It’s that time of the year here in Australia. It’s midwinter*(see footnote!), the air is clear and dry and the sunlight is blinding. There’s no summer humidity to water down the glare, and the widening hole in the ozone layer down this end doesn’t help. I need a new pair of sunglasses.

Which is better: looking into a glaring bright light or into a dark cave? Yes, we’re heading into dreams, but first please ponder this question. Which would you rather, total glaring light or deeply dark cave?

You cannot keep staring into a bright light. Your reflexes kick in, closing your eyes before further damage occurs. If you are forced to look into the light for too long, temporary blindness and perhaps long term damage will result. Either way, you will not be able to see clearly, if at all. What a paradox! So much light yet nothing to be seen.

If you keep staring into the dark cave what will happen? If you can push through the fear and stay focussed, you may begin to see faint shafts of light penetrating through hidden fissures and cracks in the cave walls. You may catch glimpses of movement, shadowy forms scuttling, lizard-like. The more you focus the more you may see that yes, these are lizards. Your eyes adjust and you discover that there are shades of darkness revealing shapes and forms.

Consider the sun and the moon. During the day sunlight is so bright (even on a rainy English day) that it blinds us to starlight. Stars don’t slip away during the day, they shine on but their subtle light is drowned by sunlight. It is only when we look into the darkness of the night sky that we can study the mysteries of the changing cosmos.

How much light do we need to get the best picture? It’s all about balance and your point of view.

Turn your back on the glaring sun and what do you see? Your own shadow, as well as shadows cast by other objects bathed in the same brilliant light. Your shadow may be outrageously distorted but it IS your shadow and it does inform you of important parameters such as how many arms and legs you have and how your size compares with other shadows around you.

And so we move into dreams where the preamble to this article will slowly make sense. Stay with me, let your eyes adjust to the dream world and be ready to see the mysteries of your inner universe more clearly in dream light, in starlight, away from the glare of the stark light that blinds.

Dolores dreamed she was watching a horse race. She followed the winning horse to the stable, keen to know the key to his success. She was surprised to find the horse weeping. He looked deeply into her eyes and told her the key to success was deep pain. He turned and revealed an ancient festering wound in his flank, and a hole where his heart had been ripped from his body long ago. “Seven years without a heart,” the horse confided. Dolores was shocked.

On waking, Dolores couldn’t shake the image of the horse and the ripped heartless hole. It stayed with her all day, distracting her from work. Slowly the pieces began to fall into place. She had been in this job for seven years since a painful marriage break-up. She loved the job. It kept her busy, far too busy to notice the pain. In fact, now she thought more about it, her successes were due to the pain. The more the pain threatened to surface, the harder she worked and the more successful she became. Why hadn’t she been able to see this before? She was mystified. It was so clear.

“Heartless,” a voice whispered from the periphery of her mind. “You’ve become heartless. You’re cold. You’ve left us behind. You don’t care,” the voice continued.

And Dolores wept, for these had been the words of her friends. They had tried to tell her, but she couldn’t relate to what they were saying. She had thought they were rude and unsupportive, perhaps even envious of her success. She had flicked them off: the words and the friends.

Dolores’ dream had shocked her into touch with her pain, with the festering anger over the way her heart had been ripped and hurt. Her dream delivered the strong message that she could not survive much longer under these conditions. It was time to stop shutting out the pain, to end her heartless pursuit of success, to recognise the heat of her anger and heal it rather than freeze it out.

The dream and Dolores’ friends both delivered the same message, but only the dream message got through. Why?

Dolores’ friends had told her straight. Too straight. The truth was too close to home, too painful, and so her defences kicked in. She found the light too blinding. She denied any truth in it because she couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it. Her dream was subtle, drawing her to feel the pain of the horse since she was blind to the pain within herself. Once the connection was made, Dolores was able to see the light.

People often ask, “Why aren’t our dreams literal? If the message we need to hear is so important, why don’t our dreams spell it out in a language we can understand?” The answer?

Dreams can help us to see, in shades of nightlight, what is too painful for us to see or acknowledge in blinding daylight.

Like your shadow when you stand with your back to the sun, your dreams may be outrageously distorted but their special effect is to draw your attention to yourself. It is only when you look into the darkness of your dreams that you are freed to study the mysteries of your changing self.

* [Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, July 2005. First published as a Dream Sight article.]

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An original signed sketch by Sir Sidney Nolan, one of Australia’s best known painters, recently sold on eBay for $113.61. It would probably have sold for thousands if it hadn’t been pan fried. Yes, you did read that correctly. Pan fried.

The idea to cook the sketch – a portrait of the dreamer’s grandfather – came in a dream.

“In the dream I had an exhibition of drawings which had all been crumbed and deep-fried. I’d never seen anything like that before,” explained artist Andy Wear.

Wear was inspired to follow his dream literally, exploring the question of valuing a work based on the artist’s signature rather than on the quality of the art. “I find it intriguing that just because a great artist does it, it’s treasured,” he said.

Many brilliant inventions, ideas, and creative solutions, have been triggered by dreams. While following a dream literally may be rewarding, it may also be disastrous or misguided.

Following a dream literally also blinds you to the more meaningful personal insight you can gain by understanding your dream at a symbolic level.

I don’t have any more details of Wear’s dream, but the notion of an exhibition of crumbed and deep-fried drawings reminds me of the hunger for fast fix dream interpretation that people new to the subject often expect.

I encounter it frequently in the form of well-intentioned questions on Twitter, when people new to exploring their dreams manage to get their dream and their request to tell them what it means down to the 140 characters that Twitter requires, clearly expecting me to be able to deliver a fast fix in up to 140 characters back.

I understand this. Dream novices think you can look up the meaning of a dream in a dream dictionary, and expect a dream expert – like me – to be that instant dream dictionary.

I love that people are interested in their dreams and what they mean, and I’d love to deliver fast fixes, but that’s not how you get meaningful, useful insight, the kind you can take action on to create meaningful,  long-lasting, deeply rewarding change in your life.

We live in a fast world, and all hail to speed and efficiency when it gets us results and frees time and energy for us to enjoy. Interpreting dreams takes time, and the only way a dreamer can speed it up is to get a professional interpretation. Absorbing that interpretation, pondering and understanding the new insight it delivers, doing the dream alchemy to reprogram limiting beliefs, and taking appropriate action: these take time.

I’m not going to do the metaphor about the time it takes to grow, harvest, shop, prepare, and cook good food as opposed to popping into McDonalds for a fast fix.

Oops, I think I just have.

Next time you find yourself taking a dream literally, stop. Have a deeper look.

 

 

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My guest this episode, Gay, is keen to hear my take on a dream she had six months ago, a dream that profoundly changed her life.

Gay dreamed of moseying along a walkway from a dark museum castle into a room filled with a blinding light where she embraced her estranged granddaughter.

There are many deep and wonderful levels to Gay’s dream, its interpretation, its healing qualities, and we explore these as Gay tells her story.

This inspirational episode will deeply touch your heart, while guiding you – as all our episodes do – in developing your dream interpretation and dream alchemy skills.

Listen here

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

(Our next show, episode 122, will be released in four weeks, on 10 February 2012.)

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Here’s a great tip for when you’re feeling stuck and need some guidance to move forward. Most dreams, when you look at them closely, have at least one pair of opposites. For example, your dream might involve slow and fast, or high and low, or noisy and quiet, or long way round and short way round. Look for these opposites, and write them down.

If the opposites don’t jump out at you straight away, look at the personalities of any people in your dream. Dreams usually highlight people with opposite personalities or approaches to life.

For example, one person in your dream might be someone you consider very flexible and open-minded, while another person in the same dream might be someone you consider rigid and closed-minded.

Not all dreams contain pairs of opposites, but most do, so have a really good look.

When you find a pair of opposites ask which opposite best describes you or a life experience you are encountering right now. Then ask what you think about people who tend to be in the opposite corner from you on this. Finally, ask if you were ever in that opposite corner before you ‘swapped sides’.

These pairs of opposites define issues that your dream is processing. Something is only an issue in your life if you tend towards one extreme opposite (or corner) because you find something about the other extreme uncomfortable. For example, you might tend towards being too flexible because you haven’t had good experiences with rigid people and don’t want to be like them. Or you might tend towards being too rigid because being too flexible in the past seems to have created difficulties for you.

What’s the solution? The solution is to identify the issue (in this example, the issue is how flexible or how rigid to be about something in your life right now) and then to balance your approach by finding a mid-point between the two extremes. For example, it’s usually best in any situation to take an approach about half way between too flexible and too rigid, a place where a bit of both serves you well.

Dreams help you to identify issues you have been blind to, issues that are affecting your life in a negative way. They help you to see where your life needs more balance. It’s up to you to follow that cue.

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

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What’s your recurring dream? If you’ve been following my blog, listening to my podcasts, and reading my books, and you’re still experiencing a recurring dream, today’s post is your wake up call. It’s time to put what you’ve been learning into action if you want to enjoy life changing results in 2012!

Let’s review the basics:

1. A dream is the experience you have, during sleep, while your brain processes your conscious and unconscious experiences of the last 24-48 hours.

2. Think of this processing as like updating your hard drive. Your brain and mind compare your latest experiences to all your past experiences, drawing conclusions – beliefs – about how life works. Mostly you consolidate your oldest beliefs. Sometimes you modify your beliefs. Sometimes you completely overwrite an old belief and wake up with a transformed personal view of how the world works.

3. During dreaming, you are more in touch with your unconscious mind, which is why dreams seem surreal. Imagine a painter trying to capture your mind’s fast processing of experiences, emotions, and beliefs, as an abstract picture. She might use metaphor, analogy, colours to represent emotions, shapes to represent belief structures, any number of creative techniques to help you ‘get the picture’ – or, at least, to store it in your archives under ‘update on how life works’.

4. The magic begins when you know how to ‘get the picture’ – how to interpret a dream – because this helps you to understand your unique mindset. You get to understand your unconscious beliefs, both the ones that work for you and the ones that work against you in your everyday life.

5. You can then see which beliefs need to be changed to get the kind of waking life results you desire. If you stop there, you probably won’t see those results. You need to apply a deeper magic – dream alchemy.

6. Dream alchemy is a process you can use to transform an unconscious belief. It’s a way of working with your unique dream symbols to reprogram your unconscious. It works because your unconscious mind relates to your personal dream symbols – after all, it created them!

7. Now, back to your recurring dream: Since dreams reflect the last 24-48 hours, your recurring dream reflects a recurring waking life issue. Have you noticed that most recurring dreams are unhappy, frustrating, or unresolved? That’s because they reflect an unhappy, frustrating, or unresolved issue in your life.

8. To resolve that issue, apply the formula: Dream interpretation + Dream alchemy = Success + an end to your recurring dream.

Ok, that’s your wake up call. Do your dream alchemy to make 2012 your best year ever!

On a more light-hearted level, here’s an hour’s entertainment about recurring dreams. DK, host of At the Watercooler on Z Talk Radio, invited me onto his show. In this podcast, he asks me about his recurring dream of driving a car that goes way out of control, and, excited by the discovery, moves on to ask me about another recurring dream featuring buildings.

Listeners ask about their dreams and we cover lucid dreaming, falling and floating dreams, a variety of toilet dreams, dreams of snakes, dream sharing, and the question of astral travelling. Oh, and we also talk about dream alchemy and much more.

Listen here. Note: the interview starts halfway through the podcast, so move the slider halfway, or enjoy DK’s interview with the guest before me, Jane Congdon, author of It Started With Dracula.

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Gwynne is my guest with a dream about finding a camera with a shocking picture on the viewfinder.

There’s a theme of lost and found, and another of being driven around – always the passenger, never the driver – and sitting so far back in the vehicle that she even falls out of the car.

Who or what is lost? Who or what is found? And how does the shocking picture help Gwynne – once I’ve interpreted her dream – to understand and transform the deep programming that has been limiting her waking life results?

Many will relate to Gwynne’s dream, and that shocking picture carries a dramatic quality that will assist anyone whose life experience is limited by the common programming it represents.

Listen as Gwynne and I discuss her dream, and hear her responses as she relates the dream to what is happening in her waking life.

Listen here or subscribe (free) to The Dream Show here on iTunes.

(Our next show, episode 121, will be released in four weeks, on 13 January 2012.)

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“One day she decided to plant a garden of her own … and it bloomed.”

I know that as you contemplate Marylou Falstreau’s print, a garden of your own calls to you. Not a physical garden, but something that you’d love to create, become, or do, something that’s completely of your own.

Artist Marylou Falstreau was inspired by a dream to create her Woman and the Hourglass series of prints and cards, and, being totally unique and of her own, they’ve bloomed and found their way into shops, homes, hearts, and minds.

I love the sense of surprise – ‘and it bloomed!’ How often have you planted other people’s ideas, cultivated other people’s expectations, and wondered what might have happened if you had planted your own?

I went to the Matisse Drawing Life exhibition at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) last weekend. Henri Matisse drew from life every morning, before he got down to the work of the day, and there were some 300 drawings on show for us to view. His earlier drawings were heavily influenced by the prominent artists he studied, his style shifting radically from season to season until he found himself drawing in a style completely of his own, a style that bloomed into what we now recognise as iconic Matisse.

We can’t all be Matisse – and his apparently simple style is very hard to emulate, as we discovered when we sat in The Drawing Room, an interactive part of the exhibition, a lush Matisse-like studio dotted with stools, easels, and drawing boards, contemplating the smorgasbord of still life on offer, our pencils poised, and poised, and poised. I drew a few squiggles and lines, and had fun. Fun was a rewarding outcome. I discarded the inept squiggles and kept the Matisse souvenir pencil for inspiration.

No, we can’t all be Matisse, but like Matisse, or like Marylou Falstreau, we can all create, become, or do, something that’s completely of our own. All we have to do is simply decide, one day, to plant a garden of our own … and it will bloom!

Tip 1: If you’re not sure what you want to create, become, or do, pay attention to your dreams as they reveal the limiting beliefs – largely those built around your past and present experiences of other people’s expectations of you – that block your connection to this knowing.

Tip 2: Pick a number from 1-27, and count through Marylou’s Women and the Hourglass prints to add some synchronistic insight.

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What’s the moral of the story of The Princess and the Pea? I’ve been putting people on the spot with this question this week, and received so many different replies. Before reading on, if you remember the story, give yourself a few moments and jot down the moral that you’ve always taken from this tale.

Need a memory jogger? In this Hans Christian Andersen tale, published in 1835, a prince searches the kingdom for a real princess to marry. He meets plenty of princesses, but each has a fault, so he returns to the castle alone. One night, during a storm, a girl knocks at the door. She’s wet and bedraggled, yet claims to be a princess. The Queen decides to test this by giving her a bed for the night, twenty mattresses high, topped with twenty feather beds. Beneath all those mattresses and feathers, the Queen places a pea.

The next morning, when asked how she had slept, the princess replied that she had had a terrible night and had hardly slept because the bed was so uncomfortable due to something hard that left her skin bruised. The Queen rejoiced, because only a real princess would feel the pea through all those mattresses. Of course, the prince and princess married and lived happily ever after.

So, what’s the moral of the story? If you haven’t written one down, do so now. And if you had written one down and you now have a new thought about the moral of this tale, write that down before reading on.

Last weekend, I went to Vashti-Sita Bardsley’s exhibition of jewellery created around the hero’s journey, and bought The Princess and the Pea – a brooch. Vashti is a dream client, and I was excited to see her work, knowing something about her journey, and now you know why I’ve been asking people all week for their view of the moral of the story of The Princess and the Pea.

As a child, and as a mother reading the story to my children, I thought the princess was very rude to mention her discomfort, yet at the same time I realised that if she had kept her discomfort to herself, she wouldn’t have married the prince and lived happily ever after.

Responses I collected this week included: that princesses are picky and rude, that it’s not good to be hypersensitive, that one’s true nature always shows through, that we shouldn’t judge a person by appearances. That’s just for starters.

I realised that my view had shifted since early motherhood, and for me the story is about authenticity, and the pea – given the bed and sleep theme – can be likened to dreams that help us to recognise uncomfortable or painful issues that we need to acknowledge and heal to live happily ever after. If we deny uncomfortable issues, turn our backs on our dreams, and pretend that all is well, we never get to experience – and here we slide into another Hans Christian Andersen tale – the joyful transformation from ugly duckling feeling to beautiful swan knowing.

It is said that Hans Christian Andersen, when asked to write his autobiography, replied that it was already written, as The Ugly Duckling. He struggled throughout his life with issues of authenticity and belonging. I wonder what he would tell us today, about the moral of The Princess and the Pea.

And what’s your personal take on the moral of the story?

Vashti’s blog   Vashti’s etsy shop

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“I dreamed ghosts were coming out from the walls and mirrors upstairs, killing people,” said Lynn, who called Radio 2GB this week when I was interpreting dreams on Chris Smith’s afternoon show. “In the dream, I thought I have to get mum to come and clean the house,” she added.

What does it mean?

Lynn described the house in her dream as double storey, and said she was on the ground floor, and the killer ghosts were upstairs. She really emphasised the ‘double storey’ and since dreams often employ word play, I wondered if there was a ‘double story’ going on in Lynn’s life. I didn’t mention this on air, and it’s certainly not as dark as it may sound. I’m not talking about a double life, or a secret life, but you’ll get the picture as you read on.

What I did say to Lynn in the couple of minutes or so that the radio show format allows, was that the ghosts probably represent feelings of being haunted by her past, perhaps regrets, perhaps loss, perhaps limiting beliefs.

In her dream, Lynn is in a practical space, on the ground floor. The ground floor probably represents her physical body and everyday world, while the upstairs probably represents her higher self – her mind, thoughts, beliefs. It’s up there, in the mind, that the past can live on in ghostly form to affect the way we live our lives today – and in the future.

Lynn’s dream ghosts were coming out from the walls and mirrors, suggesting that, until the dream, they were tucked away, hidden behind the walls and inside mirrors. Something must have happened, in Lynn’s life, to release her ghosts of the past from where she had safely hidden them.

Ah, but that’s the thing. Safely hiding (or blocking or denying) aspects of the past deep within ourselves is not the solution. Our ghosts of the past may be unseen, but they still influence the way we live our lives. They hold us back, keep us limited and fearful, even when we’ve hidden them so deep in our unconscious that we’ve forgotten about them. The unconscious powerfully influences our decisions and responses in life, like it or not.

The way to free yourself from the past is to bring your ghosts out of hiding, acknowledge them, and release them. Let your ghosts rest in peace, whether that means forgiving others, forgiving yourself, or simply realising that life’s greatest gifts can come in strange packages.

I asked Lyn to describe her mother. She said she was spiritual, mystical. Our radio time was running out, but I suggested that her mother may represent personal or spiritual development, so the dream solution of bringing her mother in to clean the house was a good one: clean up (the ghosts of the past) by doing some personal or spiritual work – much as I have described in this blog.

We are all influenced by our past, and a lot of it is good stuff, stuff to hold onto. Our dreams can help show us which aspects of our past haunt us and hold us back, and Lynn’s dream symbol of scary killer ghosts delivers the message.

And what of the double storey/ double story word play? There’s the story we tell ourselves about our life, the story we’re conscious of, and there’s the story that’s going on behind the scenes – behind our walls and mirrors, upstairs in our mind, deep in the unconscious, the story we’re not aware of until our dreams awaken us.

Life can be tough when your conscious and unconscious stories conflict. How wonderful then, that dreams can reveal what we need to know, and that dream alchemy can assist us to transform the inner story into a positive, supportive one that helps us move forward in life successfully and with ease.

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Lea, my guest having her dream interpreted in this episode, dreamed of a poet who had been murdered long ago in a small Chinese town. She found his body parts and laid some out so that they would be discovered.

Later in her dream she told of a man she once loved who caught a fantastical Chinese goldfish by dancing the hook along the water rather than by using bait.

What’s the connection between China, the poet, the dancing hook, a wise old man, and a bottle of wine that needed to be shared between fourteen people?

Lea is in the process of making a key decision, and today’s dream interpretation helps her to do this with confidence by making her aware of the perspective of her unconscious mind on the subject.

Listen in as we connect the dream-fantastical to Lea’s waking life. Hear Lea’s responses, her story, and the dream alchemy we create.

This is one of those episodes you will love to share. Listen here.

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

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