed, partly personal. For example, an Asian Indian village child and a British child in a middle-class suburb are likely to have different associations when they see a dog in the road: the Indian is more likely to see it as a source of danger and disease.

De Saussure’s structuralist account, which hoped to systematise the whole world of experience into an enormous dictionary of signs, has been succeeded by a post-structuralist view, in which the meaning of any sign is shifting, contingent, and highly dependent on its context. Does this mean, then, that creating a dictionary of dream symbols is a hopeless task? The answer is no, for two reasons. One is that every human culture combines signs (denotations and connotations) into what Barthes called myths – “stories” (true or false) that are meaningful for that culture. So the image of a gunfighter has connotations, in western (particularly north American) culture, that bring up associations of the frontier and the conquest of the American west. Most members of a culture will share many of the associations of a sign, and so interpretation is possible. The second reason is Jung’s theory of archetypes. This suggests that humanity carries certain archetypes in its collective unconscious – a common repository of signs and meanings that may transcend culture. Thus every sign and symbol contains meaning for the individual and for humanity at large. De Saussure was right to point out the affinity of signs and language. Both are at the same time personal and social, and both can be interpreted in the same way – by understanding what an individual’s combination of words, signs or symbols has to say about that person’s life.

The following is quoted from David Lodge’s novel Nice Work – It can be found at http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem07.html

A typical instance of this was the furious argument they had about the Silk Cut advertisement… Every few miles, it seemed, they passed the same huge poster on roadside hoardings, a photographic depiction of a rippling expanse of purple silk in which there was a single slit, as if the material had been slashed with a razor. There were no words in the advertisement, except for the Government Health Warning about smoking. This ubiquitous image, flashing past at regular intervals, both irritated and intrigued Robyn, and she began to do her semiotic stuff on the deep structure hidden beneath its bland surface.

It was in the first instance a kind of riddle. That is to say, in order to decode it, you had to know that there was a brand of cigarettes called Silk Cut. The poster was the iconic representation of a missing name, like a rebus. But the icon was also a metaphor. The shimmering silk, with its voluptuous curves and sensuous texture, obviously symbolized the female body, and the elliptical slit, foregrounded by a lighter colour showing through, was still more obviously a vagina. The advert thus appealed to both sensual and sadistic impulses, the desire to mutilate as well as penetrate the female body.

Vic Wilcox spluttered with outraged derision as he expounded this interpretation. He smoked a different brand himself, but it was as if he felt his whole philosophy of life was threatened by Robyn’s analysis of the advert. ‘You must have a twisted mind to see all that in a perfectly harmless bit of cloth,’ he said.

‘What’s the point of it, then?’ Robyn challenged him. ‘Why use cloth to advertise cigarettes?’

‘Well, that’s the name of ’em, isn’t it? Silk Cut. It’s a picture of the name. Nothing more or less.’

‘Suppose they’d used a picture of a roll of silk cut in half – would that do just as well?’

‘I suppose so. Yes, why not?’

‘Because it would look like a penis cut in half, that’s why.’

He forced a laugh to cover his embarrassment. ‘Why can’t you people take things at their face value?’

‘What people are you referring to?’

‘Highbrows. Intellectuals. You’re always trying to find hidden meanings in things. Why? A cigarette is a cigarette. A piece of silk is a piece of silk. Why not leave it at that?

‘When they’re represented they acquire additional meanings,’ said Robyn. ‘Signs are never innocent. Semiotics teaches us that.’

‘Semi-what?’

‘Semiotics. The study of signs.’

‘It teaches us to have dirty minds, if you ask me.’

‘Why do you think the wretched cigarettes were called Silk Cut in the first place?’

‘I dunno. It’s just a name, as good as any other.’

“Cut” has something to do with the tobacco, doesn’t it? The way the tobacco leaf is cut. Like “Player’s Navy Cut” – my uncle Walter used to smoke them.’

‘Well, what if it does?’ Vic said warily.

‘But silk has nothing to do with tobacco. It’s a metaphor, a metaphor that means something like, “smooth as silk”. Somebody in an advertising agency dreamt up the name “Silk Cut” to suggest a cigarette that wouldn’t give you a sore throat or a hacking cough or lung cancer. But after a while the public got used to the name, the word “Silk” ceased to signify, so they decided to have an advertising campaign to give the brand a high profile again. Some bright spark in the agency came up with the idea of rippling silk with a cut in it. The original metaphor is now represented literally. Whether they consciously intended or not doesn’t really matter. It’s a good example of the perpetual sliding of the signified under a signifier, actually.’

Wilcox chewed on this for a while, then said, ‘Why do women smoke them, then, eh?’ his triumphant expression showed that he thought this was a knock-down argument. ‘If smoking Silk Cut is a form of aggravated rape, as you try to make out, how come women smoke ’em too?’

‘Many women are masochistic by temperament,’ said Robyn. ‘They’ve learnt what’s expected of them in a patriarchical society.’

‘Ha!’ Wilcox exclaimed, tossing back his head. ‘I might have known you’d have some daft answer.’

‘I don’t know why you’re so worked up,’ Said Robyn. ‘It’s not as if you smoke Silk Cut yourself.’

‘No, I smoke Marlboros. Funnily enough, I smoke them because I like the taste.’

‘They’re the ones that have the lone cowboy ads, aren’t they?’

‘I suppose that makes me a repressed homosexual, does it?’

‘No, it’s a very straightforward metonymic message.’

‘Metawhat?’

‘Metonymic. One of the fundamental tools of semiotics is the distinction between metaphor and metonymy. D’you want me to explain it to you?’

‘It’ll pass the time,’ he said.

‘Metaphor is a figure of speech based on similarity, whereas metonymy is based on contiguity. In metaphor you substitute something like the thing you mean for the thing itself, whereas in metonymy you substitute some attribute or cause or effect of the thing for the thing itself’.

‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’

‘Well, take one of your moulds. The bottom bit is called the drag because it’s dragged across the floor and the top bit is called the cope because it covers the bottom bit.’

‘I told you that.’

‘Yes, I know. What you didn’t tell me was that “drag” is a metonymy and “cope” is a metaphor.’

Vic grunted. ‘What difference does it make?’

‘It’s just a question of understanding how language works. I thought you were interested in how things work.’

‘I don’t see what it’s got to do with cigarettes.’

‘In the case of the Silk Cut poster, the picture signifies the female body metaphorically: the slit in the silk is like a vagina -‘

Vic flinched at the word. ‘So you say.’

‘All holes, hollow places, fissures and folds represent the female genitals.’

‘Prove it.’

‘Freud proved it, by his successful analysis of dreams,’ said Robyn. ‘But the Marlboro ads don’t use any metaphors. That’s probably why you smoke them, actually.’

‘What d’you mean?’ he said suspiciously.

‘You don’t have any sympathy with the metaphorical way of looking at things. A cigarette is a cigarette as far as you are concerned.’

‘Right.’

‘The Marlboro ad doesn’t disturb that naive faith in the stability of the signified. It establishes a metonymic connection – completely spurious of course, but realistically plausible – between smoking that particular brand and the healthy, heroic, outdoor life of the cowboy. Buy the cigarette and you buy the lifestyle, or the fantasy of living it.’

‘Rubbish!’ said Wilcox. ‘I hate the country and the open air. I’m scared to go into a field with a cow in it.’

‘Well then, maybe it’s the solitariness of the cowboy in the ads that appeals to you. Self-reliant, independent, very macho.’

‘I’ve never heard such a lot of balls in all my life,’ said Vic Wilcox, which was strong language coming from him.

‘Balls – now that’s an interesting expression…’ Robyn mused.

‘Oh no!’ he groaned.

‘When you say a man “has balls”, approvingly, it’s a metonymy, whereas if you say something is a “lot of balls”, or “a balls-up”, it’s a sort of metaphor. The metonymy attributes value to the testicles whereas the metaphor uses them to degrade something else.’

‘I can’t take any more of this,’ said Vic. ‘D’you mind if I smoke? Just a plain, ordinary cigarette?’

John Hodgson jhodgson@bigfoot.com

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