The quote in the heading is a gem of wisdom worth remembering, unfortunately I can’t give credit to the author of it as it’s not available and the photo is of Joseph’s Ladder showing his stairway to Heaven and is in Wikipedia.
But today we begin exploring dreams and start with a few basic concepts that’s good to know.
A dream essentially links what’s going on in your outer life [your waking life] and what your subconscious is wanting you to know about it. This is a really simple way of putting it, but I don’t think it will serve any purpose to get too technical and confuse everyone including myself! So a dream is not an isolated event that has nothing to do with your everyday life – it’s actually a part of it. So when you get to the part of trying to unravel the meaning to a dream it’s wise to put the dream into context of what’s happened in the day or waking life. For this reason buying into dream dictionaries are not a good investment as with most things ‘one size doesn’t fit all’.
For me, dreams are wondrous things. They remind me just how incredible humans are – and have at our disposal all the tools needed for survival. The interpretation of dreams are part of history – one of the earliest we know is how Joseph played a vital part in the running of an Empire as a result of interpreting the dreams of an Egyptian Pharaoh.
Things changed over time especially when East split from West. Since then Western civilisation lost the ability to speak the language of symbols and can’t understand the language it speaks. It doesn’t matter though because we’re used to learning symbols in everyday life. We learn to use symbols as part of The Highway Code. We are familiar with the brand images of well-known Supermarkets and Clothes companies which all use symbols because we learn symbols far easier than we learn the written word. So it’s cool the language of dreams is the language of symbols which in addition to anything else are our own symbols which we create in our own dreams. All-in-all it means the language isn’t difficult to learn.
First things first which is: capturing the dream. This is vitally important. There is a couple of ways of achieving this. One is to record the dream as soon as you can which may mean waking-up during the night to write it down. Or, if you can, write it down first thing in the morning when you wake. You could also make a tape of the dream using an ordinary recorder which you can then play-back and listen to when you need. Whichever way you choose isn’t important, it’s whatever suits you best. But you have to find a way to get the dream recorded so you can look at it later.
So we now have our dream recorded and we’re staring at it thinking: ‘Okay – so what do I do now?’ The best way to go from here is for me to record a dream I had many years ago. I had it a few nights not in a row, at different times but it was always the same dream. I didn’t record it because it was so short I remembered it. Also I didn’t know what it meant – I had no idea. So this was the dream:
‘I saw a plane flying through the sky. It was quite small so I got the impression the plane was flying high in the sky. At some point as it passed through my vision – something fell out. Whatever it was that fell was too small for me to see. I didn’t feel alarmed or panicked or feel any sense of danger whatsoever. I just saw it happen – noted it and moved on.’
And that was it – I saw the dream in total about three times. I didn’t understand it nor did it seem to have any significance to me then so I forgot about it. Until several weeks later I had a miscarriage. After that the dream came back to me and I remembered it.
I was the plane and something quite literally fell out of me. If anybody has had a miscarriage they will understand some of the emotions that go with it. Grief at the loss certainly, but I also felt guilt. I felt that it was my fault that I had lost my baby. I blamed my body for letting me down. [However irrational that sounds – it’s true]. Strangely enough one of the things that upset me really badly at the beginning was the thought of part of me being burned-up in an incinerator in the hospital alone and without me. It was so awful I couldn’t tell anybody and I cried all night in hospital without being able to speak about it.
During those days/weeks/months after that miscarriage one of the brightest spots in my life was that dream. It kept me going. Because the plane didn’t crash, I had no sense of danger or fear during the dream and somehow or another that gave me hope. After that dream episode I paid a lot more attention to my dreams after that.
Sometimes dreams are quite literal in their meaning as that one was. But looking at the dream again something very important appears. It’s the state the plane was in travelling across the sky. It wasn’t damaged, not in the slightest, the scene of it travelling across the sky was peaceful and serene – the plane just continued on its journey exactly as before the thing dropped from it. Now after the miscarriage all those facts became more important to me than the loss of the object. Because it meant that I would ultimately be okay I would continue my journey [keep on living] as before and without any damage to me personally.
This shows the importance of getting every last bit of information out of the dream as possible and next time that’s what we’ll get into. We’ll learn how to interpret the dream – and you then will have the skill to begin interpreting your own dreams.
Until then, take care.
letsgo 