March 2019 – The Dark Knight of the Soul

Posted on March 29, 2019March 29, 2019 by The Book of Dreams blog · 1 Comment

Deciphering two disquieting dreams reveals an even more disquieting reality

Dream image: 1) An inverted evergreen tree hanging from the ceiling in a grand foyer. This caused much confusion and concern. Though not a nightmare it was very disquieting i.e. it just wasn’t right.

The card Players by.- Michaelangelo Caravagio

2) In another dream two men are cheating a younger man at cards. He is clueless as to what’s happening. They are manipulating and taking the younger man from all his worth i.e. they are stealing his self-worth. It feels evil.

What to make of these two disquieting snippets of dreams? When I break down the dreams into their component parts I begin to decipher the meaning of these dreams and their import becomes all too obvious both in my treatment of self and in my observation of how the nation as a whole is being treated.

upside down: Confusion as in “Everything turned upside down”. This could also be a metaphor for an antithesis i.e. something in opposition or thinking differently about something or someone. Are you being illogical?

Perhaps you need to see something from a different perspective.

trees: These can represent the structure of your inner being your self-portrait, how you see yourself psychologically e.g. your connection with the family and your past as in your roots.

Trees can represent your personal growth or the stages of your life.

Power, strength, patience, steadfastness, and quiet centeredness seem to be the attributes the trees offer and that I most admire and desire.

ceiling: This could be about your upper limits i.e. what you use to protect your identity. There’s a possibility that your old way of being is breaking down and there’s a need for new coping strategies. Have you reached your limit?

foyer: The main access to the vast inner self. It can also be a space where one may be ready to make an announcement about themselves or reveal something new.

evergreen tree: This could be about growth, eternal knowledge, happiness, immortality, or wealth and even immortality. It could also represent hope in the midst of despair.

Possible interpretations: On a personal level the image of myself may need to be righted in that is has been turned upside down to what is actually there. For example, my self-criticisms have turned my view of the world both in and around me upside down and is breaking down my self-confidence.

Alternatively, my world and the way I thought it was has been turned upside down and makes no sense anymore. My portrait or understanding of self has been inverted. I cannot trust the “rightness” of things.

There may also be a desire to correct the out of balance nature of the inversion and to wade into the confusion created by this out-of-rightness both in myself and in the world. But first the self because it is only from there that one can tackle the rest.

The second dream may reinforce the idea that I am cheating myself of my own worth. Things are not right and need to be corrected in this dream as well.

On a national and world level there are those who are stealing our self-worth and self-image as well and we are cluelessly letting them do it. In the dream the young card player is literally being “Trumped” at every turn. A symbol not lost on those who are following the insanity playing itself out in the American government right now.

We are allowing a small number of people to steal our sense of self and of what we have always said that we stand for both as a people and as a nation. We must stand up to these bullies whether they be our own critical inner voice or the illegitimate voices of our politicians, our so-called leaders, our President.

Our national self-portrait has been turned on its head by an insane and self-serving bunch of crooked people who are turning our deeper natures against us by turning us against ourselves and this must stop or nothing will be right side up again.

In fighting ourselves we are also distracted from the theft of our country and our livelihoods. This is to make us ever more clueless.

They are taking away our traditional good nature and replacing it with suspicion and hatred, they also manipulate us by feeding us misinformation and by destroying our sources of honest information and substituting them with what is essentially a State run media outlet. This is pretty much how it’s done in Russia and China or in any country bending toward autocracy.

This is how one takes over by shutting down honest media and thus controlling the dialog. And these dishonest fellows are masters of controlling the dialog. They say and do outrageous things to hide what they are doing behind our backs e.g. stacking the deck in their favor.

But when will enough of us catch on and refuse to play the game? Will we wait until they’ve taken all that we own? Because if we wait too long to do anything we’ll have nothing with which to stand up to them.

If it is true that there is both a sleeping dream and a waking dream we’ll see how bad the dream gets. Our waking dream is not quite a nightmare yet but moving disquietingly in that direction.

Posted on March 19, 2019 by The Book of Dreams blog

Conflict can be a gift of redemption

The world of opposites exhibits many ups and downs. There’s feminine and masculine, love and hate, left and right, light and dark, oh yes, and you and me.

The light and dark opposition is interesting in that we often use them as metaphors for our behaviors and emotions.

There’s also the strange world of color. Colored lights are additive in nature in that when we add the three colors of red, blue, and green that you and I can see we get white light whereas if we were to add the same colors in pigment that is subtractive in nature we would get black. Apparently light begets light while pigment absorbs it and gives us blackness. This is not unlike our emotions. Positive lighthearted thinking brings even more light into our experience whereas negative and subtractive thinking brings us heavy darkness.

The world of conflicting opposition can be found in all the world’s religions as well in the form of death and resurrection, punishment and forgiveness, heaven and hell (whether as an earthly experience or one after death), and gods and goddesses. Creation mythology has a something-from-nothing nature and death is just a part of life. In the Christian Bible the old God is in stark contrast to the new God of the New Testament whereas in the Hindu Bagavad -Gita the variety of aspects of the one god often display creation aspects as well as destruction aspects there is also being and non-being, immortality and death. In the Tao there is the yin and yang. This union of opposites seems to play out across the human milieu.

In life, in stories, theater, and in myth there are heroes and adversaries, destruction and redemption, and endings that morph into beginnings. Mirrors whether in our waking lives or dreams often reflect our opposites whether it be the right/left switch of a reflection or the real us that has been hiding behind the mask of who we pretend to be removed in front of the mirror in our dreams.

Some of Jesus’ parables exhibit a perplexing juxtaposition of opposites also for example, as presented in Mathew’s quote from Jesus, “whosoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whosoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” This seems to flaunt human common sense.

In our dreams opposites can reign supreme and even images that appear positive may actually be speaking to a lack of said aspect for example, an image of love and caring can suggest a desire for or a loss of love and caring. Death in dreams is often the first step toward life i.e. the end of one way of being opens the door to a new way of being.

Though we may view a conflict with others as a product of opposing ideas or right versus wrong it may reflect the same idea that resides within us that we want to reject or disavow. Sadness in dreams often reflects the opposite i.e. happiness that may actually point to immense suffering. Also in dreams the soul often shows up as the opposite gender of the dreamer e.g. a woman’s soul is masculine while a man’s is feminine. Dreams are continuously presenting images from the unconscious for the conscious to integrate with itself into a whole. To be fully human the opposites of the conscious mind and unconscious mind need to be united.

Posted on March 6, 2019 by The Book of Dreams blog · 7 Comments

Magic: Just for a moment step outside your perspective.

Fantasy Trip by–Manuel Rodgriguez Sanchez

Carl Jung the 20^th century Swiss psychoanalyst suggested that there’s a place between the conscious mind and the soul called the dream–it is a hidden door into the cosmic mind he said. It is something that exists in the twilight, the limen if you will, between the “out there” and the “in here” of our brains. This is the threshold upon which the shaman works his magic, where the healing takes place.

To the Iroquois dreams are a representation of the desires of the soul. To some tribal cultures they are messages from the ancestors, or from the spirit world. To many Christians and Muslims they were and in some ways still are seen as messages from God.

Jung thought that dreams were part of the Individuation process where we each become more fully human–where the “I” is created. Perhaps we dream to create the self? But what is this dream?

One night I thought that I had awakened from my surreal sleeping imaginarium and attempted to manipulate the lingering images so as to get back into it when I realized that I was still dreaming. So I asked myself while in the in the dream, “What is being awake? If I am still in this dream, but think I’m awake, am I really dreaming?” It came to me then that perhaps I wasn’t awake in the rest of my life, but only dreaming. “Am I a dream, dreaming I’m awake, or am I awake dreaming I’m dreaming?”

That was my first lucid dream experience, though at the time I didn’t recognize it as such, but it did shift my perspective a little about what I had been calling consciousness. Dreams then took on a different meaning for me when I realized that they were an in-between state of realities that may actually all take place within an even greater dream–the dream of God. If as Edgar Allan Poe quipped, “Are all we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream?” do we also dream God into reality and if we are dreaming him, is he also dreaming us?

In the Australian Aboriginal cosmology the Rainbow Snake god created the Earth that then created mankind, who in turn recreated the Earth, and all was done within “The Dreaming.” To them this Dreaming continues to this day and in this perspective we are the dreamer and the dream at the same time.

Every story of every creature creates. And according to the physicist Fred Alan Wolf, just as reality is affected by the surrounding energy field, dreams are not made by the dreamer alone either, but by the surrounding field, which in this case can be seen as the people around us. We are all involved to some degree in each other’s stories. When dreaming, we may be writing our own script and in this way each of us is but one dream story of the Dreamtime.

Perhaps we are all standing on the threshold of consciousness and in a lucid dream so to speak–where being awake and being in the dream are superimposed. It may be here that we create what is. We do not devise the objects of reality, though we do beget our experience and meaning for what is there. But because we can only know what we perceive-what we project; we don’t really know what exists outside our own heads.

The Mandala is for me an excellent metaphor for the dream within a dream concept where at the center of its concentric circles lie our selves. In it we are both the center and the rings around it–it represents the whole self, the conscious and unconscious striving for unity. Upon every boundary one stands and sees him self, forward and backward, in and out, above and below, creating and being created. Reality is derived from the center and then collapses upon itself as it becomes ever more aware.

On his way to the Archipelago of Dreams (R.J. Cole, 2011) Robert crossed this limen between worlds and entered the world of the dream where reality is created. In it he was confronted by the archetypes of his race and was forced to reconcile with them. Beyond the veil he discovered the reality of creation and was forced to grow up in its embrace. Robert learned of the dream within the dream and feared awakening within his slumber. This was his ultimate shadow that had stalked him all his life and would end his life as he had known it.