The famous English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge posed this question:
What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?
We have all awakened from a particularly vivid dream with the gauzy sensation that it was real, that the experience was something that actually happened, and then—floating slowly up from the compelling world of dream into the facts of ordinary everyday reality—we wondered what it all meant.
Unfortunately, too many of us forget our dreams immediately upon awakening, if we have remembered them even for a moment. There’s just always so much to do when morning arrives and we wake up to a new day. In the bustle of our daytime activities, we fail to pay attention to that wonderful, mysterious world of meaning that is revealed to us in our dreams. And this is a great loss. A Jewish proverb says, “An unremembered dream is like an unopened letter from God.”
“The future belongs to people who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, Former First
Lady and U.N.Ambassador
And yet, sometimes we find ourselves with the residue of a dream clinging to us, like dew on the grass before the sun has burned it off. It might be a misty feeling, like a fog through which we can see only dimly—yet it persists, asking for our attention. Most of us brush it away, like a bothersome fly settling on our bare skin, annoyed to be distracted from the task at hand, such as studying, planning an outing, or getting ready for school. Even so, some of the dream imagery will pop into consciousness when we are least expecting it, like a trick jack-in-the-box, a reminder from the unconscious that something important is happening within that requires our attention.
The Uses of Dreams
Most dream researchers—and active dreamers from all walks of life—agree that we can all use our dreams as tools for understanding ourselves better, for dealing with and solving the problems of everyday life, and for gaining valuable information about our inner lives. As Carlos Casteneda, famed for his contact with a Native American shaman teacher, says in his book The Art of Dreaming,”Dreaming liberates perception, enlarging the scope of what can be perceived.”
“We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
William Shakespeare,
The Tempest
“I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.”
Susan Sontag,
The Benefactor
Suppose that instead of the above scenario of forgetting a dream and ignoring the flashes of it that occur during the day, you have taken the time to write down your dream and think about what it meant. Suddenly, things are very different! Now, you have captured your dream on paper and are free to interpret it, play around with its meaning, whatever you like—at your leisure. You’ve just taken a giant step into your own personal world of dream meanings. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?
Remember, you can use your dreams for a multitude of purposes, from psychological insight to sheer entertainment. In fact, you can use your dreams to help you handle all phases of your life, both inner and outer. This is especially important during your teen years when you are growing and developing in all areas: your body is changing rapidly, your mind is expanding into new horizons, your sexual nature becomes active, even urgent. And you are under increasing pressure from many sources—school, sports, activities, parental concerns, social life, sexual decisions. On top of it all, your spiritual life and your emotional fluctuations may cause considerable turmoil.
As you read through this book and do the exercises, you will discover how to learn to use time you may consider wasted. Believe it or not, lots of people (many active teens among them) consider sleep a big waste of valuable time they could spend “doing things.” These unenlightened people really hate to spend their time sleeping because they think sleep is a zero and nothing worthwhile is happening. They could-n’t be more wrong, as you will see. Sleeping does more than refresh and renew you for another busy day: your sleeping hours are prime time for you to commune with yourself at the deepest, most significant level.
Dreams weave the events of the day into a new pattern; they can even combine with previous dreams into a sort of recombinant dream chemistry. In this mysterious process, we are introduced to new levels of meaning in our lives, shown new ways of doing things, of thinking and perceiving. We are blessed by our visits to the strange inner territory of our personal dream world. Mythologist and philosopher Joseph Campbell, in his book The Mythic Image, comments thus:
For in dreams, things are not as single, simple, and separate as they seem, the logic of Aristotle fails, and what is not-A may indeed be A. . . . [In] this one life-enclosing sphere of space-time, all things are brought to manifestation, multiplied, and in the end return to the universal womb that is night.
Take Naps!
No kidding—naps are excellent times for dreams. Any time of the day or evening that you can sneak in a nap is potential dreamtime. Not only that, but the dreams from different times of day, evening, night, and early morning, possess distinctly different qualities. You can have a lot of fun investigating this phenomenon.
“The mind doesn’t just wander around in sleep without a purpose. It wants to bring back shapes and angles, golden ratios, oceans, and mountains—it wants to make order out of chaos. It seems to be this: It wants to dream up stories.”
Popie Mohring,
Master Gardener
“I have never lost the sense that where my dreams come from is where I come from. And for that reason, they deserve serious study.”
Elizabeth Rose, Editor
The Rose Reader
When you take an active interest in your dreams and learn to interpret them, it’s like having a psychic savings account that builds your inner resources. And the more attention you pay to your dreams, by thinking about them and recording them, the more you will gain from your dream life. You will dream more, remember more, understand more. Your dreams will speak more clearly to you. You can have a relationship with your dream world that is just as real and valid as the one you have with your waking world.
And what an exciting relationship it can be! In chapter l, you’ll learn just what dreams can do for you, while chapter 2 will introduce you to the Dream Explorers of other cultures (for native and indigenous peoples have always held dreams to be important and sacred). Then, in chapter 3 you’ll begin to learn the art of dream interpretation. You’ll read some examples of real dreams others have had and what they meant, which will guide you into interpreting your own dreams.
Chapter 4 will show you how to access your dreams for specific purposes and how to get the most out of your dreamtime. Chapter 5 will teach you how to better recall your dreams—a valuable skill you’ll use your whole life long. Following recall methods and tips, in chapter 6 you’ll learn to keep a dream diary.
Moving along, chapter 7 will show you how to build your own dream dictionary of meanings. Chapter 8 will discuss different states of dreaming: those intriguing out-of-body experiences we hear about, lucid dreaming (the art of knowing you are dreaming while you are still asleep and dreaming), and the bogeymen of dreams—nightmares—and what to do about them.
Finally, chapter 9 will talk about using your dreams for spiritual purposes, to reach higher states of consciousness.
A fascinating trip awaits you as you embark on this journey of self-discovery and sail into your own hidden sea of dreams. Enjoy it, learn from it, treasure it. It’s a fabulous experience!
Dream Control
You can learn to “program” your dreams and acquire an extra dimension in your dream life that will help you grow into a mature adult. And you’ll then have permanent access to the magical power of your dreams. Learning this technique will be of special aid to you at the critical time of life that your teen years are. With practice, you can learn to program your dreams to serve your needs, to let you get a handle on whatever needs handling.