Waking Your Dreams Unlock the Wisdom of Your Unconscious

The Lure of the Dream "Dreaming is a nightly dip, a skinny dip, into the pool of images and feelings." a?James Hillman Perchance to Dream Picture this dream scene in monochrome gray. Massive boulders edge this portion of the beach. I see a Neanderthal man motionless in a squat, his eyes fixed on a configuration in the sand of five straight, parallel lines extending into the distance. Small iron balls lie in the gullies between the lines. I'm there too, thinking all this has nothing to do with me. I feel alone, far from home and anxious about being among people who don't look like me. I am afraid of the primitive human. In my hurry to get away, I walk diagonally across his design. It occurs to me that I am ruining the field by tracking across it, and I worry I'll be punished. I awoke feeling bewildered. In my daytime life, I'd just begun writing this book, and I'd gone to sleep wondering what my dreamlife would have to say about it. But this? I'd expected something more contemporary and more colorful. Maybe some advice about the book. Yet this brief, puzzling scene was what I got. It was my dream, conjured out of my own body and soul, experiences, beliefs and unconscious depths. And I had no idea what it meant. And so it goes with dreamers. We awake with a puzzle, much like fairy-tale characters begin a journey with a dilemma and find their way through a more-than-ordinary world to a resolution. The expedition changes them just as being with a dream alters the dreamer. It's the journey, the joining with the story that creates new life in the fairy-tale characters and in the dreamers. Meaning emerges from the encounter. Say you have a dream about picking strawberries. Don't ask what strawberries stand for. At least not yet. First, in your imagination rejoin the dream. Notice how the ripe red strawberries are tucked under leaves in the cool morning. Touch the sturdy leaves and enjoy the scent that rises as you push the leaves aside. Pick a strawberry, look into its pocky red face, taste it. Notice your reaction. What are you feeling and thinking? The dream leads you to the strawberry, and the berry engages all your senses. Meaning comes out of that encounter. That intimate contact, that time spent with night and daydreams, enriches and enlarges our humanity. You and I are descendants of a 140-million-year-old family of dreamers. Though we now understand the physiology of dreams, we, like our ancestors, are confounded, entertained, frightened and inspired by these images of sleep. Dreams offer entree to a realm beyond the rational, a nonmaterial reality or spirituality. They feed the human hunger for mystery, adventure, amazement and guidance. The usual rules of time and space do not apply. Dreams reveal the timelessness at our core. I can be dreaming of a contemporary scene and suddenly I am looking at myself as a fifteen-year-old sitting in my bedroom with that familiar light coming in the windows and family sounds rising from downstairs. Past, present and future mingle, and even the boundary of death yields so that we meet lost loved ones and others who have not yet arrived in waking life. Time is an idea we live in, and dreams give us the opportunity to escape time. The fluidity of dreams shows us the essential undividedness of existence. Dreams suspend physics, and we fly and travel great distances with less effort than it takes to walk in waking time. The customary rules of ethics and manners lose their authority and dreams move beyond political correctness, censorship, custom and taboo. Aspects of ourselves emerge that are disallowed in daylight. We are rude without remorse, seductive, impish and irresponsible. We can lose control with no lasting consequence, get perspective on our daytime selves, our habits, assumptions and fears. Anything is possible and we can't know what will happen next. It's like watching home movies sMellon, Emma is the author of 'Waking Your Dreams Unlock the Wisdom of Your Unconscious', published 2006 under ISBN 9780757305542 and ISBN 0757305547.