Issue 87, November 2005
Quarry query
©Jane Teresa Anderson, November 2005
"Why are you slowing down here?" I asked the driver, a master-builder friend. We were heading for the gym, only a few metres down the road, but he was stopping short, gazing across a huge quarry.
"I’m looking for a large blue brick,” he said, surveying the exposed bedrock. “It’s a breeze block, but very precious. I need one for my house."
Deep in my dream, yet not knowing I was dreaming, I rolled down the car window and glanced cursorily at acres of jumbled rocks, bricks and building materials. What was this place? A quarry? A mine? A building site? Needle in a haystack, I thought, eager to get to the gym.
But there it was, sitting on a pedestal, as if pre-selected, quietly waiting to be spotted and chosen. "There’s your brick," I announced to my master-builder friend, a moment before waking up.
"There’s your precious blue brick," I said to myself, opening my eyes, bringing my dream trophy into the light of a Brisbane Monday morning, a morning upon which my first task was to write this November Dream Sight article.
If you’re advanced in your dream interpretation skills you might like to pause at this point and re-read my dream. How many word plays can you see? How many metaphors? What might it mean? Why might I have been delighted to bring this dream to my computer this morning, knowing I had a Dream Sight to compose and send before the end of the day?
Yesterday I had an idea for today’s article but it needed fine-tuning. I gave that task to my dreams. I placed the question – the query – in my mind and fell asleep confidently expecting my dreaming mind to do the rest of the work for me. And it did.
This is a process technically known as Dream Incubation. You focus on the question or puzzle as you fall asleep, knowing that your unconscious mind will work hard at solving the puzzle while you sleep.
How many times have you woken up with a brilliant idea or a solution to a problem that seemed impossible the night before? How many times have you woken up with a different perspective on a situation? Whether or not you remember your dreams, these are the result of your unconscious mind problem solving while your conscious mind sleeps.
But if your dreaming mind is such a brilliant problem solver, why not bypass remembering and interpreting dreams altogether? Why not just let your unconscious mind get on with it, without any interference from you?
Ah, well, interference is where the magic really can begin!
Picture your dreaming mind as an extremely complex processor, rapidly sorting through all your experiences, thoughts and ideas of the last 24-48 hours. Add into the mix all your unconscious perceptions, responses and beliefs that were stirred up by the last two days, as these need processing too. While you sleep, your dreaming mind’s task is to update your hard drive, to include your recent experiences.
What is this hard drive exactly? Is it the way your brain is wired? Is it the way your mind is programmed to respond? Is it the way your body holds emotions and memories in your muscles? Is it the way that your spirit gains insight? Is it the way that your soul records this life journey? Or are these all one and the same? Whichever way you frame it, what your dreaming mind does is update life as you see it on a daily basis.
Sometimes a new experience over-writes an old one, and an insight is born. You wake up seeing things differently. Your world changes or, at least, it shifts slightly.
More often that not, a new experience is compared to older ones and deleted because it doesn’t fit your long-held beliefs. This is why real change is such a challenge. The ‘way things are’ according to your longest-held beliefs, tends to be reinforced rather than changed.
When you don’t recall or interpret your dreams, you are at the whim of your dreaming mind’s editing. It reinforces old beliefs or establishes new ones without your approval. You simply wake up and follow the programming, old or new.
But when you remember your dreams and learn how to interpret them, you gain awesome insight into that hard drive of yours, whether you regard it as body, mind or soul. You begin to understand why you see life the way you do, and why others see it differently.
And then? Then you simply reach back into a dream, choose a symbol and rework it in a way that influences the updating of your hard drive. You interfere with the automatic processing. You take an active part in master-building your life. You empower yourself to overthrow old ways of looking at the world, old ways of responding, old long-term conditioned beliefs that suited your past but not your present… or your future.
You can do this with all dreams. Working wisely with a dream symbol in this way is a process I refer to as ‘dream alchemy practice’. It’s the magic of working with your dreams, rather than leaving your dreams to work on you.
So how does Dream Incubation fit into this? Why put a problem to your dreaming mind to solve? Sometimes your dreaming mind comes up with perfect solutions. Sometimes it’s off-key. Sometimes it cannot come up with a solution, ending unresolved, or going round in circles, or repeating over a period of time as a recurring dream. But, hey! The dream reveals enough elements to allow you to reach in and choose the symbol to transform!
My dream? A personal symbol for problem solving, in my dreams, is the gym, because it’s where I go for a ‘work out’. Being a writer, my dreams tend to favour word play, so the dream gym is where I go to ‘work out’ a solution to something. I had wanted to ‘work out’ a good way to illustrate today’s article.
In the dream, I had the feeling the master builder was going to use the blue brick to make a sculpture. There was something in the careful choice of the exact brick from a whole quarry of possibilities that fitted this picture. Also, when I saw the brick it was on a pedestal, like a sculpture.
The brick was the ideal dream symbol, waiting to be chosen and actively sculpted into shape as the master builder desired. It looked like a common breeze block, indeed, it may even have been a writer’s block waiting for me to chip it away to find the precious story laying in wait within.
The blue brick was precious, reminding me that in sculpting and shaping it, in chipping away at it, my work is a ‘blue chip’ investment. In investing in dream work, in doing my dream alchemy practices, I am ensuring solid and long lasting, valuable returns.
In my dream I wondered what the place was. A quarry: a place to query, or a place of digging deep into my unconscious mind? A mine: a mine of information? A building site: another dream sight article to add to the huge web site I have been building over all these years?
The exposed bedrock symbolised my exposed dreaming mind, bed pun included. All in all, I didn’t need to get as far as the gym to find the solution I was looking for. I didn’t need to sweat and labour over it. For all its rarity, the precious blue brick was right here all the time. I just needed to reach into my dream and bring it into my Monday morning to chip it into shape and make it work for me.
Life’s a breeze when you are ready to sculpt the old blocks and transform them into something that works for you, rather than against you.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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