PART TWO: SOME PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS IN DEALING WITH OUR DREAMS

THE THEATRES OF THE SOUL

Based on a Dreams Retreat by Rev. Colin Andrews

1. The first thing we can do with our dreams is to write them down.

Why? Because it ‘fixes’ the dream in our minds and helps to make it a permanent part of the memory. It also gives us a record of our dreams that enables us to go back over them, see the pattern that is emerging and the way the different dreams relate to each other. Writing down dreams is also a way of giving recognition to the unconscious.

After a dream has been recorded the next step is to walk around in it; make a friend of it. The dream is like a story or a parable and you, the dreamer, are involved in it. Explore your own story! Ask yourself what it felt like to be in the dream. Did you experience fear, joy, beauty, curiosity? What are the figures who appeared to you? Did you like them or shun them? Walk around in the dream and reflect. Work with it. ‘Ripen the dream’.

Use your dreams as objects of meditation or active imagination. Meditation involves contemplation of an image. Active imagination is interaction with an image. Prayer can also be used in working with dreams. For example, a dream figure who needs help - a retarded child or injured wo/man, etc.

Ask questions: Why did this dream come to me? Does it show me an unpleasant side of me l have ignored? Does it affirm me by showing me something in a positive light? Does it surprise me with something totally unexpected? Does it comment upon some choice or decision I am making? This will unfold unwrap its meaning.

We can discuss our dreams with a friend or a spiritual director. Our culture needs dreams badly. We are spiritually deprived people. Our souls are hungry, and if we are not filled with the right food we will fill ourselves with the wrong food. Humans cannot go empty for long. It is a marvellous thought that every night the Spirit sends us food for our souls in the form of dreams. ‘Human beings do not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’

Your dream will never tell you anything that you already know. So begin on this basis that the dream is pointing out a ‘blind spot.’ Beat down the resistance to do inner work and get down to the meaning of your dream.

Repetitive dreams: God pounding on your heart. ‘Please sit up and take some notice and listen to what I am saying - I told you forty-five times and this is now the forty-sixth time, when will of listen?’

Dreams are a subjective phenomenon - 90% of dreams are a portrayal of the inner situation of the dreamer - portraying a part of our own personality: ‘What part of me is that?’ our interior life laid out for us (again the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious.)

The dream will never waste so much as one word, anymore than a master playwright would waste one sentence or one bit of scenery on the stage if s/he were trying to tell you something of importance. What a superb way of showing you to you! But that will take a long time to get through all the detail. Yes it will. But, if you see through one dream and understand it you will save yourself many dreams in future!

2. Key Questions for Responding to Dreams:

Respond to as many questions as you choose. In selecting usually go with your greatest positive or negative energy response.

What relation, if any, does this dream have to what is happening right now in my life? To something in my future? To something in my personality?