Posted on by The Book of Dreams blog

“Throw a line into the darkness”

The Nightmare by-Henry Fuseli

The other day while watching a rather intriguing detective series on PBS titled Anika I became aware of the background music and its rather haunting lyrics. The theme song “Bringing Murder to the Land” by Newcome and Allison spoke to me in another way than perhaps it was intended as a theme song for a murder drama.

“Throw a line into the darkness

Oh, we are shadows, blaze inside

This light will shine unbroken tonight

Shine inside

And this light, it can blind us

Torch the shadows for all time

And you can color in my dark nights

Paint your promise over me

This light will shine unbroken tonight

Shine inside

Shine tonight

Shine tonight

Shine tonight

Burn

Burn

Burn

Burn

Burn”

The first line, “Throw a line into the darkness,” reminds me of what the mind is doing through a nightmare. It’s also reminiscent of “fishing,” a metaphor for bringing up something from the spiritual and the deep so that one can deal with it in the light. While trying to bring this darkness into the light of consciousness, “Oh, we are shadows, blaze inside. This light will shine unbroken tonight; shine inside. And this light, it can blind us, torch the shadows for all time” these lines suggest to me that we can be overwhelmed and blinded by the darkness of our shadow self as it grows in brightness, entering our awareness. Bringing the dark into the light can add color to our darker natures, and by looking more closely at the nightmare, it can hold much promise for bringing light into our future nights and “burn” away our fears.

Perhaps it was the mysterious and haunting way the music was sung and the slight reverb in its presentation that wormed its way into my soul, or maybe it was the cryptic lyrics. Still, it struck me as the perfect theme for the nightmare dreaming and interpreting genre.

Murder in a dream can conjure the need for change or the effects change can have on one’s status quo. It can also be about ending some vexing issues, habits, or behavior.

Bright lights can symbolize spiritual awakening from the darkness of the ego coming through the hidden aspects of the unconscious, which can be quite shocking at first when one sees a different reality than the one they have been living.

The ‘’burn, burn, burn…” in a dream can be about something that you can’t just ignore. This may be true of any occasional nightmare. If one is human, There is repressed material in the unconscious mind that can affect everything done in the conscious world. Nightmares bring light to that hidden material, especially when it causes problems that must be addressed.

Posted on by The Book of Dreams blog

Soul Crying: Dreams have your six*

One can hardly miss the craziness of our “leaders” and the number of deaths and shootings, police beatings and shootings, extreme weather damage, and unprovoked wars inundating us from the media. I’ve tried to moderate the amount of craziness by what I read or watch on TV but it’s all so pervasive that it’s almost impossible to screen out.

The craziness, mayhem, and fear also show up in my dreams or when I’m just watching a show.

Sometimes it just gets to be too much, and I find myself having a grieving response, a shoulder shaking response with no tears and no sound coming forth through my wide-open mouth, but real grief, nonetheless. Sometimes I’m bent over in grief unable to stand upright before it. Sometimes it all feels so helpless and hopeless.

But sometimes a witnessed act of love and kindness will trigger the grief response and I’m made to realize how much I long for kindness and love in a world that seems to have so little of it to go around.

However, when any of these grief responses want release from what I normally try to control, my dreams often suggest that I just let go and let the grief flow. I know that my dreams always have my back, my six as they say, my well-being. My dreams often recommend that I let my grief just fall out of me back into the ocean of tears that can be the world sometimes. For some it’s letting those cries for help fall into the open arms of God.

When awake I know that when this soul urging comes that it’s not what I’m reading or watching that is causing the need but that psychically I’m being touched by the event and that this moves me strongly. By letting go of the control and letting the feelings flow and knowing that it’s safe to do so, and that I’ll come back when it’s done, I find it releasing and cathartic, sort of like the old “primal therapy” technique of screaming and punching the pillow type of coping and healing. For some, doing this with a trusted friend or therapist can be very useful.

And that is what happens when I let go, when I let my soul speak for me, it heals or begins the healing of the psychic damage that life through ego-self humanity is causing. It loosens all that scar tissue that has built up over the years.

I’ve always known it; dreams can be about healing and well-being but listening to them now is even more important in order to deal more effectively with the self-serving human chaos spreading across the world.

Opening up to a good cry if that is what the soul is urging and then do your part to heal others through your enhanced listening and help to make room for love to come through is often the meta message of my dreams and perhaps to the dreams of millions more if they were to look more closely.

_______

*This post can also be seen on https://thebookofdreamsblog.wordpress.com

Posted on by The Book of Dreams blog

Is reality just a soap opera we’ve made up?

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What we see of reality is often just a conditioned response and not reality.

 

Today I posted an article on the Book of Dreams Blog on Becoming Real and wanted to expand on that idea. The thought then struck me that in the Dark Knight blog I often speak to the hidden parts of ourselves and the how and why that material gets hidden in the first place. This blog posting is then an answer to those thoughts.

Most of my writings have been about reality and my relationship to it. When younger I thought that reality was pretty much created by something outside my self and that I was pretty much at the effect of it versus being at cause with it and God forbid I should be responsible for any of it.

The truth was my reality was conditioned by those around me i.e. I pretty much went for acknowledgment of any kind, negative or positive. Why? Because in a state of being separate from others, an individual entity, my only chance of feeling connected i.e. related was to seek and get acknowledgment, or approval. I would therefor do those things that achieved the goal. What I learned to do was to behave in those ways that insured approval i.e. I became something other than myself. This is called behavioral conditioning.

This is where we all begin to develop a mask because often being who we are beneath the mask is often not enough to secure the needed approval. So we fashion a mask that seems to be what people want us to be in order to give us the acknowledgment that we so crave. Note that the people we are seeking acknowledgment from are doing the same thing. So neither of us is being real, we’re all being what we think the other mask wants us to be with each desperately wanting to feel connected. But connection can only happen between real people, not their masks, so there’s no real satisfaction in the relationship.

The problem with this kind of relationship is that we never really get the approval we seek because what we get is for the fake us, not the real us. Most of us then decide that there must be something wrong with us because being ourselves isn’t enough. And the bottom line to this farce is that one cannot truly experience a joyful, happy relationship with anything or anyone because even if we’re loved it is only the mask, the “not me” that is loved. And out of that reality is created, the threat of being found out.

So here we are trying to avoid the pain of being separated by creating an avatar of ourselves so as to feel connected but by definition this isn’t the real us so we still aren’t in relationship, we still don’t feel connected and still don’t feel acknowledged. Can you see how this can become neurotic? We cannot win in this state, nor can anyone else. The masks we wear actually sustain the disconnect we’re hoping to overcome.

But what would happen if we were to support each other in being ourselves, with all the blemishes, habits, doubts and fears that make up a human being? What would happen if we could be like our much younger selves before we learned how not to be ourselves?

What would happen if we stopped enabling each other’s masks? What if we stopped using each other to support our soap operas?