Issue 116, April 2008
Your dream is my command
©Jane Teresa Anderson, April 2008
“What would you like to dream about tonight? Your wish is my command,” said the dream genie.
Ah, wouldn’t that be wonderful, to order up a dream of your choice, each night? What would you choose? A dream romance, a meeting with a long-lost or long-passed loved one, a dream trip to a faraway location, a dream massage, a dream glimpse of your future, or an insight about how to handle something in your life?
Go on - name the dream you would love to have. Write it down. Simply by introducing your dream wish into your day, by suggesting it to the backburner of your mind, you may well soon find yourself dreaming your dream. Here’s a recent example from my life - one of those dreams that will stay with me forever. Enjoy the story and notice the clues it gives about how to command your dream genie to fulfil your dream wish.
Sometimes, when there’s pollen or dust in the air, I have mild asthma. It’s not much – more an occasional cough or tickly feeling of bubbles in my lungs than any difficulty with breathing. In normal everyday life, it’s nothing. The only time it can become an issue is when I’m doing radio or television on a high pollen day and I feel a cough coming on. You know what it’s like trying to stop a sneeze? Well, that’s easily done by pressing the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth, but stopping a cough is more challenging, especially when you’re being broadcast live to air.
Of course, it only takes a couple of experiences of trying to keep a frog in the throat from croaking during a show to make it more likely to happen. I realised I needed to find a solution.
Naturally, being a dream analyst and alchemist, my first thought was that a dream on the subject would be helpful. If I could identify a symbol, in a dream, that represented the cough or bubbly lung feeling, I could create a dream alchemy practice to un-cough the cough or un-bubble the bubbles.
The thought lasted no longer than a few seconds because my very busy day soon swept me far away, and, hours later, I hit the pillow and was sound asleep and dreaming.
I dreamed someone was showing me a transparent bubble made from a very fine, delicate, flexible, silken plastic. Inside the bubble I could see strands of algae and plant spores. The bubble was half-filling with air, then deflating slightly. Air was escaping from around the middle of the bubble, so someone kept inserting a straw and blowing into the bubble to expand it again. This cycle of half expansion and deflation continued. In the dream I realised that this was the symbol I needed. Clearly, I thought, while still in the dream, this is a perfect symbol for my asthma. This plastic bubble is like a lung, the algae and plant spores inside it are like the pollen that causes the asthma, and the difficulty in reaching full expansion is exactly like the feeling I get when I need to cough and can’t quite complete my breath.
If my dream had ended there, I would have woken up and created a dream alchemy practice to change the deflating bubble into a strong bubble capable of full expansion. But the wonderful surprise was that my dream went on to do this for me, and in quite an extraordinary, unforgettable way. This is what happened next.
In my dream a man, standing behind me, suggested I lean back a little, resting on him for support. He said it was a healing thing to do, and since it felt right, I did. I didn’t turn round to look at the man. His energy felt right and I just leant back. As I did this I saw my hands reach out to gently hold the bubble, one hand to each side. As soon as my hands came into contact with the bubble, it started to ‘breathe’ fully. It filled to full expansion, gently breathed out all the air, expanded again, and so on, cycle after cycle. No longer was air escaping from holes around the middle of the bubble. It was breathing itself because it was supported by my two hands, just as I was supported, in my leaning back, by the man standing behind me. I knew, in the dream, that between my hands and the bubble, nothing else was required.
At that moment, the man behind me gave a quick squeeze to my lungs and I felt, in the dream, a rush of magnetism through my body and the sensation of something (a cough?) leaving my body for good. I turned around to thank the man. He looked so kind. His job done, he took his coat from a hook on the wall and put it on. It was a Tibetan monk’s robe. He was a Tibetan monk. I tied the silk threads at the back of his neck for him, and thanked him for his dream gift.
On waking, I no longer needed to devise a dream alchemy practice to solve my asthma issue. I had experienced the alchemy while in the dream. The key to successful dream alchemy is summoning up the positive feelings you associate with achieving the change. Because my dream was pumped full with positive expansive feelings as well as the energising, uplifting magnetism I felt flowing through my body, the alchemy was performed under the best possible conditions.
Best of all, once I awoke I decided to reinforce my dream alchemy experience by repeating it, awake. I visualised holding my hands out, placing them either side of the bubble. I drew upon the feelings in the dream - sensing the easy expansion and the magnetism in my body, feeling the energy in my hands, feeling again the sense of absolute awe that such a delicate bubble ‘knew’ exactly how to breathe as long as my hands were there to give support and as long as my head (thinking about coughing) was not in the picture to complicate the issue. I repeated this many times a day, as per the formula for doing dream alchemy practice.
You can use dream alchemy to transform a dream symbol (to transform a leaky bubble into a strong one, for example), or to reinforce a dream symbol (as I did when I awoke from this dream). When you transform a symbol and add the positive feelings, you transform the issue it represents in your life – you heal it. When you reinforce a dream symbol (one that transformed itself during your dream), you not only reinforce the healing of the issue in your life, you also accelerate all the good things that flow from it.
For this story to be of help to you there’s no need for me to interpret the rest of my dream, but if you’re curious about the Tibetan monk, he was a beautiful reminder of trusting the universe. Our heads too easily get in the way of trusting our bodies to get on and do the job they were built to do – to provide the vehicle for the spiritual lessons we are here to learn.
My wish, to dream a symbol to help banish the frog in my throat, was fulfilled. In interpreting my dream I learned a lot about the way I breathe, and about how to improve this. I have repeatedly and successfully used the dream alchemy visualisation to banish the frog at my command.
So how can you get your dream genie to make your dream wish your command?
Paradoxically, the two best methods of inducing a dream topic are:
1. Fleetingly contemplate a subject.
2. Deeply and repetitively contemplate a subject as you fall asleep.
The second works because you tend to dream first about whatever unresolved issue is on your mind as you fall asleep.
The first works because your dreaming mind is compelled to solve puzzles, and when you fleetingly contemplate something that puzzles you, without allowing your conscious mind time to work on it during the day, your unconscious mind gets busy and just can’t wait to deliver as soon as your eyes close.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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