On Following Instructions

"This dream occurred before I began to work with or understand dreams, but it was so clear and precise, so real, that I just ‘knew’ it was to be acted on."
Sue

In the best of all worlds we would understand every dream, measure up the importance of its significance or message, and decide on whether action was appropriate. Action on a dream might be subtle, such as a change in attitude towards someone or something, or it might be dramatic, like packing your bags and moving into a monastery for the rest of your life! Somewhere along the line, if we comprehend the value of dreaming, we carry forward some teaching into our waking lives. How far should we go in carrying out instructions received in our dreams, and how much can doing so change our lives?

Of the forty-five dreamers in this life-changing dream survey, fifteen showed elements of following instructions received directly in the dream, either from another dream character, or from their own words of wisdom within the dream.

Ocean Dip
Pam
Change of Direction 1991

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

I saw a set of traffic lights and they were on red. I was going to climb through some barbed wire fencing when someone said ‘Go the other way’. Next there was some flooding and I was in a truck about to go through the water when again someone said ‘Go the other way’.

~~~~~~

I was having trouble working under my chief accountant at work, stressed out through trying to please him. I felt like I was getting nowhere and couldn’t figure out what to do about the situation until I had the dream.

What struck Pam the most in her dream was the fact that the message was repeated. Clearly she should take action and ‘Go the other way’.

Starting the next day, I completely changed the way I was dealing with him. From that moment on I seemed to go ahead in the company. Our working relationship improved, leading to promotion and more interesting tasks. I was asked to go to work in Perth for eight weeks, all expenses paid. On the weekends I became a tourist and thoroughly enjoyed my time there.

Jane’s Interpretation

The general message in Pam’s dream needs little translation, but which other way should she go? (‘The other way’ perhaps implies the exact opposite approach to the one she had been taking.) Fortunately Pam was able to successfully work that one out for herself. In interpreting the dream, the first step is to ask the dreamer where, in their life, they feel stopped (the red light). The truck, as a dream vehicle, often symbolises work (work truck), even in white collar professions like accountancy. Floods usually suggest emotional flooding and fences tend to represent limitations. The barbed wire may have been barbed or hurtful communications between the boss and Pam. The dream suggests, then, that getting through to the boss will be most successful if Pam keeps clear of her emotions and carefully considers her words when negotiating a better working relationship.

Wraith followed her own affirmation, which resonated in her ears after her life-changing dream experience of death in a mental asylum in London in the late 1700s: ‘I have to do something to put this right’. Her achievements with working with psychiatric patients became testimony to the degree with which she abided by her statement.

Calli, who was happily living in Queensland at the time and resisting any hints her husband had been making about moving interstate, heard a commanding voice in her dream: ‘....a hand appeared, pointing in the sky, and a voice said, "You have to move near that man over there". I turned and looked over my shoulder and there was this large man with a big head sitting cross-legged, I said, "No, I don’t know him. I don’t want to move !" And the voice said "It is most important that you move near the man over there". "Eventually she did move ‘over there’, much to her advantage as things turned out.

John shared with Calli the ‘commanding voice’ experience. He heard, in his dream, a voice saying ‘Jill is pregnant’. Acting on his instruction, Jill took a pregnancy test, they discovered the truth of the dream, and then promptly brought their marriage forward.

Fiona’s realisation that she loved Simon came in an unforgettable life-changing dream, but it received sweet backing in the form of instruction from a deceased relative in a dream: ‘My dead uncle came to me in another dream and told me Simon was the right man for me and I’d better not let him go.’

Susannah took good advice from her deceased grandparents who visited her in her dreams during a particular difficult time in her life.

River 9
Susannah
Meeting My Ancestor Spirit Guides 1991

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

My maternal grandfather, who I was very close to, and who died in 1973 when I was fourteen, came and sat down on the edge of my bed and said ‘I know you’re asleep but I need to talk to you’. He was a very handsome, tall man, and there he was, wearing his favourite old red plaid hunting shirt and smiling, his hair still black, his glasses and the many fillings in his teeth glinting gold in the dark. He said he knew I was going through a rough time, that I was far from home, impoverished, physically ill, lonely and that I was thinking of leaving my husband.

He said ‘Don’t do that. He is a fine man. You’ll come out of this OK.’ He said he’d lived through the Great Depression and he knew what we were going through. And I felt this rush of love and warmth, and I was a little girl again. I crawled over and sat in his lap. Then I was shocked to find myself, an adult, sitting on his lap, looking at myself in bed. I woke up then.

He came back a few more times in dreams and told me not to worry about him not being able to see my baby, because he had seen him and he thought he’d make a great kid. I always remember those words because that’s just how he spoke. He’d say things like ‘your hair is growin’ away like a weed’. Hearing him again made me cry when I woke up.

~~~~~~

The main dreams that signalled turning points in Susannah’s life were a series she had when her first child was about six months old.

Shortly after my son was born my husband lost his job as the recession hit Australia. We had just brought our first house and we were plunged into a terrible period of our lives, with the loss of everything but the house, which we somehow managed to hang onto. I am originally from America. We were both feeling extremely stranded and isolated, having no family around to support us. I was thinking about leaving my husband, not because I didn’t feel love for him, but because the situation was just about killing us both. I was quite sick physically following my first child’s birth and back problems ensued. Everything possible went wrong, except for our beautiful baby boy who thrived and kept us going.

Other dreams in this series involved a woman, unknown to me at the time. She was an older woman with thick black hair, a little stooped, but very finely built, in long skirts. She’d take me walking around a construction site, where there was a big pit dug and all sorts of machines and lots of piles of materials for building, such as steel, wood and bricks. We’d peer through the fence at it.

Then she’d take me into a little white house across the street from the site. The house looked a bit like our own house, and she’d lead me down a long hall to a room painted white, where there were shelves and shelves full of bowls, all made of pottery, all painted rich shades of blue. She would tell me about them and advise me to take note of her descriptions of the bowls.

She came into my dreams three or four times during 1991 and then went away, but she came back last year, in June 994. Suddenly, out of the blue, in June, my husband was offered a job in his profession again. He’d been doing terribly degrading jobs previously. In my dream she told me, while standing in my room, which had moved to a sort of cloud position above a long, white pebbled road, that if we put everything into the house and spent our very little cash on nothing else, we would be able to sell the house and would never be without money again.

Shortly after this dream, my parents came to visit and my Dad, for the first time, began talking about his mother, who died when he was four. And I knew that the woman spirit guide of my dreams was my paternal grandmother. I actually had a physical sensation, like in the dream, all tingling and hot all over, my heart and stomach fluttering, and I just knew it was her.

Susannah took both her grandparents’ dream advice over the next two years. She started reading immediately about spirituality and psychic development, and the decisions were made to renovate, sell and move in early 1993.

Now we have nearly finished renovating our house ourselves. It has been difficult, to say the least, as we have very little money and two children now, as our second son was born in 1993. We are still in debt from the original crash we experienced. Although our relationship has taken a battering, along with our self-esteem, we’re still together, and growing as people. We are about to sell our house, which, in its renovated state, has exceeded our expectations, and to move back to America to live in the mountains where I grew up. Also I’ve become a POTTER with a penchant for blue bowls: I am only an amateur, but I am passionate and, I think, talented!

I have always had experiences of the supernatural, but I never let myself own them or believe them. No longer! I thought I saw my grandfather’s ghost a few times as a teenager but disregarded it. I’ve had many experiences like that since then and disregarded them too: dreams, sightings, feelings, very strange coincidences and premonitions. now I do not disregard even the smallest thing. Since the dreams, I have been reading everything I can get my hands on regarding psychic phenomena, spirituality and so on. The last in this succession of dreams which have turned my life around were a long series of dreams last year, 1994, in which a male and female would appear and tell me repeatedly I was a witch in a past life and was meant to reclaim my power. I am now studying the Tarot in depth and looking for a Wiccan group to join and study with.

My interpretation of all three series of these dreams is that these people and guides are telling me I am blessed. I can do things, and can make it. The power is within me, shown by the blue bowls and the witches’ words. My grandfather loves me and comes to see me but I must recognise my power and build upon it, as symbolised by the construction site. The general message for me has been to trust myself and go with what I want to do, to stop pushing aside my feelings and experiences. And I think my husband and my grandfather are very much alike, in retrospect.

I have given up working in my old job, as it only served to stop me from being who I want to be, and have begun, at last, to write fiction. I rely on my intuition now and trust it. My husband has come around to these things too.

I regret nothing, although sometimes I wish we’d sold the house and taken a financial loss and gone home. I think that my Grandma’s advice will prevail and when we sell the house shortly, I’ll be glad we stuck it out. I am pretty amazingly healthy now and have been for a long time. And even though we’re not at the end of the tunnel yet, the fact is, we wouldn’t be the same people we are now if we hadn’t gone through this period of our lives. Neither would I be living my life with such an open mind or strong sense of wonderment.

Jane’s Interpretation

We can and do make contact with people who have passed on, in and out of our dreams. The difficulty as an outsider is knowing which dreams are true spirit contact and which are dreams about the memory of the deceased person and what they might have said to us. Sometimes the dream itself brings information previously unknown to the dreamer, or ‘proof’ presents itself within a short while. The best guide is the dreamer’s reaction to the ‘reality’ of the dream meeting. Such dreams leave the dreamer to decide whether the received information is good advice and whether to follow it, and perhaps also encourage a review of their perception of life and death.  

Annie and her husband had been trying to conceive a baby for many years and had been through several unsuccessful attempts at pregnancy through the IVF program. Their one and only pregnancy during that time ended traumatically in miscarriage. Having given up and applied for adoption, Annie had a dream: ‘My husband and I were sitting in the doctor’s office being told we were expecting a baby in November’. She took this as an instruction to try one more time and, yes, the dream turned out not only to bear good advice but also to have been precognitive in every detail.

Dee followed instructions which she believed had been laid down before this life. During the time in which she died in hospital, she met ‘adult figures and two of them hadn’t been born to me yet. We had arranged to be together and I would have let them down’. On re-entering her body and being resuscitated, Dee went on to bear two more children, despite being told by her doctor that she wouldn’t survive childbirth.

Phillipa wrote a book to heal her past based on her own thoughts in a dream: ‘I feel I want to write a book, starting then (present time) and going back to my childhood (the beginning)’.

Sue received a specific piece of advice in her dream.

Ocean Dip
Sue
Husband to Leave 1977

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

I was shown that my husband would meet another woman while away on a trip. I saw the whole thing down to what she looked like. I was then told that I was not to have any more children, as I could manage alone with one, and that people didn’t usually mind babysitting for one, but not for more than one.

 ~~~~~~

I was married to a sailor, with a baby under twelve months. We were happy and there was no sign of any problem with the relationship. This dream occurred before I began to work with or understand dreams, but it was so clear and precise, so real, that I just ‘knew’ it was to be acted on. I knew it meant that my husband would meet a new woman, fall in love and leave. I alone could not support more than one child and should not have any more children. I did not hesitate.

I had a tubal ligation performed as soon as it could be arranged, which was only a few weeks later, even against the wishes of my then husband.

The whole thing happened exactly as in the dream. Even the woman was identical. When the actual waking life event occurred it was rather eerie, like replaying a movie. At first he told me there was not anyone else, just that he was leaving, but I knew there was someone else. It turned out there was, he had met her on a trip.

Although it was three years between the dream and this event, we would have had more children at the time had it not been for the dream. Instead I was left with only one child to look after. I am glad the dream was so clear and so strong that I acted on it, even without understanding dreams. It certainly simplified my life in the years to come. I really would not have handled looking after more than one child by myself.

This was probably the first dream that had an impact on me and when the events actually happened as I dreamt them, I began to read about, and work with dreams. At first I approached them in a half-hearted way, but then with so many dreams coming, it became a very important part of my life. The move after the separation also led me into the world of spirituality, motivation, metaphysics and guides.

I have no regrets about following the dream’s advice. I feel that I handled the separation much better having been forewarned. Knowing it was destined made it easier.

Jane’s Interpretation

Sue’s resolve about reality of this message was so clear that I would never have been asked for an interpretation. If is was felt to be a ‘normal’ symbolic dream, I would have suggested that Sue’s male side (Yang: relationship with her outer world) was getting itchy feet, that she was not entirely satisfied with her present situation as mother of a small child, and that she would ultimately step away from creative motherhood to form a different creative relationship with the world. In this sense, Sue’s choice to restrict her family to one child was sensible, allowing her the future freedom, in or out of a relationship with her then-husband, to express her creativity in a different way.

These and other dreamers on the survey seemed to have nothing in common other than that they followed instructions in their dreams to some extent and changed their lives in the process. Stress or crisis didn’t appear to play a part in their willingness to take advice directly from a dream. All believed they were acting from a measured consideration of the dream advice and were apparently confident in the steps they took as well as satisfied with the outcome.

In my own life I have tossed away many instructions heard in my dreams because I have realised they were not literal. I have been able to comprehend their symbolic meaning and put that into action instead. I don’t doubt that these dreamers acted only out of certainty too.

I had a dream several years ago, when life seemed to be dealing a few perverse blows. For a while it seemed the harder I tried to achieve my goals, the more the proverbial brick wall would appear in front of me. Then I dreamed I was faced with a brick house and I was trying to gain entry through the side wall. Again and again I tried, perhaps perceiving that this was a dream, and thinking that somehow, surely, I should be able to walk through this wall. I heard a strong, male voice from the sky. It appeared to come from behind a cloud over my right shoulder and boomed ‘Jane, why are you trying to walk through this wall when the front door is wide open?’ Sure enough, when I walked to the front of the house I could see a big, wide-open door, through which I walked with ease.

On waking I decided it would be crazy to turn away from every goal and walk through every open door, but my dream voice certainly had a point. I decided to follow the dream instruction for a period of three weeks only. I guess I made a pact with the voice. It was like saying ‘I won’t give everything up, after all, I’ve worked hard to get this far, but I’ll give it a go and trust you to protect me as I walk through the doors’. In those weeks, among many important opportunities that came my way, I met my husband, Glen, simply by walking through one of those doors. Had I not met him, I probably wouldn’t have started writing books on dreams..... among other things!