Dreaming My Life

I love dreaming. I love all the amazing experiences I have when I dream and I love all the ways there are to dream. Flying, breathing underwater, traveling through space and time, lucid dreaming, past life dreaming, seeing loved ones who have passed away – these are just some of the experiences awaiting you in your sleep.

My Mother used to ask me each morning what I had dreamed the night before and so from an early age I became very good at dream recall. The earliest dream I consciously remember involved a talking squirrel that lived in a large tree at the end of our street when I was about 2 years old. I would meet him at the little door in the bottom of the tree each night and we would sit and chat about life, both his and mine. Sometimes he would help me to climb the tree so that I could see my street and my house from his perspective. I even remember a dream I had after my mother bought me new blue stockings and black Mary Jane shoes; I walked out of my house that night, in my dream state, excited to show my squirrel friend my new stockings and shoes. I have a vivid recollection of looking down at my feet as I twirled around in front of him!

The tree still stands at the end of the street I lived on when I was 2. It is much bigger now, almost 50 years later, and each time I pass it I remember those dreams and my talking squirrel friend and I find myself still looking for the door.

Dreaming is such a powerful part of being human that any discussion on developing your intuition wouldn’t be complete without a discussion on dreaming. Everyone does it, every night. In fact, studies have shown that you can become extremely depressed and even psychotic if you are kept from dreaming, with sleeping pills, anti-depressants or sleep deprivation. If you’re purposefully deprived of the full cycles of sleeping, the three stages of NREM (Non-Rapid-Eye-Movement) and the full stage of REM (Rapid-Eye-Movement) sleep, your motor skills and cognitive abilities suffer and you are more likely to make poor decisions during the day.

Other studies have shown that people who are severely sleep deprived, for whatever reasons, are far more hazardous drivers on the road then those who have had a few drinks and then gotten behind the wheel of their car. I don’t condone either, however, our culture is less accepting of you saying you feel unsafe to drive and not coming into work because you had a bad night’s sleep, then it is about allowing you to drive if you’ve had a drink after work.

In Australia the Aboriginal people hold the belief that Dreamtime is their true lives while their waking life is the illusion, whereas in our culture we tend to believe the opposite. Cultures around the world have created relationships with their dreams in various ways, each attempting to understand, categorize and work with their dreaming experiences.

How many times have you told yourself, or been told by others, “It’s only a dream?” When you have a bad dream this can be comforting, however, it can also feel dismissive if the dream feels to be important to you.

Visit any bookstore and you’ll find plenty of books on dream symbol interpretation. As there are many universal human experiences it’s possible to assign common meanings to the things you see and experience in your dreams. I would caution you to remember that your life has its own symbols that are special to you. You might read that seeing a feather in your dream is a symbol of freedom. This might hold true for you, unless you are terrified of birds. A feather could then have an entirely different meaning for you. As you connect with your dreaming landscape more deeply you’ll learn how your Soul Being and Higher Self communicate with you through you own, personal dream symbolism.

The power of your dreams to bring ideas, comfort, healing and communication from your Higher Self or Spirit should not be underestimated. A client came to see me shortly after her husband has passed away. She was devastated and was looking for answers and confirmation that he was OK now and was nearby.

As we sat in session I described a scene to her that I was seeing; she and her husband were sitting at their kitchen table and he was telling her that he was OK and that he would stay near her for as long as she needed him too. He told he loved her in a way known only between the two of them. When I stopped my narrative and looked up at my client there were tears streaming down her face.

“You just described the dream I had the other night! I was afraid to believe it but now I know it was truly him.” She said to me.

Through the shared vision of her communication with her husband she knew her healing from her deep loss had begun and that her husband truly was OK and still with her. This is how powerful your dreams can be!

In Western culture there is an underlying belief that dreaming is just something we do when we sleep and that “it’s just a dream”. We tend not to give attention or serious exploration to the things we experience in the dream state or other altered states of consciousness. Studying your dreaming can give you a different and more expansive framework for understanding how limitless you truly are. Your dream reality is as rich and varied as your waking reality, in some cases even more so. Working with these other realms of consciousness opens you up to a deeper connection with your intuition, allowing you a deeper relationship with your core Self.

Worth going to sleep for, wouldn’t you agree?