Posted on Sage Knight's blog Tuesday Oct, 4, 2011:
Have you ever wondered why you are here, why you die, or what the next step is on your soul’s journey? You may find answers to these and other questions in your sleep.
According to Carl Jung, human beings are always on the hunt for the next great story. We are storytellers, story listeners. We rearrange our cells and our lives around the story. Our unconscious tales may be the most powerful, because without our conscious understanding or awareness of them, we cannot question the information they present. Dreams are like sleeping stories. When we are unconscious of our dreams, they still inform our lives.
If you are like most people, you spend about a third of your life asleep. What if you could access the wisdom of those hours? What if you could receive the full gifts of your dreams and even dialogue with them for a richer life — both dreaming and awake?
I recently spoke with Kelly Walden, author of I Had the Strangest Dream, the Dreamer’s Dictionary for the 21st Century. Through her work as “Doctor Dream,” Kelly provides insights on how to use dreams as a key to open a door into our soul life.
“Aboriginal cultures believe that dreams connect us to the larger story of why we are here. We’re all familiar with our ‘smaller story,’ the pressing human concerns we deal with daily. However, we each have a larger story as well, a purpose that affects many other souls besides our own. Most people spend their lives concerned with their smaller story (how to pay the bills, etc.).”
Through uncovering the symbolic meanings of your dreams, Kelly can help you discover your larger story. “Being connected to the larger story doesn’t mean you lose the smaller story,” she says.
It’s not an either/or, but a both/and, one more way to live life more holistically, to consciously welcome an aspect of self back into the whole being that is you. “Dreams bypass the maze of the mind and go right into the soul where they can take hold. They have an organizing effect where everything can be transformed around that new picture.”
Kelly speaks about the Senoi, a highly evolved people of Malaysia. They have a powerful way to deal with what we call nightmares. From an early age, Senoi children are taught to overcome their fears by facing whatever villain is opposing them in the dream, and to ask them, “What is your gift for me?” Imagine the impact this has on the child’s waking life. While asleep, these children learn how to transform any fear or stress into a gift for themselves and their tribe.
Some dreams even have the power of physical healing. Kelly shared one such miracle: a dream of dolphins. They swam extraordinarily fast and carried her along in their current. She described the feeling as one of exhilaration and being “in the flow” beyond anything she’d previously imagined. She woke up with blurry vision that continued for several days. Although she repeatedly cleaned her contact lenses, this did not help, so she made an appointment with her eye doctor who discovered that her vision had improved. She needed a lighter prescription. “What are the odds of this happening?” she asked. According to her doctor, about one in a thousand.
It could be a coincidence that Kelly’s sight improved after her dolphin dream, but I don’t think so. Perhaps dolphins, seen by many as advanced and healing souls, were able to reach Kelly only when her waking mind was at bay. Even if it was “all in her mind,” this story demonstrates once again that the mind is powerful — awake or asleep.
Einstein used the term “the dreaming mind,” a more centered state of being giving you access to your intuition, which many people regard as the voice of Spirit, the communication connection between the conscious mind and the divine mind. In Kelly’s words, you cannot even talk about dreams without activating the dreaming mind.
I told Kelly one of my own nightmares, an old recurring dream where my partner and I harbored a dead body in our home. I always woke up feeling incredible remorse and shame, as though we’d killed something in real life. As Kelly and I entered our dreaming minds, we both understood the corpse to be the relationship itself. It had died, but we harbored it in our home, because we had no inner permission to let go. We felt trapped by community projections of us as the “perfect couple;” I saw ending as a failure; even our families could not see us separating. We had a dead body and nowhere to put it.
With Kelly’s expert reframing, I now have a new vision. Together we imagined a funeral, where I celebrated the beautiful parts of the relationship, gently laid the body in the ground, and then covered it with soil. My old partner and I wept tears of real sorrow as we released the body and then planted flowers in the new soil, creating a sanctuary where we can both go on a soul level to safely be with a memory of what once was.
I feel liberated. Though I’d not had this dream for years, it still haunted me. Kelly, my dream angel, helped me transform an old nightmare into a beautiful new memory.
“Dreams are a mystical bridge from the human to the divine.” How many can the dreaming bridge hold? Tune in next month for Dreaming ~ Part II where we’ll explore community dreams with Deena Metzger.
Dreaming — Part I
A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read. — The Talmud
Kelly’s F.E.A.R. formula to transform any “nightmare” into rocket fuel for your soul’s evolution:
F = Face it. Look at the fear. Breathe. Do not run away. Prepare yourself to be surprised…in a good way.
E = Embrace it. Move toward it as if you knew it had a gift, blessing, or miracle to share with you—even though it is wrapped in questionable clothing.
A = Ace it. Overcome the challenge, becoming stronger and more powerful through your Ability to Alchemize the situation.
R = Replace it. Your foe, monster, or challenging creature has now become your ally. Identify it and name what it has been Replaced with and become as a result of your dream alchemy.
