By SHELLEY STOCKWELL-NICHOLAS, PhD
(with excerpts from “Awakened Miracles: Your Course From Source” Spiritual Counselor Certification)
What happens if you close your eyes and tell yourself, “The next thing I think is a dream?”
Go ahead, close your eyes and say it…“The next thing I think is a dream?”
…You can’t help it; you enter the dream state of your imagination. In fact, you dream day and night. By the time you keel over, you’ll have spent more than six years dreaming!
Daydreams become reality. DO THIS! Close your eyes and think of what you want for yourself inside a golden heart as you recite these magic words: “The power to dream and imagine is the exact power that makes things real. In the magic of my amazing mind, I manifest what I request.”
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
“Who are YOU?” The caterpillar asks Alice
“I am who I am when I say ‘I.’” Alice’s conscious mind replies.
“If you’re YOU when conscious, are YOU someone else when asleep?… Who are YOU?””
“Last night I… No, that wasn’t me….” Or was it? Enthralled by storylines, symbols, objects, patterns and themes, your dreams speak in your own secret language. Let’s say you dream about a flying shoe that sings to the queen. While in it, non-sense makes sense and you take it at face value. ‘Common sense’ evaporates. Hypnotists call this “trance-logic.”
When you awaken, a fantasmagorical YOU switches to the literal YOU. Then, when you pay attention, the abstract, wonky, or vivid, tells you a true story of who YOU are.
Even when dreams incorporates a past and future, now, in real time, your curiousity brings clarity of what you think. This clarity enhances self-awareness, messages, themes and premonitions.
Kalahari and Australian aborigines say “you yourself are the Creator’s daydream–or a dream within a dream– The dream is real; the waking state is the dream.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Aristotle (384-322 BC) noted that in dreams “an object, even when removed, remains in your imagination and senses as a realistic afterimage… “Some are moved in sleep to perform with a certain phantasm things that pertain to wakefulness…a dream is the animating voice of your soul and often sensible perception.” Researchers now have no simplistic explanation of the function of your sleep, dreams and neurotransmitter activity and why dreams causes you to process information differently.
DREAM CATCHERS: AWAKENING
Being aware that you dream while dreaming– “lucid dreaming” –ranges from a brief flash of awareness to a prolonged saga.” You become conscious of consciousness itself as you understand that you are the dream; the dreamer and the observer of the dream; three perspectives of enlightement. Like the story of Rumplestiltskin, your vivid awareness, spins dream threads to golden strands of wisdom and harmony.
CREATIVE DREAMING
As in any altered state, senses are muted until you focus upon them. I teach clients and students to come to their senses to enjoy the interactive movie from wake… to sleep… to dream… to re-awakening. The best part about creative dreaming is that you can have fun all night long. Will you fly? Converse with some one? Go places? Visit other worlds? Answer questions? Invent new things? Improve old things? Make love? Help others?
Choose what you think and do in dreams and you become more mindful when awake. Creative dreaming resolves real life issues. Creative dreaming taps unlimited mental resources. If you ask for gifts, they are given. So tonight, before you “drift off” tell yourself, “I pay attention to what wafts across my mind and dream my best dreams. My dream is my domain. I’m in charge! If I don’t like a dream, I stay asleep and re-dream it as one I like better. I tell mean people to ‘go away’ and they do. I ask for and receive gifts in my dreams. Positive nuetrality results and I remember my dreams when I awaken.”
WHAT DREAMS MEAN?
Throughout history, focused dreamers served as seers, remote viewers and telepaths who crossed time, space, and energy to embody guidence from an ascended spirits. This same trance-configuration is used by worshipers numerous church and temple rituals to this day.
Ancient documents from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome claim enhanced intelligence and inspiration from prayer, meditation and dreams. Dream interpretation is a jumbled preoccupation of all traditions. Depending on the book you read you are called upon to decide dream meanings or someone else tells you what it means. Some ideas are worth considering; others are rediculously farfetched.
In every Judeo/Christian Bible, the words “dreams” and “visions” are used interchangeably. The classic passage, Job 33:15–16 reads, “God speaks in dreams, in visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on people as they lie in their beds…God whispers in their ears…”
“Since dreams are the imagined product of your waking experiences, only you can accurately decode the exact meaning of a metaphore for advice and prophesy… says the Greek “Book of Dreams” (“Oneirocritica” written by Artemidous; 2nd century AD).
The Egyptian ‘Dream Book’ papyrys (1279-1213 B.C. found in Deir el-Medina or Set Maat- “The Place of Truth”) categorizes seventy-eight, mainly visual, activities like eating, drinking, love making or looking out a window then lists 108 interpretations as “good” or “bad.” Bad ones that are written in red. The book seems to be an heirloom passed down from generation to generation. A rightful ancient king was required to travel “between the worlds” (called incubation) in sleep and dreams to receive messages and answers.
DREAM TEMPLES
In the ancient sleep temples of Egypt, and Greece your “Master of secret things,” “Isis” or “Osiris. (In Greece, Asklepios) helps you decipher dream meanings to prescribe what’s needed. (Much like a modern doctor). For example, “a dream of dirty water implies kidney problems so you best drink more water and less beer.”
You lay upon an abaton or bed and are told: “Rest, sleep and venture to the stars (specifically Sopdet, Sothis, Sirius) and the ‘moist land’ as you take the road to the multidimensional universe and afterlife… When you arrive, open your dream eyes and awaken god/goddess to reveal your inner realms and help you on your journey… Take in their advice, prophecy or meaning…and ask how your dream relates to you and your body.” (Sounds like guided imagery, prayer, meditation, hypnosis or psychotherapy doesn’t it!)
Famous dreams changed the course of history. Dream travelers advised leaders on affairs of culture, state and military strategy. In the Jewish Book of Genesis, Joseph, son of Jacob, interpreted Pharaoh’s dream and foretold of a seven-year famine said to have enabled Egypt to avoid disaster. Dreams submitted to the Roman Senate were analyzed and interpreted.
Tibetan dream yogis embrace dreams for enlightenment and suggest that you “Lie on your side and in-vision a symbol of the sound ‘ah’ or ‘ohm’” and report to yourself what you notice.
Indigenous ones use dream prophesies to shape their future. A Hawaiian proverb says that in dreams “divine guidance lifts you up- even if you don’t notice because the great night provides, what the great day neglects” (“Ka p-nui ho`olakolako, ke ao nui ho`ohemahema”).