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Chapter 18
Sleep On It – Solving Problems
Have you ever dropped thankfully into bed
after a long night’s drive along major highways, only to close your eyes and see more
traffic signs, tail lights and headlamps, and to feel the steering wheel still vibrating
beneath your hands? Or have you spent too many hours closely weeding a garden without
looking up, only to see weeds sprawled before you again as soon as your head touches the
pillow? Or have you fallen to sleep while reading a book, but through your closed eyes
dream you are still reading, perhaps only realising you are dreaming because the
book’s narrative begins to take uncharacteristic bizarre twists? I have been
unfortunate enough to take all of these, not to mention computer screens and dozens of
hand written dream questionnaires, into my sleep! We take our relatives, friends, work,
television programs, plans, ideas, hopes, wishes and, of course, our problems to bed with
us and meet them again in our dreams.
As we drift into dreaming, our conscious brain
largely switches off and hands the whole bag of the day’s thoughts, experiences and
problems over to the unconscious and other accessible means of guidance to work on. Our
dreams may try to deal with our current situation by taking us back into the past, or by
projecting us forward to show how things might be if we take this or that action. Our
dreams might concentrate on the relationship aspect of our natures, or on our ingrained
behaviours, attempting to illustrate why we continually end up in the same kind of
situations that we found ourselves in yesterday. Or we might find ourselves, in our dream
state, taking a clearly focussed view of one particular problem and coming up with a real
eureka of an answer.
That moment of clear focus, whether it arises
naturally or whether we need to program it, is the purpose of this chapter. Can we really
sleep on a problem and come up with an answer, and, if so, are there techniques we can use
to ask for, and get, an answer to a chosen question?
Of Science, Art and Dreams
A German chemist, Friedrich Kekule, (1829-96),
had been struggling in his effort to determine the molecular structure of benzene.
Something about the structure, whenever he drew it, didn’t balance. He dreamed he saw
a snake swallowing its tail and found his answer. He had expected the molecule to be a
string, or a string with branches, whereas, in fact, it joined onto itself and formed a
circle! The dream was correct. Kekule was apparently so moved by this dream revelation
that he addressed a scientific audience with the advice: ‘Let us learn to dream,
Gentlemen, and then we may perhaps learn the truth.’
Early the next century, another German-born
scientist, Otto Leowi, dreamed of the crucial experimental method that would test whether
nerves passed their impulses around the brain and body electrically or chemically. After
the dream he conducted the experiment and later collected the 1936 Nobel Prize for
Medicine or Physiology for his discovery of neurotransmitters.
A Nobel Prize based on a dream! Let’s take a
different example: Singer sewing machines. Elias Howe, an American, had tried just about
everything to create a more efficient sewing machine, and was finally saved by a dream. He
had been captured by cannibals who encircled him, holding their spears. Fearing his death,
he looked at the sharp point on each spear and noticed a hole just below each point. And
that’s exactly where the hole in the sewing machine needle is today.
Einstein, often quoted as the most creative
scientific genius of modern times, traced the roots of his Theory of Relativity to a
boyhood dream. In the dream he rode a sledge, faster and faster until he was travelling at
the speed of light itself. At this point, the stars fused into patterns and colours, and
relativity was glimpsed in picture form.
Poets and authors have many times awoken with a
new creative flow derived from the benefit of sleeping on it. The British poet Samuel
Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) dreamed most of the story of the Kubla Khan, awoke with a
reported 200-300 lines of the poem in his head, but was interrupted and had to add the
rest himself. There may have been more to Coleridge’s dream than shifting
writer’s block, though, as the Kubla Khan palace in Xanadu was accurately described
in this poem, but the manuscript containing a description of the palace from a Persian
painting was not translated into English util after Coleridge’s death.
Problem Solving in the 1990’s
Closer to home, consider these dream solutions
from the dream survey:
My brother was trying to buy a grazing station
and everything was going along fine to begin with until someone began to make it difficult
for him. My brother had signed an unconditional contract and had his all on the line, so
he was about to lose the whole lot. He asked me what he should do, and I said, ‘I
don’t know, but I’ll tell you tomorrow!’ I was too busy to think about it
then. I went to bed and woke up an hour later knowing exactly what to say to him. In the
morning I made the right phone calls and in 24 hours we had it fixed. We had completely
aborted this other guy’s efforts to abort the show.
(Seeker, astrologer)
About nine months ago I began a new job as a
clerk typist. The position dealt exclusively with one of Australia’s largest
companies and I was responsible for balancing the accounts to somewhere between $1.5-$2.5
million every month. This figure comprised sales to and purchases from the other company
over eight different departments, so there were many areas where mistakes could be made. I
was approaching my deadline by still being $7.20 out of balance on my first attempt alone.
I had no idea where else I could look. I tried not to worry about it, but the problem
would not leave my mind, whatever I did. When I finally got to sleep I just kept seeing
figures in front of me. I was really exasperated.
As I awoke the next morning I realised I was
coming out of a consciousness where I’d been searching through documents, and had
held, in my hand, a commission docket to an agency which had deducted $7.20 commission
from their sales return rather than wait for us to apply the $7.20 credit to their
account. Could it possibly be? At work, when I physically held it in my hand, I believed
it. In fact, I was totally blown away!
(Louisa, accounts co-ordinator)
There was an occasion when I got a car bogged and
there was little or no help available. After I had lunch I had a short rest, and in a
dream I was able to see how I would get the car out of the bog myself. And I did.
(John, town planner)
The dream can be so literal and precise, that it
is also a precognitive dream. Pearl was preoccupied with her anxiety about driving a ute,
as she describes:
To give some background first, I was brought up
on a farm near a small country town and I was taught to drive a tractor when I was very
young. Even though it was illegal at this age, I was encouraged to drive to town when it
was necessary. Though I found driving the tractor fun, I was apprehensive about the ute,
because its brakes weren’t working. The seat was also stuck back so I couldn’t
reach the pedals effectively.
At first sight, Pearl’s dream appeared to be
a good example of a problem solving dream, suggesting a way of coping should an emergency
arise:
In the dream, I was driving to town with
Grandfather as passenger. I noticed a vehicle travelling up the hill in front of us, and
as I approached it I realised it was travelling slower than we were, and that I would have
to change down gears. As we neared the vehicle I fumbled the gear change and stalled the
engine which then cut out! The handbrake wasn’t working so I applied the foot brake
as hard as I could. As I began to slide further back against the seat, the pressure on the
brake was diminishing and the vehicle began to roll back, picking up speed.
I was frightened that I would lose control and
that we would both end up in the river and drown. Then a thought came to me that I could
steer the ute into the embankment on our left.
This solution was perhaps comforting. It restored
a sense of control should an emergency arise. Consider what happened next:
I cannot remember how long after this dream the
exact experience occurred, but as it unfolded (exactly as I had dreamt it), I thought of
my dream at the most crucial time and I steered the car into the embankment.
This really scared me, both because the dream had
predicted it and because I would have been responsible for Grandfather’s death had
the worst happened.
The dream solution probably saved both lives, and
was also seen to have been a precognitive dream all along. Pearl learned two things from
this experience: Firstly:
I had learned my lesson. I decided that in future
I would stop prior to the climb, change down, and travel up the hill slowly, thereby
alleviating the gear change further up.
I believe my Higher Self gave me other
precognitive dreams over the years so that I would eventually begin to take notice of them
and accept them as a means to give me insight into the future and eventually save my life
once again.
(Pearl, secretary).
Pre-empting the Future?
Do we see here another function of precognitive
dreaming? Precognitive dreaming can warn us of future dangers and save our lives. It can
help us feel good when an enjoyable or peaceful prediction becomes reality and we feel a
sense of confirmation about the direction we are taking in life. It can push us to look at
life in a different way, to readjust our philosophy of life to fit what we have
experienced in finding ourselves reliving our dreams. It can cause us to think more deeply
about time, psychic senses, our place and individual purpose in the world and so on, but
Pearl’s dream is more than all those things.
Pearl’s dream solved a potential problem in
her life by suggesting a way out of danger should her anxieties occur. It also made her
aware of the risks she was taking with other people’s lives. If she had acted on this
awareness, she might have refused to drive that particular vehicle again, or changed her
driving habits. Either of these actions would presumably have prevented the dream from
coming true. Although the dream probably saved lives, it begs the question of the
necessity of a precognitive dream manifesting into waking reality. Should we be more
sensitive to our dreams and take their advice more seriously? Do waking life calamities
occur because we have not understood or ignored previous advice, perhaps through our
dreams? After the accident, as Pearl reported above: ‘I had learned my lesson. I
decided that in future I would stop prior to the climb, change down, and travel up the
hill slowly, thereby alleviating the gear change further up.’ Was the original dream
trying to teach this lesson, backing the teaching up with a safe way out (the embankment
idea) in case she continued to take risks?
More precisely, do the events in our waking life
take place, or not take place, according to how much we have learned, misunderstood or
ignored when first presented with our situation in our dreams? Do we run through our
learning in our dream state, but, when this is not effective, find ourselves exposed to a
waking life version instead? If this is true, can we change our future by paying closer
heed to the teachings and advice in our dreams? (My 1998 book, The Shape of Things to
Come, explores these questions deeply … and draws conclusions about precognition
and our abilities to predict or change our personal futures.)
Dream Incubation: the Power of Focus
If the purpose of our dreams is to give us
feedback on how we go about our lives, and to help us make wiser decisions based on this
knowledge, then surely all we need to know is how to interpret our dreams. In the long
term this is true, but sometimes we have a need to hurry the process along, or we feel, in
waking life, a need to focus on one specific problem. While our dreams may prefer to
address a difficulty in our lives in (what appears to us) a roundabout way, there are
times when we have less patience. Perhaps also, especially when we are still learning how
to interpret our dreams, we need our dreams to be more finely tuned, more obviously
directed towards a precisely worded question. This is the process of dream incubation.
Dream incubation is an ancient technique which
existed in many cultures including those in Central America, China, Africa and Aboriginal
Australia, but it was the Ancient Greeks who used dream incubation as their primary
healing tool for over 1,000 years before the birth of Christ. Some 300 healing temples
were distributed throughout Ancient Greece, dedicated to Asclepius, the Greek god of
healing. Asclepius lived (and was later deified) around 1100 BC, before the Trojan Wars,
and was believed to have been instructed in the art of healing by Cheiron. His symbol was
the snake.
Whenever people needed a physical or emotional
cure, they would go to a healing temple and be taken through various cleansing processes.
They would sleep overnight, often in an underground room containing harmless snakes, in
deference to Asclepius. In the morning, they would recount their dreams to their healers,
who were, effectively, dream interpreters. The healers would then interpret the dreams to
show the cause of the person’s suffering and to offer a method of cure.
This system was in place for a thousand years!
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, studied at a healing temple on the island of Kos
around the 4th century BC, learning dream interpretation and its application to
physical disease. I wonder how many modern-day Western doctors are aware of the origins of
the snake which entwines the caduceus, the symbol of the Hippocratic Oath?
Robyn has used dream interpretation techniques to
discover the basis of her medical problems:
Before sleeping, I asked for an answer to this
question: ‘Why am I consistently so incredibly tired, catching every virus and
infection? I eat healthily, take supplements, don’t drink or smoke and have a
positive attitude.’ The dream was very short and clear, one image, one sentence. I
saw an enlarged cell. The nucleus was fine but the energy stores were depleted. The
‘voice’ came on, ‘Your T cells are down.’
In the morning I decided to find out whether we
have T cells, which of course I now know we do.
(Robyn, sculptor)
Scotty was anxious to know the sex of his first
baby and programmed a dream to find his answer:
I went to bed wanting a sign of whether our new
baby would be a boy or a girl. I dreamed I went on a fishing trip with my wife and we were
on a boat. She baits up with a big round lemon-like ball. I just shrug my head and laugh.
As I start doubting she gets a strike: a big healthy silver fish, a real fighter. I’m
amazed. She looks up in the sky and she says, ‘Look, there’s the sign you
wanted.’ I look up, and there in the clouds, lit up by the moon, are the white
letters ‘boy’.
(Scotty, petrol tank driver)
Scotty’s baby boy was born on 5 August 1993.
Lainey used dream incubation to gain first-hand
experience of death for her book:
I was trying to write my first book and one
chapter is on death. I wondered what it would be like to experience death in a car
accident. I then had this unusual dream:
I was a passenger in a friend’s car which
was travelling up a mountain. When we reached the top we decided to get out to stretch our
legs. While resting my arm on a railing I had strong feelings that I was going to fall off
the mountain, or something dreadful was about to occur, so I told my friends we should go.
We drove away and the last thing I remembered was
a blackness overtaking me which was followed by a falling sensation. It was then that I
realised that the car I was in, and the other cars, were falling down the mountain as
trees and bushes flashed by. My thoughts were ‘I am going to die!’ I felt the
car hit the ground with a sickening thud and pieces lay everywhere. My thoughts were
‘I’m still alive’, but this was not so.
I became aware that I was travelling into the air
at a very high speed towards a white circle. As I drew nearer, the circle changed into a
white woman with white flowing hair which broke into pieces. I then began a rapid descent
to the ground. I awoke gasping for breath for a moment and it took a while to regain my
senses.
(Lainey, home maker)
Dream Incubation: The Practicalities
1. Formulate your question precisely, so
that you are clear about what, exactly, you want to know.
For example, ‘How can I free myself from my
financial debts?’ might be too broad, whereas ‘Would it be wise to consolidate
my debts?’ is more focused. The dream you receive may seem inappropriate at first and
interpretation is always easier if you know the precise question the dream is addressing.
Once you have your answer, you can incubate dreams to look at other aspects of your
financial life.
2. Write the question down.
Doing this ensures you have indeed been precise,
and also serves as a reminder of the exact question in the morning. It is easy to sleepily
lay in bed and think up a dream question, have a dream, then wake up with only a blurred
memory of your request.
3. Choose a ritual that feels good to you.
You may wish to pick one (or all) of the
following, or you may wish to create your own procedure. The important thing is not so
much what you do, as the fact that the ritual underlines the solemnity of the occasion and
your dedication to solving your problem. As you become proficient at dream incubation, you
will find that maintaining the same ritual brings even greater rewards, as your dream
state becomes programmed to recognise your ritual. In other words, practice makes perfect!
Suggested rituals include:
- Write your dream request on scented paper and place it under your
pillow to ‘sleep on it’.
- Sleep in a different place which you reserve specially for dream
incubation nights. Try a spiritually inspiring place, such as out in the open air, or
camped at the top of a mountain.
- Wear a ritual garment or choose a bedcover, sheet or pillow that
you keep for this purpose only.
- Light a candle, or several, by your bed, and watch them for a
while as you contemplate your question. Then state your dream request aloud and blow out
the candles before sleep. As the flames disappear, mentally dispatch your dream request to
the night.
- As above, but write your dream request on a piece of paper, and
burn it in the candle flame, thereby sending it on its way into the night.
- Pray and ask for your prayer to be answered in your dream in a way
that you will understand clearly.
- If your dream request concerns other people, place photos or
letters from them around your bed to add to your ritual.
- Write a poem, stating your problem, and finishing with the precise
request, then burn it or place it under your pillow.
- Take a bath in scented oils, or have someone give you a massage
perhaps incorporating aromatherapy oils chosen to enhance your dream ritual.
- Choose all full moon (or all new moon) nights as special dream
incubation nights.
- Address your request to your Higher Self, the universe, God …
whichever is appropriate for you.
- Picture a wise old woman or a wise old man, especially focusing on
the infinite wisdom and kindness in their eyes, and put your dream request to this
guardian of your dreams.
- Choose a ritual of your own.
4. Place paper and pen, or a tape recorder by your
bed to record your dream.
It is common to wake in the middle of the
night with an illuminating dream that you are certain you will never forget, but which
remains only fleetingly in the morning. Program yourself to wake up and write your dream
down, or record it onto tape, as soon as you have experienced it.
5. Don’t discount a dream.
Don’t discount a dream because it does not
bear any literal resemblance to your request. The dream may be highly symbolic, so spend
time applying all the dream interpretation techniques you have learned from this book, and
see what sense emerges.
6. If you recall nothing …
If you recall nothing, or can’t make sense
from the dreams you do remember, try again for no more than three consecutive nights, then
take a break. Be aware that any anxiety you bring into this procedure may block your
recall. Practise.
Problem Solving through Lucid Dreaming
Lucid dreamers have a great advantage when it
comes to dream incubation. The moment you realise you are dreaming you can take control of
the situation and bring in all the people and tools that you need to answer your question.
You can speak to estranged lovers and hear their answers, talk to the boss about your
chances of promotion, or experiment with the idea you had for that unusual function by
staging it in your lucid dream. What you are essentially doing here is role-playing and
looking at the possible outcomes. Even though you are consciously lucid in the dream, your
unconscious and other dream input systems are in action too, so you can ‘let the
dream roll’ and let the characters speak for themselves. This gives you access to
knowledge of which you were not consciously aware before the dream.
In his book, Exploring the World of Lucid
Dreaming, Stephen LaBerge quotes the inspiring experience of one dreamer who used to
design new computer programs in his lucid dreams. He would take the ‘problem’ to
bed and, when he became lucid, would flit over to his Sherlock Holmes-type parlour and
invite Einstein around. Together they would sit and talk and write ideas down on a
blackboard. A flow diagram would evolve as the dream progressed, and this dreamer
programmed himself to wake up when he was satisfied with a new program. He would then jot
the diagram down and try it out the next day. He reported that he found this method to be
99% accurate.
Imagine taking this approach a step further:
bringing into your lucid dream all the computers or technology which you do not have
access to in waking life, or being able to kaleidoscope ten years worth of experiments and
results into a 20 minute dream!
With that mind-boggling thought, I’ll leave
you to contemplate the enormity of your potential to truly ‘Sleep on it … and
change your life.’
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