Issue 94, June 2006
The Golden Door (d'or)
©Jane Teresa Anderson, June 2006
It’s the answer to all your dreams, an easy exercise you can do whenever you need a simple solution to life’s challenges. Sounds great, doesn’t it? And it’s true!
Today I decided to give you one of the simplest dream alchemy practices I know. It’s easy to do and it works like magic every time you use it. In fact, it’s so simple and so easy to describe that I thought this article would be too short.
Little did I know the twists and turns the story would develop between coming up with the idea this morning and sitting here typing it out this afternoon! As a result, this has become a multi-levelled tale. So, stay with me long enough to learn the exercise so you can apply it in your life to great advantage, or read on to the end to see how the magic played out in my life today, and to discover the bigger questions behind the simplest solutions.
When life challenges or puzzles you, when you can’t see your way through a situation or issue, or when you seem to be going round and round in the same old circles, your dreaming mind works at finding solutions. Sometimes your dreams come up with brilliant breakthrough solutions and you wake up instantly knowing what to do because you’ve ‘slept on it’ and found your solution. Sometimes your dreams trundle round the same old ground, seemingly unable to find the missing key. This can go on for weeks, months or years, resulting in the same old recurring dreams or recurring dream themes before the solution is found.
Have you ever had the dream where you’re lost in a city, trying to get somewhere, looking for the right road, bus, train, building, map, person or any kind of clue to get you to where you want to be? This kind of dream comes up when you’ve lost direction in life, or when your old ways of achieving your needs or goals just don’t work any more. Wouldn’t it be great to wake up from a dream like this and do a simple, magical exercise that gives you the direction you need, or shows you a new path or way to achieve your goals? That’s exactly what I’m about to give you.
How many of your dreams have happy endings? How many have satisfactory endings? How many of your dreams seem unfinished? How many end up going round and round in circles, getting nowhere? To put this another way, if you went to the cinema and saw your dreams made into movies, how many would leave you feeling cheated, thinking, “I paid good money for that movie and I sat there and hung in till the end and all for nothing! It just left me up in the air! How did it all end?”
Dreams that don’t really have endings are unresolved dreams. They happen when your dreaming brain is still trying to fathom out a solution to a challenge or difficulty you’re experiencing in your waking life. The exercise I’m about to give you works best when applied to these kinds of dreams – to unresolved dreams with blah endings.
Okay, here it is. Imagine waking up from an unresolved dream, knowing that your dream was unresolved because SOMEWHERE in your life, something is unresolved. You may not understand what the dream means in detail, and you may not even know to which area of your life it applies. (Sometimes we don’t know we have a problem until we find a solution. We just accept a situation as difficult until suddenly we discover a way to change it.) All you know is that your dream couldn’t find a solution to a situation in your life where you, up till now, have not been able to find a suitable solution. Imagine, for the moment, that your unresolved dream was the one where you were walking around a city, completely lost.
Now, imagine yourself back in that dream and introduce a change. Introduce an open door into the dream scene. Make that open door safe and beautiful, perhaps have a loving light emanating from it, or a glimpse of sunshine, or a few bars of uplifting music. Imagine that beyond that open door are all the solutions you will ever need in your life. That’s all you need to do in this dream alchemy practice. You don’t need to go through the door in your visualisation. It’s enough just to notice that it’s there and to know that all the solutions you will ever need are through that door. It also goes without saying that the door is permanently open, because the solutions are always there. They always have been and they always will be. You just haven’t known that, until now.
That’s a simple enough exercise isn’t it? You can apply it to ANY unresolved dream, without necessarily understanding the dream. Just visualise the most stuck part of the dream, then introduce the golden door and all the uplifting, safe feelings that go with knowing it is there.
Do this around 20 times a day for two weeks. What will happen is that at sometime during the two weeks (probably on the first day!) you will suddenly have an idea or see your situation in a new way. It will seem to come out of the blue, and so it will surprise you. Think about it, consider it, and if the idea or new insight seems good, act on it. You will be well on the way to finding a solution to the situation which, until now, had seemed unsolvable.
How does this work?
Your unconscious mind sees the open door as a new way, a path you haven’t seen before, a way around the obstacles or a way out of the stuck situation. It also sees the open door as a possible portal for the arrival of something new in your life, perhaps a new idea or a person bearing a solution for you. Your unconscious mind also sees the open door as an open mind. When you visualise introducing this symbol into your unresolved dream scenario you are introducing an open minded approach. You are introducing a willingness to be open to new solutions. You are expanding your horizons beyond the limited parameters of the situation as you know it. You’re saying to your unconscious mind, “Okay, surprise me! Open up and deliver a solution! Help me to see what I haven’t seen yet!”
Why does the open door dream alchemy practice only deliver good ideas for you to consider? It’s because, in your visualisation, you imbued the door with positive features. You saw it as safe, beautiful, loving and light. You heard uplifting music. In doing this you are priming your unconscious mind to deliver positive, loving solutions.
That’s the exercise! Use it, enjoy it, and share your results with me! Now for the twists and turns:
I took five minutes this morning to sit in the garden and conjure up the nuts and bolts of this article. I decided on the theme of the open door dream alchemy practice and ran the exercise through my mind as I did so. I then went into my study, sat down in front of the computer, reached out for my mouse and clicked on the icon for my firewall.
Hmm, yes, that was an unexpected action, wasn’t it? It surprised me too, yet even as I did this, I knew why. My conscious mind was at a lag of about one second behind my unconscious mind which was fully in charge of the proceedings. In the next five seconds I solved a problem that had been on my mind for a week. Mystified? Read on.
About a week ago the images dropped out of my email signatures. They also dropped out of some incoming email signatures, so I knew the problem wasn’t to do with my email signature file. I sent my image-less emails to another computer, and saw that my images arrived intact. I was totally puzzled as to where my images had gone.
Of course you already know the answer. It was something to do with my firewall, but I didn’t know that until my unconscious mind took my mouse there and showed me the cause of the problem. On and off throughout the week I had returned to the problem, trying this, trying that, asking other people, looking for help, trying more and more elaborate and unlikely fixes to no avail.
All it took was a moment’s focus, in the garden, on that open door and …the solution arrived automatically! As soon as I went into my firewall programme I remembered an afternoon last week when the firewall barraged me with questions and I hastily checked boxes while talking to someone at the same time. It turned out that I had checked a box asking the firewall to block images located on the internet from being downloaded into my inbox. How simple is that? How totally obvious?
How could I have not remembered or come up with this solution when I was troubleshooting the problem? It was because my conscious mind checked boxes without awareness, being distracted at the time, and it was only my unconscious mind that observed and recorded my actions. Given an open door, it told me what I needed to know. Until then I had applied logical thinking to the problem of my disappearing images, instead of opening the door to my unconscious wisdom.
Are you jumping up and down with questions at this stage? You should be!
Did you notice that there was no dream involved in this success? I didn’t start with an unresolved dream, visualise it and then introduce an open door. All I did was think about (and therefore visualise) the open door. I thought about all the positive vibes I would ask you to use when visualising your open door, and in thinking about this, I applied them to my open door image too. And my unconscious mind raked around for an unresolved problem in response and came up with my lost email images … and solved it!
So, do you need a dream for this exercise to work powerfully in your life? If you have an unresolved dream, yes! If you simply introduce the open door without applying it to a specific situation, then it will do a random search for a problem to solve, as it did with me. How infinitely more powerful it is to begin with an unresolved dream and focus your open door intention there? When you introduce the open door into the unresolved dream scenario you are directly requesting a solution for that particular issue.
Now, I also told you that my email image problem had been on my mind for about a week. I settled on the idea for today’s Dream Sight article this morning. So, which came first, the idea of the article featuring the open door (which then provided me with my solution) or the problem of my lost email images (which prompted my unconscious to remind me of the open door problem-solver exercise)?
And how’s this for further twists and turns? A firewall is a programme that opens and closes doors (or walls) to information exiting or entering a computer. I decided to write this article about the magic of opening doors. What I needed to do, to solve my email image problem, was open an area of the firewall that was closed. I had to open the way to allow images to enter my email system. I had to open a door, to allow entry. So again, which came first, the article idea or an unconscious prompting of the solution?
And my problem was how to get my images to be visible again in my email. My idea for the article was to share a visualisation with you. Visualisation, visuals, visible images: which came first, the idea for the article or the solution?
Did you get the pun in the title of this article? Dream alchemy practices are exercises designed to transform the ‘base metal’ of your dreams into ‘gold’ insights and rewards, in the same way that the alchemists of old worked to try to transform actual base metals into gold, a challenging exercise, the real purpose of which was the inner journey, the personal and spiritual insights these masters of old acquired as they went about their challenging task. D’or means ‘golden’ or ‘of gold’ in French. I put d’or into the title of this article as a pun, and also as a reminder to you that whenever you use this open door dream alchemy practice you can expect golden rewards, both in solutions to life situations and personal and spiritual insights. And yes, they ARE the same thing, aren’t they?
Jane Teresa Anderson
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