The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams (27 page)

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Authors: Phyllis R. Koch-Sheras

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BOOK: The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams
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waking self and telling it that there is some past-life information that it might benefit from knowing." There are several indications of past-life dreams, according to Talbot: having a recurrent dream that troubles you for months or even years, finding yourself or others wearing clothing from a different era, experiencing yourself as a different person or of a different sex in several dreams, or sensing that the dreams are more vivid and clearer than other dreams. One woman began having a recurring dream at the age of five, when she moved to Germany, of being chased and caught at a barbed wire fence; she and others are led to a room with a table where they are to undergo experiments. She reported feeling terrified at the end of this dream and at the end of several other similar dreams until age forty, when she received some guidance that helped her identify this experience as a past life in a concentration camp. After this revelation, she no longer had this recurring dream and felt resolved.
Finishing or Changing Your Dreams
Sometimes, our dreams leave us with a sense of anxiety or "unfinished business." Other times, we literally do not get to finish our dreams because an alarm, a barking dog, or a crying baby wakes us up. It's like having to walk out of a movie in the middle of the pivotal scene. Can you finish an unfinished dream? There are many ways to do so, the easiest of which is to do nothing; the dream themes of an unfinished dream often recur spontaneously over the following few nights. But you might prefer to work actively toward resolution, especially if it is a disturbing dream or a nightmare that keeps recurring; once you complete the dream, it will stop returning to bother you. Here are some techniques to try:
 
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Replay
This strategy is a way of promoting the dreaming mind's natural inclination to go back over the interrupted material. Before you fall asleep the next night, go over the dream in detail, and tell yourself you will complete the dream that night. Continue to do so each night until the dream feels finished. Keep in mind, however, that you may not revisit the same theme through the exact same story line and characters; the dream may get resolved through an alternative form. Work with your dreams during the week following the unfinished dream, with an eye toward finding related themes.
Waking Fantasy
Begin by relaxing completely. Let your body feel loose and restful as your mind unwinds. If you wish, close your eyes. When you feel fully relaxed, begin to replay the dream in your mind. See it as clearly and vividly as you can. Go over every detail and strive to feel the feelings the dream originally provoked. Whether narrating it in your mind or aloud to a friend or group, stay in the present tense: "I am walking down a long hallway. My face feels very cold," and so forth. When you get to the part where you woke up, or where the dream ended prematurely for whatever reason, allow yourself to continue the narrative. Let it flowdon't worry about whether you "really dreamed this." Think of it as a waking dream, and follow it wherever it leads you. Continue until you feel you have come to the end.
Changing Your Dream
Sometimes a dream is so upsetting that you would like to forget it, before you even take the time to understand what it might mean. The Senoi people called the disturbing images in dreams "the evil spirits of the dream universe." To confront and change
 
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these evil spirits into dream helpers, turn the negative into the positive. Because this is your dream, you want to be in control of it: When changing a dream, confront your oppressors, right the wrongs, and take command of your dreamworld for the better. Use dream dialogue to converse with the elements of your dream that disturb you, then engage in waking fantasy to amend the story to match your own wishes and desires. You may wish to begin by asking questions such as, "Who are you?" "Why are you coming up now?" ''What do you want from me?" "What is the source of your power?" ''What gift do you have for me?" When you have begun to understand the message, change the figure or the story so that you are in control of your dream's direction and outcome.
You can also modify or destroy the negative images in your dreams. First, be sure you have received everything from them that you need; don't just change them to avoid confronting difficult issues or aspects of yourself. It is not necessary to give all your dreams "happy endings." Sometimes you may want to just let yourself experience what your dream may be telling you, and let it be; another time you may be ready to move on. If you are, then focus on the negative dream images for a few minutes, get their message, keep the useful parts of them, then say good-bye, and, in waking fantasy, burn, bomb, kill, melt, or otherwise eliminate the offending images. Tell them they are gone, and that you forgive them, if necessary, but that they are not needed or welcome to come back to your dreamworldat least not in that form. For example, you might kill off your negative dream Mother, but bring her back into your dreams or fantasy world in a new, more positive way. You can think of this as a way of letting go of or changing a part of you that is no longer useful.
One woman singer used this technique to rework a negative dream experience into one that was helpful and positive. In her
 
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dream, she is working on learning the musical score to
Fiddler on the Roof
, part of which was sung at her wedding, with several other people and discovers that all of the solos have already been assigned; she becomes nervous and upset, and says, "It's not fair!" She connected the dream with her wedding and recent divorce. Rather than feel like there were no "solos" out there for her, she chose to change the ending of the dream, fantasizing a bonfire in which she and her colleagues burn the score, and she proceeds to write her own script and sing a solo of her own. Determining that she didn't need the old ''score" (or the marriage) any longer helped her to move on alone (''solo") and create a new life script.
Some of the most disturbing dreams are those that feature catastrophe or apocalypse. In the atomic age, the ominous mushroom cloud became an archetype of Armageddon, a twentieth-century symbol of the Evil that Good must battle against. Typically, an apocalyptic vision includes some prediction of the coming upheaval, perhaps a chance for redemption, and often a promise of eternal reward to those who have suffered along the way. The biblical foretelling of the Apocalypse has as its precursor a tradition since our earliest history of such dreams invading the human consciousnessboth as a part of religious belief and as individual visions. For example, dreams of catastrophic events plagued Buddha's wife, Gopa. When she told her husband about them, he "explained that world turmoil heralds the inner liberation that is possible." This ancient spiritual interpretation has found concurrence among contemporary dream researchers. In 1992, New York psychiatrist Mortimer Ostow published his research on apocalyptic dreams in
Dreaming: The Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams.
In this article, he suggests that apocalypse as a dream experience is a way for the psyche to do battle with itself, to wrestle with the dual impulse to create and destroy, to survive and succumb.
 
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In the on-line magazine
Electric Dreams
, dream expert Henry Reed writes, "Apocalyptic dreams have widespread occurrence, but for a variety of mental illnesses these dreams have a special function. [They] don't have to mean the end of the world, but may outline the transformation of an unbearable inner condition." Indeed, this could hold true for all dreamers. Why not use an apocalyptic dream as an opportunity to usher in a new era of self? Even if a dream presents no phoenix rising up from the ashes, it is still possible to use dreamwork techniques to transform an ominous apocalyptic dream into a positive, and even healing, inspiration. In the following dream, for instance, such transformation is possible:
"Swept Away"
I am sitting at a table in an oceanside restaurant. My table is in front of a big plate-glass window facing the ocean. I am having lunchthe sun is shining, the sea is calm, with a slight wave formation. I am aware of the other diners in back of me, but I am enjoying the day and am alone with my thoughts. My next awareness is being swept out through the windowthere are chairs, people, etc., being tossed about, swirling in a chaotic mannerI have a sense of catastrophe and finality.
In this dream, there is no ominous feeling during the antedeluvian moment of calm. Nor is there an express opportunity for survival or a new beginning. But the apocalyptic notion of decimating life as the dreamer knows it is clear. In an on-line response to Reed's article, Richard Wilkerson asserts that "these dreams may be used as maps to our traversing unbearable conditions. In this sense, the images hold and contain us through the transition, providing mediation both in the old value system we might be leaving as well as the new one we might still be trying to enter." Using the technique of finishing or changing a dream
 
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(see page 163), this dreamer could transform a jarring dream experience into an empowering one.
Keep in mind, of course, that one person's metaphor is another person's everyday experience. On a recent segment of the television show
National Geographic Explorer
, one nine-year-old girl, living in the shadow of an active volcano on the island of Montserrat, reported: "I dream that the volcano blew and everyone died and I hid. And I don't want to die very young." For this child, catastrophethe kind that wipes out entire villageswas an imminent concern, not merely a metaphor for drastic change. Indeed, the "unbearable condition" the dream volcano refers to is in fact the volcano itself.
Lucid Dreaming
Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a dream, aware that you're dreaming and perhaps about to make choices and take actions that affect the dream's outcome without waking up? Awareness of this kind is called lucid dreaming, and it seems to be little known in our culture. In other cultures, however, lucid dreaming is a prized skill, and dreamworkers around the world have for centuries cultivated this practice as a way of getting the most out of their dreams each night. In these societies, dream manipulations are believed to be more effectively practiced during the dream state, where we are free of the limitations of our physical bodies. Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and Sufism are among the cultures that have valued lucid dreaming through the ages. Greek philosopher Aristotle, too, made reference in his writings to the "consciousness" of a dream taking place during sleep. In 1876, the Marquis d'Hervey Saint-Denys published
Dreams and How to Guide Them
, becoming the first Western dreamworker to discuss lucid dreaming as a practice. A lifelong
 
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dream experimenter, Saint-Denys developed ways to manipulate his dreams while in the dream state.
It was a Dutch psychiatrist named Frederick Van Eeden who in 1913 coined the term lucid dreaming in the "Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research." At the time, however, most people were looking at either the progress of physical science or the theories of Freud, who did not advocate tampering with the messages of the unconscious except to analyze them. So, Van Eeden's observations went relatively unnoticed until they were reprinted in 1969 in psychologist Charles Tart's
Altered States of Consciousness
. Since that time, many modern researchers have studied this phenomenon to such an extent that some say the study of lucid dreaming is now dominating the field of dream research.
Everyone has probably had a lucid dream at one time or another. For most people, lucidity commonly occurs during a nightmare, when they suddenly realize that the frightening experience is taking place in a dream rather than in waking life. Sometimes, this awareness is enough to relieve the fear, and the dream continues, without the dreamer awakening. But often, the dreamer wakes up soon after becoming lucid. For those who seek out lucid dreams, the goal is to remain lucid in the dream, directing and controlling the experience without waking up.
"I Do Not Know Whether I Was Dreaming I Was A Butterfly, Or Whether I Am Now A Butterfly Dreaming I Am A Man."
Chuang Tzu, Chinese philosopher
It's possible, even desirable, to have a pleasant lucid dream, in which you are able to participate in the events, influencing the story or altering characters as you wish. This type of dream is a wonderful experience. Flying is a typical scenario for a lucid dream. Perhaps because flying is such an unusual and exhilarating

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