are numerous famous examples of dreams offering inspiration. Solutions to problems, ideas for inventions and artistic endeavours have all found their way to the conscious mind via dreams. Mary Shelley dreamed of the creature that was to become Frankenstein. Other famous literary dreamers include Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Louis Stevenson and J R R Tolkien. Paul McCartney heard a haunting melody in one of his dreams and wrote it down. It became the song ‘Yesterday’. Inventions and ideas that have sprung from dreams include the model of the atom, the M9 analogue computer, the isolation of insulin in the treatment of diabetes and the sewing machine.
Dreams and the paranormal
Dreams of the dead are viewed in the West from a psychological perspective and not as actual encounters with ghosts, but many believe that the dead appear in dreams because they have a purpose: usually to offer advice and instruction, as happened in the Chaffin Will case. Some dreams involving the dead are also thought to be death omens. In the eighteenth century Lord Lyttelton dreamt of a fluttering bird and a woman in white who told him he would die in three days’ time. Despite his best efforts to prove her wrong, Lyttleton died as predicted.
Although dreams that focus on communication between the living and the dead have been accepted in many cultures since ancient times as proof that the dead have the ability to interfere with the lives of the living, dreams have also always shared a strong link with supernatural powers, in particular with precognition and telepathy.
Although rare, precognitive dreams are ones in which you see the future before it happens. The ancient Chaldeans, Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Native Americans all believed dreams were a method of foretelling the future, and even today there are instances when people claim to have dreamt of things before they happen. Many people, for example, claim to have had dreams of the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster before it happened. There are also stories of people who cancel trips or flights because of a foreboding dream or people who dreamt the winning lottery numbers.
There is strong evidence that some precognitive dreams warn about future health problems. Jung noticed that if his patients dreamt of injury to a horse - the archetypal symbol of animal life within the human body - they were often in the early stages of serious illness. A 1987 study at Michigan State University showed that cardiac patients who dreamt of destruction were far more likely to have worse heart disease than those who did not. Dreams also serve as a preparation for death, with terminally ill patients sometimes reporting transitional dreams of crossing bridges or walking through doors just before death. These dreams often bring peace of mind.
Dream telepathy has interested psychical researchers since the late nineteenth century. The founders of the Society for Psychical Research in London collected numerous dream telepathy cases in their study of paranormal experiences published in Phantasms of the Living (1886).
Interpreting your dreams
Have you ever wondered why dreams are often hard to make sense of? It’s because the information they contain is presented in the language of images and the number of images your brain can present is endless. Dream experts believe that the images are your own thoughts, feelings and ideas turned into a series of pictures or scenes and it’s up to the individual to translate and interpret them.
Your unconscious mind is working all the time using images, feelings and pictures from your past and present and linking them in with the issues currently concerning you. For example, if you feel stressed you may have a dream where you are swimming and can’t keep your head above water. If you feel confused you may have a dream where you are lost in a dark wood. Some of these images can be universally recognized - a boat, for example, is typically is a symbol of transition - but most of the images in your dreams can only really be interpreted by you. That’s \ why a dream dictionary isn’t always helpful as the interpretations in there will be universal and not unique to you.
A good way to uncover the meanings of your dreams is by free association. You simply go with the first thing that pops into your mind when recalling an image you had in a dream. For example, if you dream of a dog what are the first thoughts that come into your mind when you think about dogs? Forget about universal associations; what are your personal associations with dogs? What a dog means to you and what a dog means to someone else may be entirely different. Perhaps you had an unpleasant encounter with a dog once and rather than being symbols of love, loyalty and devotion dogs represent fear and trauma for you?
The more you work with your dreams the more familiar you will become with your personal images. Always bear in mind that your dream symbols and images will be unique to you. What do you think your dream is trying to tell you?
A number of other telepathic dream studies have been conducted since, the most famous of which is perhaps the one conducted at the dream laboratory of the Mai-monides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York from 1963-1974. When subjects were in REM stages of sleep, a person in another room attempted to transmit images to the sleeping subject and the correlation of dream images was significantly above average.
Some dreams are interpreted as having past-life content. Recurring dreams which involve the same action, people and scenery are thought to be memories from past lives that have lingered for some reason and the dreamer needs to work out why. Others are thought to be out-of-body experiences when the astral body travels - seven out of ten people experience the sensation of flying in their dreams at some point in their life. Another type of dream is the lucid dream, in which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming and is able to influence the content of the dream and, in some instances, its outcome.
Many believe that dreams are a powerful way to connect with and harness psychic power. Studies of ESP experiences show that dreams are involved in between 33 and 69 per cent of all cases. In precognitive cases dreams are involved around 60 per cent of the time and in telepathic cases dreams are involved around 25 per cent of the time.
Most of us forget our dreams immediately on waking. There is so much to do when the new day starts and the wonderful world of meaning dreams can reveal to us is neglected. According to a Jewish proverb, An unremembered dream is like an unopened letter from God.’
To work with your dreams you do need to remember them. Keeping a dream journal and recording your dreams as soon as you wake will help your dream recall. If dreams are not written down they will fade away. The technique of dream recording is simple. You leave a notepad and pencil within reach of your bed and immediately on waking you write down whatever you can remember about your dream - the people, the colours, the places, the events -every detail, however small, is significant.
DREAMTIME
Similar to Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, dreamtime is an Australian Aboriginal belief of a psychic realm that is shared by everyone. Dreamtime is not separate from the real world; it inhabits the part of our consciousness that can be accessed in meditation, trance or in dreams.
Aborigines typically believe that all life is spiritually interconnected and that the human race originated in dreamtime before taking human form. Dreamtime is the land’ to which the spirits of the Aboriginal dead must return, and it is the dimension from which shamans draw their psychic power.
DROP IN COMMUNICATOR
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