Posts Tagged ‘moon’

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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Some dreams are more vivid and memorable than others, and they seem to come in cycles, a burst of vivid dreams grabbing our attention every so often before we return to runs of the more mundane variety.

When do you dream most vividly? Have you noticed any patterns?

Last week I had a call from Pat Hession, presenter of the Afternoon Show on Radio ABC North Queensland, inviting me onto his show to comment on the possible effect of the full moon on dreams. Pat and several of his friends, family and colleagues had all had vivid dreams earlier that week and they wondered if it was due to the full moon.

We’re all familiar with anecdotal evidence about the effect of the full moon on our mental and emotional balance in waking life, and a quick Google revealed contradictory research results and opinions. My husband, Michael, was a London cop many hundreds of moons ago, and he remembers there was always an increase in ‘incidents’ on a full moon.

Arguments for the full moon affecting our waking lives range from a decrease in the Earth’s geomagnetic field (it’s at its quietest at full and new moons) to an increase in night light causing enough sleep deprivation to unhinge the susceptible (perhaps more relevant in the days before we had electricity to artificially light our evenings and disrupt our rhythms).

We are closest to waking at the end of a dream, rather than during the long deep sleep periods between dreams. So if you find yourself waking up more often on full moon nights because the light disturbs your sleep, you’re most likely to wake while a dream is fresh on your mind, and remember it in the morning. You may think that you’ve had more vivid dreams than usual, but what you’ve really done is remember more middle-of-the-night dreams than usual.

In the past, when I’ve researched the subject of full moons and vivid dreams, I’ve drawn a blank. There are so many other factors that influence our dreams, and I believe these are more powerful, but I was curious, so I researched some more.

I remembered that the full moon in question, on 26 June 2010, was also a partial lunar eclipse, and I wondered if that had affected Pat & Co’s dreams.

According to astrologer Carolyn Wilkinson, the partial lunar eclipse was in the early degrees of Capricorn, meaning it may affect those born in the early degrees of Capricorn. Hmm, is that me? My birth date is 22 December, and you don’t get much earlier in Capricorn than that. I did have vivid dreams that week, but a few days after the eclipse.

According to Carolyn, “Lunar eclipses naturally tend to ‘reveal’ things to us. I do believe that (just to add to the mix) the apogee/perigee cycle (ie when the moon is closest and farthermost from the earth) has a hand in dream activity as well as other matters of life on earth.”

Our dreams reflect our waking life, and many things influence our waking life including, perhaps, the full moon. Our dreams tend to be most vivid when we experience challenge, conflict or change in waking life, so I began to wonder what challenge, conflict or change Pat, his friends and colleagues, might have all experienced at the time of their vivid dreams. What experience did they have in common that might have resulted in vivid dreams?

It was the school holidays – so tick up challenge, conflict and change for working families  – and there were big political changes happening here in Australia that week, causing radio producers to chase different stories and people to worry about their jobs and finances in light of a possible election … well, you know how it goes.

My guess is that Pat & Co’s vivid dreams were the stuff of shared experiences such as these rather than the full moon or the eclipse, and I think I detected an ‘aha’ in Pat’s voice when I mentioned this possibility.

What do you think?

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