A Little Bit About Dreams
Permit me to describe a dream for you that I had when I was six years old.
It is winter and my mother has sent my older sister and me outside to play. We are in the garage my sister is scolding me for some reason while she is looking for something. I think it is a shovel so we can dig tunnels in the snow. I am not really listening. I have zoned out and am studying the details around me as though somehow compelled to do so. Eventually the compulsion has me looking out the open garage door at the falling snow noting the pattern of its descent.
Then I wake up and get ready for the day. It is winter and my mother sends my older sister and me outside to play. We go into the garage. My sister scolds me for some reason while she is looking for something. I think it is a shovel so we can dig tunnels in the snow. I am not really listening. I have zoned out and am studying the details around me as though somehow compelled to do so. Eventually the compulsion has me looking out the open garage door at the falling snow noting the pattern of its descent. Then I realize that was what I had dreamed.
This dream and the events of the next day have led me to study dreams. As you might suspect I started off by researching dreams as a metaphysical phenomenon. I watched documentaries about dreams and their relationships to astral projection and precognition. Then I started to read dream dictionaries which lead to books that spoke of Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious then books about what happens when you dream (rem sleep and sleep walking) then finally books on why we dream. All the while doing experiments to learn to increase my ability to remember my dreams as well as manipulate them in that ever prized lucid dream state.
Here's what I have learned. Dreams are our purest form of thinking. Generally (no process in nature is perfect) undisturbed by external stimulus. What I mean by that is when we are awake and conscious of the outside world we are distracted from what we see in our minds eye or ear or finger or tongue or nose whatever sensory stimulation and center you want. I give as an example something that stands out for me. I'm afraid of heights. For example I still do roofing as required. I just get down once I can no longer take it. While on there I am constantly picturing myself falling over the side and dropping to my death but I am steadied by the fact that I'm not because I am still on the roof and can confirm it by seeing the roof or feeling it beneath my feet and hands. If I were dreaming about falling off the roof I would have nothing to confirm I was safe in bed.
I came to this conclusion by the methods I used to learn how to dream lucidly. I started off by working on increasing my ability to remember dreams. I never kept a dream journal. What I did instead was retell myself the dreams I had when I woke up. This way I would integrate them into my waking thoughts and memory. Once I remembered my dreams I became more familiar with what it felt like to be dreaming. From there when I went to bed I would imagine to the smallest detail I could imagine what I wanted to dream about. After awhile I could influence what I was going to dream about. A little after that I could dream lucidly. The point being the more I trained myself to think and remember in more detail the better I became at dreaming. Not to mention the impressive visualization skills I've picked up. I don't even necessarily dream with visual components anymore. Now my mind just conveys the necessary information without much fanfare.
As far as interpreting dreams goes, I spent a lot time going through dream dictionaries and psychology books and I've learned something important. Symbolism in dreams is very personal and not everything in dreams are overtly symbolic. I had a dream where I was using a mostly empty bag of brown sugar in a weapon Kata (the Japanese word for a martial arts form). I was told dreaming about sugar was a sign that I will soon come into money. I found that dubious given the nature of my life. What later dawned on me was that's what I do with mostly empty bags of brown sugar. I pretend to do a weapon Kata with them (yes I'm weird.) It wasn't in my dream as foretelling future fortune it was just an element in my dream drawn from something I do while awake. In the dream I was showing off for a woman and that's what I was doing to show off. It was a dream. It was more impressive than it sounds.
I no longer bother to lucid dream anymore. I came to the conclusion that my mind has things to tell me so I might as well listen instead of obscuring it with my need to escape reality. Mind you it was fun while it lasted but in the end the control in a lucid dream is only make believe so I decided to concentrate on working with real life.
Since I started off describing a dream that seemed to predict the future I wanted to touch on dreams and the metaphysical. I don't think dreams in and of themselves are inherently metaphysical but as I said they are our purest form of thinking undisturbed by external stimulus. So if you are getting information from a metaphysical source then dreams would be the ideal place to process it. I would imagine just like thinking, metaphysically acquired information would be less obfuscated by physical stimulus in a dream.
It is winter and my mother has sent my older sister and me outside to play. We are in the garage my sister is scolding me for some reason while she is looking for something. I think it is a shovel so we can dig tunnels in the snow. I am not really listening. I have zoned out and am studying the details around me as though somehow compelled to do so. Eventually the compulsion has me looking out the open garage door at the falling snow noting the pattern of its descent.
Then I wake up and get ready for the day. It is winter and my mother sends my older sister and me outside to play. We go into the garage. My sister scolds me for some reason while she is looking for something. I think it is a shovel so we can dig tunnels in the snow. I am not really listening. I have zoned out and am studying the details around me as though somehow compelled to do so. Eventually the compulsion has me looking out the open garage door at the falling snow noting the pattern of its descent. Then I realize that was what I had dreamed.
This dream and the events of the next day have led me to study dreams. As you might suspect I started off by researching dreams as a metaphysical phenomenon. I watched documentaries about dreams and their relationships to astral projection and precognition. Then I started to read dream dictionaries which lead to books that spoke of Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious then books about what happens when you dream (rem sleep and sleep walking) then finally books on why we dream. All the while doing experiments to learn to increase my ability to remember my dreams as well as manipulate them in that ever prized lucid dream state.
Here's what I have learned. Dreams are our purest form of thinking. Generally (no process in nature is perfect) undisturbed by external stimulus. What I mean by that is when we are awake and conscious of the outside world we are distracted from what we see in our minds eye or ear or finger or tongue or nose whatever sensory stimulation and center you want. I give as an example something that stands out for me. I'm afraid of heights. For example I still do roofing as required. I just get down once I can no longer take it. While on there I am constantly picturing myself falling over the side and dropping to my death but I am steadied by the fact that I'm not because I am still on the roof and can confirm it by seeing the roof or feeling it beneath my feet and hands. If I were dreaming about falling off the roof I would have nothing to confirm I was safe in bed.
I came to this conclusion by the methods I used to learn how to dream lucidly. I started off by working on increasing my ability to remember dreams. I never kept a dream journal. What I did instead was retell myself the dreams I had when I woke up. This way I would integrate them into my waking thoughts and memory. Once I remembered my dreams I became more familiar with what it felt like to be dreaming. From there when I went to bed I would imagine to the smallest detail I could imagine what I wanted to dream about. After awhile I could influence what I was going to dream about. A little after that I could dream lucidly. The point being the more I trained myself to think and remember in more detail the better I became at dreaming. Not to mention the impressive visualization skills I've picked up. I don't even necessarily dream with visual components anymore. Now my mind just conveys the necessary information without much fanfare.
As far as interpreting dreams goes, I spent a lot time going through dream dictionaries and psychology books and I've learned something important. Symbolism in dreams is very personal and not everything in dreams are overtly symbolic. I had a dream where I was using a mostly empty bag of brown sugar in a weapon Kata (the Japanese word for a martial arts form). I was told dreaming about sugar was a sign that I will soon come into money. I found that dubious given the nature of my life. What later dawned on me was that's what I do with mostly empty bags of brown sugar. I pretend to do a weapon Kata with them (yes I'm weird.) It wasn't in my dream as foretelling future fortune it was just an element in my dream drawn from something I do while awake. In the dream I was showing off for a woman and that's what I was doing to show off. It was a dream. It was more impressive than it sounds.
I no longer bother to lucid dream anymore. I came to the conclusion that my mind has things to tell me so I might as well listen instead of obscuring it with my need to escape reality. Mind you it was fun while it lasted but in the end the control in a lucid dream is only make believe so I decided to concentrate on working with real life.
Since I started off describing a dream that seemed to predict the future I wanted to touch on dreams and the metaphysical. I don't think dreams in and of themselves are inherently metaphysical but as I said they are our purest form of thinking undisturbed by external stimulus. So if you are getting information from a metaphysical source then dreams would be the ideal place to process it. I would imagine just like thinking, metaphysically acquired information would be less obfuscated by physical stimulus in a dream.
posted by Urban Shaman at 3:07 PM
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