"Use the light

that lies within you

to regain your

natural clarity of sight."


Lao-Tse

A Chinese novelist of the 17th Century described it with a more earthly perspective. He told of how a great

In other cultures, the distinction between reality and dreams doesn't exist at all. Consider the case of the African chief who dreamed he visited England and Portugal. When he awoke, he dressed in western clothes and told everyone about his visit with the Queen. All the people in the tribe greeted him and congratulated him on a safe journey.

The Kai tribe of New Guinea and the Ashantis of West Africa also equate dreams with reality. They believe, for example, that if someone dreams of having committed adultery that person must be punished.

But we're 21st Century people. We all know the difference between our dreams and reality… right? Dreams can hold fleeting fragments of something or contain images or show long weird and often confusing movies in our head. They can mimic reality or be totally surreal. They can be clear and detailed or jumbled and confused - or both at the same time. They might leave you completely baffled or scared stiff. But then you wake up and gradually realize that you're in the safety of your own home, in your own bed, and you say, "Oh well, it was only a dream."

Have you ever had a dream that you didn't want to tell anybody about?

If dreams aren't reality, what's the difference?

The truth is there is no difference. Dreams are as real as any waking event. There is a daytime reality and there is a nighttime reality. There is inner world experience and there is outer world experience, and sometimes the two meet. Maybe it's more accurate to say that the inner world experience of dreams and your outer world experience in life always reflect each other, but you're just not always conscious of that. When we are, when our "un" conscious and conscious awareness begins to come together, we call that integrating the unconscious.

The psychologist Carl Jung called this integrating the personality - integrating the understanding of all the disparate pieces of your life that made you who you are today - for better or for worse - integrating all the various unconscious parts of yourself that come to your conscious awareness by way of your dreams. Sometimes you may not want to admit this into your conscious awareness. Indeed, this material often resides in the unconscious because it did not fit the ideal image we held for ourselves when we were growing up. It’s equally accurate to say that these parts of ourselves did not fit the ideal expected of us by others, and so we stuffed it away. When you begin to reclaim this material, reintegrate back into yourself, we call this a person of integrity; that's where the word comes from.

Part IV of the Dream Work Series, The Kaleidoscope Set To Whirl, discusses this process more fully in the context of transforming yourself and your world.

Right now, we're going to talk more about the creative potential of dreams, their reality, and the ways that these inner doorways open to new potential in our outer world lives. Dreams. They are a voice of the human psyche, and as I’ve mentioned, psyche literally translates to mean soul. Some people refer to as the "self." Others may call it the "higher self." It may appear to you in many different ways and have many different names. It can be the still small voice within, or the intuitive ways you come to know something. For some, it is a somatic response, such as with goose bumps.

If you desire to know your soul, the first step is to recognize that you have one. The next step is to allow yourself to consider, "What does my soul want?"

"What is the relationship between my soul and me?

"How does my soul affect my life?'

The short answer is that your soul wants you to be happy, and to live your life according to how you function best.

Another way of framing the question might be "Who am I?"

When you begin to ask these questions the energy of the soul is recognized, acknowledged, and valued, and it begins to infuse the life of your conscious intellect - your personality - and when the personality comes to more fully serve the energy of the soul… that's being real, being true to yourself in the world. Every experience that you have and will have during your time on earth encourages the alignment of the personality with your soul. Every circumstance and situation you encounter gives you the opportunity to choose this path, to allow your soul to shine through, to bring you an understanding and reverence for the fullness and love of your live. When the soul comes calling by way of your dreams, you're going to have to learn the language.

Accessing Creative Resources

Let's return to where we began, this time using a phrase from western scripture. The Bible says, "When we come to look at the world, it is comparable to things in a dream." Remember Lian Chi Ba Shi? He said, "Living in this world is like having a big dream." The Shuar shamans of South America put it this way: "The world is as you dream it." So we have Chinese, Indo-European people, and South Americans all saying the same thing. There must be something to it, don't you think?

The ancient Israelites believed dreams to be messages sent from God. In fact, their words for "dreams" and "to see" were one and the same. And they had dream workers to help the people with that. They called them Patriarchs. The Patriarchs did a brisk business. Joseph and Daniel were patriarchs, dream workers who helped to quicken the pulse of life. According to the book of Genesis, Joseph, son of Jacob, had this dream and he told it to his brothers:

"We were binding sheaves in the field and, lo, my sheaf arose and stood upright and, behold, your sheaves gathered around it, and bowed down to my sheaf." Then later that same night he dreamed, "... behold the sun, the moon and the eleven stars were bowing down to me."

We're going to look at Joseph's story, and the dreams contained within it, as if perhaps he was here with us right now. Of course, we're going to have to take a few liberties because it's Joseph's dream and he isn't here to tell us certain things. I'll fill in some of the pieces for you, because we do know about his life and times, the time he had these dreams.

Start by looking at the first sentence of the dream. "We were binding sheaves in the field." Mind you, he's telling his brothers this dream, so Joseph is saying that he and his brothers are binding sheaves of wheat. That's where they worked, in the fields. So, at first glance, this dream is going to address something related to work. But it's a little more than that. It's about the means of making a living, literally how Joseph's family got money, how they put a roof over their head and food on the table.

Then, the dream says, "… and, lo, my sheaf arose and stood upright and, behold, your sheaves gathered around it, and bowed down to my sheaf." So while the dream is addressing matters related to work, it is at the same time also colored not so much by the material aspects of it all - money, food, and so forth - but with something to do with the family hierarchy, how the different family members stand in relation to one another. The head of the family is the one who leads and takes care of the others, and by extension provides food and money. I guess we'd call them the "bread winner" today.

Bread. Sheaves of wheat are converted to flour for sustenance. Flour is made into bread. "Bread winner." This is important because it's one of the ways the psyche works. It's part of the syntax of the language of dreams. All of these sorts of sayings that we have are rooted in some more literal utilitarian purpose from the past. We all really know that, too, though sometimes only at some deeper, less conscious place. Our dreams always remember, however, and it's how they talk. In Part I, we talked about the Indian boy on a vision quest. He was in the dark cave. He was "in the dark" about something. "Bread winner" is a similar play on words. Bread was literally a currency in the past, part of a system of barter. I have bread and you have cheese, so we make a trade of fair value so we each can have grilled cheese sandwiches. This was before the advent of a cash economy. During the 1960's we called money "bread." You'd go to the office and you brought home the bread. Or brought home the bacon - same thing, except instead of wheat it was pigs. Politicians bring home the "pork."

Here's another example on the syntax of dreams and the ways that dreams use symbolic representation to communicate something to you. One of my clients came to me last week with this dream. In the dream she was hitchhiking in the fog. There's a saying, isn't there? I feel a little foggy today, which means you're not clear-headed. You're not focused. Take it a step further, just as the dream does. I mean, look at the action - hitchhiking. You're looking for somebody else to give you a lift. You want or expect somebody else to give you that boost, to help you get to where you're going. In this case, you are looking for somebody else to tell you where to go. I don't want to wander too far from the Biblical dream of Joseph, but this short, one sentence dream is talking about responsibility. Or more precisely about the abrogation of the dreamer's own power. It's something we're taught in this world. Heaven is someplace out in space, not right here and how. You go to the doctor to fix you. Someone else will make things right. But our dreamer is in a fog, not clear about where it is they want and need to go, just like the native boy was "in the dark,” not clearly seeing or hearing or trusting his own experience, his own instinct, his own self. In a fog. It's lacking vision - a necessary first step in setting out to reach your goals.

The dream is saying to the dreamer that this is the way you're operating, and if you really want to be happy, you need to find your own direction, follow your own dreams, learn to live truer to yourself. Actually, you'd be better off waiting until the fog lifted, wouldn't you, before you asked someone else for help? So, like I said, this dream it's pointing out the need to work to lift the fog, to become more focused, to become more aware of your own inner compass as the first step in the journey, and that means shedding a certain kind of worldview. At least for this dreamer, and that's why this person has come to work with me. They don't think so, at first. They've come with a problem they want me to solve. They want me to tell them what this means or what that means, what they should do and how they should do it. And I can. But what would have the greater effect on your life? My telling you what I can see? Or the intuitive knowingness welling up from inside of you? The truth is, the work is a little bit of both. The point is that dreams use representational, symbolic imagery as language to convey meaning. You're in a fog. You're in the dark. You're bringing home the bacon. It's the way that dreams speak.

Back in Joseph's time, I'm sure they didn't call them the breadwinner, per se, but it meant the same thing. It was their livelihood. So in the first sentence, Joseph's dream is talking about making a living, especially in relationship to his brothers, and then the dream takes it a step further. Joseph's sheaves stand up and the other sheaves bow down to his. Who's the breadwinner? Or who will be the breadwinner? Who will stand above the rest? Why Joseph will. His sheaves stand above the rest. That's one way to look at it, and it's probably correct, especially when you hear more of the story. There's another way to look at it, however, a way that's equally correct. It's another element of the language and structure of dreams. They work on different levels of meaning, though they're inter-related meanings.

For example, gathering up sheaves of wheat can also be considered to be something of the ability to harvest something of value. Let's explore this a bit more.

Sheaves of wheat first started as little seeds, seeds with the potential to grow into something else as they germinate below the surface world of things. Seeds that sprout, pop up, and break through the surface to reach the light of day. If nurtured, they can grow into a very bountiful new thing to be harvested. That's the same as things sprouting up from the psyche, from below the surface, into consciousness. Dream things. There's this guy Manco, he's a Shuar shaman from South America. He says, "The seed is the dream of what is to be."

The seed is the dream of what is to be.

As I said, back in the times depicted in the book of Genesis, dreams had great value, and working with dreams was an honored profession, like being a doctor today. So, Joseph's dream might also be hinting at his destiny, his vocation, and a purpose for his place here on earth. It is suggesting that he has a facility for harvesting sheaves of wheat, harvesting the life giving forces, the nourishing elements which spring up from beneath the surface of things. At least, the dream is saying he is more predisposed to this than his siblings are. If understood and followed - this implication of a calling - it would also bestow upon him the status as the head of the family, the breadwinner, someone with something of value that could actually be traded for the material things of life. Dreams and dream messages have different levels of meaning - different, but mutually supportive levels of meaning.

Joseph has another dream from later that same night, and it repeats the same theme, only using different symbology. That is, dreams from the same night often repeat the same message, using different ways of telling the same story in the effort to bring it to awareness. It repeats it. Here, it's "Behold the sun, moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me" - just like his brothers' sheaves were bowing down to Joseph's. The action is the same. Now let's look at the symbols.

The Israelites and the early Egyptians were contemporaries, and we know something of their cosmology, their mythology, in that they considered the sun and moon as feminine and masculine, respectively. So you might want to consider the sun and moon are either symbolizing his mother and father, or something much greater. Perhaps even the rulers of the cosmos, the rulers of heaven and earth. The sun rules the heavens; the moon rules the earth, such as with its influence on the tides, et al. Joseph's parents certainly were the rulers of his day-to-day world. I mean, they worked the fields and he was their son, and he still lived with the family and all. The reason I make this mother / father leap so readily is because there just so happens that there are eleven stars in his dream, and we know Joseph had eleven brothers. So it seems reasonable to consider that this dream is talking about the family - sun and moon and eleven stars = father and mother and eleven brothers.

We also know that in Egypt, where Joseph resided, that the rulers, the Pharaohs, were considered the physical embodiments of the divine. Indeed, for the 100 years leading up to this story, the Egyptians were in the midst of integrating a whole new religious iconography. This was part of a movement away from belief in the feminine powers as all-supreme to the primacy of the Sun god, of which the Pharaoh was considered his child. It was the first go at formulating the monotheistic religions. Later, Jesus would play the same role - Son of God, that is. In Egypt, just like the moon and the sun, the Pharaoh was representative of the ruler of all the heavens - the Sun - as well as things down here on earth - the Moon. And in the dream, the rulers are bowing down to Joseph.

We're starting the get some inkling of this dream, aren't we? There's another saying for you. "Get some inkling." Joseph is somehow being set apart, acknowledged in some way as different from the rest of his brothers and worthy of some greater due or respect. It's talking about Joseph's destiny and his place in the family structure. It's also, on a different level, talking about the means of his becoming the breadwinner, about a possible vocation or direction that his life will take. The dream is also hinting at what the future will bring - some big stuff. Well, his brothers must have gotten the same idea and they must not have liked that either. You know, Joseph being in charge instead of them. Maybe it was a bit of jealousy. So they kidnapped him and sold him into slavery.

Does this sound like anybody's family you know?

The story doesn't end there.

While Joseph was in prison, he met two other inmates, the Pharaoh's butler and a baker, and they were very sad. They were sad because each of them had a dream and they didn't know what they meant. Today was their lucky day, however, because Joseph has this thing with dreams - the ability to gather up the sheaves, the things that spring up from below the surface of things - and so he interprets his fellow inmates' dreams for them. We don't know the text of their dreams, but he tells them that the butler would be freed from prison and be back at work in three days. The baker, however, would be found guilty of his crime and be hanged. Sure enough, according to the Bible, "all this came to pass."

Well, here's Joseph still sitting in prison when the Pharaoh himself has a troublesome dream. None of his wise men could help the Pharaoh with a satisfactory interpretation. That's when the butler - the same butler Joseph met in prison - recommended that the Pharaoh try Joseph. Remember what I told you? Follow your dreams and your life can take on a magical quality, sometimes in the most unexpected ways. So Joseph was released from prison and brought before the ruler of heaven and earth - the Pharaoh - who told him the following dream. The Pharaoh dreamed that he stood on the bank of the Nile River and watched seven fat cows come up out of the water. As the fat cows grazed, he saw seven other cows emerge from the water, as well. These cows, however, were skinny and not doing so well. They are not like any cows the Pharaoh had ever seen. Indeed, they were starving. Then the starving cows ate the fat cows. Later that same night the Pharaoh had another similar dream showing seven full heads of grain being eaten up by seven withered heads of grain.

What would Joseph tell the Pharaoh?

Look at the dream. The first sentence says seven fat cows are coming up out of the Nile. There are a several things to be considered with this introduction. One is that it uses a universal symbol for the unconscious itself - water. Water is one of the most common symbols for the unconscious. Why is that? It’s because all life begins in water - the water of life. It's true in the microcosm, meaning you and me, raised in amniotic fluid. This is also true in the macrocosm, meaning the evolution of the species. It's engrained in the memory of the species, an ancient, ancient belief. But it's more than just some vague memory. It's literally true.

Single-celled life appeared 3.9 billion years ago, all found in the oceans, an undifferentiated state of awareness, not yet separated out into anything else. In the evolutionary scheme of things, the cells split; fishes evolve, adapt, out of the waters, onto land, and ultimately become upright Homos. Before you know it, we're suddenly aware. "I think therefore I am." Before that, it was totally unconscious. That's why water is the universal symbol of the unconscious, the deep, dark depths of a sort which depth psychology explores. Like I said, it's literally true and we carry that awareness within us to this day. Some would say it's a memory encoded in the strands of our DNA. So, if you dream of water rising, it usually signifies that unconscious material is rising, something is rising up to be brought to conscious awareness. The same is true for the Pharaoh. Simply put, something is coming out of the Pharaoh's unconscious for him to understand. That's one level of this dream. It also works on another level. You see, the water is clearly identified as the Nile River.

You probably all know that the Nile Valley has been something of the life source for Egypt throughout time. The river rises and floods the valley plain each year to nourish the land with silt and microbes and such, thereby ensuing a bountiful harvest. Liquids in general are regarded as life giving and the Nile is no exception - it is the source of life in this way, too. So you might say that what is coming up out of the Pharaoh's unconscious has to do with just that, the source of life for his people. I won't go on ad nausea here, other than to point out that the dream has to do with cattle and wheat - protein and carbohydrates - meat and potatoes, so to speak.

Joseph told the Pharaoh that the dream was a warning, that Egypt would enjoy seven years of healthy harvests, followed by seven years of famine - the seven fat cows and the seven starving cows. Sure enough, according to the Bible, "All this came to pass."

For the first seven years the harvests were plenty and, just like the dream foretold, for the next seven years the river Nile failed to flood. The crops withered on the vine and there was famine in the land. Or, rather there would have been had not the Pharaoh heeded Joseph's warning. You see, the Pharaoh honored the dream. He believed in the prophetic, or precognitive voice of his Self. And so, during the seven fruitful years, the Egyptians stored enough grain to last another seven years if it was needed, and, when it was, nobody suffered because they had stored provisions sufficient to wait out the drought. The starving cows ate the fat cows. The withered grain ate the full heads of wheat.

Dreams are just as useful today as they ever were for planning and decision-making.

The story is almost over.

Joseph was elevated to an important position with the Pharaoh. He became the Pharaoh's Patriarch. Just like his dream of years before had foretold, the center of the universe, the physical embodiment of the Sun and Moon - meaning the Pharaoh - was in some way bowing down to Joseph, acknowledging his special gift by giving him a great job. On another level, Joseph was living his dream, harvesting the life giving, and nourishing things that sprout up from the regions below - unconscious material rising forth for conscious consumption. And on yet another level, after hearing of his good fortune, Joseph's family came, his Mother, Father and eleven brothers bowing down to him, honoring him just like the dream sheaves and the stars bowing down to him in his prophetic dream. Joseph became the Pharaoh's Patriarch and titular head of his own family - the breadwinner, as it were. He did so by understanding or following his destiny as laid out for him in his dreams.

The Genie In The Bottle

Sometimes what your family wants you to do or be, or the way they want you to act is not necessarily the right thing for you. You could even say it's a bit like being sent to prison - like Joseph was. Right? But the dream wills out, one way or the other. In our age of reason we tend to sometimes forget that. We tend to honor only our conscious intellect, or our ego, and we get caught up in it. We tend to "push the river." There's another saying. "Push the river” means to go against the natural flow of things. In the way that I use it, it literally refers to when your actions, fueled by your conscious intent, are at odds with what is at yet unconscious for you. There's a conflict between your outer life and your inner life, and it usually makes things a bit difficult. On the one hand, the difficulties may be arising because that unconscious part of yourself is right, and it is trying to slow you down or to direct you more onto a path of less resistance. On the other hand, it could be that you are setting out to accomplish something, and something in your unconscious, something within you, sets about to sabotage those efforts. That unconscious something needs to then be brought forth, understood, integrated in order for you to move more smoothly forward.

Let me give a simple example. You want to take the next step in your career but you just seem to run into obstacles left and right. It feels like you're pushing the river. So you begin to lose heart, become frustrated, begin to doubt yourself. Well, maybe there's some part of you that is sending a different message, such as "I’m not good enough," or "I don't deserve it." Such self-negating messages can be found in your inner life. They need to be met and shed in order to move on.

Or, perhaps the career enhancements or new direction have more to do with trying to live up to somebody else's expectations and you find yourself foiled, despite your best efforts. Again, you feel like you're trying to push the river. In this instance, that source of life within, the as yet unconscious message from your inner world might be "I don't want to do this. I don't want to be a lawyer. I really want to be a ballerina." So you may need to discover just why it is you gave up or never pursued a passion for dance.

Look at it as an evolutionary phenomenon, the way we perceive things, that is. On one end, we had an undifferentiated state of consciousness, the elementary life forms in the sea. Then the pendulum begins swinging the other way, up and out of the waters, onto land, soon to become human beings who discover reason and advance to the greatest heights of technological and scientific prowess. There's lots of progress, but also certain problems. It’s overcompensation, where we begin to shut out feelings, intuition and such. So the pendulum begins swinging back again. The metaphor for the pendulum is that, ultimately, it will come to find center, we will come to a place of balance in the very fabric of our beings. This may be what interests some of you in wanting to learn about dreams.

We all know the story of the genie in the magic lamp. The word genius finds its root in the word genie, so you begin to get a sense of what this story is all about. The genie really exists within you. You have your own answers. All you need to do is call them forth, and your dreams are one way, a very good way, to do just that. You don't have to expend any effort to dream. We all do, without fail, every single night. You just need to start paying attention. Of course, remember the other story: "Pandora's Box." It's very alluring, with lots of promise, but, when opened, it's like a flood has been loosed and all sorts of things come tumbling out. I don't say that as a warning against some great danger. But keep in mind that if you seek, for example, the key to material fame and riches from your dreams, you might not be told the winning lottery numbers, but rather be presented with some of the parts of yourself which hold you back from receiving pleasure, money, happiness or whatever it is you desire.

Joseph Campbell was one of the pre-eminent mythologists of our time. He used to teach at Sarah Lawrence College. Maybe you’ve read one of his books, such as "The Hero's Journey," or have seen him on public television. Campbell saw many parallels between myth and dreams. Indeed, myths are something of a collective dream of their times. Campbell also saw that a person's dreams carry with them something of a mythic dimension. For example, a dreamer worrying about an upcoming test may dream of previous failures. The dream content here is purely personal, but it's also something more, for everyone has to pass a threshold of some kind. With that, the dream draws on some pretty basic mythological themes of initiation, struggle and breakthrough - the hero's quest, as it were. It's another way of understanding your personal dream content. I mean, by looking at the parallels to be found in the myths and legends when someone encounters blockages, or they stumble in some way, you learn more about what it is you are up against yourself. Campbell points out "where you stumble, there your treasure lies." He makes the point with a tale of a farmer from The Arabian Nights.

The farmer is plowing a field when the blade suddenly gets caught in an object planted firmly in the earth. The farmer is very annoyed by this and he pulls away the plow and tries again. But the blade strikes the same stubborn block. So the farmer gets really angry and pulls the plow away. He reaches down to try to find what it is that's stopped him. Digging in the earth with his hands, he discovers a huge iron ring. So he brushes away the dirt and finds the ring is attached to a door. He pulls hard and the door opens up, and he finds himself staring into a cave filled with magnificent jewels.

The same is true in our own psyche; that underworld place filled with treasures. It's the fact that we're not letting their energies - our energies - move us that bring us up short. This is similar to what I was saying about trying to "push the river." The world is a match for us, and we are a match for the world. Where it seems most challenging is also the greatest invitation for us to find deeper and greater powers within ourselves. If you don't pay attention, if you don't trust that inner impulse, you're closing that door - perhaps never even daring to stop to open it, missing opportunities for a fuller experience of life, your potential in life, or something to be learned as you do. The sad irony is that if you don't learn something when it first presents itself, it will just keep coming back until you do. Psychologically speaking, this is called the "compulsion to repeat." Your plow will keep striking at the object in the ground, foiling your efforts, just like your dreams will keep repeating the message, in many different ways. It may be during the same night or it may be a recurring dream. If you don't give it a look, then it will manifest itself in your outer life. If the Pharaoh hadn't listened, surely his people would have starved. If you don't listen, you might be pulling down the rent, but you'll just as surely starve, foregoing pieces of passion bit by bit until you're nothing but a withered head of grain. The way the early Greek philosopher Plato said it was: "A life which is unexamined is not worth living."

Working With Dreams

As I’ve noted, dreams are like a relationship. The more time you spend with them, the better you’ll recall them, and the clearer they'll become. At first they may be fragments or seem to be hopelessly jumbled. Alcohol also tends to diminish recall. But the more you work with your dreams, the clearer and deeper and more fruitful they'll become. Even more literal.

You start by keeping a dream journal, a notebook devoted to your dreams. If you have trouble recalling your dreams, try simply putting your dream journal, your notebook and a pen beside your bed when you go to sleep. And when you lay down, close your eyes and tell yourself that you'll recall your dream and you'll record it when you wake up. It's really as simple as that. You're starting a process. When you wake, be sure to write down whatever you recall. If it's a word, a phrase from a song, or just a snippet of something - an image, even a feeling - write it down. You're opening the channels of communication.

I want to say here that there is some resistance of consciousness to unconscious material, to recalling your dreams. Part of that has to do with conditioning, our conscious mind wanting to be in control. The literal mind says, oh it's just a bunch of nonsense. Or, if we have an erotic dream, that's just because we're horny. Period. End. I don't need my dream to tell me that. Or it's "just a dream." You see, we all have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. It's easier. It's safer. Better to let some things rest. And none of us have been taught to go smoothly into change, have we? It’s more than that, however. In the evolution of human kind, there was an historic imperative - the necessity of human psychic development to resist the unconscious part of our selves. Otherwise consciousness could never have differentiated itself from the unconscious at all, and we'd still be hunkering around on our knuckles or swinging from tree to tree. Consciousness is, after all, part of what makes us humans different than our furred and feathered kin. Yet the consciousness of modern man has withdrawn too far from the reality of the non-ordinary world, and it's sometimes very much to our detriment. On a mundane level, we're simply not accessing our full potentials.

Writing down what you do recall will likely trigger a greater recall. In a day, or a week - I guarantee you'll begin to unfold.

As we've begun to discuss, dreams speak a different language filled with unusual metaphors, symbols and things. So in order to explore your dreams without distorting them, you have to learn the language. Simply put, you can pose questions that are designed to help you discover what you think and feel about your own imagery. For example, if you dream of a deer it might mean one thing if when you were a child you were absolutely terrified when the young, innocent Bambi loses her family and friends when the fire destroys the whole forest. A deer might represent something else if you continue to believe in deer as peaceful benevolent doe-eyed creatures that nibble on bark and fauna. What if that deer had come out of the forest and nibbled your thousand dollar landscaping down to the nub? And the appearance of a deer in your dream could mean quite another thing if you know of the vicious social traits which deer exhibit or if a big four-point buck has actually mauled you.

Usually if you elicit a solid precise description here, you can successfully bridge the material to similar things going on in your outer day waking life. As you go along, intuitive psychological material will well up from the unconscious. We call it the experience of the "ah ha!"

I'm just walking through these now.

The other thing I want to touch on is that dreams usually follow a certain pattern. They have a structure. It's pretty much like the traditional three act play. First you have the introduction that establishes the setting or names the problem. Usually this is in the very first sentence of the dream. Someone may be looking at himself or herself in a mirror in the dream. It's going to show them something about them. With the Indian boy, he loses his way in the mountains.

The second part is like the second act of a movie or play - all the ups and down of the story. And thirdly, you have a resolution of sorts.

You may recall more than one dream in one night. Your dream cycle usually runs up to five or more dreams per night. They often talk about the same things, using different metaphors, different symbols to address whatever is the foremost front burner issue in your life. A dream at midnight or 1 AM might be directly addressing more literal experiences from the previous day. As you go deeper into the theta state, further into the night, your dreams may go deeper, too, addressing more root or causative incidents in life that predisposed you for what happened during the day. You see, they're talking about the same thing, but coming at it in different ways. If you consistently wake at 1 or 2 AM and then have difficulty falling back to sleep, it may be because the deeper dream material is somehow threatening or anxiety provoking, so you keep yourself from facing it. But the dream wills out. If not in your sleep, then you'll meet it in your waking life.

Maybe your dream will follow more of a cause-effect scenario. Say the action or attitudes in your dream remind you of something from that day. For example you're running away from something or you're being chased by something. Well, the dream may lay out the new possibilities, choices you have, or the possible consequences if you continue to live this way - for better or for worse. Let's take a simple example. The action in the dream has you running or being chased. Then you suddenly run right into the thing that is chasing you. It's in front of you and behind you. The dream would be suggesting that not only must you face whatever it is you're running from, but it's also saying you'll keep running into it in your outer life unless you face it inside yourself. If you remain unconscious, unaware of the conflict or unwilling to address the matters, you will necessarily come to face it in your outer life as you draw it to yourself in the effort to resolve it. The simplest dream solution is to ask, "What do you want?" And with that you'll convert the problem into a helper or a friend.

Look at it a different way. How many of you have ever had the experience of deja vu? You've met someone, or you're in a certain situation and you're suddenly struck by the certainty that you've been there before? Well, you have. You've been there in your dreams. You were unable or not yet ready at that time to bring it to your conscious awareness, and now you have run smack into it in your outer life. You've been there before. It’s tangible and it's real. It’s the experience of déjà vu.

One more quick example. Let's say the dream lays out a scenario in which you've come to a crossroads, or a fork in the road. These are typical dream motifs. Let's say there are signs at the fork. Pointing in one direction, the left fork, is sign that says "Disneyland." The sign to the right says "Love." The dream just might be suggesting something about the difference between following a road of just fooling around or playing out some sort of fantasy, seeking an experience or sensation, where the other fork might lead you to just the opposite of that, might lead to love and all that means, if that's what you're seeking or that's a necessary next step for you. What I'm talking about are options and free will, the necessity for making conscious choices. Jean Paul Sartre called it "condemned to be free." Basically he meant that you can't blame somebody else if you make choices with a conscious awareness of the probable effects - or, if you refuse to make those choices, you will suffer the consequences. It's also referred to as the moral responsibility of choice. Choice making is about embracing your own power over the circumstances of your life, choosing to live a life on purpose, and by design. It’s very straight forward, as well. You live true to yourself. You present an honest face to the world, and you thereby allow other people the chance to have an honest reaction to you - like telling someone you love them. Dreams will bring these choices to your conscious awareness. It’s not somebody else telling you what to think or how to feel. We could all use some consistent good advice, right?

Interpretation Techniques

Honor the dream. The first sentence will lay it out for you; tell you what the dream is addressing. Then to begin to get a better understanding of the material, you amplify it. You turn up the volume, so to speak, to better hear the message, the better understand the logic and language that the dreams employ. As you do, you'll find the syntax often plays on puns or clichés, old wives' tales, or nature-based analogies that have come down to us through time. "Bread winner" is one simple example we've looked at so far. Dreams draw on more of a collective memory of things, even the memory of evolution itself. You turn up the volume, define the images.

There are other ways to amplify dream content. As I said, the first way is to look at all the elements of your dreams - the settings, people, animals, objects, feelings, actions, and plots which your dreams employ. In many ways this is the process of what Freud called "free-association," to help you get a better, more conscious awareness of, let's say, what a butterfly is trying to tell you.

What happens when someone like Margaret Burke White appears in your dream, and you know nothing about this person. You amplify the material through some simple research. Maybe you learn that Margaret Bourke-White was a woman who overcame society's limitations imposed on her gender, how she made it in a man's world, so to speak, and did it on her own terms. Or maybe you learn that the way she did that was as a world-class photojournalist, maintaining a high degree of artistic integrity, as she did. Perhaps you learn that during different phases of her work, she employed a certain amount of social realism in her photographs, exploring society, different subsets of culture. Whatever it may be, you learn something about her that's sure to strike a resonant chord in you. She's in your dreams for something, and, what it may be, she is the most appropriate symbol to communicate that you. Sometimes dream work can feel a lot like being a detective, and it's usually quite fun. You're setting out on an adventure of discovery. As you do, you begin to free up potentiality, and your whole life begins to open up. Maybe you have a dream that's a little vague, but then in the course of your day you see a bumper sticker on the car in front of you that provides the answer, the next clue. "Ah ha!" Things start popping and leading you on to discoveries you never imagined, so that you can't wait to go to bed and dream some more.

The ancient Greeks also turned to soothsayers or dream interpreters to help understand the significance of their dreams. They devised an elaborate system where people would travel to temples. This was something of their version of the Native American's vision quest. The most famous Greek temple was located at Epidaures, something like a dream spa where they offered a system of careful preparation in order to induce, or incubate a dream. The better the preparations, the more fortuitous the results.

There was a litany of ablutions before you were even allowed to enter the temple. You would have to abstain from sex, and certain foods, or fast altogether - just like in the vision quest, fasting for three days. We know today that alcohol diminishes recall, so you'd abstain from that, too. Then you'd sit in saunas or jump into cold-water cleansings, make offerings to the Gods - meaning paying the temple priests - and you'd meditate or attend prayer services. Then, according to what kind of dream you were there for, certain animals would have to be sacrificed so that you could sleep on their skins. Or you'd be put in a room full of writhing yellow snakes. The snakes were harmless, but they added a nice touch of mystery, and therefore authenticity to the temples. And it all seemed to work. Indeed, divine prophecies, solutions to problems, healing dreams - one success after the other was inscribed on the temple walls.

Such things as fasting or cleansing yourself, or meditating or praying are all very typical ritual techniques to help in focusing or centering your intent, but you don't have to sleep with snakes to incubate a dream. Unless, of course, you're into that. The results will probably be the same, or maybe better. You won't be waking up all night thinking the snakes are crawling up your nose. All you need is a pen or pencil, your notebook or dream journal, and the intent to target your dreams to solve problems or generate new ideas.

Incubating A Dream

Dream incubation already begins the moment you being to focus on some question or problem. You're setting your inner mind to work. In fact, just by reading material such as these, on dreams, tends to stir the pot, initiates the process, as well. Like I said at the beginning of Part I, I repeat myself throughout this series, a phrase here and there, to speak to that part of you that dreams. It's about forming a relationship with your self, a process that's beginning. When you select a dream journal, your psyche takes note. When you write down your first dreams, your psyche takes note. All of this and more is part of the incubation process, activating the relationship, opening up the channels of communication with your soul.

What we're going to look at right here is targeting a specific problem or seeking an idea.

Gayle Delaney, in her book, Living Your Dreams, presents a very straightforward and effective method for dream incubation. She covers most of the same material in another book, Breakthrough Dreaming, which is very comprehensive, but I don't think it's in print anymore. What you'll find is that she's culled the rituals from the ancient dream temple priests to bring them into modern times. You start with what she calls the day notes.

Day notes are a recitation or regurgitation of the day's activities - all the frustrations, joy, the magic, and so forth that you've met during the day, paying special attention to those things that have somehow hooked you, something in which you recognize that you had some sort of emotional investment. In the writing, you'll possibly recall something that you didn't really recognize at the time - some little sting or annoyance that affixed itself to you that you were not consciously aware at the time that it occurred. Maybe you were a little annoyed with something Mr. Jones said to you, or the way he said it, but you didn't give it any notice at the time. Now it comes bubbling up. The idea is that you spend some short amount of time acknowledging that and perhaps getting some insight into it, so your dreamtime can be devoted to something else. You are undertaking a ritual cleansing of yourself. Acknowledge it. Perhaps even understand it. Get it out of the way. It doesn't need to be elaborate. Just make sure you've covered the ground. As I said, the point is to process some of your daytime stuff so your dream can more accurately focus on your question. To get to your question, you next write out your incubation discussion.

The incubation discussion is where you begin to hone in on your subject for the dream. As you write this down, the idea is to take the opportunity to see what you already know. You don't need to incubate a dream if you already have the answer, do you? Let's say you're looking for a job, but you haven't been having much luck. So your incubation discussion would focus, in part, on the job hunt, an interview you had, writing your resume, or whatever else may be related to that. Or maybe you have a job, but you're seeking a means of "making bread" in a way that is truer to who and what you are. Maybe you're trying to call forth your true passion in life.

I carry around a little card in my wallet as a reminder to myself, and I think it's relevant to what I'm trying to get at here. It goes like this: "You know better than anyone else in the world what you need. The problem in finding the answers you want is often not a lack of information, but an unwillingness, or fear, of acknowledging what you already know."

That's the purpose of an incubation discussion. It’s a means to establish what you already know about your problem. If you already genuinely know the answer to your question, you don't need your dream to reiterate it for you. And it won't. You're looking for what you don't know - the blindside which the question implies - and that's what your dreams will address.

Let's suppose you're a painter and you want the dream to provide you with the finished image of your next painting, because you don't know what you want to do next. Your dream might tell you that you already know the solution. That is, painting is a process. Trust the process and just paint. Or, if you're writing, just write. If you're actively involved in the process, your dreams will join right in with the conscious efforts, like in a partnership with your Self. In the incubation discussion, you may turn the phrase just the way you want for your resume or for part of your repertoire of interview answers. They're there already, just below the surface. And now you already have the answers for that. Or you may find yourself realizing how drawn you were to the activities at the greenhouse that you visited for potting soil while you were en route to look at listings for a data entries job. You may realize you'd much rather work in a greenhouse than some computer job. Well, now you know why your job hunt is not working so well. You don't really want to work in computers, after all. There's some other star that is calling to you.

Take another example. You're dating someone, and you're trying to determine how you really feel about that person. So you turn it around and upside down in your dream incubation until you've distilled in all into one simple, single question. It's a one-line phrase or question that clearly states what it is you are seeking guidance on: "How do I really feel about Kevin?" That's your incubation question. Then you take it to your bed.

Lie down, close your eyes, and repeat the incubation question over and over again like a mantra. If your mind drifts, that's okay. Just recognize it and bring it back to focus on your question as you drift off to sleep. "How do I feel about Kevin?"

There you have it. Day notes - cleansing your self. Dream Discussion - slaughtering the animals for their skins. And the incubation question - a focusing or prayerful technique, a bit like rubbing the magic lamp to coax the genie out, so to speak.

In dream incubation, from cleansing yourself to closing your eyes to sleep, it should take about 10-20 minutes. In can take more if you want, but a short focused period is sufficient. When you wake, be sure to write your dream down in as much detail as you can remember - no matter how much you think the dream could not possibly have anything to do with your question. Most likely, the dream will be as focused as your effort to incubate it.