Dreams

Do dreams matter? Some people swear that they don’t dream. I know others who believe they dream but say that they NEVER remember them. I know people who occasionally remember their dreams but truly believe that there is no significance to them. Some people think that dreams are merely a product of physiological activity, like indigestion from eating or drinking too much, interference from nighttime stimuli, like the noise of an air conditioner, the scent of a skin lotion or nearby flowers, or the sound of water dripping. But I also know people who are fascinated by their dreams. Some people even try to analyze them.

The reason I have chosen to mention dreams in this website is that I have come to believe that our dreams are “sent” to us by our unconscious…and that they are either the by-product of what we are unconsciously processing in our sleep or a message given to us from a deeper, more objective aspect of our psyche. Because I have come to believe this I encourage people to pay attention to their dreams. The English author D.H.Lawrence once wrote, “I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts or my thoughts the result of my dreams.” My answer would be, “Both are true.” I believe that whatever part of us survives, or transcends, the death of our body is our true, core self. I believe that this self is always awake, even when our conscious is asleep. While we sleep this non-conscious aspect of our psyche processes both the new data that our waking self has inputted during the day and continues to process the core issues that drive us, whose agendas control much of how and why we react to waking situations.

A dream might be related to spending the day in some radically different way (like being in a foreign land for the first time, experiencing all kinds of new gadgets at a convention, or meeting dozens of relatives for the first time at a family reunion). The dream is then the by-product of processing all of the day’s exciting new data. But a dream might also be the result of an unresolved issue continuing to create an unbearable stress. Lyndon B.Johnson had a recurring dream throughout his life when he would be under severe stress. It was that he was sitting in a chair, paralyzed, and a cattle stampede was coming right at him. As president, with the death-toll of American soldiers constantly mounting, this dream became that he was lying in a bed and his head was his own but his body was a thin, paralyzed body of Woodrow Wilson. He was so frightened by this recurring dream that he would actually walk through the White House until he came to Wilson’s portrait and then touch it to assure himself that he was not Wilson…that he was not crippled and bed-ridden. Tortured nightly by dreams, LBJ decided to not run for the presidency for another term, believing that his dreams were telling him that he was in an untenable situation.

Each one of us is more than our waking self. We are our unconscious…and our unconscious is us. When we dream it is perhaps much like when our conscious dies. Our unconscious (our core self) takes over. It is safe and has access to a universe that is not limited like our conscious dimension, which in our case is this planet, in this galaxy. It understands our conscious life, including our dilemmas and doubts and disappointments…and why we made the decisions we made. It understands the gravity of our mistakes if we have been destructive to ourselves or others. Whatever is urgent in our lives is addressed in the form of the imagery that our unconscious “emails” us as it processes our daily experiences, while reconciling our hopes with our fears. Although it is more “us” than our waking self, it IS our waking self and what we do as our conscious influences what our unconscious has to process. The two are inextricably intertwined.

I want to share a dream with you of a woman named Jeanette Fusco, dreamed during an agonizing period of her life when she was dealing with her husband having been diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer:
I was in a very expansive place and…everyone was there-thousands of entities like myself who belonged there and were also in spirit…we were all one, yet each of us was separate. We were in a paradise of complete warmth, happiness, and comfort…
I was shown that the physical is actually almost like what we consider the dream state.
I also realized how time-oriented, primitive, encumbered, and tiny the Earth is compared to the place from which I was observing it. There was no time-past, present, or future. It just is. Even though I experienced this, I can’t explain it in words… Looking at the Earth and the physical realm from there made it seem insignificant. I could not imagine why I had worried and was so concerned about what went on down on Earth…
From out there the Earth seemed but a speck of sand. I realized that the concept of time went hand in hand with the physical dimension, one reason being that there has to be a time limit on our Earth-lives for the assignments we are trying to fulfill. It is hard to explain the insignificance of an Earth life from this other perspective. While I felt detached from the Earth. I was also still strongly me while on Earth. The most amazing thing, however, was the realization that I had gotten the whole thing reversed and that the dream is actually the physical.

For those of us who want to be better people…who want to live healthier, happier lives…we should consider the possibility that our dreams are the language of a better, more objective, caring aspect of our own self. I hope you’ll consider the possibility that dreams are sort of “bed-time stories” told to us by our wiser self; to enchant us, enlighten us, and even to fore-warn us.