| What do you Dream? part one October 2009 blog Many years ago, I used to conduct classes and workshops on dream interpretation and reprogramming. I integrated studies on symbology, retraining the subconscious, and even a little Tibetan Astral travel. It never ceases to amaze me how little is known about dreams, published, or even discussed in our mainstream media. We spend 1/3 of life asleep and all of us dream (even if we don’t remember them well), and all of us can benefit from understanding the doors of our secret mind. So this is the first in a 4 part series about dreams. What does this have to do with massage? Not much, I have used guided imagery in some sessions when it was appropriate, other than having a better relationship with your unconscious mind can have great health benefits such as have more restful sleep. Most of us are familiar with Sigmund Freud’s pioneer effort into modern dream interpretation, but any student of the Bible knows it goes back much further than that. Joseph interpreted Pharoah’s dreams and was quite a dreamer himself, there are many instances of angelic visitations in dreams, and whose to say that visions are nothing but waking dreams. Robert Louis Stevenson claimed that stories such as Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were brought to him by ‘brownies” during his dreams (remember that the people of Scotland and Ireland took great stock in “little people”). Freud advanced theories of the subconscious that delved heavily in the meaning of symbolic meanings for the actions of the dreamer. Mostly his ended up relating to sex or Mother issues. Others such as Jung looked at symbols as being universal or archetypical. My research breaks dreaming into four specific types where the rules of interpretation may be different for each type, therefore, the first objective is to identify what category the dream falls into. Then lets discuss the first and most commonly known dream type. Symbolic Dreams: we have dreams where the characters are often exaggerated like a Salvidor Dali painting and the places we see and things we do are unlike those of our waking life. These are the dreams where repressed feelings and memories are often dealt with in form that we can handle. We may even assume the character of some unknown person so that we aren’t directly confronted with issues that we have been avoiding or are just not ready to handle. Often in our waking life we suppress memories, for an example, I couldn’t remember much of my elementary school years for much of my early adult life. There was a lot of emotional pain associated with those years. Eventually, I was able to bring back those years by association of the good times I had back then. We tend to throw out the baby with the bath water, only when I could bring balance to those years could I face and deal with the bad things and balance it out by celebrating the good that occurred. Once that happened, several reoccurring dreams I had up to that point (and yes they were often scary and largely symbolic, mostly having my legs stuck in quicksand as I was trying to run away from the bad guys), left and never came back. As we grow and learn in life eventually we must face all our inner demons in order to progress. By getting these issues addressed as symbols we can be detached and objective as we unravel the messages brought to us by our dreams. It doesn’t have to be dark and heavy either. Dreams associated with this quadrant of the brain are tied to our emotional body so it’s not unusual to wake up laughing or crying. Next month we will talk about 2 other types of dreams, and in the articles after that we will discuss dream programing, techniques to remember dreams, and even some ways to sleep better. Please send me any questions you want me to address in this series. I hope you enjoy this topic and I wouldn’t be opposed to conducting some workshops down the road if there was enough interest. |
