Chapter 17

But I Missed the End of the Dream!

Fragments and Frustration

How often does the alarm ring at crucial moments? You were just about to kiss the woman of your dreams, reach the top of the mountain or open the door into a new dimension. How many more years worth of dreaming will it take before you have that opportunity again?!

Or maybe you have become very adept at waking yourself up out of frightening dreams, escaping from the clutches of a monstrous killer into the familiar darkness of your bedroom in the opening of an eye. Ah, you may have eluded that particular scene, but will you ever escape the whole recurring nightmare unless you face the end of the dream? What can an unfinished dream tell you? You need to grapple with the monster, or see what comes next to know how to resolve the waking dilemmas that the dream symbolically portrays.

Do you get frustrated because you can only recall fragments of your dreams? You write down a snatch here, a bit there, suddenly remember the bathroom scene and then wonder how the cuckoo fitted into it all. You sit back and regard the page in your journal. Were these parts of one dream or snippets of four different dreams? Should you be trying to piece them together somehow? Did this action cause that event, or were they unrelated? It may be helpful to realise that a night’s dreaming often seems to investigate one issue in your life, as if the dreams are looking at the problem from a variety of angles, or working out several different ways of dealing with the same situation to see which is best. This approach leaves you with a number of scenes, rather like glimpses of the action seen through a keyhole at random time intervals throughout a day.

How many dream reports start along the lines ‘I found myself on a boat’ or ‘I was swimming in the middle of an ocean’? How did you get there? Did the dream start abruptly, or has the beginning of the story been lost? Are you perhaps remembering the end of the dream, or the middle, seeing the ‘effect’ without recall of the ‘cause’? How can you make sense of the dream’s message if you can’t sort out the cause from the effect?

Recognising the Unfinished Dream

The examples given in the introduction are obvious, but often we believe we have recalled a whole dream until we try to interpret it or to take action based on the dream’s message. You may interpret a dream to see it is a statement of how you feel about a certain issue, for instance. Now, this can be useful information, especially if the dream reveals unconscious feelings that you hadn’t previously acknowledged. This recognition alone may be enough to allow you to see what is holding you back in life, or to decide what action to take. In many cases, though, far more information was lost than was remembered.

Look at the dream you have recalled. Was each action carried through to a conclusion? When you walked down the road, did you get somewhere, or did you learn something along the way? When you asked someone a question, did you hear the answer? When you made a decision in your dream, did you stay around long enough to see the effect? Look at the beginning of the dream. Are you satisfied that this was the opening scene, or do you feel that something is missing? Would it help your dream interpretation to know how you got there, or why you were there?

A satisfying dream will frequently contain words such as ‘suddenly’ or ‘I realised’, or there is a feeling that something has been resolved. Look for turning points or moments of enlightenment, then compare the action before these moments, and the events which follow them. At such points your dreams may be saying ‘If you do that, then this will happen’ and so on. To be complete, a dream needs a sense of resolution. If this is missing in your dream, try one of the following techniques.

Filling in the Gaps

There are several ways you can retrace possible gaps in your dreams, and these are explained in this short practical chapter. Each method works on the assumption that you do have an unconscious memory of your dream, or of its true meaning, and that this is best tapped into through entering a state where you are more closely in tune with your unconscious mind.

Professional hypnosis may help you to relive or recall a dream, especially if you are plagued by a recurring nightmare yet continually block recall of parts of the dream. Self-hypnosis, or a semi-trance state, can work well too, but a simple procedure of putting yourself in a state of deep relaxation or meditation is usually all that is required to get the most out of these dream re-entry techniques.

Relaxation Procedure

Allow yourself 20 minutes to lay or sit in a comfortable position, with the phone off the hook, in a place where you will not be disturbed. Let all your muscles release their tension until you feel heavy as if your body is sinking down. Just ‘let go’. Check every muscle from your toes to your head, focussing on relaxing deeper and deeper with each outward breath. Finally become so aware of the heaviness of your body that it suddenly becomes as light as air and you feel yourself ‘float away’. Keep your eyes closed and lay back to enjoy the ride, seeing whatever floats before your mind’s eye.

You may wish to use deeper meditation or cleansing procedures, or to add rituals similar to those described in Chapter 18. This can be extremely effective, but the simple relaxation procedure outlined above is sufficient for the task.

Method 1: Re-entering the Dream

FINDING THE ENDING

Follow the relaxation procedure and allow the dream to replay in your mind’s eye. Take time and feel free to ‘stop the film’ occasionally, or to replay sections in slow motion. When you reach the end of your remembered dream, don’t stop. Allow yourself to daydream on, imagining the ending. The secret is to stay relaxed and to bypass your head or your thinking processes. Let your heart tell the story, allowing your intuition to be your sole (soul?) guide. Don’t concern yourself with the question of whether you are ‘right’ or not. Just let the new version unfold itself. The chances are that your unconscious will direct the new ‘dream’ along similar lines, if you let it flow.

You may prefer, at the end of the session, to record your feelings in poetry or as a painting rather than as a strict record of each detail of the relived dream. Follow your intuition to get the best results.

FINDING THE BEGINNING

Follow the same procedure as for Finding the Ending, but put yourself at the start of the remembered part of your dream and picture yourself physically turning around 180 degrees to face the other direction. Daydream yourself backwards through time, retracing your steps. Follow the same advice given above to allow your intuition and your heart to lead you. If you give yourself the freedom to enjoy this daydream, you will find enormous benefit from the exercise.

FINDING THE MIDDLE BITS

Follow the above procedure again, but allow your intuition to daydream the links that get you from the end of one remembered dream fragment to the beginning of the next. Explore possibilities by changing the order in which you place the fragments until the story flows and you feel a sense of satisfaction and resolution with your daytime creation.

This method of finding an ending for your dream relies on a quick gut reaction response on your behalf, so allow yourself three or four minutes only for this exercise. Again the advice is to let the heart speak and try to bypass the brain altogether.

Take a blank sheet of paper and fold it into four quarters, then spread it open. You now have four sections marked by creases. Take your dream memory and reduce it to three main parts. Draw part one in stick person action (maybe with bubbles showing what they are saying) in the first box. Draw part two in the second and part three in the third. Very quickly, and without thinking, draw part four in the last section. This is your unconscious effort at getting the dream message across by providing a similar ending to the original dream. If you feel unsatisfied, repeat the procedure several times, and then sit back, switch on the brain again, and compare all the possible scenarios.

Use one of the dream incubation techniques described in Chapter 18 to request either a replay of the lost dream or a substitute the next night. Relax and remember that, in the end, if the message is important enough, it will come through again.

Take your dream fragment or unfinished dream as a starting point for a creative fairy tale, television script or other television medium as shown in Chapter 16, Tell Me a Story. Let your intuition pick up the theme and direct the action by letting the story flow without worrying about grammar or originality. Allow it to become as personal as you wish. You can always burn it afterwards.

Meditate on a symbol, or a feeling from your dream memory and let it grow and take on a life of its own. Let a story emerge and allow it to find a life of its own. Conclude the meditation by focussing on the image which inspired you most, and take this symbol and feeling into your day.

These methods are successful if you allow the unconscious free reign. In cultivating this art of letting go, you stand to reap further benefit as you begin to allow your dream recall blocks to fade. If you find yourself ‘trying hard’ in any of these techniques, stop. Trying is a way of blocking success. It never succeeds. If you try to write a letter, for example, your paper will remain blank. The only way the letter will get written is if you write it. Don’t try, write! Trying to do your best is an excuse for failure. It means ‘I won’t do my best, but I’ll fool myself and everyone else into thinking that I am working on it.’ The only way to do your best, is to do your best. Don’t try, do! The same applies to these ‘let go’ methods of dream re-entry or daydream explorations. If you find yourself thinking it’s hard and ‘trying’, nothing will happen. The only way to let go, is to let go.

Always remember, too, that if the dream message is really important, it will come back. It might reappear in a different drama, with different characters, but the meaning will be the same. So, just let go!

* Quoted in A Guide for the Advanced Soul, by Susan Hayward, In-Tune Books. (Quoted by Susan as copyright to the Rajneesh Foundation International.)