Introduction

Just a Dream?

‘Don’t worry dear, it’s only a dream,’ comforts the father, whose distressed child has just woken from a nightmare. ‘What a vivid imagination!’ laughs the proud mother, You’ll make a good storyteller one day!’ unwittingly belittling her child’s dream experience. Her son grows to forget his dreams as he is taught that his outer world, his career, even his vivid imagination are far more important than the world within.

As adults we wonder why we forget our dreams or even why we seem not to dream at all. Surely this is no surprise if we have been conditioned to believe our dreams are confused mumbo jumbo, or the brain’s electrical filing system sorting through the previous day’s events and chucking out the old useless memories. Why would we respect, recall or take a second glance at what we are programmed to believe is mere night-time garbage?

In these decades of changing economic times and spiritual evolution, the focus is on ’how to’ and self-reliance, yet people everywhere emerge from their nightly sleep with little comprehension of the power of their dreams to give clear direction and to change their lives. Why waste what the night brings?

Dream amnesia commonly sets in when our dreams deal with issues we’d rather not face. Who would want to spoil the delicate balance of their daily life even though that balance may be as tricky to maintain as walking along a knife edge? If we can get to the end of each day without putting a foot wrong, without too much pain, who would want to risk jeopardising this by peering over the edge into their dreams? I would! I’d much rather look at the underlying causes of my life’s patterns, the ways I react and behave in different circumstances and gain new understanding that can convert that stomach churning knife edge into a pair of wings! All it takes is the willingness to open yourself to your dreams, their meanings and their ability to provide you with the means to change your life. This requires an open mind and the courage to look right in the eyes of whatever comes up. Are you ready to take that journey?

This book is based on the Dream Survey which researched the dreaming and waking lives of 160 people from a variety of backgrounds. The results bring a clearer understanding of the meaning and practical application of our dreams to our lives. The research from the study reveals how to improve your dream recall, how to open yourself up to more dream experiences and, most importantly, how to take actions based on them!

Reuniting with your true self through your dreams means getting back in touch with a long-lost language: the language of symbol and intuition. Deep inside you have a perfect knowledge of this universal and ancient tongue. It simply needs to be rekindled and brought back into your conscious awareness where it can serve you best and awaken your full power to create the life you deserve. This book reconnects you with this dream language by teaching you up-to-date, practical, tried and tested methods for interpreting and understanding your dreams. This is made easier with the 'Tree of Discovery' in Chapter 22 which guides you through this process.

Once we see our dreams as vehicles of meaningful information or guidance which can help us to transform our lives, we must question the source of this nightly wisdom. Where do our dreams come from?

Does our religion or our spirituality influence our dreams? Do we see the face of God we are raised to expect? Do we meet angels, saints, Buddha, light beings, spiritual guides or Hindu deities? Or do our dreams confront us, challenge our spiritual beliefs and cause major changes in our outlook on life? Do we write off religious or spiritual dreams as conditioned symbology, as reflections of our subconscious worlds, or do they inspire us to greater purpose and fulfilment?

How do you feel when you suddenly find yourself reliving a dream in waking reality? You suddenly realise that you have glimpsed the future in a dream and now it is taking place in front of your eyes. How does this experience affect your understanding of life? Does deja vu inspire understanding of alternate realities? Many people experience time travelling in their dreams. Can we use this phenomenon to make better decisions or to alter the situation when it plays out before us? How do we cope with living through a bad experience that we have pre-seen, either in a dream, or in a misty, long-lost sense of having ‘been through this before’?

Do we carry our unresolved problems into our sleep, and, if so, do our dreams take over and work on the solutions that our conscious minds have ignored, or found too hard? Do worriers dream more about their problems than people who positively set about solving their difficulties? Can dreaming provide fresh insight, or more creative answers than our more logical daytime problem solving techniques? Can we use dreaming to our advantage, and hand over our weightier challenges and decisions to our dreaming selves? Is there good cause to snuff out the late night candle, close the account books and burn the midnight oil in your dreams instead, getting a good night’s sleep into the bargain? Or is it better to address your problems, clear your head, and settle for a stress free rewarding night of pleasant dreams? Is there good advice in the well-worn phrase ‘Sleep on it’, or is going to bed with matters unsettled a cop-out?

People you know, used to know, who are dead, hardly know, or just plain strangers all enter your dreams. Who are they and why are they there? You may dream of places you used to live in, or of times that feel like past lives. How can you tell the difference between time travelling and symbolic settings? How can you use these experiences to make your waking life easier or more successful?

How does writing down your dreams, thinking about them or taking part in the dream survey affect your dreams? Does diet, exercise, your sleeping and waking routine, and other aspects of your lifestyle affect the quality or quantity of dreams you remember? Does interpreting, understanding and acting upon your dreams change or influence your dreaming life? Do future dreams confirm or comment on the actions you have taken?

How does daydreaming or meditating affect your dreams? Is it possible to resolve unfinished dreams or go back into a dream to fish for lost details? Why do some people have recurring dreams and nightmares? Can these be stopped?

Apart from speech, which other senses pervade our dreams? Some people dream in colour, or in intense colour quite unlike waking life. Others dream in black and white. Taste, touch, telepathy, out-of-the-body sensations and other psychic senses add detail to our dreams. Our hearts beat faster, our bodies may feel paralysed and some people, particularly women, report orgasms. Are these dream sensations real or symbolic?

What do we mean when we question the ‘real’ and the ‘symbolic’ in our dreams? What is our measure of reality? Is reality what happens to us when we are awake? Are dreams illusions because we are asleep when they occur? We see rainbows and mirages when awake. Are they real or illusions? When we are awake, we know that we dream, but in the middle of a dream, unless we are lucid (consciously aware that we are dreaming while we are in the dream), we have no idea that we have another life: a waking life. In the midst of a dream, we have only one reality and that is our dreaming life. The things we experience and the emotions we feel are, at that moment, real. We carry these dream feelings over into our waking lives, often with as much conviction as a daytime, conscious experience.

We can and do bring back different points of view, spiritual insights, details of future events, medical diagnoses, lotto numbers, chemical formulae, mathematical theories, winning horses and accurate information about those close to us. When our dreaming worlds expand and explode into detail, we experience a ‘reality’ far greater than our waking consciousness and finally begin to glimpse new dimensions. As we learn to remember these dream details, to bring back more of our dream life, we find increased practical application in our waking life. We begin to break the bonds of our own restrictions and manifest our true potential.

The survey roams the far reaches of night-time experience, from symbolism to precognitive dreaming, from word play to time travel and from mental housekeeping to conversations with God. But where are the borderlines? When all is said and done, what is the difference between dream reality and waking reality? Should we look for dream signs and symbols in waking life too? Can we align both worlds to gain a deeper yet practical understanding of our overall reality and the actions we can take to change it?

Physiology, psychology, philosophy and metaphysics meet and mingle in this book to give an overall, practical perspective on the realities of dreaming and waking life, and how to fine tune yourself to benefit from travelling in both worlds.

Enjoy the journey!

SLEEP ON IT … AND CHANGE YOUR LIFE is presented in three parts:

PART ONE invites you to complete the Dream Survey Questionnaires, to meet the survey dreamers and to compare your answers with theirs. The research is summarised to show how waking and dreaming lives interplay. Finally, Part One ties together the survey findings in the ‘Guide to Good Dreaming’ which gives practical suggestions on how to improve your dream recall and experience.

PART TWO takes an in-depth look at how to interpret your dreams and take action on them, as well as a considered approach to questioning other aspects of our dream experiences, such as time travel and other forms of psychic dreaming. It teaches you how to become ‘The Magician on the Astral Plane’ and bring back the magic of insight, practical application and food for spiritual thought from your dreaming life.

PART THREE looks at dreaming through the eyes of science, psychology and philosophy. In my language, that roughly translates as the body, mind and soul of dreaming. This section reviews it all and offers an embracing theory of dreams. It takes you into the realm of merging your dreaming and waking lives and a step closer towards ‘Dreaming the Holy Grail’: discovering the meaning of life.

~ CONTINUE YOUR JOURNEY HERE ~
go to:
Chapter 1: The Dream Survey

or return to the
CONTENTS PAGE