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Ever woken to eerie sounds in the night, or a feeling of your skin being touched when you’re sleeping alone, or been scared out of your wits when you’ve opened your eyes to see ghosts or strange things going on in your bedroom? As utterly convincing and frightening as these sensations are, it’s important to take a deep breath and know that what you are hearing, feeling, and seeing is not real. Neither are you going insane. What you are doing is dreaming while partly awake, so that both your dreaming and waking worlds overlap. You could say you are experiencing the Twilight Zone, not a scary spirit world but a brain zone where the night of dreams mixes with the light of day in a hazy, confused half light. This is how it happens.

When you wake up to visions in your bedroom, you are experiencing a phenomenon known as hypnopompic hallucination. When you open your eyes while you are dreaming, your eyes transmit a picture of your bedroom to your brain, and this is then superimposed onto your dream images. Because your eyes are open, your brain decides the mix of images is a real event situated in the bedroom. So you see the ghost, or dream scene, in your room.

The same applies to other sensations, such as sound and touch. If you start to wake up while you are still dreaming of a wolf howling, or a tiger nuzzling your skin, your brain will superimpose the fading howls or the warmth of the tiger’s breathy lick onto your bedroom scene. You will be absolutely convinced that a wolf is outside your door, or that a tiger is under your bed, as your ears will still be ringing, and your skin still tingling. The sensations feel real, but they are dream sensations, dissolving away as your brain becomes fully awake. The memories of those sensations may haunt you, but they were dreams.

Have you ever got into bed and then felt the covers lift as if an invisible stranger or spirit has just climbed in with you? The explanation for this sensation is the same, except that your dreaming mind has switched on while you are still half awake. This common experience usually happens when you’re not expressing your whole self, holding back too much of the real you, the true enormity of your power. Your dream is about to introduce your ‘lost spirit’ and you perceive this lost, detached, abandoned shadow as a separate being as your brain begins to switch into dreaming mode.

So when these kinds of spooky events happen to you, relax in the safety of this knowledge, and be amazed at the power of the mind to believe what it sees and feels.

Then simply record your awesome Twilight Zone experience, and interpret it as the dream it really is.

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

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What you see is what you get, depending on how you see it.

As your eye changes – as your experiences change – so does what you get.

Have you noticed how a favourite story from childhood is different when you reread it as an adult? Or how the message of a movie can change from one viewing to the next? Or how even a non-fiction book can seem to impart different information when you review it years later?

Beauty – and all other value judgements and interpretations of life – is also in the ear, mouth, nose, skin, mind, heart and soul of the beholder.

Have you noticed a difference in what you get from reading a story to what you get from hearing it?

If you’re primarily a visual person, you may feel you get more from reading an article than from hearing it, and if you’re primarily an auditory person the opposite will probably be true.

Yet the challenge of listening as a visual person focuses your attention in a different way, and what you get from listening may be quite different from what you get from reading. And vice-versa.

Test this by listening to this month’s episode, episode 122, in which I read four of my blog articles, all interlinked upon a theme. Oh, and of course there’s a bit of chat too.

This is what you get in this episode, depending on how you get it!

What’s the moral of The Princess and the Pea? If you were to sleep on twenty feather beds piled high upon twenty feather mattresses, would you feel the pea the Queen had placed beneath this luxurious mountain of a bed, and would you mention your discomfort to your royal hosts in the morning? There are life lessons ripe for learning here.

Far more uncomfortable than a pea under the mattress are those dreams where you feel over-the-top loss, devastation, rejection, betrayal, anger, or other painful emotions. Why do we have these kinds of dreams from time to time, and what do they mean?

In this episode, we also take a light-hearted look at life through the eyes of a dog and cat, explore how we interpret and misinterpret waking life, and interpret a dream at four different levels – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

This is a power-packed episode that will broaden and deepen your approach to dreams, and get you thinking again about the goals you pursue in life. Enjoy.

Listen here

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

(Our next show, episode 123, will be released in four weeks, on 9 March 2012.)

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Twenty-one years ago, I dreamed I was trying to get into a building by pushing through one of its solid brick walls. It was hard work that got me nowhere at all. All it did was exhaust me. I stood back, walked around the house, and discovered an open door. I realised that the door had been open all this time.

This short, simple dream helped me to see that there was a much easier way for me to get to where I wanted to be. I realised that I believed the way was tough, that I needed to push to achieve my goal. What an exhausting belief!

I had this dream a year before I began my research into dreams, and my interpretation, while insightful and life-changing for me, was basic. If you brought this same dream to me for a dream therapy session, we would spend a full hour exploring the many concurrent levels of meaningful insight such a dream offers, and I would lead you through a dream alchemy practice to transform limiting beliefs that block your progress into more rewarding ones that open your way.

When I had this dream, I hadn’t done the research, hadn’t developed and tested the concept of dream alchemy, hadn’t seen or experienced the power of working with dreams at such a deep level. It was enough for me, back then, to stand back and look at where I pushed hard in life – and why – and then to look for the open door, the opportunity I was not seeing. And this approach worked quite magically for me.

Now, looking back with twenty years professional experience in working with dreams, I also see the building as me, the brick walls as my solid beliefs, my pushing on the walls as a readiness to breakthrough my beliefs (my illusions of reality), and the open door as the result of surrender to change.

Each interpretation is correct. The same dream – any dream- can be interpreted on a physical level (pushing hard is exhausting you, there’s an easier way), a mental level (you have a belief that you need to push to achieve your goal), an emotional level (you have this belief because of the emotional rewards it gives you, and because you fear what will happen if you release this belief), and a spiritual level (surrender). And this is only a beginning. There are many other interpretation levels, each adding dimensions to the one emerging picture of why your life is the way it is at this particular point in time, and what you can do to change this, if you wish.

The journey – as the old cliché reminds us – is more important than the destination. A goal gives you purpose, inspiration, motivation, and a sense of achievement when you attain it, but it’s the insights you receive along the way that build physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual mastery.

Choose goals that feel important and meaningful to you, or goals that feel fun and enjoyable, or goals that make you face your fears. Pick goals that are big, or small, long-term, or short-term, because no matter which goal you choose, the lessons inherent in the journey will be the same.

Twenty-one years ago, I walked through an open door. I no longer remember the goal I had in mind at the time of the dream, but the lesson was life-changing.

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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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