Dreams bring understanding, if we start to record them, the understanding will come out from our journals to teach us. By recording them we will see all the themes that play in our dreams. For example, we will start to notice similar people, similar places where they occur, similar ideas trying to be conveyed to us by our dreams. All these connections will start to jump out from our journals if we are consistent in recording our dreams. With time we will then gain a greater understanding of our dreams and of ourselves.
I often have recurring themes of dreaming of being in a similar place with similar people. For example an office environment or my Mum’s house are frequent dream environments for me. Often the people in my dreams will be my wife or other family members, but every so often a stranger will appear. I believe all dreams have an underlying spiritual theme that they are trying to show us and lessons or learning they are bringing to us, that cannot easily be obtained in any other way.
A couple of examples from my dream journals:
I was dreaming that I was in an office working there with my wife, I’ll call her Mavis here. I was at my desk and Mavis was at her desk which was just in front of me. I have just come back to work from a three weeks holiday away from work, but Mavis had been still working over this time. My desk has lots of folders and piles of work and papers to read, also several large blue coloured binders. I see one circular for a worker who has just adopted an eight year old daughter and a collection is being taken up suggesting a gold coin donation to buy them a gift. I then try to find my signing in and off sheet of paper that we use in this office. I look in my intray thinking it’s somewhere amongst all the new papers. It’s 4.30 pm now, I look on the clock on the wall and I then decide to go to the toilet but when I come back to my desk I notice that the lights are now all dimmed and my computer is moved off from my desk. The others are about to watch a film or some sort of training program in the next room. It opens to our room and I can see the screen from my desk as I look over from my desk. After it finishes it’s now just a couple of minutes before 6 pm and I decide to go home for the night. I look around for my wife, for Mavis thinking we will leave together but I notice that she has already gone and left earlier or so it seems. I’m feeling slightly annoyed by this as she didn’t tell me before she left that she was going, and we could have gone together at the same time, I’m thinking.
What’s this dream mean, I often dream that Mavis, my wife and I are working together in the same office? It’s a frequently repeating theme in my dreams.
I think this dream represents my marriage and the office is actually our house. My wife Mavis is working hard but I have been on vacation. When I return to work she leaves early, which means I think that often we have some sort of misunderstanding, and we are not really working well together at times. This is common amongst couples as there are always differences in personalities. And so we come to the most important part of this dream. I actually stay and watch the training program and I value it, she goes home and thinks it is useless and a waste of time. Generally this is like me as I think all training and self development is good, she can’t seem to see the point in them as she thinks that she is just like she is and she thinks that’s just the way she is. So its about personalities and personality differences and these can’t be changed as we come into this life wearing them. What can be changed is our souls and so if we work on different real deeper soul growth this will bring out the better aspects of the particular personality we have adopted for this particular lifetime. Is that surprising to you? Personality is similar to karma but it is also like your skin, it is chosen by you before the life you are coming to, to match the karma you will work through and provide the best style of being to learn in the most productive way the lessons you have come to learn this lifetime in the most efficient way. Imagine if your personality was that of an aggressive, angry, person and you came this lifetime to learn more about patience and gentleness. The personality you wore would not be conducive to this lesson. So you take on a more gentler and quieter personality before entering this life to enable you to learn better what you are coming in to learn in this lifetime. The karma you bring in will affect the play of your personality but the right personality ensures that the karma is played out and the possibility of creating more is lessened by the new personality style, the changed personality style, not really new as you have the chance to play or take on all personalities over your different reincarnations.
In a second dream I dreamed I am at my Mum’s house. I am hopping up from sitting on the side of my bed to use my computer. I thought it was next to my bed on a small table I usually had there, but it is further away on my desk. I am thinking in my dream that I should apply for a book shop job that I had seen advertised on the computer. I ring up and talk to the man, who tells me they had lots of applications, but to send my application in as they will still accept some late ones as they are always still looking for good workers. They will be interviewing soon. It is morning and my brother, I’ll call here Charles has just come home from University, he has been kicked out. Mum asks him have you been kicked out from the University. He doesn’t answer her. He has lots of small cases and bags with him, and he puts them in his old room. The cases are old ones and are all from my late Uncle Alywn’s estate. Charles has come from his rented room. In my dream Charles then goes to the toilet. My Mum says to him, get out of there as it’s Dads time to go there now. ( My Dad had a habit of always going to the toilet at the same time every morning at 6.45am, he believed in forming regularity in his habits to obtain regularity at the toilet!) Just then one of my Mum’s good friends, I’ll call her Mrs Walls, but a few years older than my Mum comes into my room, without even knocking first. I am sitting on my bed in my pyjamas,with my dressing gown over me to keep warm, not on properly just draped over my lap. I feel annoyed and embarrassed that she has barged into my private bedroom like this. She asks me for an envelope, she has stamps in her hand and wants to send a letter. Perhaps my Mum has told her to ask me for a stamp, I am also thinking. I pull some envelopes from my desk drawer, but everyone I pull out is used and with writing on it already. She’s about to leave when I find a packet of new envelopes and so I give her one.
So what is some of the meaning of this dream? In my journal I wrote these extra questions I was working on in my personal life at that time and I wanted to see if they were related to my dream. Why is it I have trouble seeing and owning the strengths of my own personality and of the real me? How come I only ever seem to see my negative traits and don’t really own my good traits? Do we really have an inner critic, responsible for criticising us from inside of us? Is it different from the dream censor that censors our dreams so that we are not overloaded and shocked too much and converts the dream message into symbols that seem garbled at times? Should I ring up about the actual bookshop job I saw advertised in the weekend newspaper? Is it related to my dream in which I am told to send in my application? Do dreams often relate to actual events happening in our lives or not? I use questions often to stimulate my imagination and allow me to see outside of the obvious meanings to greater connective and underlying deeper life issues. In this way I gain many insights and jump to surprising connections of understanding diverse and seemingly separate ideas and experiences in my life. So dreams do bring understanding but understanding them fully requires us to really try to understand their meaning in connection with our life’s path and journey. All understanding is ultimately to aid us on our own individual paths, and dreams are also a part of this purpose.
Now this second dream set once again at my Mum’s house is a mixture of the past and of the present. The things in it from my past are affecting my present now. Charles dropping out of University is really exactly what I had done after my second year, he actually completed his University degree. Dad in the toilet in the dream is saying to me that I am affected still by his power and of his strict rigidity. The computer in my room represents my mind which has recorded the past. Mrs Walls represents someone looking for answers, and the dream is telling me not to give people the old used answers but always give them the fresh new ones, or my latest real thoughts and actual thinking and to not just fob them off with surface thinking and casual thoughts. The new envelopes represent my new ideas as I had just written them in my recently published book. At the time I had just had my book self published. The job situation in my dream is encouraging me by saying to me that my new book will be a success, and will lead to visits to bookshops.
The inner critic is a side of our personality that is identified with negativity and with all the criticism that we have taken on over the years. It is a window into the behind the scenes programming that is voicing it. Look at it that way, and be aware. For example if the critic is saying you have no strengths or good traits, realise that this is the voice of what someone has programmed into you and told you from your past. It is not your own truth.
The dream censor is not the critic, it is more a filter that breaks down the input from the your dreams to a level that it thinks your mind can take on, or accept for now. The critic has an independent voice and is the voice of your past programming and conditioned ways of thinking that have become traits and habits for you. The critic is your connection to this programming and as such we should befriend it and learn from it. Nothing it says is from your truth. It is a gathering of your past experiences, programming and past ways of thinking that provide a voice that speaks out all that is being held inside in your subconscious programming.
My level of understanding and connecting all my different life learning’s and experiences have really knitted themselves together as a result of the many threads that I have drawn from my dreams. My dreams are providing me with that richer tapestry to my life and inner life. They bring to me a comforting grasp of their usefulness in allowing me to see how my life is being influenced by the different aspects my dreams are bringing out and showing me. This then enables me to assess consciously if the ideas and programming are serving me or holding me up on my overall life path.
