Dream Sight articles | In your dreams …

Episode 83 The Dream Show: Chased by a lion

Posted on November 19, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

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‘There must be 50 ways to leave a lover,’ according to Paul Simon’s lyrics, but how many ways are there to escape a hungry lion hot on your tail?

In today’s show we look at how to find creative solutions to waking life problems by applying a simple, fun technique to any dream.

Paul Simon’s lyrics continue, ‘”The problem is all inside your head”, she said to me,’ and isn’t that so true? A problem is only a problem if that’s the way you see it. Then again, every problem or question has a solution – many solutions – once you shift your perspective and look at it from a different angle.

The technique I share with you in this episode shows you how to take any dream, identify the problem or question it poses about your waking life, and find several solutions for you to choose from.

I wish I’d thought of the Paul Simon angle while I was recording this episode, but it didn’t come to me until I started to type this introduction. Hmm, well, bear it in mind while you listen to the story of the lion. For good measure, I’ve added a story about why grass is green. Have a think before listening: why is grass green? Enjoy.

A new podcast every Friday. Listen here or subscribe on iTunes.

And if you’d like to have a dream interpreted on the show, please contact me to book yourself in. (I phone or skype you and we record our chat. It’s that simple.)

You can listen here (Episode 83) or subscribe to the whole series at iTunes.

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Gentle disguise: dreams of the departed

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 2 Comments

My grandfather died when I was thirteen. I didn’t really know him very well, and most memories I have of him are second hand, borrowed from stories told by others, a person and a life fabricated from tall tales, hearsay, and conjecture. He was well into his 60s when I, his first grandchild, was born. When he died, they found his heart pills tucked one-by-one under the mattress of his sick bed. He must have slipped them under his tongue then slipped them out again when no-one was looking.

I have three pictures of him.

My grandfather’s wedding: a grand affair in Budapest, Hungary. My grandmother is sixteen.

One is the last photo taken of him, relaxing in a garden chair. My grandmother kept that photo in a frame by her armchair, until she died many years later. I have that picture in my mind’s eye, in my photographic memory, you might say.

One is his wedding photo, a grand affair in Budapest, Hungary. He is in his late 20s or early 30s, an English sailor; my grandmother is about 16, a Budapest child. Read their faces.

One is the picture I have of him sitting on his motorbike, a couple of nights after he died, when he surprised me in a dream. And that’s the picture that stays with me, though I don’t remember him having a motorbike in waking life, and I don’t remember anything he ever said to me when he was alive. At the tender age of thirteen, that dream was life-changing. And at the tender age of thirteen, of course, I believed that Philip Augustus Newton had actually visited me from the afterlife in a dream.

I’ve had vivid, colourful, full-on textural dream recall for almost as long as I can remember being alive. I have always been fascinated by my dreams, but this was perhaps the first one that got my serious attention.

The dream was short. I was standing outside my school waiting for my young brother to walk up from primary school so we could walk home together. While I was waiting, a motorbike came up the road and stopped in front of me. After exchanging a few words, the driver lifted his dark visor, slowly revealing his face. I was surprised to see it was my grandfather.

“But you’re dead!” I reminded him.

“I didn’t want to frighten you, so I came in a dream,” he said.

That made sense, and I was thankful. I was surprised, my breath was momentarily taken away, but I was not frightened.

“I’m here to answer any questions. Is there anything you’d like to know before I go?” he asked.

“I only had one question,” I said. “Is there life after death? But I don’t need to ask that now.”

He smiled, lowered his visor, and rode away.

If this story sounds familiar to you, it’s because I’ve referred to this dream in another Dream Sight article, ‘Relativity’, which I wrote nine years ago, in October 2000. That article explores the question of communicating with the recently departed in dreams and looks at the symbolism of death dreams. Today, I am exploring a different theme.

“I didn’t want to frighten you, so I came in a dream,” he said, sitting astride a motorbike.

What that dream did for me, as a teenager, was to assure me that dreaming was a safe space where I could face fears and find answers to questions as large as the meaning of life. I had no idea where to begin, and it would be many years before I would be able to interpret dreams, but I developed a profound respect for my dreams from that point forward.

Today, as a dream analyst and alchemist, my task, like my grandfather’s in my dream, is to help people safely face and understand the fears that limit and shape their lives, and to gently ask and answer questions that help them to clarify their vision and touch a deeper sense of meaning.

I’m often asked why dreams are so bizarre, so masked in symbolic language. I’m glad that they are. They allow us to gently prise them open, to give our eyes and hearts time to softly accustom to the light.

You may not know your deepest fears, but they show up, somewhat disguised, in your dreams.

“I didn’t want to frighten you,” a buried fear might say, “so I came in a dream. I’m here to answer any questions. Is there anything you’d like to know before I go?”

When you bury a fear, deep in your unconscious, it exerts a powerful influence on your life. It may be out of sight and out of your conscious mind, but that only gives it more power. Your unconscious fears limit and shape the way you respond in the world – and you have no idea that this is happening! You bury fears you do not want to face, yet the saving grace within gently reveals these to you in your dreams, asking, “Is there anything you’d like to know …?”

Knowledge is power. When you know about your fears – what they are, where they originated, why you have buried them, how they are influencing your life – you can set them, and yourself, free.

[Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, November 2009. First published as a Dream Sight article.]

More on dreams about death, dying and the departed.

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Dream Alchemy – secret spells

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 7 Comments

I’m about to give you some magical formulae you can use to transform your life.

I’m about to give you some magical formulae you can use to transform your life. They’re simple, yet powerful. They’re serious, and they work, but for a bit of fun I’ve arranged them as magic spells from an imaginary book of alchemical secrets. Before we delve in, though, let’s look at the theory so you understand why these work and how to apply them.

Imagine you dreamed of a huge dark cloud. The cloud was suspended above you, throwing its darkness and gloom all around. The air was oppressive, heavy, and still. What is the meaning of this dream?

You might have this dream if you were feeling oppressed by dark, gloomy, negative feelings. You might think about your dream and see that this is indeed true. You might then think about where these dark, gloomy, negative feelings are coming from. You might decide they’re coming from you and your negative thoughts about life. You might suddenly see that you have been going about your life dragging this negative outlook with you wherever you go. Other people in similar circumstances might see the sunny side or be uplifted by the silver lining in life’s challenges. Rather than being motivated to create something wonderful from the silver lining, your dream shows you bogged down in the heavy stillness of your negative outlook on life. Okay, so far so good. You have interpreted and understood your dream.

You may even go further and say the dark cloud is the gloom cast by a relationship break-up, job loss, or major disappointment. You may think about this and decide the gloom is your anger about the disappointment (like a thunderous cloud before an angry storm) or you might decide the heavy cloud is your unexpressed grief (like a cloud that hasn’t rained itself free of its tears).

Okay, so far even better. You have interpreted and understood your dream even more deeply. Is this enough then? Is this the power of dream interpretation?

Does it end here? Does going forward in your life understanding your gloomy, negative outlook help you to dispel it and substitute an uplifting, positive outlook in its place?

Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes awareness is powerful enough to enable you to make a change. For example, each time you feel the presence of the gloomy, black cloud pervading a situation you might think, “Enough! Where’s the silver lining? How can I look at my situation positively?” Some people can make the switch effectively. Many need a little extra magic to make the change.

It’s better to cry away the black cloud, to feel the grief and let it go, or to feel the anger and let it go, so that looking at the world positively becomes natural rather than forced.

Sometimes you cannot effectively make the change until you get in touch with associated emotions and work through them. For example, if you have not cried away your grief, then when you switch from negative to positive outlook you push your grief further down into your being and this will certainly give you discomfort at a later stage in your life. It’s better to cry away the black cloud, to feel the grief and let it go, or to feel the anger and let it go, so that looking at the world positively becomes natural rather than forced. If there’s no grief or anger in your way, then naturally things look good. If there’s still grief or anger hanging around, it’s hard work to keep remembering to switch on a positive outlook, and, besides, your grief or anger will keep returning in your dreams until you hear it, feel it, learn from it, and let it go.

So how can you do the magical bit to move from simply understanding your dream to transforming your life in a long-lasting (deeply healing) way? The solution is dream alchemy (those alchemical spells).

Dream alchemy is the magic of transforming symbols from your dream. In this example, you might visualise transforming the gloomy, black cloud by letting it rain itself away over a dry field, causing beautiful sunny flowers to bloom. Dream alchemy practices always sound far too simple, silly even, but they work because they involve symbols that your unconscious dreaming mind understands. When you do dream alchemy, you are talking the language of your unconscious mind and it is listening, responding, and transforming. These alchemical spells, correctly done, change the beliefs you carry that are affecting the way you see the world and the way you act in the world. When these things change – when you see the world differently and act in the world differently – your experience of life changes accordingly. In other words, your life changes for the better.

You can get quite creative with your dream alchemy practices. In the example, I added the flowers blooming to ensure that something wonderful blossomed from the release of grief.

If you had the black cloud dream and you did the dream alchemy visualisation described above according to the correct method you may first feel the grief or the anger, but this will feel deeply cathartic and healing. You will naturally traverse through these feelings, and emerge feeling light and free. From there forward, you will move through the world in a different way.

You can get quite creative with your dream alchemy practices. In the example, I added the flowers blooming to ensure that something wonderful blossomed from the release of grief.

The key to designing the best dream alchemy practice is to understand your dream first. When you understand your dream you gain self-awareness, a precious gift, and when you understand your dream you are best-equipped to pick the right symbol to transform through dream alchemy.

As a general guide, be inspired by these secret formulae from my imaginary book ‘Alchemical secrets’.

Alchemical Secrets

Dream
dark cloud,
understood by dreamer as negative outlook due to grief

Alchemy
let the cloud rain its tears away over a desert, making flowers bloom

Dream
starving horse,
understood by dreamer as a passionate energy you are not feeding

Alchemy
feed the horse until you can feel its strength and passion in your body

Dream
old man close to death,
understood by dreamer as a belief you need to put to rest

Alchemy
embrace the man and thank him for all he has taught you

Dream
old man close to death,
understood by dreamer as old values you want to revive

Alchemy
give the man a job or role that restores his sense of value and vitality

Dream
going round in circles,
understood by dreamer as needing a new approach

Alchemy
half way round the circle take a straight route to an exciting place

Dream
unable to fly beyond power lines,
understood by dreamer as trapped by power games

Alchemy
fly around the power lines to the place you want to be

Dream
shaky ground,
understood by dreamer as losing your sense of confidence

Alchemy
make the ground firm and feel its solidity beneath your feet

Dream
shaky ground,
understood by dreamer as changes around you feeling exciting

Alchemy
shake that ground into where you would like to be

Get the picture? As you can see from the dreams of the old man close to death and the dreams of the shaky ground, the secret is to understand your dream before creating your dream alchemy practice and casting your alchemical spell. (Two people may each dream of shaky ground, but the different details in their dreams reveal the different meanings.)

Remember to check the detailed methods for doing your dream alchemy practices, and if you need a little help from me in understanding your dreams or creating dream alchemy practices you can consult me by Skype or phone.

[Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, July 2007. First published as a Dream Sight article.]

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Dancing yin to yang

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

In dreams I am a most spectacular dancer, and from each dream dance a great lesson is learned.

In night dreams I am the most spectacular dancer, always harmoniously partnered, cheek to cheek, heart to heart, soul to soul. Our weightless dances defy the gravity and clumsiness of waking life, as we move as one into every dimension of space until the dance ends and I wake up still smiling from the touch of the light fantastic. And from each dream dance, a great lesson is learned.

My earliest dance lessons came from my father as he waltzed me around the room, my little feet perched upon his.

My earliest dance lessons came from my father as he waltzed me around the lounge room, my little feet perched upon his big, dependable shoes.

By the time I was seven I had decided my life’s mission was to be a ballet dancer. On being told I’d probably be too tall, I thought I could be a choreographer. Either way, no money for ballet lessons soon buried that plan. Prancing and pirouetting around the bedroom did nothing to enhance my future career prospects.

Besides, I was knock-kneed as my dancing needs clashed with economical reality. I took up yoga and learned the art of freestyle dance instead. I have since learned that dance lessons fade to insignificance alongside the lessons of dancing. Step with me into my dancing dreams to see why:

My dream partner was dancing me as he stood firmly and fully on my toes.

I once dream danced with someone I knew from waking life. It was a kind of reversal of my father’s waltz routine. In this dream dance the man placed his feet on mine and we waltzed the perfect waltz. The strangeness of the dream was that instead of me dancing his balancing feet through the steps, he was in control of the dance. He was the one calling the tune. He was dancing me as he stood firmly and fully on my toes. On waking I realised that this man had indeed, in waking life, called the steps. He had often trodden on my toes, but I had not recognised this and so the dance had been perfect for my learning at that time.

Life is always in harmony and balance, even when it seems not to be so. What we need to learn about ourselves is reflected in our world. I needed to learn about issues of control and being controlled, of restriction and freedom, through the delirious dance of the trodden toes. We danced to the pendulum of extremes until the calmness of the middle path stilled the motion and the dance came to its natural end.

Yet people in our dreams are not themselves, but aspects of our own selves. My treading-toes dance partner was the part of myself which danced the tune of conditioned restriction and lovingly taught the lesson of breaking free. He was my outer world, my Yang. I was his inner world, his Yin. We danced, cheek to cheek, Yin to Yang in search of the still calm point between us.

Think of the Yin Yang symbol, looking like two tadpoles nestled into each other, opposites huddled together in balance.

Think of the Yin Yang symbol, for all the world looking like two tadpoles nestled into each other, top to tail, each complete with an eye at the rounded head end. Or perhaps the symbol is more of a sacred 69. One side is black with a white ‘eye’ while the other is white with a black ‘eye’. One is Yin, one is Yang.

They are extremes, opposites huddled together in balance. As you trace the black of one tadpole from the thinness of its tail to the abundance of its head, you see the white of the eye colour. What this means is that as we approach an extreme in our attitude or being (the extreme being represented by the abundance of colour) a seed of the opposite nature appears. At the extreme swing of the pendulum, an excess of Yang births the return swing of the Yin. By the time the pendulum reaches its Yin extreme, the seed of a new Yang birth springs into being.

In swing style, Yin and Yang dance the great pendulum arcs that ultimately deliver the mutual destiny of the middle path.

My tango dream: was I being too flexible, too laid back? Or was I over-extending myself?

In another dream of years past, I tangoed across the tiles, leaning back so far in my dream stranger partner’s arms that my body was suspended horizontal to the floor. I momentarily hovered only a few centimetres above the ground until I was lightly whisked and whirled back into the next staccato tango pose. The lesson from this dream dance was to find the balance between the extreme of being too flexible, too laid back and the extreme of expecting too much from myself through forcing over-extension.

One dream dance duo had me cart-wheeling, face to face, hands to hands, feet to feet with my tumbling dream partner. Childish joy, upside-down, right side up, round and round, dizzying we roller-coastered our cartwheel harmony until my partner finally let go and I finished in standing pose, one hand out-stretched, ready for my next dance partner to continue my journey. And so the great lesson of the cycles of life, the ups and downs, the rounds and rounds, the repetitions, the recurring dreams and the final achieving of the still point was energetically clothed as a dream dance. There I stood, in the quiet moment between one cycle of life and the next, between one lesson completed and another about to start, between one dance partner and the next.

Dance lessons fade to insignificance alongside the lessons of dancing.

May you soon find yourself dream dancing cheek to cheek, Yin to Yang, paradoxically stepping the duality of life’s one path strewn with the lessons of so many perfect dances.

[Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, September 2000. First published as a Dream Sight article.]

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On solid ground

Posted on June 8, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 3 Comments

(Note: I wrote this article ten years ago, during a period of change, before I had found the name ‘dream alchemy’ to describe the approach I was evolving. Yet here it is, and there I am, doing the magic that created the firm foundation upon which the last ten years have been built.)

***

In the early hours of a still dark morning, back in 1983, my stomach churned as our bed lurched across the polished floor and the long bedroom curtains swished through the still air and swiped my face. The windows were closed. My husband slept soundly. My tiny children cradled on, familiar with sleeping in rocking arms, strapped onto my back or being carried in midnight sleep from late parties back to their beds without stirring. Perched in the penthouse of an apartment block high in the South American Andes, I realised why all our new friends lived in houses. This was my first experience of an earthquake and with a year ahead of us in Quito, Ecuador, it would not be my last. When we weren’t being shaken from side to side we were flipped from the ground by vertical quakes, leaving us stepping air for heart lurching moments.

I was reminded of this recently when I dreamed I was back in Quito, standing in a star-shaped dream house drawing a feeling of great strength from the ground beneath my feet: that very same ground that had rumbled and growled all those years ago. How things change!

In dreams the ground, or the earth, often represents the basis of our conscious understanding of the world. (It stands under us: it gives us our under-standing.)

In dreams the ground, or the earth, often represents the basis of our conscious understanding of the world. (It stands under us: it gives us our ‘understanding’.) I have dreamed many earthquakes and earth tremors since my year in Ecuador, each dream shake-up symbolising change in my understanding of life. Out with the old basis and onto new territory.

Change begins in the depths of the unconscious, just as earthquakes begin in the deeper layers of the earth, moving unseen and dark way below the known surface. Subtle changes in our unconscious percolate through to affect the world we see and the way we see it. Our dreams often pick up on the deep inner upheavals, the re-arranging of our unconscious strata of thoughts, memories and conditionings, and present the deep movement as dream earthquakes, tremors, earth changes or earthworks. In this way, our earthquake dreams are like seismic detectors, giving us advance warning of coming change. They are personally precognitive rather than being premonitions of physical earth changes or world disasters.

So why did the ground beneath my feet in my recent dream of standing in the star-shaped house feel so solid? Why did I feel I was drawing on great strength?

Quito was not only a place of earthquake and tremor for me. It was a time of adaptation, of opening myself to new skills and new possibilities. In its quaky shakiness it created new foundation stones for my future, a future based on trusting intuition and embracing change as a positive force directing the unfolding of life. My recent dream mirrored back to me the difference between my initial fear of change in those early Quito days and the strength I can draw from the ground I have built beneath my feet since then.

One of the advantages of a dream rich in sensation is that you can invoke the memory of the dream feeling when needed. I have summoned up that intense sensation of drawing strength from the ground on several occasions since the dream, and felt it positively influence the situations and their outcomes. You can use positive emotions from dreams in this way by picturing yourself in the dream scene and letting the same feeling fill you to overflowing as you negotiate life situations relevant to the dream.

Pay attention to the various grounds you walk upon in your dreams to learn what they reflect about your present understanding of life. Traversing rocky ground may suggest that life seems ‘rocky’ to you. Or, on the contrary, walking on rock in a dream may reflect solidity or a firm belief in old ways since rocks themselves are ancient formations. Slippery ground may reveal feelings of insecurity about life (what will happen if you ‘slip up’?). Muddy earth may reflect a muddied, unclear basis to your understanding. Gravel may symbolise a connection with the temporary as gravel paths are often later made more solid.

Your dream ground may be a high rung on a tottering ladder with a small centre of gravity. What might this reflect about your under-standing?

Or gravelly ground may suggest an irritating basis to life since gravel gets under your skin when you fall, or can make it difficult for you to ‘get a firm grip’ under certain conditions. Your dream ground may be a high rung on a tottering ladder with a small centre of gravity, indicating perhaps instability or lack of a firm basis.

If you find yourself walking on water … well … water symbolises our emotions as well as our unconscious and don’t we just need the reminder from time to time that we can all perform miracles if we’re in touch with our unconscious?

I haven’t walked on water, but I have walked on air in my waking life – well, almost. After the year of living at altitude in the Andes my body changed in the way that all bodies do to adapt to the lesser amounts of oxygen in the high atmosphere. The haemoglobin levels in my blood increased and so did my lung capacity. Together these physical adaptations to the thin air worked to deliver more oxygen to my body than in my pre-Quito days. Gone were the tingling lips, numb finger tips and dizziness of my first six weeks living up near the snow-capped volcanoes on the equator. When we left Ecuador en route to Australia, we touched down in San Francisco for a week. ‘Touched’ was the right word. Pumped up on oxygen I felt as if I was air-walking, bouncing back from each step and bounding forward without effort. Like walking on the Moon. And when I laughed at the lack of ground beneath my feet, I hyperventilated and spun out on oxygen overload. I was high from living on high and was finding the old familiar world disorientating and unreal in its new strangeness.

Our dreams help us to resolve our unconscious conflicts as they shuffle the unconscious layers of thoughts, memories and conditioning to create changed perceptions of once familiar worlds. The strengths we can draw from our many awakenings are well worth the occasional queasy quakes that create the firmer ground of new under-standing.

[Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, July 2000. First published as a Dream Sight article.]

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Hole in the road

Posted on May 18, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 2 Comments

His father’s voice would always sing out from the back of his mind, ‘There was I, a-digging this ‘ole’.

Out driving recently, we slowed down to pass road works. Orange witches’ hats marked off a hole in the centre of the road. Intrepid road workers were jack-hammering their way, waist deep in rubble, ear deep in mind numbing noise.

“You know,” Michael began, “whenever we passed road works when we were children, Dad would always sing, ‘There was I, a-digging this ‘ole, ‘ole in the ground sort of big and sort of round …’. And I would vow never to be as predictable and repetitive when I grew up.”

“And you’ve succeeded,” I replied, “I’ve never heard you burst into song and we’ve passed plenty of road works in our life together.”

“Yes and no,” Michael cringed. “I may not sing but I’ve never passed a road works without hearing my father’s voice striking up from the back of my mind, ‘There was I, a-digging this ‘ole’. He just won’t go away!”

We can drive on past the hole in the road without bursting into song … but what about the holes we can’t see?

We can laugh about these perpetual voices that echo on from our past. Parents, teachers, priests and school bullies, for example, often leave their mark. All the while we are aware of them we can shrug our shoulders and smile. We can drive on past the hole in the road without bursting into song, talk to our children without old-fashioned admonishment, and be assertive without fear of the school bully hurting us.

But what about the echoes we are not aware of? Deep in your unconscious mind are the records of every conversation, event and experience you have lived through carefully filed alongside the feelings these evoked in you. These experiences and feelings have shaped your life, even though you do not remember them. They form a blueprint, a pattern that exerts an influence on how you respond to the world. They may be unconscious patterns, but that fact alone makes them far more powerful than the patterns you are consciously aware of. The hole in the road you know about is not a problem. You won’t fall into it. But the very real hole in the road you are NOT conscious of is a danger.

How does this relate to dreams?

Dreams are reflections of both your unconscious and conscious minds, with special highlights on the conflicts between the two. When you know how to cut through the language of your dreams and interpret them, you can understand the blueprint patterns that are still operating in your life. Your dreams bring to light what is usually hidden to your waking eyes. Your dreams reveal the holes in the road, how they got there, and how they are affecting your waking life today. What powerful information!

“Money doesn’t grow on trees”, she said, speaking without thinking her own mother’s echoing words which were also her grandmother’s.

For example, you may have forgotten the day when the other kids in your street were given money to buy ice creams from the ice cream van, but your mother didn’t have the change. She told you, “Money doesn’t grow on trees”, speaking without thinking her own mother’s echoing words which were also her grandmother’s. She didn’t realise you were the only kid in the street to miss out, and she certainly didn’t know the others taunted you about it for weeks.

As a five year old you felt deeply hurt, by the other kids and by your mother. You mistakenly learned that money was available to other people but not to you. When a deep feeling is associated with a belief (remember that children’s feelings are big) the belief is all the more strongly anchored. The child, in this example, grew up and forgot the incident, but his unconscious mind remembered and dug a huge hole in the road. As an adult, he wondered why he encountered difficulties with self-esteem and self-value. He didn’t know that his unconscious mind had established a belief pattern that he was less worthy of reward than others.

The problem is that the unconscious mind is far more powerful than the conscious mind, so its blueprint wins over conscious mind ideals, thoughts and goals.

Those plans you have that seem to keep misfiring are most likely overpowered by your unconscious beliefs in holes in the road and other perceived pitfalls and dangers. Your unconscious mind will sabotage realisation of your plans to ‘save’ you from such fates.

The solution? Change the blueprint.

This is easily done once you can interpret your dreams. There are various techniques (dream alchemy practices) that use the symbols of your unique dreams to change your unconscious blueprint.

Let your dreams enable you to build a smooth road forward, splendidly lit by diamonds gathered from the deepest pitfalls that once lined your route.

Think of the process as mending the holes in the road so that you can make smoother and faster progress. You can’t remove a hole. The way to mend it is to fill it in. You can’t simply remove an unconscious belief; you need to fill the hole it occupied with a new, more appropriate belief. Dream alchemy practices are designed to do this.

But first, dream alchemy encourages you to look deep into the hole your dreams have revealed, for the best gems and treasures are discovered by mining deep into the earth, deep into the self.

Let your dreams enable you to build a smooth road forward, splendidly lit by diamonds gathered from the deepest pitfalls that once lined your route.

[Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, March 2003. First published as a Dream Sight article.]

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Dream vibrations and the LOA

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 3 Comments

I am often asked about the Law of Attraction, and whether nightmares and dreams with negative vibes attract negative people and events into our lives. It’s a good question. So, let’s explore:

Books about the Law of Attraction have enjoyed waves of popularity since the early 1900s

Books about the Law of Attraction have enjoyed waves of popularity since the early 1900s, with a recent resurgence in the early 1990s and a deluge of interest since 2000. Rhonda Byrne’s ‘The Secret’ DVD and book, published in 2006, repackaged the Law of Attraction in a way that inspired millions of people to start making the LOA – as it is now commonly known – help them achieve their goals. So, what is the LOA, exactly?

According to the LOA, you receive according to the vibe you give out. Like vibes attract like vibes. If your focus on money is all positive you attract plenty of it into your life, whereas if your focus on money is negative (for example, if you focus on debt or lack of money), then you attract debt or lack into your life. According to the law, whatever you focus on, you get more of the same.

The LOA is working all the time, whether you believe in it or not. I know this to be true. The secret everyone is searching for is how to become an active participant in the process – how to create and maintain the vibe that brings you what you want.

Imagine you know that secret, and you put all your waking hours into maintaining the vibe that will bring you what you want, and then you go to sleep and have a dream …

Imagine you know that secret, and you put all your waking hours into maintaining the vibe that will bring you what you want, and then you go to sleep and have a dream brimming with negative emotions, perhaps grief, anger or loss of confidence. Does the negative vibe of your dream beam out into the universe and undo all that daytime work?

Here’s where the magic of working with your dreams comes in. If you really want the LOA to work for you, then pay attention to your dreams. First up, there are a few basics you need to know:

1. Remember that dreams are symbolic, not literal. So if you dream that someone you know dies, your dream is NOT predicting that person’s death. The dream is symbolic and it is about something that is ending (dying off) in your life. Dreams of death are very common, and many people are frightened to mention them because they fear that putting the dream into words, or paying it attention, will cause it to happen. Please be assured that this is not the way it works. In fact, not talking about a worrying dream increases your waking life anxiety – and this affects your vibe. It’s better to talk about a worrying dream, interpret it, understand more about yourself as a result, and move on, free of any negative vibe. In this example, once you understand what is coming to an end in your life, you can decide to bring it back to life or to let it go and move on to something better. Interpretation brings you self understanding and choice.

2. The emotions you feel in your dreams are emotions that belong to you. Sometimes they’re emotions you’re aware of; most often they’re unconscious emotions that you’ve buried long ago, or emotions you’ve repressed because you can’t acknowledge them in your waking life.

3. In the same way, the beliefs, limitations and blocks you encounter in your dreams are your own unconscious beliefs, limitations and blocks.

4. So, when you interpret a dream, you discover your unconscious emotions, beliefs, limitations and blocks.

Whether you’re awake or asleep, your unconscious mind continuously sends out its vibe.

Now here’s the most important thing to understand. Whether you’re awake or asleep, your unconscious mind continuously sends out its vibe. And your unconscious mind is far more powerful than your conscious mind.

For example, you might choose to focus on sending out a positive vibe about money all day. You spend all day doing this, feeling totally positive and good about it. As far as you are aware, you have absolutely no block to having vast amounts of money in your life. However, your unconscious mind may have a different agenda. You may have unconscious doubts, limiting beliefs and blocks about having so much money. Because your unconscious mind is stronger than your conscious mind, it wins in the battle of the vibes. You don’t see the results you wanted and you declare the LOA to be a crock. But it isn’t! The LOA is working for you perfectly. Your overall vibe, dictated by your unconscious mind, is attracting according to the law. You are receiving according to the vibe you are giving out.

The real secret to getting the Law of Attraction to bring you what you consciously want is to get your unconscious mind on side.

If you want the LOA to work for you, pay attention to your dreams.

So rather than ask if a worrying dream is sending out a negative vibe, attracting negative things to you, celebrate the fact that being able to remember your dream is the first step to identifying a negative vibe that your unconscious mind is sending out while you are awake, a negative vibe of which you are oblivious, a negative vibe that is attracting negative stuff to you.

You dream every night, and a dream has a vibe whether or not your remember it. Learning to remember your dreams and interpret them is an empowering step to take if you’re serious about attracting what you want into your life.

Dream interpretation identifies your unconscious beliefs, so you can easily pick the ones that are working against your conscious wishes. The next question is, how do you change those unconscious beliefs to align them to your conscious wishes?

This is done through the process of dream alchemy. These are simple exercises such as visualisations and affirmations that reprogram your unconscious beliefs. Here’s an example:

You dream you are driving a car but you can’t see ahead clearly because the windscreen is dark. This is a common dream indicating that you are unclear about your vision for your future. This lack of clarity is the work of an unconscious block sabotaging your vision. To apply dream alchemy when you wake up, visualise yourself back in the dream only this time the windscreen is exceptionally clear and you can see your way. Visualise yourself driving well, and add in all the positive emotions you associate with achieving your goal. Doing the dream alchemy practice – the visualisation – undoes the block and reprograms the associated unconscious belief in alignment with your conscious intention. (Do a dream alchemy visualisation 20 times a day for a week, ten times a day for the second week and twice a day for the next month.)

So tune into your dreams to tune those unconscious negative vibes that you are beaming out 24/7 into positive vibes that ensure that the Law of Attraction fulfils your conscious desires.

[Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, April 2009. First published in longer version as a Dream Sight article.]

[You can listen to this article in episode 33 The Dream Show.]

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Charlie’s bone

Posted on May 3, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

A dog, Charlie, sees a meaty bone tantalisingly just out of reach.

A dog, Charlie, sees a meaty bone tantalisingly just out of reach, on the grass, on the other side of a high wire fence. The aroma twitches his nose, moistens his mouth, and fixes his eyes to the tasty prize. The only problem is the fence between where he is now and where he wants to be. It’s too high to jump, too solid to squeeze through. What’s the solution?

Hours pass, and Charlie sits in his garden, totally focussed on the bone. You could say he spent the morning visualising gnawing the bone, imagining how it would taste, how happy he’d be. That’s true. But he was also focussed on that dratted fence, occasionally trying to burrow beneath it, lunge at it, poke his nose through it, each time feeling nothing but its unrelenting resistance barring his way to where he wanted to be.

What’s the tasty bone you’ve been visualising in your life recently? What’s the fence? Have you been spending as much time and energy visualising the fence as visualising the bone? Which do you think will manifest, getting the bone or strengthening the resistance of the fence?

Do you find yourself analysing the analogy, picking holes in it?

Does this little story resonate with your heart (does it feel right, does it deliver an Aha?), or do you find your head analysing the analogy, picking holes in it?

Legends, myths, fairy tales and parables are lovingly passed through generations because they offer insights and solutions from the safety zone of a story.

The story does not judge the listener or tell them what to do. If the listener resonates with the story, inner shifts begin. If she doesn’t, it isn’t the right story for her current predicament.

An analogy works best if it’s not too close to home, or even not close to species. Think Disney, Pixar, movies featuring animals, fables. Why is this?

You’re not a dog. You probably gag at the thought of eating a raw bone. Yet maybe you resonated at some level with my simple little story about Charlie.

An analogy works best if it’s not too close to home, or even not close to species.

In fact, the story may have a deeper impact on you than a realistic story featuring someone like you in your exact predicament. The more the details resemble your life, the harder it is for you to see solutions because you start to lock into the way you see your life, with all your familiar fences, obstacles and problems included. Your blind spots engage. Comfort zone prevails. But when the story takes you away from the life you know and gets you to look through the eyes of, say, a dog, you are suspended from your attachment to your own situation for long enough to see new possibilities.

I might have told a different Charlie analogy. How about the one where Charlie focuses so intently on the fence that he realises it is nothing but a myriad atoms floating in space, giving the impression of solidity, so he just walks through it?

Or how about the one where Charlie’s frustration with the fence makes him bark louder than ever before so that a passing stranger hears his cry for help and tosses him the bone?

Analogies are full of holes. Mere atoms of storytelling breath suspended in voids big enough to step through. But isn’t that the point? Aren’t analogies simply vehicles to transport you to the next … ah, anyone spot an analogy coming?

Dreams can be seen as analogies.

Dreams can be seen as analogies. Dreams reflect the last 24-48 hours of your conscious and unconscious experiences, compare these to your past experiences, update your personal worldview, and project forward, based on this blueprint of your expectations. The resulting dream, encompassing all this stuff, is mostly a production of your creative right brain. Left brain logic doesn’t get a look in. Approach a dream as an analogy of your current mindset, and you’re well on the way to accurate interpretation.

For example, you dream of being lost, unable to find your way: where, in the last two days, did you feel lost at some level, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually? Or you dream of being bogged down in mud: where, in the last two days, did you feel, at some level, bogged down? Or you dream of seeing a tasty reward, out of reach on the other side of a tall fence: where, in the last two days, did you feel blocked from attaining something rewarding?

When you interpret a dream, identifying the analogy is a good starting point. It helps you to relate your dream to the waking life situation it applies to.

Then you can bring in all the interpretation tools you’ve learned from me along the way (through my articles, books, podcasts and so on) to interpret the details, uncover how your mindset is affecting your life experience, and flesh out (oh, that bone again) personal meaning.

Just as analogies can be full of holes, dreams – being analogies – can reveal the holes in the way you look at your life.

Just as analogies can be full of holes, dreams – being analogies – can reveal the holes in the way you look at your life. And just as analogies can inspire insights and solutions to problems, dreams – being analogies – can do this too.

And just as the best legends, myths, fairy tales and Disney productions are analogies whipped up into spellbinding stories, you can whip your dreams up into spellbinding dream alchemy practices. Simply write an inspirational dream as a children’s story, or rewrite a dream that reveals a personal limitation as a children’s story with a happy ending.

If you resonated with Charlie, spin some magic right now by writing a one page children’s story about how Charlie finally got his bone.

[Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, May 2010. First published as a Dream Sight article.]

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Trash tells all

Posted on April 27, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

People say, “Dreams are just the brain filtering through daily stuff.”

“I don’t believe in dream interpretation. Dreams are just the brain filtering through daily stuff, sorting out the trash. That’s why you get bits of work, bits of television, bits of things you’re worried about. You wouldn’t want to analyse mine! Let the trash go, I say. Wake up fresh.”

I love it when people tell me that dreams are the result of the brain processing the day, clearing out the garbage. I love the look on their faces when I agree.

“If someone went through your garbage,” I jump in between the lines of their jaw-dropped bewilderment, “how much could they tell about you?”

Big business takes trash seriously, shredding papers and wiping hard drives to prevent secrets being exposed while many a prospective high security employee has unwittingly had her home garbage bin trawled by company detectives while she slept.

Stop for a moment and think about what you throw out with your trash and what it says about you.

If someone went through your garbage, how much could they tell about you?

Over a period of time a good garbage detective could produce a personal profile of your eating habits, what medicines you take (what conditions you suffer), your interests and political persuasions (newspapers, letters), your financial situation, what you spend your money on (shopping dockets), where you’ve been and when (train tickets, theatre tickets) and much more. And then there’s your electronic trash, the recycle bin on your computer and the decipherable ghost of every email you’ve received or sent and every website you’ve visited still etched on your hard drive way after you’ve pressed the delete key.

Trash tells all. Well, a great deal, anyway. To put it simply, everything you put in the trash represents a decision about what you decide to keep and what you decide not to keep. Sometimes you make mistakes and throw out the baby with the bathwater, or hang on to stuff that is more of a hindrance than a help to you. Sometimes you cleverly recycle your trash, finding new ways to make use of things you no longer need. Or you foolishly recycle garbage, perhaps rescuing a rain-soaked item only to introduce mould or vermin into the house, or reusing an envelope bearing revealing sender ID, for example.

When you sleep, your brain filters through your experiences of the last day or two. It filters not only the experiences you were aware of, but also the ones your unconscious mind registered.

Your dreams are a work in progress, an ever-changing sculpture of your personal worldview.

Dreams do the job of sorting out your recent experiences in an effort to make sense of the world and your place in it. From babyhood your dreams have helped you to form your unique view of the world updating it nightly to accommodate your new experiences.

So, on the surface, dreams “are just the brain filtering through daily stuff, sorting out the trash”, but on a deeper level they paint a picture of the dreamer.

Your dreams are a work in progress, an ongoing, ever-changing sculpture of your personal worldview. Take time to stand aside and contemplate your sculpture, to decide which lines to enhance, which to erase, and which to change. Whether you see elements of your sculpture as trash or treasure is … well, revealing of your worldview, really, isn’t it?

Contemplations

Where and when, in your life, have you thrown out the baby with the bathwater? Have you had dreams of losing things or being lost?Where and when, in your life, have you held onto stuff (physical or emotional) that has hindered your progress? Have you had dreams of obstacle courses, or carrying heavy baggage?

What, in your life, has been the result of clever recycling: getting gold from physical or emotional dross? Have you had recurring dreams with successful outcomes (where they had previously been unsuccessful)?

Where or when, in your life, have you recycled old attitudes or patterns of behaviour to your disadvantage instead of changing them? Do you have recurring dreams with unresolved or unsatisfying endings?

Contemplate your sculpture: decide which lines to enhance, which to erase, and which to change.

[Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, June 2004. First published as a Dream Sight article.]

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A powerful presence

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 6 Comments

The horse seemed to challenge me, to demand that I acknowledge his powerful presence.

This is the story of a very simple dream that had a profound effect on my life. The powerful factor was not the dream itself. It was what I did with the dream – I applied the very simple magic of dream alchemy. You can do this too. Here’s the story – and the formula.

Once upon a time, long ago, I dreamed I was walking along a road when a horse came up from behind, overtook me, and galloped playfully on. He galloped right past a turning that would have taken him to a meadow ripe with food. He reached the end of the road and came galloping back, again missing the turning. He was playful, burning up his energy on the road he knew – up and down, up and down, oblivious to the ripe meadow where he might rest, eat and enjoy a sense of home.

Suddenly he drew up right alongside me, so close we almost touched. I felt a small shudder of fear at his proximity, yet also a small shudder of excitement. The horse seemed to challenge me, to demand that I acknowledge his powerful presence.

That was all there was to the dream. I woke up and interpreted it, as all good dream analysts do.

The more I thought about the horse, the more I felt the fear, no the excitement, no the fear, no the excitement. Well, was it fear or excitement? The two feelings were so close as to be almost indistinguishable. So close, as close as the horse nudging up alongside me with his powerful, fear-excitement presence.

And that’s when it happened – a long lost memory came into clear focus, a memory of being about ten years old, standing in a field, talking to my horse-mad friend, Helen. Helen dreamed of having her own horse. She spent her Saturdays mucking out stables in return for rides. Her passion was contagious, so I listened to her stories and read several books about horses and about how to ride and care for them. Mucking out stables wasn’t for me, but the idea of riding was inspiring, so Helen took me to the field to get up close and personal with a horse. I was very excited until the horse stood close beside me and I realised just how big it was. Nothing was going to get me onto its back, so high above the ground. Reading about horses was one thing; reality was quite another. The horse nudged me with his head and elicited not love, but pure terror. He was big and strong. I was weak, powerless and scared.

Too powerful and scary to ride …

As always with dream interpretation, I asked myself what was happening in my life to remind me of that time. I recognised the situation immediately. I was about to go public with some new ideas and yet I was holding back, thinking small scale to ‘be on the safe side’ rather than big scale in case that big scale turned out to be too powerful and scary to ride.

According to the picture painted by my dream, I was just going to amble along that road in a small scale way, creating, at best, an unfocussed, playful ‘horse’ energy that would burn itself up galloping around on safe known territory, always missing the road that led to the rewarding meadow.

How silly can that be, making decisions as an adult based on an experience at age ten? Not silly at all, of course, because the fears that drive these decisions are unconscious. Dreams, once interpreted, help us to remember experiences and recognise how they have programmed our behaviour.

Let’s take stock. I had a simple dream. As a dream analyst, I interpreted it. The interpretation enabled me to recognise an unconscious fear that was about to hold me back from doing something in a big way.

I asked myself if that was what I really wanted.

I wanted to find that meadow, that place of ripe rewards.

My answer was no. I wanted to find that meadow, that place of ripe rewards.

As a dream alchemist, I then applied alchemy to my dream so that I could reap the rewards I desired. This is what I did.

I closed my eyes and visualised that dream horse coming up close beside me, just as he did in the dream. I felt the same small shudder of fear at his proximity, and also the same small shudder of excitement. As in the dream, I visualised the horse challenging me, demanding that I acknowledge his powerful presence. Then I visualised walking even closer to the horse, feeling the excitement more than the fear, walking closer and closer until I absorbed his being into mine. When I did this, I felt a jolt of energy pulse through my body, a sign that the alchemy was working. I then visualised – and focussed on feeling – moving along the road as if I was riding that horse.

An amazing thing happened.

An amazing thing happened. As I did this visualisation and focussed on feeling the power, I felt a steadiness flow through my body. I had expected to feel an all-powerful, high energy, as if nothing could stop me. Instead, I felt steady, supremely confident. So confident, in fact, that I slowed the horse’s gallop down to a relaxed walk, and that meant we were at exactly the right speed to notice the road leading to the meadow. Instead of whizzing around and never seeing the road, we made the turn, the horse and I, as one, and entered the meadow. In my visualisation, I focussed on how good it felt to finally reap the rewards I desired.

As per the formula for dream alchemy practices, I repeated my visualisation for a few weeks more. Day by day I found my confidence improving, and gradually I began to make bigger scale decisions.

My feelings had changed. What on earth was there to fear about reality turning out to be bigger and better and more powerful than I had imagined?

And that’s exactly what dream alchemy does. Once it’s worked its magic and changed a fear or belief, it leaves you wondering how on earth you ever thought differently. It transforms you. The new you shakes your wiser head in amazement at how the old you lived your life. And things move forward as life delivers greater rewards.

[Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, October 2007. First published as a Dream Sight article.]

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