Issue 53, January 2003
Resolutions
©Jane Teresa Anderson, January 2003
No! This isn't another article on New Year Resolutions! This is about the kind of resolutions that get results. You don't have to work at keeping them and they're extremely easy to do. Sometimes the results are instantaneous. Sometimes they are astounding. Are you ready for a new year of moving forward? Here's how.
Start by writing down your dreams each morning. It's okay if you're not into interpreting them - just write them down.
Then look at each dream in turn and ask yourself one question: "Does the dream have a satisfying ending?" Each time you answer "No" you have all you need to get the magic happening.
Each dream with an unsatisfying ending is an unresolved dream reflecting an unresolved and unsatisfying area of your waking life. What you are going to do is a simple exercise to create a better ending, a better resolution, for your dream. Why? Because resolved dreams become resolved waking life situations.
Here's an example.
You dream you are walking around a city trying to find your way to a certain location but you just keep getting more and more lost.
This dream is unresolved because it has an unsatisfying ending. A more satisfying ending would be to suddenly find yourself at the desired location and to feel fantastic about being there.
Once you've identified an unresolved dream, first note how you were feeling in the dream. In this example perhaps the feeling was 'lost' or 'confused' or 'daunted'. Then ask yourself where, in your waking life, you sometimes feel lost, confused or daunted. Don't worry if you can't relate to a waking life situation, but if you can make the connection you can be pretty sure your dream holds a key to resolving that particular situation.
Next choose words to describe feelings opposite to those you felt in your dream. In this example you might choose 'found', 'clear' or 'encouraged'.
Then close your eyes and imagine being back in your dream. Allow yourself to feel lost, confused and daunted. Bring all your senses alive. Smell the dream place, hear it and touch it. Then imagine suddenly finding yourself standing in the desired location. At this moment in your visualisation summon up the positive feelings you listed. In this example, allow feelings of being found, clear and encouraged to flood into your mind and body.
This whole visualisation should take you less than one minute to do.
You may wish to practise several times until the visualisation and the new feelings flow easily. When you've got the flow happening, do the visualisation 20 times a day for 7 consecutive days. After that, do the visualisation twice a day for a few more weeks only. That's all.
What will happen?
What you will notice is that the waking life situation where you had been feeling lost, confused and daunted will begin to shift. You will start to see solutions where before you felt lost for answers. You will approach the situation more positively as the daunting feeling fades away and you feel more encouraged.
Why does this happen?
One of the functions of dreams is to find solutions to problems and conflicts. Often the reason why something in your waking life is not working out is that your unconscious mind is in conflict with your conscious mind. Awake you may be very clear about what you want. Your conscious mind may be goal directed and the steps you need to take may seem logical and clear. But if your unconscious mind holds an opposite belief, experience, feeling or expectation then it will undermine your success.
Wherever a dream is unresolved, there is inner conflict undermining your outer world life. When you do these kinds of visualisations you are communicating with your unconscious mind using its own language - the language of dreams. When you use a visualisation to resolve a dream you are changing the old patterns of your unconscious mind and reprogramming it for successful outcomes. After a week of 20 one-minute visualisations a day your unconscious mind begins to respond to the old situation in a new way. Old problems become resolved.
Just pause for a moment and consider the weighty implication of this.
When you have a worrying dream, how often do you spend reliving it during the day? How often do you describe it to others, replay the ending or worry that you will have the same dream again?
What do you think the result of replaying this dream and all the feelings that accompany it could be?
Yes, you are in danger of reinforcing the unresolved outcome, the unsatisfying feelings. Does this mean that remembering dreams and talking about them is counter-productive? Should we instead be hurrying to forget them?
There are two approaches. Firstly you can follow the visualisation formula described here and dwell no longer on the original dream.
Secondly, if you wish, you can explore every intricate twist and turn of the original dream, every nuance of feeling, every sadness and hurt AND THEN, spiritually and personally enriched by the depths of understanding and insight such dream-working gifts, begin the visualisations. The secret is to allow yourself enough reflection time to gain deep insight and then to accelerate positive change through visualisation.
The example given is a simple one. It is easy to work out a visualisation for simple unresolved dreams. Thankfully most of the common recurring dreams are simple and so the visualisations are easy to apply. But a more complex dream can open up to a range of possible visualisations, all providing a satisfying, resolved ending to your dream. Where do you begin with a complex dream and how do you know which visualisation to choose?
This is where it becomes important to interpret your dream*. Once you know what the symbols in your dream mean you can work with them to create the best visualisation, or to create alternative visualisations according to the outcome you want to achieve.
Think of your dream as a tapestry woven from the various threads of your beliefs. Destiny is the sum total of the pattern of the threads but who says the threads must stay as they are?
When you interpret your dream you understand what the threads mean and why they create the picture that is your life. You can then stick with the picture, or add more threads, undo threads, remove them, change their colours and hues, or weave them back in to create a changed picture. Choosing a visualisation is like choosing which threads to change to alter the tapestry of your life.
Now, if only I could think up a satisfying resolution for this article. Let me see now. Closing my eyes, visualising ....
I see ... Ah. I see it's done.
Happy New Year!
Jane Teresa Anderson
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