Guidance from Dreams
There is a long history of dream guidance reaching back to the earliest known dream records from the time of Gilgamesh of Babylonia, yet dreams are now largely disregarded in the west as fanciful, nonsensical, or mental rubbish left over from the day’s experiences. In the background, however, there have always been those who understood the value of dreams, such as Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, scientists, artists and Nobel laureates. So when we work with our dreams, we are in prestigious company.
Several years ago, after a very long dream dry spell when I could hardly recall a single dream, I was unhappy with the way a certain project I had undertaken was turning out, and was not sure what to do about it. So I began a four week experiment in asking my dreams for help, based on the psychic, Edgar Cayce’s suggestion that dreams can give us practical advice regarding our day to day decisions and choices. For this experiment, I followed Dr. Henry Reed’s method described in Dream Solutions! Dream Realizations! 2007, which involved dream cultivation for a particular purpose, dream recall, interpretation, initial application of the dream’s advice, and exercises to promote deeper examination and reflection on the dream and its symbols. Daily meditation was recommended, but my meditation practice at that time was sketchy at best.
The first challenge was to remember my dreams on waking. Before the experiment, I had not remembered a single dream for three months, but on the first night after setting and reinforcing my intention, I clearly recalled a dream that at first seemed totally unrelated to my stated intention but that later proved to be quite relevant. One critical factor, I think, was setting my intention. Having a real goal for your dream, one that you care about, as the ancients often did, is said to help dream recall. Auto-suggestion (telling yourself that you will remember your dreams) and visualization (imagining yourself successfully recalling and recording dreams) are also very helpful. It can, however, take time to achieve reliable results. Dream expert, Dr. Henry Reed, reports that it took him three months of preparation to start recalling his dreams. I recalled only two dreams over my four week experiment, but continuing with these practices for several more months, dream recall became more complete, and I often recalled several dreams a night.
In The Secret History of Dreaming (2009), Robert Moss recounts that the ancient Greek physician Asclepius encouraged therapeutic dreams using psychological disorientation, suggestion and dream ‘incubation’ to foster dreams to help heal clients’ ailments. In medieval Spain, Lucrecia de Leon used her uncanny ability to ‘visit’ places and people in her dreams simply by intending to do so, which made her a valuable ‘spy.’ Certain officials would tell her where to go and who to visit in her dreams that night, and report back on her findings. In the American south, former slave Harriet Tubman aided the escape of many slaves along pathways that she saw clearly in her dreams yet that were completely unknown to her. For Nobel laureate scientist Pauli, “dreams were, as he put it, a ‘secret laboratory’ where he received and tested some of his best ideas”.
I have asked for and received healing dreams before, and have also had pre-cognitive dreams in which I receive forewarning of serious illness, though I usually did not recognise them as such until later. A few days before a bad fall, I dreamed I was looking out to sea when a South American-looking native with a beautiful feather headdress and red body paint approached, smiling. Looking at me with kind eyes, he moved behind me and placed a hand on my right shoulder. I waited for him to say something, but he stepped in front of me again, smiled gently and with real compassion, and walked away. Several days later, I fell hard on my right shoulder and seriously dislocated my shoulder, ripping a major tendon and muscle in the process.
This time, I wasn’t looking for healing, just advice about a path of action that wasn’t working for me. Although I slept with that clear request for guidance in mind during my four-week experiment, my initial dream seemed to be on another track altogether. It was only after applying Jung’s free-association and creative visualisation methods of dream interpretation that I realised how well that dream had responded to my intention, though not at all how I had expected. That dream and the only other one recalled during the experiment did not tell me what I had asked to know, but what I needed to know in order to answer my own question. The insights gained helped me to understand why I had chosen a particular path, and why it was a wrong path for me regardless of how I approached it. So there it was, the answer to my practical problem of how to do something better: ‘Don’t do it. It is not part of your purpose. This is .....’
Here again was confirmation of what the wise ones have told us, that dreams do not speak to our perceptions of a problem, but go straight to underlying causes or influences. We must be prepared, therefore, for dreams to guide us on unfamiliar pathways. We can call up dreams to help us, and even ask them to help us interpret their meanings, but dreams can also introduce completely new information to us, or teach us something that we could not even think to know by other means. Many artists and scientists have experienced that for themselves. Country singer Johnny Cash dreamed the arrangement for the song “Ring of Fire” that turned him into “a superstar”, and in one dream, Rachmaninoff showed pianist Olga Kern how he played the Barcarolle, “impulsively, without pedals”; it was the first time she had ever heard or seen the great composer playing his works. Scientific breakthroughs have come from dreams, and Mark Twain had many experiences with dreams, some creative, some pre-cognitive, others leading him into deep, imaginative encounters with the unknown.
One thing to keep in mind when interpreting our dreams is that not all dreams are personal. Some are about our society, humanity or future world events. One aspect of my second dream in this experiment seemed to be about changes in human consciousness. Three eagles were guarding several hives of wild bees who, they said, were asleep in this world and must be awakened for they represented the creative, generative force of the world that is also within us, but to which we are blind. Many centuries ago, Joan d’Arc, whose visions of a France liberated by her armies led her to do the unthinkable and change history, believed that her dreams were divinely inspired, and the Byzantine emperor, Constantine’s, dream of conquering under Christian cross not only presaged his victory but led him to throw his full authority behind the church, for good or bad eventually making it a powerful world force. Though he could do nothing about impending doom in his own time, Jung began to notice in the dark pre-war dreams of his clients signs of a deep and dangerous malaise in German society that did soon materialize in Nazism. As small as we may feel in the grand scheme of things, dreams of this kind are reminders that we also dream dreams of great import.
Not all dreams are calls to action, but we ignore those that are at our own peril. Mark Twain, for instance, deeply regretted not acting on a dream of his brother’s impending death which he thought he might have prevented. Pauli failed to read signs in his dreams of mirrors that the universe may not be symmetrical as he firmly believed. Had he delved deeper, he might have investigated and made a great scientific breakthrough. Yet we cannot blame ourselves for not recognizing warnings. Even the physician, Freud, who introduced the notion that dreams could help diagnose and cure psychological and health problems, failed to notice the warning in a dream that prefigured his mouth cancer twenty eight years later and even told him the names of the deadly chemicals that he was smoking.
Edgar Cayce’s source said that the most effective way to improve dream recall and to make our dreams more understandable is to act on them; even a small action in response to a dream is better than just trying to interpret it. Like Carl Jung, Cayce suggested that dreamers draw their dreams, or make little sculptures of them, or do something related to the dream. Dream of butterflies, for instance, and you might spend time in the garden watching butterflies, or buy and wear a little butterfly charm. If you dream of sweeping out a neglected shed, you might clean up an area of your home that doesn’t get much attention, or take only water and raw vegetables that day to ‘sweep out’ your system, as I did after such a dream. There is no one proper response, just do what feels right. Somehow, taking action on dreams helps to ground them more firmly in your waking reality, and lets your ‘dreaming self’ know that you are paying attention, encouraging it to dream and remember more and more clear helpful dreams.
People who regularly work with dreams, from Jungian psychologists and dream therapists to tribal shamans, tell us that if we do not heed the messages of our dreams, we miss out on the valuable knowledge and insights that our unconscious mind and Spirit are trying to communicate to us. Without those insights, we are more likely to stay stuck in old patterns of thinking and behaviour, and despite our best intentions, we will keep operating from learned insecurities and fears rather than from Truth. We would not learn to trust our deep Self as the generous source of guidance that it is. When we give our dreams the attention and respect they warrant, we learn that we are not at the mercy of the external world, can free ourselves from old destructive patterns, and that we come into this world, each one of us, with truthful, compassionate guidance far beyond what mind alone can conceive. Dreams, feelings, intuition, divine revelations ....... these are part of our spiritual heritage, spiritual resources that can and do support and guide us through life’s challenges.
References:
Jung, C.G. (1965) Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York, N.Y. Vintage Press.
Moss, R. (2009) The Secret History of Dreaming. Novato, Calif: New World Press.
Reed, H. (2007) Dream Solutions! Dream Realizations! The Original Dream Quest Guidebook. Mouth of Wilson, Virginia: Hermes Home Press.