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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: benefits of remembering dreams, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 13 of 13
1. Indications of Growth and Progress in Dreamwork

When my students do dreamwork (the recording and working with dreams to learn something from the dreams) on a regular basis, what I sometimes get asked is this: How do I know I am making progress in working with dreams?

This is a good question, because unless I am working with someone who knows a lot about dreamwork such as a dream mentor, the answers may not be all that apparent, especially in the beginning. However, in the long run, progress will definitely become more obvious because of the positive changes the dreamer will see in his or life.

Indicators of progress in dreamwork can be seen in the following:
  • Dreams become more vivid and easier to remember. A beginner usually has difficulty remembering dreams. Just having the intention to remember dreams will often prompt the dreamer to remember his or her dreams. Need help in remembering dreams? See Tried and True Tips to Better Remember Your Dreams at http://wp.me/p45aiq-5B
  • Dreams seem to “come” when one needs or wants them. Just making the intention to do regular dreamwork or participate in a dream class will often encourage the psyche to offer the dreamer a sudden outpouring of dreams.
  • Discovering that dreams do respond to requests for information and wisdom with appropriate insights. Asking for a particular dream (Dream Incubation) and getting a helpful answer is truly empowering for the neophyte starting the study of dreams. It’s like meeting a powerful helper for the first time. This experience gives the dreamer confidence to ask for more help from dreams. For information on incubating a dream see Ask and You Shall Receive: Incubating a #Dream at http://wp.me/p45aiq-71
  • Experiencing a lucid dream. A lucid dream is one in which the dreamer feels like he or she is awake and aware in the dream, all the while knowing it is a dream. Conscious choices can be made within the dream.  One feels one can create the dream.  Like dream incubation, this is an empowering to the dreamer.  Lucid dreams can be also be requested for or intended in order to heal, problem solve or gain information.
  • Experiencing healing, a solution or guidance in a dream or through information received in a dream.
  • Discovering and evaluating what contributions dreams have made. After recording dreams for a significant period of time, one can go back and review dreams to find how they related to events and experiences in waking life during that time. This can be an eye-opening experience of discovery when one sees that many dreams do come true, show the processes and transformations one is going through in life, and support and nurture the dreamer from a deeper source.

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2. The Importance of Dreams for Recovery of Soul Loss

Dreams: A Pathway to the Soul

Dreams: A Pathway to the Soul Image via Pertash Koul

Do you feel out of touch with yourself? Do you feel that your culture is shallow and vapid? You are not alone. In 20 Diagnostic Signs That You’re Suffering From “Soul Loss,” Lissa Rankin, M.D., states that this is a very common malady in today’s world. She says not only individuals suffer from this but so do cultures. In my opinion, religions, and in particular, churches can also suffer from it. Whenever we, whether individually or collectively, have lost sight of what animates us, what makes us come alive or what drives us, we suffer from a form of soul loss.

Dreams and holding on to a dream are some keys to recover the soul’s enlivening power in our waking life. Dreams come from the soul itself and speak for the soul and its needs. It is no wonder that so many individuals suffer soul loss when they don’t value their dreams and don’t make an effort to remember them or work with them. Institutions lose soul when they lose sight of the founder’s vision or dream for that organization. This is particularly true of religions and churches which become social clubs or babysitting stations for kids when the ties to a deep spiritual connection have been broken or not promoted among the followers.

Therefore, a remedy for recovering from soul loss is studying about dreams, learning both how to work with them and learning from them:

Individually, this means keeping a dream journal and doing dreamwork on an on-going and consistent basis.

Collectively, this means studying and learning from the dreams and visions of the founders. Institutions can recapture their original dynamism by going back to the basics, to be once again inspired by the founders, learning what defined the organization and why it was started in the first place.

Dreams and visions are all about purposes of soul and how soul presents itself in the world. What is your true dream? In that you will find your true inspiration.


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3. What It Means to Commit to Dreamwork

Recording dreams regularly will provide many insights not otherwise available to the waking mind.

Recording Dreams

Dreamwork is the practice of regularly recording and reflecting on one’s dream in a conscious and applied manner with the intention to learn from the wisdom of dreams. It is not an easy task. In fact, it is probably one of the most challenging projects a person could take on, and yet, possibly one of the most rewarding.

Freud said dreams were “the royal road to the Unconscious.” Connecting to dreams is a direct method to connect to the Unconscious, the deepest part of you. So if you want to really get to know yourself through and through, doing dreamwork is one of the best ways to do it.

By committing to dreamwork, you are giving permission to the Unconscious to inform your waking life, bringing new and often challenging insights into a consciousness that is often protected from this greater reality by a tough Ego that wants to be safe, secure and in control. Often, the interests of Ego and the interests of Unconscious are at odds. This means:

  • You may experience conflicting values in situations where your ego has learned to adapt, appease, turn a blind eye or, conversely, be overly critical and your Unconscious is suggesting a bolder, risky or more loving response.
  • You may be presented with information about a situation you would rather not know. Dreams often can see the bigger picture and give information you do not pick up in waking consciousness or they may portend events in the future that may be hard to accept.
  • Dreams may show you how powerful you can be if you forgo your fears and act on your dreams. Dreams may show you doing things in dreamtime you are frightened to do in your waking life—but in dreamtime accomplish with ease, grace and sometimes with the help of angelic beings. This is why the phrase “If you can dream it, you can do it” is so true. It’s like the holographic prototype model has already been tested in dreamtime, proving to you it can work.

By committing to dreamwork, then, you are committing yourself to be open to another level of awareness that calls you to move beyond the constraints of Ego limitations and into a world of limitless possibilities. What can be more exciting than that?


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4. Reflections on Which Dreams May Manifest in Waking Life

Dreams can help keep us healthy.

Hippocrates of Kos taught about dreams indicating illnesses.


If you faithfully keep a dream journal you will notice, over time, many things and events that you dream about come true in waking life. It may be the sequence of events that particularly manifest or it may be that you see a person in dreamtime you never met before–but several months after the dream you meet that person in waking life. Then there are some dreams that don’t appear to have any relationship to current reality or seem so bizarre and surrealistic that it doesn’t seem they could ever be making a true statement about anything.

This raises the question of how do you know if a dream might manifest in waking life? From nearly forty years of dreamwork, I have made these observations about my own dreams. You might see if they apply to your own.

  1. Very realistic dreams tend to manifest in waking life. If I have a dream that is realistic and probable, i.e., I am driving my own car and not some fantasy car, then it probably has something to do with manifesting something in waking life. For example, any physical ailment which I knew about ahead of time in dreamtime presented quite literally and showed up later on a medical test as when years ago I had a dream in which a voice said I had blood in my stool. A medical test actually concurred with that even though a later colonoscopy proved it was nothing to worry about. This rule applies also in cases where the symbolism is present but there is a clear resemblance such as dreaming of having overflowing pipes and end up having diarrhea. This is possible because there is a close proximity to the symbol and waking reality. In fact, Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, said much medical and diagnostic information of this sort could be gained from similar dreams.
  2. Somewhat surrealistic or unrealistic events may be relating events in the far off future. Years ago I had a series of dreams in which I was traveling around Hawaii with my brother. At the time I was living in Massachusetts, and so the possibility of this happening seemed a little far-fetched. The island’s scenery was stylized in my dream, not being typical of a specific place on any of the islands. Yet, as I read my dream journal years later, I found that after I moved to Hawaii, we did travel around the island of Oahu as we did in the dream, and we shared certain concerns that showed up in those early dreams.
  3. Very surrealistic dreams tend to be making a statement about the interior world of the dreamer. Really bizarre, odd or unusual objects in places they don’t usually belong, such as a rare or extinct species of owl in a refrigerator, are most often aspects of the dreamer and need to be looked at as such by asking, “What about me is like this owl?” or “What about me is like the refrigerator?” In this type of dream, I personally have not seen a close or frequent connection to events or objects manifesting in waking life such as opening the refrigerator and finding a rare spotted owl perched next to the orange juice.

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5. Working with Dream Themes: Dream Lovers

Lover as Muse

Gustave Moreau, Hesiod and the Muse (1891)—Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Meeting and possibly making love with a very attractive person in a dream is a quite common dream theme, no matter whether it is someone we know in waking life or a mysterious lover who only populates our dreams. In the dream, these encounters are often marked by passion, beauty, and wonder so vivid that upon waking we feel driven to act on the dream—no matter if the person is someone in waking life who is unavailable, a poor choice or someone we don’t know or haven’t even encountered yet!

The importance of the dream is not so much the person referred to but the energy that is evoked in the dream. Powerful energy does, indeed, need acting upon and that is what the dream is asking us to do. However, before going and doing something foolish or regrettable, the thing to remember is that the dream is all about the dreamer. That highly attractive and lovely soul you are encountering is perhaps an aspect of your own loveliness or quality, and it is that which is asking you to recognize in yourself!

Example:

In the dream you are falling for a writer who is physically attractive and highly competent as a writer. Before you go associating this person with someone you know who is a writer, you might ask yourself: Have you thought about becoming a writer? Do you have writing skills you haven’t developed? If so, this dream perhaps is telling you that the profession would be attractive to you and that you would be competent at it! It is like your muse inviting you to this possibility.

If you actually know a writer in waking life that you think this dream symbol represents, you may want to pursue the relationship in real life if the person is available emotionally or otherwise. That person may have a lot to teach you about writing and life itself. The good news is that if this person is a jerk in waking life, or is married with three kids, or you are married, you can still nurture that wonderful energy by recognizing that it is part of you—you can value it by learning about the craft of writing, starting writing, and getting feedback on your writing. Your love will blossom to fruition with the development of a whole new aspect of yourself and you will have avoided a possibly disastrous relationship!


3 Comments on Working with Dream Themes: Dream Lovers, last added: 10/14/2014
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6. Building Self-Respect through Dreamwork and Intuitive Meditation

What do I rely on to get respect?

Where Does Self-Respect Come From?

5 Signs You’re Not Respecting Yourself by Vironika Tugaleva  is a good article about the negative behaviors that can pull us down, indicating that our self-esteem is plummeting. If these behaviors become habitual patterns they can be very self-destructive and undermine our relationships with other people.

Usually these behaviors manifest because, for any number of reasons, we are not in touch with our true self, and so don’t respect who we are.  Dreamwork and accessing intuitive insight are great tools that can counteract any tendency to disrespect ourselves because the on-going practice of these exercises can lead to a healthy awareness of who we truly and uniquely are at the deepest emotional and spiritual levels. These exercises tap us into the root of our being and nourish us with information that gives the bigger picture, the grander vision and the substance of things. They can also give us specific answers to problems and concerns we may have. Instead of being buffeted around by the questionable and often enslaving pressures and opinions of those around us, we are fed by healing truths that are custom made for each of us in a way that meets the problem at hand while preserving our innate goodness and integrity.  The end result is that we can behave in a manner that is worthy of respect, both from others and from ourselves!

Example: When I start to feel jealous of someone’s life, thinking it is better than mine, I can ask for a dream will give me guidance on how I can get more out of my own life, being very specific in the questioning to indicate what makes me jealous of someone else and what I might need to fulfill my own life. Asking for a dream to help resolve an issue is called incubating a dream (Ask and You Shall Receive: Incubating a Dream), and it can become one way to work through an issue.

The same can be done by an intuitive meditation such as the Inspired Heart™ Meditation. Prior to doing the meditation I can ask for insight to come. During the meditation I observe the breath and quiet the mind. I then make a heart connection, and receive the insight that comes.

No matter if I work with a dream or in a meditation, the occasion may become a turning point in my life that encourages me to face my feelings, and work towards resolving my issues based on information I have received from a profound inner source and not someone’s opinion or outside pressure. With regular practice I will find that such empowerment will lead to a healthy self-respect. I will come to experience that I am a Child of God, fed and cared for by divine sources, and placed on this earth for an important purpose that only I can serve.  What better basis for self-respect can there be?


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7. Building Self-Respect through Dreamwork and Intuitive Meditation

What do I rely on to get respect?

Where Does Self-Respect Come From?

5 Signs You’re Not Respecting Yourself by Vironika Tugaleva  is a good article about the negative behaviors that can pull us down, indicating that our self-esteem is plummeting. If these behaviors become habitual patterns they can be very self-destructive and undermine our relationships with other people.

Usually these behaviors manifest because, for any number of reasons, we are not in touch with our true self, and so don’t respect who we are.  Dreamwork and accessing intuitive insight are great tools that can counteract any tendency to disrespect ourselves because the on-going practice of these exercises can lead to a healthy awareness of who we truly and uniquely are at the deepest emotional and spiritual levels. These exercises tap us into the root of our being and nourish us with information that gives the bigger picture, the grander vision and the substance of things. They can also give us specific answers to problems and concerns we may have. Instead of being buffeted around by the questionable and often enslaving pressures and opinions of those around us, we are fed by healing truths that are custom made for each of us in a way that meets the problem at hand while preserving our innate goodness and integrity.  The end result is that we can behave in a manner that is worthy of respect, both from others and from ourselves!

Example: When I start to feel jealous of someone’s life, thinking it is better than mine, I can ask for a dream will give me guidance on how I can get more out of my own life, being very specific in the questioning to indicate what makes me jealous of someone else and what I might need to fulfill my own life. Asking for a dream to help resolve an issue is called incubating a dream (Ask and You Shall Receive: Incubating a Dream), and it can become one way to work through an issue.

The same can be done by an intuitive meditation such as the Inspired Heart™ Meditation. Prior to doing the meditation I can ask for insight to come. During the meditation I observe the breath and quiet the mind. I then make a heart connection, and receive the insight that comes.

No matter if I work with a dream or in a meditation, the occasion may become a turning point in my life that encourages me to face my feelings, and work towards resolving my issues based on information I have received from a profound inner source and not someone’s opinion or outside pressure. With regular practice I will find that such empowerment will lead to a healthy self-respect. I will come to experience that I am a Child of God, fed and cared for by divine sources, and placed on this earth for an important purpose that only I can serve.  What better basis for self-respect can there be?


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8. Too Much of a Good Thing: An Ashlynn Acosta Intuitive Discoveries Mystery

What do we own?

A Lady Desires a Painting
Artwork by Christine Soltys

For the many who have asked, Ashlynn Acosta will be making her second appearance as the intuitive teen sleuth in Too Much of a Good Thing, a young adult mystery novel set in Gloucester, Massachusetts. In the intriguing story, our heroine deals with issues of hoarding, ownership, greed and possessiveness that lead to a crime.

The problematic relationship with her single dad, a “just the facts” police detective, has healed through the challenges met and shared in Dead Men Do Tell Tales. Relishing this lively new connection with her dad, Ashlynn suspects any woman seriously claiming her father’s attention. When a beautiful redhead enters the scene, Ashlynn faces the need to solve a mystery in the midst of a budding romance between her father and this most surprising lady. Pressure builds when her buddy group divides into romantic couples and she is paired with a guy who evokes new feelings in her! She is overwhelmed by it all.

Ashlynn’s very first date takes place as she tries to uncover the real mystery in the midst of too much of too many good things. Intuition and real dreamwork are the tools Ashlynn uses to help her understand and act on her new feelings as well as unravel the secrets in a mansion on a hill where a rich old lady has been found dead.

In a Reader’s Guide at the end of the novel, you can learn more about the intuitive tools Ashlynn uses and learn how they can be employed to unlock your own mysteries and solve your own problems.


0 Comments on Too Much of a Good Thing: An Ashlynn Acosta Intuitive Discoveries Mystery as of 9/12/2014 8:16:00 PM
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9. Too Much of a Good Thing: An Ashlynn Acosta Intuitive Discoveries Mystery

What do we own?

A Lady Desires a Painting
Artwork by Christine Soltys

For the many who have asked, Ashlynn Acosta will be making her second appearance as the intuitive teen sleuth in Too Much of a Good Thing, a young adult mystery novel set in Gloucester, Massachusetts. In the intriguing story, our heroine deals with issues of hoarding, ownership, greed and possessiveness that lead to a crime.

The problematic relationship with her single dad, a “just the facts” police detective, has healed through the challenges met and shared in Dead Men Do Tell Tales. Relishing this lively new connection with her dad, Ashlynn suspects any woman seriously claiming her father’s attention. When a beautiful redhead enters the scene, Ashlynn faces the need to solve a mystery in the midst of a budding romance between her father and this most surprising lady. Pressure builds when her buddy group divides into romantic couples and she is paired with a guy who evokes new feelings in her! She is overwhelmed by it all.

Ashlynn’s very first date takes place as she tries to uncover the real mystery in the midst of too much of too many good things. Intuition and real dreamwork are the tools Ashlynn uses to help her understand and act on her new feelings as well as unravel the secrets in a mansion on a hill where a rich old lady has been found dead.

In a Reader’s Guide at the end of the novel, you can learn more about the intuitive tools Ashlynn uses and learn how they can be employed to unlock your own mysteries and solve your own problems.


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10. Is Déjà vu a Memory of a Forgotten Dream?

Déjà vu suggests two realities, dreamtime and waking time.

Déjà vu: How could I be here before?

Déjà vu, the experience of already having seen something or visited someplace, is a common experience that modern science cannot explain. For example, I might be traveling in a foreign country, visiting a famous place like the Great Wall of China for the first time. All of sudden I get the feeling I have been here and this place is familiar.

After nearly forty years of recording my dreams, and having so many dreams of being in strange places and meeting new people that become manifest in waking life, I am almost convinced déjà vu is an experience of remembering something or someplace previously seen in dreamtime, and the memory surfaces from the long-forgotten, or possibly never-remembered dream when waking reality mimics the earlier experience in dreamtime. I was first made aware of this dual reality when I was in college and had a dream just after my roommate became engaged.

Dream:
I dream of attending my college roommate’s wedding in a white church I didn’t recognize in waking life. The dream is vivid and clear in every detail, especially the completely white color of church exterior, the unusual reddish brown design inside the church and the fact that I am taken to the church in the groom’s parents’ white car, sitting in the right rear seat.

On waking I completely forgot about the dream because I wasn’t in the habit of recording my dreams at this stage of my life. When the day of the wedding arrived approximately six months later, and we were about to go to the church, I was told to ride in the groom’s parents’ white car. As I looked at the car, I suddenly I recalled the dream and remembered I had seen this before, been here and done this! I got goose bumps. Reality then played out according to my dream. I was told to sit in the right backseat, exactly where I was in the dream. On the way to the church I suspected the church would be all white on the outside and inside would have that unusual reddish brown design. And sure enough, it did.

Déjà vu suggests a Similar Dreamtime and Waking Reality

Edgar Cayce and others have stated that in dreamtime we get a foreshadowing of all the important events in our life before they become manifest in waking life. It is in dreamtime where we make choices that may eventually play out in waking time because dreamtime puts us into the future to prepare the way for us. That is one reason why Casey is quoted as saying “Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.” It’s like we are given a trial run. If we are dream-aware, we can make use of this test case scenario. If not, it’s as if we are programmed to follow through with the same decision in waking life as we made in dreamtime.

Living Twice in this Life

This concept of living our life twice, in dreamtime and waking time, is hinted at in popular culture with the James Bond theme song sung by Nancy Sinatra,

“You only live twice or so it seems
One life for yourself and one for your dreams.”

While some may interpret this to mean we live two different lives, one in our dreams (perhaps daydreams) and one in waking life, and these realities might not necessarily match in quality or enjoyment, my experience indicates that night dreams pretty well do match waking life—unless I consciously NOT make a decision I made in dreamtime because I didn’t like the outcome I saw in the dream. However, this type of decision-making requires knowing what was dreamed about and remembering it, perhaps many years after the dream! To me, this is what is meant by getting answers about the future from the dream. If you liked the outcome of your choice in dreamtime, go with it. If not, make another choice.

So the next time you experience déjà vu, consider that you may have passed this way before—in your dreams, and your dreams were preparing you for this experience.


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11. Working with Dream Themes: Health and Healing

Caduceus - Medical Symbol for Healing

Caduceus: The Healing Rod of Asclepius

With nearly 40 years of dreamwork experience, one thing I can say for certain about my dreams is that the archetypal energy of healing at all levels, spiritual, psychological and physical has been expressed in myriad symbols, processes and themes, indicating to me that the primary purpose of dreams is to heal and make whole.

The Benefits of Working with Dreams to Heal

Learning to recognize when and how healing is at work within is a fascinating aspect of the study of dreams. It was one of the first benefits I clearly saw from keeping a dream journal. (See my blog 6 Health Related Benefits of Keeping a #Dream Journal.) As I grew more adept at working with dreams, I learned that they could be used to diagnose, treat and monitor the progress of any kind of ailment. Over the years, I learned to request information about a piece of health information prior to getting the specific lab results to verify the accuracy of that test. I have found my dreams to be up to this point in time 100% accurate and I have been doing this for more than ten years. And last but not least, I saw healings take place within my dreams which then manifested in my body.

How to Become Adept at Working with Health-Related Dreams

If you want to become adept at exploring your health from the dream perspective, do the following:

  1. Keep a dream journal and be faithful in recording all the dreams you can remember, even the most minor and insignificant. Many years ago I had an obscure “one-liner” dream which conveyed the cryptic message, “Everyone is working to develop a method of self-healing.” I knew nothing of what this meant at the time but many years later, I saw it would become one the main purposes of my life, and “everyone” referred to all aspects of me!
  2. Read the groundbreaking book by Patricia Garfield, Ph.D., The Healing Power of Dreams, which gives researched information on how symbols occurring in dreams relate to the body and its state of health. She gives many of the commonly occurring symbols for health in dreams.
  3. In addition the to common symbols for health and healing; learn your personal dream vocabulary. (See Recognizing Your Personal Dream Vocabulary.) What are your unique symbols for health, healing and healers that appear in your dreams?
  4. Notice and reflect on all images, processes and symbols relating to health, the medical field, therapists and healers. What are they telling you?
  5. Learn to request specific health information from dreams (Dream Incubation.) (See Ask and You Shall Receive: Incubating a #Dream.)  For example, ask what particular foods do you need to eat to get healthier?
  6. Request healings to come in dreams.
  7. Test your dream findings with your medical lab tests or a doctor’s diagnosis.  If your dream tells you one thing, and a doctor another, get a second opinion.

Many doctors now are beginning to see the helpfulness of dreams in staying healthy.  My doctor always takes my health dreams seriously and so should yours!  Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, is said to have learned about the value of dreams and their relationship to health at an asclepion, an ancient type of hospital which was dedicated to the god of healing, Asclepius.  The caduceus, the symbol of medicine which comes to us from this ancient era, depicts snakes wrapped around the rod of Asclepius.


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12. 6 Health Related Benefits of Keeping a Dream Journal

Rod of Asclepius2

Rod of Aesclepius

Since the days of the ancient Greek healing centers called aesclepions, dreams have been associated with health and healing.  Keeping a regular record of your dreams will clearly demonstrate the special relationship dreams have to health.  It will produce many health related benefits to include:

  1. The revealing of your personal symbols, themes and processes that relate to healing and health. You will better understand how your psyche images and presents health related information to your waking mind when you see the repetitive appearance of certain symbols. You may see a physician or health care worker reappear over and over or you may be given a profound symbol for a disease you are facing. The symbol may hold the key to the healing.
  2. Having a recording of patterns of healings, diagnoses, and warnings of diseases and ailments. As you learn to recognize your symbols for these events, you will see the congruences between the status of your health and the dream symbols.
  3. Seeing that certain ailments may be healed for you in the dream. Dream healings can come as a gift given. You may told in the dream that a certain issue, perhaps one you didn’t even know about, was being taken care of. If you were not in the habit of remembering and writing down your dreams you would not even be aware of the healing process going on without your intervention.
  4. Gaining deep insight into specific health issues over a period of time. The symbol of a particular ailment may change over time, reflecting the change in the ailment itself—for better or worse that may help the dreamer better deal with the ailment.
  5. Giving clues as what will be the outcomes for certain choices. Dreams will often present scenarios that can and do come true in waking life.  So when an alarming dream happens, it is important to write it down, reflect on it and learn for it. For example, a friend of mine had disconcerting repetitive dreams about being arrested for drunk driving. While he is a moderate drinker, there is probably little likelihood this will happen but certainly the warning is there to help him make good choices about drinking and driving. And if he should make a wrong choice, this dream could very well come true. Also, because dreams can have multiple meanings, I told him his dream might actually be about something else entirely. Only he could know for sure.
  6. Accessing information that gives me choices. Therefore, the power of dreams is not so much that they can look into the future; it’s that when remembered, they give us the opportunity to make a different choice than the one we made in the dream— if we want to. They give us a chance to test drive a decision before it pans out in real life. From a lifetime of recording my dreams I have found that all major issues in life seem to be “worked through” with a choice made in dream time prior to my need to make that decision in waking time. It’s like there is a program that has been set by a decision I have already made in dream time that will manifest itself in waking life. Having all my dreams written down lets me go back and see how an issue, especially a health related one that I am facing now, got resolved earlier in a dream. If I liked the way it turned out then, then I can resolve it as I did in the dream. If I did not like the outcome, I can simply make a different choice as I did in the following instance.

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13. Looking back on 40 years of Recorded Dreams: What Can Be Seen?

We all dream every night but few of us actually try to remember, much less record, these messages from the Unconscious. Some people may jot down important dreams or keep a dream journal for a few months. A very small percentage of people, I among them, have made a lifetime habit of recording on a daily basis almost every dream remembered, resulting in a collection of dreams numbering in the thousands. What can be seen from reading and reflecting on all these dreams?

Many Dreams are Prophetic

As I read the dreams in chronological order as I would a novel, I see that a large percentage of the dreams are either telling me something about my current situation or are prophetic messages of something happening in the future. The dreams that relate to the present usually offer some sort of insight such as clarifying feelings I have or indicating a process I am going through. The ones that relate to future usually are a bit hard to understand in my current situation so I have learned to take them to be indicators of something that may happen later in a different situation. For example over ten years ago I had many dreams occurring over several months that had me living in Hawaii—at a time when I did not even consider making my home there. Three years later, I ended up moving to Hawaii. Because of experiences like this, I believe that déjà vu is often the remembrance of place, events and people we have already seen in dreamtime. Seeing this congruence between dreams and the future gives one a tremendous sense of awe at the power of the Unconscious to connect us to the future.

The Real Power of Dreams

In dreamtime, setting the stage for the future we may walk into and the making choices among several presented to us, is an important awareness that puts the conscious dreamer at a great advantage. I believe, after a lifetime of seeing this process take place, that we all live our lives twice— like the James Bond movie says—once in our dreams and once in our lives. In dreamtime we are already negotiating the future. Edgar Cayce noted that dreams are the answers to tomorrow’s questions. In dreamtime, we make the choices, experience the transformations, and meet the people we will meet later. If we tune into our dreams and become aware of the process, we can be prepared with foreknowledge to face the future. We will know that we can get through that awful transition or survive a breakup of a marriage because we will have already experienced and remembered doing it in dreamtime. However, the real power of dreams is not that they can predict the future. The real power lies in knowing we don’t have to make the decisions we made in dreamtime. If we weren’t happy with the decision we made in dreamtime, we can make a different decision in waking life. We have a second chance. But that only happens if we remember the dream. Otherwise, we are like computers playing out a code that has already been programmed—and live with the consequences.

Sustained by a Greater Power

Years of recorded dreams will show times when guides and healers appeared in periods of crisis to sustain and support the dreamer. These figures bring insights and healing power that far exceed the abilities of the waking mind. Once these helpers are recognized for what they are, they can be accessed and employed for intentional purposes of the dreamer, again making the dreamer realize we are in the hands of loving and profoundly powerful forces that are ready to help us. And in dreams we can even see their faces!


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