or types:
Physical: dreams that provide helpful information about our physical bodies and our health through symbols that may suggest improper diet, a kind of exercise needed, previews of illnesses, and so on. These dreams can even provide specific suggestions for treatment.
Self-revealing: dreams that provide self-knowledge and insight into problems, goals, desires, plans, decisions, relationships, character traits, and so on.
Psychic: dreams that reach out through the windows of telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition to provide insight and information not accessible by our ordinary three-dimensional consciousness.
Spiritual: dreams originating from the dreamer's higher self, dreams flowing from the superconscious mind and the Universal Forces. Cayce often called such dreams “visions.”
These four kinds of dreams serve two functions: to solve problems and to aid in spiritual growth.
Interpreting the dreamer, not the dream
The best interpreter of a person's dream is the individual dreamer, since the symbols are one's own. Interpreting dreams, as Cayce described the process, is not just looking up a symbol in a handy dream book and applying it to a dream. Rather, one interprets a dreamer, not a dream.
“Study self; study self” was Cayce's first counsel on training to interpret dreams. As Bro says, “If one grasps the dreamer in the dream, one can take the first important step in interpretation: determining which of the two major functions of dreams is to the fore in a particular dream— (a) problem solving and adaptation to external affairs, or (b) awakening and alerting the dreamer to some new potential within him.”
Studying dreams and interpreting them is not enough. Bringing dreams into action in everyday life is critical. Cayce called for “application” and included a section on application in every dream reading. While study is a form of application, Cayce had something more concrete in mind. The dreamer must put the insights, tips, and ideas received in dreams into motion in life, trying out the guidance given by experiment. Over and over Cayce counseled his dreamers, Do, do, do.
The lawful patterns of dreaming
Bro points out that the same natural laws or principles that governed Cayce's readings also appear to govern the dreamer's dreams. While these laws were rarely explicitly spelled out in the readings, they can be glimpsed as patterns that are evident in the body of the readings as a whole.
Bro provides a fascinating outline of what he called the “lawful patterns in dreaming.” Of particular help are the following:
• “[Cayce] had to be directed to his targets by hypnotic suggestions. For medical counsel he needed the address of the individual who sought aid. For psychological readings he needed the birth date of the individual. And for topical readings, or those on bidden resources, he had to be told both what was sought, and the names and location of those seeking.
“Often those who wanted one type of counsel would request, in the question period following the reading, counsel of another kind. When Cayce was especially keyed up or relating deeply to the person seeking aid, they might get the desired medical information in a business reading, or counsel for a loved one in a dream reading. But more often they would be told, “We do not have this,” and instructed to seek a different type of reading.
“Cayce explained to his dreamers that their dream-focus had similar limits. He coached them to set before their minds, by hard study, concentration, and activity, whatever they sought aid upon through dreams…. Dreams are limited by the conscious focus of the dreamer.”
• “Cayce's readings were limited to the information and guidance which an individual could constructively use; it is the same with dreams, said Cayce…. [While unlimited] information [is] available through the subconscious and the other resources,…the psyche [protects] its balance by feeding the dreamer limited material. It [operates] by laws of self-regulation.”
• “Cayce's health affected his readings. When he was ill he could not give them…. Cayce's state of mind [also] affected his readings. When he was distraught and defensive with those about him, he experienced some of the few clear errors in a lifetime of giving readings: once in giving readings on oil wells, and once in giving readings on patients in his hospital. Neither time was a complete miss, but the distortions, as later readings pointed out, were dangerous…. His best readings came when he was buoyant, relaxed, humorous, secure. However, he also gave exceptional readings when in keen distress—as when he was twice jailed for giving readings, or when his university collapsed.
“Dreams, too, he said, are conditioned subjectively. He urged his dreamers to get out and play, to take vacations, to balance up their wit and reason, to tease and to laugh and to enjoy children. But he also urged them to note the depth of dreams for the person confronted by death-loss, or by business failure, or by divorce, or by difficult vocational choices—all of which might call forth dreams of such depth and power as to make them ‘visions.”
• “Cayce's readings were affected by what his own trance products described as his relative 'spirituality.’ When he was carried away by the ambitions of a treasure hunt, or temptations to seek notoriety with his gift and his considerable lecturing ability, he was reminded to notice how the quality of his readings suffered. On the other hand, when he was regular in his times of prayer and Bible study, as well as in his quiet fishing times, he was reminded to notice that his readings gained in quality, and that he even developed new types of gifts or capacities, both within his readings (for example, producing an entire series on a new subject), or awake (aiding the sick, through prayer).
“Similar factors, his readings said, affect the quality of dreams. When his dreamers drove themselves for money or fame or power, they could see that their dreams brought up these very issues, and then began to deteriorate in clarity and helpfulness. When they were secure in their faith, their prayer times, and in their desire to serve others, they could find new vistas in their dreams—giving them glimpses into the world of the future or the past or the transcendent.”
• Frequently, the Cayce source noted that the attitudes of those who sought information and guidance from Cayce affected what they got. Those who sought novelty, exploitation of others, a godlike guarantor for their lives, justification for their past mistakes, or anything but genuine aid and growth, received curt responses, or vague ones, or unexpected lectures on their motives. Those who failed to act on the counsel given them might find future counsel brief or even withheld.
“Gullibility was as readily rejected as cynicism; adulation of Cayce accomplished as little as belittling or envy of him. ‘The real miracle,’ one reading said, ‘occurs in the seeker.’
“Similar factors, he said, govern the extent to which dreamers produce dream information helpful to those about them. Often a dreamer secures facts unavailable to a loved one because of his greater detachment toward the need or problem. Often, too, unconscious telepathy from a brother or sister or child shows dreamers how to reach the other's bad temper, or alcoholic habit, or despairing heart, or overbearing pride.”
Improving the usefulness of dreams
To strengthen dream recall and enhance the usefulness of dreams, Cayce emphasized the value of daily contemplation on an affirmation and regularly entering into the deep silence of meditation. Cayce stressed that the spiritually oriented person, whose own intuition is disciplined to a high level, can interpret dreams more exactly than an individual depending solely on his or her own capacity to reason.
But
