I was called onto this morning’s Maz, Dan and Shane breakfast show on Nova 919, to do a bit of dream detective work on the embarrassing dream Maz had just shared with the listeners.

“I woke up when Josh Pyke mooned me and my new personal trainer,” she laughed. She had the dream the night after her introductory PT session, and she was doubtful that she’d be able to keep a straight face during her second session later today.

In the dream, she and her new PT went to a gig at an amphitheatre near her old primary school, to hear Australian singer-songwriter Josh Pyke. When she went up to the stage to introduce Josh Pyke to her PT, he mooned them.

Nova style radio means getting to the – ahem – bottom line pretty swiftly, give or take a bit of banter.

“If you want to succeed with your exercise goals, you’ll need to understand your mooning attitude,” I began, perhaps mysteriously. “Which three words would you use to describe Josh Pyke’s personality?”

“Chilled out, a chiller, friendly,” Maz replied.

“So there’s a chilled out part of you that feels like mooning your PT,” I suggested. “And because your primary school comes up in the dream, this probably goes back to how you felt about training and discipline back in your primary school days.”

“I was 110% committed at primary school,” Maz observed.

Every aspect has its shadow – or balance – and for committed, disciplined people there’s always a chilled out side hanging in the shadows. Sometimes we’re driven to extremes (like 110% discipline) by a fear of the opposite extreme (totally chilled out).

Things began to click for Maz. In her introductory session, her PT had discussed nutrition, and she said she began to think, “Oh, no! I’ll have to give up booze, foods I love …”.  She could relate to the feeling of mooning the whole PT idea in favour of chilling out. But by the time she went to bed, she said she’d decided to “110%” commit to her personal training goals.

Maz’s dream reflects the way her mind processed all of this – as all dreams do.

I pointed out some dream word play: her introductory PT session became, in the dream, an introduction to her PT.

Dreams cleverly convey levels of meaning and visual word play, and I suggested to Maz that the mooning may reflect deeper feelings of being quite happy with her butt the way it is (assuming her training also targeted this area).

I returned to the opening bottom line.

“If you want to succeed with your exercise goals, you’ll need to understand your mooning attitude. Giving your PT 110% discipline may lead to burn out. Better to add some balance, to add some chill, to get the right mix to make it fun and achievable, and maybe, just maybe, to factor in being happy with your butt the way it is.”

Maz related to this, and I’m sure the memory of the dream mooning incident will bring a chuckle and a chill factor to her workout this afternoon.

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Alicia, my guest from Atlanta, Georgia, dreamed of winning a prize that led her on a mystery journey. Listen as we piece together the elements she encountered along the way: the red tinted photographs, the light under the garage door, the significant numbers and directions, the distinguished faces, Carmen the neighbour, Debra the team mate.

What does Alicia discover, and how does this relate to her life? Listen as we explore the many, concurrent levels of meaning shining through this dream, the whole always being so much greater than the sum of its parts.

During the interpretation, Alicia shared that she is a photographer, and she is delighted to invite you to see her work on her website at www.kindnessoflife.com

Listen here.

 

(Our next show, episode 126, will be released in four weeks, on 1 June 2012.)

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People are such perfect dream symbols for your various beliefs, issues, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, memories, and experiences, but sometimes you need a little extra help in narrowing the field when interpreting the meaning of a certain person in a particular dream.

Here’s that little extra help. Use this checklist (an extract from my book, Dream Alchemy, 2nd edition, published by Hachette). Answer the questions until something clicks.

CHECKLIST

1.    What is the personality of this person (three words or phrases)?

2.    How does this person approach life (three words or phrases)?

3.    When was the last time you saw, heard of or interacted with this person?

4.    What were the circumstances of your answer to question 3?

5.    How would you feel if you met this person today?

6.    Who else does this person remind you of?

7.    Is there a pun or different meaning in this person’s name?

8.    What role does this person play in the world?

9.    What role does this person play in your life?

10.    Which three things do you admire about this person?

11.    Which three things do you dislike about this person (be honest!)

12.    Do you have any unresolved feelings or business with this person? If so, what?

13.    What belief might you have borrowed from this person?

14.    Do you need to make peace with this person?

15.    If you were to meet this person today, what message would you like to deliver?

Remember that everyone and everything in a dream represents something about you, and dreams reflect your mind’s processing of the last couple of days.

Use the checklist to trigger a connection between what that person means to you and what has been happening in your life during the last 24-48 hours. Then add that insight into the mix when interpreting the other details of your dream.

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Need a little help recalling your dreams? An app can help you with that. Want to dream the perfect dream? There’s an app designed for that too.

One key to good dream recall is to wake gently, keep your eyes closed, and allow dream fragments time to come together before your alarm clock – the one that means get out of bed now or you’ll be late – jolts you fully awake. You can help the process by asking yourself simple questions such as What happened before this? What happened after this? How did I get here? You can also help the process by setting two alarms, one gentle one to signal dream recall time, and your usual one, set about twenty minutes later, to get you out of bed.

Joe Halajian’s DreamGlobally app allows you to set a wake prompt that is just audible enough to glide you into dream recall. You can choose from a number of prompts, including questions designed to help you remember your dreams, and you can choose how long you’d like to drift in this stage before the app sounds your get out of bed now call. You can also choose sleep prompts – verbal suggestions about remembering your dreams – that play as you fall asleep.

The DreamGlobally app enables you to record your dreams by speaking them into your device before moving or opening your eyes. All good stuff, and this may be for you if you’re audio inclined and don’t mind sleeping with your iDevice. It may also be for you if you’re interested in global dreaming patterns and connecting with others via your dreams, as you can send tags about your dream content to the DreamGlobally dream database.

iLoved my zen alarm clock, an analogue clock with a maple wood finish and a little gong that gently struck a tubular bell once, twenty minutes before get out of bed now or you’ll be late time. That first single strike was followed by another 3.48 seconds later, then one 2.21 seconds after that, and so on in a Golden Ratio Progression (a mathematical formula related to the Fibonacci sequence, and believed to be inherently aesthetic), until it chimed every five seconds to get you up and out of bed. It was perfect for entering dream drift recall, and I found it a peaceful way to wake up each morning. Unfortunately, it wasn’t so perfect for Michael, who found it irritating, Golden Ratio or no Golden Ratio. Michael found the chimes either woke him wide awake too early or morphed their way into his dreams.

Which brings me to Richard Wiseman’s Dream:ON app, launched a few days ago as a mass participation project to create your perfect dream by having your iDevice play soundscapes designed to influence your dreams at key points during your sleep cycle. 100,000 people downloaded the free app on the first night following the media campaign, and if the blog comments are anything to go by, there was a lot of general disappointment. The Dream:ON team say it will take time for dreamers to get used to the app, and to expect results after three or four nights.

Like DreamGlobally, Dream:ON offers both a gradual waking system and a social dreaming component. You can tag friends who appear in your dreams and send short descriptions of your dreams to their Dream Bank. Unlike DreamGlobally, Dream:ON may be trying to be too smart (e.g. its REM monitoring system) and missing out on interesting results a simpler system might produce.

External and physiological stimuli do enter our dreams (barking dogs, zen chimes, heat, indigestion), so theoretically the Dream:ON soundscapes will, in some cases, influence dreams, but how?

My research shows that our dreams process the last 24-48 hours of our conscious and unconscious experiences, and that can include stimuli we are experiencing at the time of dreaming. That processing, though, can change the zen chimes into Tinkerbell, a barking dog into a strange tooting train, or indigestion into a stomach-strangling cobra. The point is, the dreaming mind interprets the stimulus – or soundscape – according to a mix of past experiences and the dream drama leading up to the intrusion. It rarely interprets the stimulus logically. A soundscape of tweeting birds may be designed to induce an uplifting perfect dream, but the dreamer may end up dreaming about their Twitter account anxieties. Such is the nature of dreaming and its tendency to word play and lateral ‘thinking’!

I once did an experiment where I asked participants to dream about a blue star. I gave instructions (a mix of dream incubation techniques and suggestion) designed to maximise the possibility of a blue star appearing in a dream. Of those who were successful, the blue star in their dreams tended to represent (when the dreams were analysed) each dreamer’s beliefs and feelings about performing, succeeding, being tested, or whatever each dreamer was processing about taking part in the experiment. Those who didn’t remember seeing a blue star in their dream tended to report dreams of searching, trying, or feeling tested.

My interest is in individual dreams, how they reflect the dreamer’s waking life, the insights the dreamer can gain about their unconscious mindset, and the dream alchemy exercises the dreamer can do to change and align their mindset with their personal choices for their future.

The perfect dream, to me, is the one that bestows helpful insight when it is analysed, the one that gifts the opportunity to understand your waking life experiences by understanding your mindset, and that offers the raw material you can use to create the kind of deep change that results in more personally rewarding life experience. Whether that dream is happy or nightmarish is not the issue. If you want to influence and control your dreams for fun, go ahead, but make it a rare adventure. Leave room for your natural dreams and their potential to help you fulfil and enjoy the rewarding waking life outcomes of your choice.

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Jason from Seattle, my guest this episode, dreamed of viewing the magnificence of outer space from a spacecraft, before landing back on Earth. He had been abducted by aliens, and knew they would find him again. Back home there’s maths homework to do, a blood transfusion to endure against his will, and a sense of deep sadness connected with a journey he wants to make into the unknown. How will the dream end, and how does it relate to Jason’s life?

As always when I have a guest on the show, I know nothing about the dream until we start recording, and we don’t edit, so you hear the whole process of exploring and interpreting the dream, Jason’s responses and discussions, and applying dream alchemy, as it happens.  Enjoy, and do please share with your friends and colleagues.

Oh, and we’re celebrating 3 years of The Dream Show! We launched in April 2009.

Listen here and email me if you’d like to be a guest on the show.

iTunes: You can also subscribe (free) to The Dream Show here on iTunes.

(Our next show, episode 125, will be released in four weeks, on 4 May 2012.)

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Here’s the video of my dream interpretation segment on Channel 7, The Morning Show, (national television Australia), this morning:

Have you seen A Dangerous Method*, the movie about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung’s intense relationship from first meeting, through the birth of psychoanalysis, to their professional and personal falling out? Along the way, Jung (Michael Fassbender), shares some of his dreams with Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and you might enjoy, as I did at the cinema on Friday evening, listening to their thoughts and insights from their increasingly different points of view. If you’ve studied the popular literature on Jung, the dreams will probably be familiar to you, but they’re short and sweet on film which makes them all the more accessible.

One of the biggest differences between Freud and Jung’s clinical approaches to dreams was that Freud saw dreams as revealing his patients’ neuroses while Jung saw dreams as revealing a person’s potential for living a bigger life. Freud focused on rigid scientific diagnosis (according to his theories) and cure, while Jung allowed a more spiritual, mystical, flexibility to influence his analysis of dreams.

And of course there’s lots of sex, in Freud’s analyses and in Jung’s relationship with Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightly), the young woman suffering hysteria who became the first patient Jung treated with Freud’s new talking cure (psychoanalysis).

Toward the end of the film, Jung describes his apocalyptic recurring dream, which he believed was precognitive of the coming apocalypse, World War I. Yet as you listen you’ll notice the metaphor of personal apocalypse as he slides into his nervous breakdown from which he later emerged, the wounded healer.

If you’ve followed my work, you’ll know that one of my key approaches is to look for limiting beliefs, reflected in dreams, and to assist the dreamer with dream alchemy to transform such beliefs into ones that allow the person to grow into his or her potential, to live that bigger life. Go see the movie. Listen to the dreams, and have a think about the kind of dream alchemy you might prescribe for each one.

* Directed by David Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method, is based on John Kerr’s 1993 book, A Dangerous Method. The screenplay was adapted by Christopher Hampton from his 2002 stage play The Talking Cure.

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When someone who has died appears to you in a dream, are they communicating with you from spirit, or are these dreams symbolic? Dreaming of a loved one after death can be the most precious, comforting, uplifting experience, especially when the dream is full of love, embraces, and tender messages, and when the person looks healthy, full of life, and perhaps even presents at a different age – younger for someone who died in old age, adult for a child who died young.

Many a bereaved dreamer cherishes such exquisite moments in a dream, and although they wake up to a world empty of their loved one, they draw on strengths from the night-time encounter and a feeling of receiving support from spirit to get through the early days.

Many more wish they could have just one such dream, and often feel devastated and abandoned when they discover their loved one is appearing in other people’s dreams, but not in their own.

On the other hand, many bereaved people have experienced distressing dreams where the deceased person, who was loving and kind in life, is completely different in dreams – angry, blaming, hurtful, controlling, or condemning. In other cases, people who were difficult in life continue to be difficult in dreams, often leaving the dreamer feeling the deceased person is controlling him and restraining him from moving on with life.

There are instances where accurate information has been communicated by the deceased in dreams, information, for example, about the circumstances of death that have been later verified, however these are extremely rare. Contact through dreams in the early days following death may sometimes be the case, but as time passes, you can be increasingly certain that these dreams are symbolic. If a loving person acts negatively in a dream, you can be certain your dream is symbolic.

Dreams of the deceased usually deal with grief and healing. For example, it is normal, during grieving, to feel angry with the person for dying and abandoning you, even though this is irrational. When anger, abandonment and blame come up in your dreams, these are your own emotions being processed. When forgiveness and letting go come up in these dreams, these reflect your own readiness to heal and move on, your own resting in peace.

Look at the person appearing in your dream as symbolising your loss, or your feelings about death, or your feelings about that person and the role they played in your life, and then see the rest of the dream as exploring and resolving these issues within yourself.

[Extract from 101 Dream Interpretation Tips, Jane Teresa Anderson]

Further reading: Dreams of death and the departed

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“I’m quadriplegic,” said the caller to a dream segment I was hosting on radio many years ago, “but in my dreams I can run and dance, and I’m devastated when I wake up and remember that I can’t.”

Before his accident, he had enjoyed running and dancing, and he could draw on his sensual and spatial memories to experience those freedoms in his dreams.

Does the same apply to people who have become blind, or deaf, and can people who were born blind see in their dreams? Does the visual region of a congenitally blind person’s brain create images for dreams, as it does for sighted people whose closed eyes are not sending sight data to the brain while dreaming?

As you’ve probably guessed, the congenitally blind do not see images in their dreams because they cannot draw on personal experience. Their dreams reflect their more highly developed non-visual sensory experiences of life. In place of images, they dream of sound, touch, smell, taste, and, for those who have developed the skill, echolocation. They dream of the picture of the world they have built using their predominant senses. They picture the world, but not in visual images.

While we sleep, we process the last 24-48 hours of our conscious and unconscious experiences, and we experience this processing as dreams. So our dreams reflect the last couple of days, as our brain and mind work at making sense of the world. We each build our unique pictures of the world as we experience it, and awaken each morning to an updated view, mental map, or mindset. As this processing takes into account all our past experiences, it tends to consolidate our mindset rather than change it.

Sighted or blind, our dreaming brains get creative during sleep. We imagine flying, being the opposite sex, living in an underwater palace, having a pet dog of a breed that doesn’t exist in waking life, talking to a celebrity we haven’t met, being chased by an impossible monster, or just about anything. People who have been blind since birth can dream of what they imagine seeing to be, just as we can all dream of what we imagine flying, or talking to that celebrity, or being chased by that impossible monster might be like. We draw on our experiences of dancing or flying in a plane or trampolining to imagine what it might be like to fly, and we can experience that imagined sense of flying in our dreams. And it feels absolutely real because that’s the nature of dreams.

People who have been blind since birth can – if it’s important to them – dream of what they imagine seeing to be like, or dream of what they imagine objects or people to look like based on their own acutely developed senses and the descriptions of those who can see, but the visual region of the brain is not engaged. They are not able to access visual memories to replay or build upon creatively.  It’s interesting to note that their eye movements are weak or non-existent during REM sleep, adding weight to research that suggests that eye movements during REM sleep are associated with watching dream action.

Sighted people might dream of being able to echolocate, but such a dream experience is imagined, and while it may feel real in the dream, it is not real in the sense that a blind person who has developed echolocation to navigate in waking life would dream the sensation.

Sighted people can and do dream sounds, smell, touch, and taste, but visuals are the predominant dream sense, with about half of all dreams (according to research) including sound, but less than one percent of all dreams including smell, touch or taste. (You can train yourself to engage your other senses in dreams by paying more attention to them in waking life.) Some research suggests that congenitally blind people’s dreams include 45% sound and 55% combined taste, smell, and touch.

What about people who become blind? The research shows that people who become blind after the age of seven remain able to see in their dreams, though the emphasis on sight may decline as other senses become predominant, and, I imagine, more interesting and relevant. Those who lose their sight before the age of five seem to also lose the ability to see in their dreams, and that leaves a couple of years, from age 5-7, where continuing to see in dreams may reflect individual development at the time of sight loss.

People whose vision has been blurred from birth dream of blurred images, people who have been deaf from birth do not hear in their dreams, and the colourblind are equally colourblind in their dreams.

All of which serves to remind us that our dreams reflect our waking life experiences – conscious and unconscious – in symbolic and metaphoric form, and in all the sensual shades and tones of meaning that are personally relevant to us as unique human beings searching to make sense of our worlds, night by night, dream by dream.

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Ann is my guest (listen here) with a vivid dream where she returns to her childhood neighbourhood and witnesses a miraculous solar eclipse.

In the dream, she and John, a friend from her church, follow the solar eclipse with a discussion about yoga, maths, english, and an abstract drawing in a notepad. All this during a short afternoon nap!

Listen as we explore Ann’s dream, link it to recent events and concerns in her life today, and create the alchemy to soothe and address those concerns and give Ann a greater sense of inner peace.

Listen here and email me if you’d like to be a guest on the show.

iTunes: You can also subscribe (free) to The Dream Show here on iTunes.

(Our next show, episode 124, will be released in four weeks, on 6 April 2012.)

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