Learn to use your dreams

Our dreams offer us value and enjoyment on multiple levels. 

Perhaps the greatest value of the material in our dreams is its pragmatic nature.  Our nightly dreams come to us in service of our daily health and well-being.  Like a loving parent or mentor, our dreams offer insights into our own puzzling and sometimes confounding behavior patterns, the intricacies of our relationships, our physical and mental health, and the world around us.

To these ends, our dreams offer us a unique perspective.  Consider your dream’s apparent ability to view you and your daily life from above, as though from a helicopter.  Our dreams seem to have a 360 degree view of us as well as the capacity to see us from within. 

Maybe on a subconscious level we know what our dreams tell us, but we are often too deep in the forest of daily business to find the pathways our dreams readily see. 

No doubt, the language of dreams can be perplexing, but it can be learned.  Those who take the time are rewarded with the universal “ah ha!” of self-knowledge and an opportunity to progress beyond a snag in their personal growth and development.

Our dreams also bring beauty in images and sensations that simply are not available to us in our waking lives.  Their contributions to the creative accomplishments of some of the most exalted writers, artists, musicians and thinkers of all time are well-documented.  And such dreams are available to us all.

Dreams of flying are among the most pleasurable of all.  Most of us hold memories of such dreams for our lifetimes.  These dreams are valuable for the exhilaration alone, but can also offer the impetus for exploring new horizons in life.

In each weekly column, we attempt to help dreamers make the connections their dreams present while sharing methods and strategies for working with dreams.  Now, we are offering a series of Dreamwork Workshops for our readers’ benefit and enjoyment.

Sunday, June 7^th ~ Session 1 will offer dreamwork basics for understanding your dreams and applying their insights to your daily life and lifelong aspirations.  Recognizing symbols, metaphors, puns and plays on words are the building blocks we will explore.

Sunday, June 14^th ~ Session 2 offers more advanced strategies developed by the leaders in the dreamwork community including Projective dreamwork by Jeremy Taylor, PhD, Co-Founder of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and the Marin Institute for Projective Dreamwork; and Dream Themes by Robert Gongloff, Past President of the IASD.

Sunday, June 28^th ~ Session 3 will explore the power and beauty of dream incubation and lucid dreaming.  We will present methods for ‘hatching’ a dream that responds to a dreamer’s specific problem or question.  In addition, we will offer the processes used to induce lucid dreams and the many possibilities such dreams raise.

For details please visit Benicia Dreamwork Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/Benicia-Dreamwork-Meetup/?scheduleNow=true

You may attend one, two or all three sessions.  Hope to see you there!

Sweet dreams to you, Dear Dreamer!

Dream interpretation - That abandoned baby is you!

If you dream of losing a baby or forgetting one, leaving it behind or in danger, you likely are ignoring your deepest spiritual needs and desires.  

Dear SMYD,

You always say that it helps to understand a recurring dream if you make a note of when you have it, how you’re feeling and what’s going on in your life.  Well, I haven’t made any notes, but I can tell you exactly when I have had this particular recurring dream over the years.  It came up when each of my three children were born and at milestones in their lives.  When they went off to kindergarten, or had their first sleep over.  Sports or academic achievements, first love, graduation, first apartment – I always made sure they were the best prepared and that we celebrated all those things.   

I have always put my children first so it’s especially hard to understand why I have this recurring dream at exactly the moment when I’m sacrificing everything for them:

In my dream I always leave the baby behind.  It is set in different places but they are all similar in that I am at a crossroads or a threshold of some kind.  Most recently, when my youngest asked me to help her plan her wedding, I was on the platform in a train station, and the baby was somewhere in the crowd.  I’ll have to find her and I know this will make me miss the train.

These dreams are always so stressful!  I wake up terrified at the way things are going.

Signed,

Am I a Terrible Mom?

Dear Mom,

Jeremy Taylor, founder of the Marin Institute forProjective Dream Work and past president of the International Association forthe Study of Dreams says that dreams of leaving a baby behind are “classic” in their recurrence and “usually come to people who lead productive, responsible lives.  [Such a dream] is all the more upsetting or distressing for precisely that reason.”

Without giving too many details, you reveal yourself to be in this high achieving category when you say that your children are always the best prepared for the milestones in their lives and that you take special care to celebrate all those events as they come.  That’s a lot of focus and attention for the eighteen year formative lives of three children! 

You also mention that you sacrifice everything for them.  Could it be that at each milestone for one of your children, some part of you – your aspiration or inner desire – was saying, “Hey – what about me?  Looks like I’m being left behind again.”  The infant in your dream may represent aspects of yourself that were neglected or ill-defined – misplaced or ill-attended in favor of the needs of your family.

Those actions over the years are noble indeed and your healthy, successful children are testimony to your sacrifice and skill as a parent.  But perhaps now, Dear Dreamer, you can give that inner baby, the budding part of yourself, the attention it deserves.

Sweet Dreams to You!

Sex, death and automobiles!

In anticipation of the 31^st Annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, to be held at the Doubletree Hotel at the Berkeley Marina, June 4-8, 2014, let’s take a look at some timeless insights into dream meaning by the Reverend JeremyTaylor, Co-Founder and Past President of the IASD.

Dear Dreamers,

You most likely have known me to dissuade you from subscribing to any source of information about dreams that claims to know definitively that “if you dream ‘this’ it means ‘this.’”

Dreams are too personal and too complex to be reduced to such simplistic terms!

But, having said that, we can look to certain archetypal images that occur in dreams across the spectrum of dreamers.  Even their implications for an individual dreamer cannot be summed up in a pat “definition;” but as former President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Reverend Jeremy Taylor says, their metaphorical message “turns out to be true so often, that it’s worth asking if it might be true” for the current dream you’re working on. 

Keeping mindful of the already-stated caveat, Taylor goes on to discuss several dream images with which you are no doubt are familiar:

1.      1.  Vehicles, specifically automobiles:  These will frequently provide analogies to the physical self.  If something is wrong with your car in your dream, it is a good starting place to look for a corresponding physical symptom in your own body.  Or, there may be a literal tie to your actual, waking-life automobile.  Brakes fail in your dream; check your brakes in your waking life.

      2.   Death:  In our dreams, is not to be feared.  Death represents a dramatic change through emotional growth.  You cannot grow up and become, let’s say, a more empathetic person until you experience the death of your self-centered, uncaring self.  Even dreams of suicide speak to our deliberate choice to change our way of being in waking life.  In effect, death is the necessary precursor to rebirth as a “new, improved” person!

3.     3. Sex:  Almost always, overt sex in our dreams will be addressing a longing in our waking life.  Here it is important to spend time understanding our sex partner.  If your dreaming self has you in an intimate embrace with a former professional colleague, for example, it will be helpful to think about the salient qualities that person has.  Your dream suggests that you are longing to make them your own.  According to Taylor, dreams of same sex love or attraction reflect your own deepening sense of self-acceptance.

There are, of course, many more archetypal images that frequent our dreams.  Beginning your exploration with such timeless approaches is a sure gateway to understanding your dreams.  From there, dream work shifts naturally to the personal application that will change your thinking and change your life!

If you can attend the IASD Conference in Berkeley, by all means do!  You will have a rich and worthwhile experience.  In any case, please continue to Send Me Your Dreams!

Sweet Dreams to You!

sendmeyourdreams@yahoo.com