River 8
Violet
Dream of A Dark Night 1971

~~~~~~dream~~~~~~

I dreamed I was watching a woman running up the next door neighbour’s block of land. She was screaming. I was watching her from an aerial point of view. The scene around her was true to life, not distorted or unfamiliar in any way, however she did seem to be moving in slow motion. The dream was simply that, but it was accompanied by absolutely terrifying feelings.

~~~~~~

I was about sixteen years old, still living at home with my parents and still going to school. To date, this is still the most frightening dream I have ever had. It was so real and frightening that I moved my bed to the opposite end of the room away from the window, because the location of the dream was outside my bedroom window.

The strange thing was, Violet’s dream seemed to trigger an unusual event which then persisted for many years.

From that time on, an eerie sound began to ‘visit’ me in my room at nights. It was the sound of heavy breathing coming from the window side of the room. I had not heard it or anything like it before this dream. I was so terrified at night that I put a crucifix beside my bed, and began saying the Lord’s Prayer as a matter of self-defence. This seemed to work. I also had a few books on black magic and ghost stories which I threw away - and I never throw away books!

I talked the dream over with my mother, but she could offer no explanation. Neither could she hear the sound when I called her into the room. Still frightened, I brought my dog into the room, just for some moral support. I remember sitting up in bed, with the light on, looking at the dog while the dog was looking at me, a bit surprised to have been brought into my room. We were looking at each other as the sound began again. At that very instance the dog spun her head around towards the direction of the noise. This was comforting to me because at least I felt someone else could hear it, even if it was the family dog.

As months went past, I became used to this strange noise and lost my fear of it, ignoring it or asking it to go away. The noise seemed to react to my thoughts. Eventually I moved from home and the sound didn’t follow me, but many years later I moved back to the old house. My boyfriend and I were in bed one night when the sound started again. He heard it straight away, and jumped out of bed to try to find out what it was.

He believed the noise to be an animal in a chimney or something. He searched and searched for the source of the noise on more than once occasion, but without success. He was so keen to locate it that I remember him getting out of bed and walking around the house in his underpants: this was something because it was winter in Tasmania at the time! Why do I think he could hear the sound, whereas others couldn’t? He was a person of some sensitivity although he didn’t realise it. He did say to me that as a little boy he thought everyone could see the coloured lights around people!

I believe the noise had no physical source. I think what I saw was actually happening on some level. I know the dream was connected to it but, of course, there is no evidence for any of this. It changed my life, though, because I was awoken to the very real world of ‘spirit’ or ‘psychic’ experience and began what I expect is a lifelong interest in these things.

I had always felt different from my family because they weren’t really interested in any of this. I was more academic than they were, but, as time went past, my mother also became involved in learning and reading. I thought I was open to the original dream and experience because of my interest in these areas. I was dabbling around in unusual supernatural type things, and, being only young and not understanding, I was looking at the nastier side of it, the darker side, rather than the more positive.

Years later, I was married to a man who was fighting his psychic gift. It confused him so much that I decided that I didn’t want to know anything about anything unless I could touch it. It was awful to see someone else get very mixed up. Years later, once I’d divorced, I realised I could go back and follow these things without anything harmful happening to me.

Nowadays I would say that there isn’t anything to fear. Recently I have had a break from these things, but for about five years previously I was quite involved with meditation and other metaphysical experiences. I’d be the sort of person who would go to someone’s house and see ghostly shapes. I wouldn’t mention it. I was just in tune with that kind of thing.

After all these years of investigation, initiated by the dream and eerie noise experience, I feel I have processed it all and spat it out at the end. I do not wish not to have gone through it all because I feel I have learned a lot.

In conclusion my life philosophy now is that it’s actually not complicated at all! There is really only one thing: just be happy. The difference between being happy and unhappy is just basically deciding you’re going to be happy. It’s actually as simple as that. Simple, but not necessarily easy!

Once I realised that, I totally changed my life again. I moved out of a long relationship, changed my physical situation, changed my diet, changed my exercise program, just changed everything. It was time to work on a very physical level, to sort my physical life out. The whole experience was an education in faith and the loss of fear in conquering an unknown experience.

Jane’s Interpretation

If the dream scenery had not been so true to life I would have interpreted this dream symbolically to begin with. If the setting had been unusual or unidentifiable, I would have focused on the emotional content of the dream (terrified, screaming) and the movement of the woman (unable to escape, held back). The aerial point of view, in symbolic terms, would have denoted a degree of detachment of the dreamer, who was looking at herself and her situation, symbolised by the terrified, running woman. Although the dreamer views from an objective position, she is emotionally involved in the dream, which causes me to wonder how much more of an emotional reaction she would have had to endure if she had experienced the dream as the running woman.

Often in dreams we remove ourselves from the most sensitive episodes, or most hurtful parts, either to protect ourselves from the full emotional impact or to gain a clearer, more objective viewpoint.

In an unrecognisable dreamscape, then, this would be the dream of someone who was feeling extremely distressed, trapped and unable to escape her situation. If the dream still included the notion of the neighbour’s land, the dreamer would have to think about which attitudes or personality aspects she shares with her neighbour, because she identifies with the neighbour somehow in the dream.

Even when we have a dream which is set in our present home, at work or at some other location well known to us, we usually encounter slight changes in the environment. People report dreams about familiar places with descriptions such as ‘we were at work, but the office had a new window’, or ‘it was my daughter, but she had her hair cut’, or ‘we were in our house but in a different city’. Violet was certain that her dream took place in either the actual landscape of her home, or in an accurate copy of it. Flying or hovering above, or simply looking down upon an entirely familiar and accurate landscape is a dream situation which is often described as ‘astral travelling’. My own definition of ‘astral travelling’ is quite different, and is discussed in Sleep On It and Change Your Life. However, this common belief does tend to set this type of dream apart from the normal ‘symbolic’ dream. It is for this reason that we have to look at Violet’s dream from another angle.

There are many possibilities, but I believe Violet’s final understanding that she was tuned into past, present, future or parallel negative occurrences was probably the case. If we can tune into others telepathically while we dream, yet also move between time dimensions in our sleep, then viewing the agony of someone else from whichever dimension becomes a possibility. If this screaming, running woman had existed sometime in the past, or in some other parallel dimension, and her emotion was so intense that it somehow imprinted or remained within the psychic landscape, then it would be easy for a sensitive dreamer to tune into.

I believe we generally resonate with situations with which we can empathise, so the symbolic interpretation should always be considered unless it does not make sense. Once Violet had tuned into this experience, it presumably became easier for her to pick up again and again, like a well worn pathway.

No dream interpretation is ever complete, and some dreams, like this one, end up more as a list of possibilities. Part of the magnetism of dream research for me is the challenge of working with an extremely difficult subject, and I feel it is better sometimes to leave an open-minded set of possibilities and offer those on a platter, rather than to arrive at an authoritative imposing conclusion just for the sake of completion. Violet, though, has been able to look back on her dream experience with more precision, since it was her experience and it has shaped her life in definite and measurable ways which have helped make her the person she is.

My personal experience is an absolute knowledge of a wider reality than the one we are accustomed to agree upon in our waking lives. As always, we live, in this life ‘the dreamer’s dream’. Each dream contains, therefore, the dreamer’s personal truth. Each dream experience presented in Dream It: Do It! is for the dreamer to know and for you to discover. On one point, though, there must be unanimous agreement: these dreams, based on a meeting with the spiritual, are amongst the most profoundly life-changing dreams and experiences in this book.

"Nothing I have written is accurate enough to give a precise image of the experience. It was, in total, a charged or heightened experience."
Lorna

"This dream was different. Its impact lay in its deeply profound experiential nature in which I felt that I had actually been infused by the Light of God."
Grace

"The feeling of being surrounded by love was the start of it all."
Sarras

"There was light up ahead. And I felt totally peaceful and was looking around at this new experience."
Dee

"It seems natural to accept the dream as a spiritual message and I still believe it to have been a deeply spiritual experience, explicable through the noumenal rather than the phenomenal."
Lorna

"It was so precious to me, it was almost like a sacred passage or initiation. I know beyond a doubt that the life force, or the universal energy of life, or of spirit, whatever you want to call it, is as real as I am holding this telephone. It is there, it’s everything."
Francoise