A word of caution......
It takes honesty and courage to investigate your dreams.
When you first start to pay attention to them, it's common to experience alarming ones, sometimes even nightmares. This is nothing to be afraid of; it happens because you
are bringing into consciousness, experiences that you have accumulated over a lifetime and not all of those experiences will have been positive. Those that frightened or
unsettled you may be represented in your dreams by monsters that chase you through dark landscapes. Those that hurt you may appear as vicious dream characters that
seem to want to do you harm. Such things appear in dreams when something has, or is, happening that is causing your subconscious to experience the underlying emotion
in a literal way. So for instance, if you're frightened that your business is going to fail and you're not facing up to it, your fear could manifest in your dreams as a pursuer who
seems intent on killing you or stealing your possessions. Situations that cause emotional reactions in the present attach themselves to similar emotion from the past and this
results in some aspect of the past experience being brought into the dream. This is a clear indication that the emotion is still active in your life and, if this is a negative
emotion, there is the opportunity to examine it in full consciousness, transform it and integrate it into your psyche. Nightmares are a gift - they allow you to move forward and
make informed choices about your life. Some people have no interest in what's going on inside their head and have no wish to find out. That's fine, the unconscious
tendencies will play out in their lives anyway. When things go wrong they can call it fate or blame someone else for their trouble, pick themselves up and run away towards
the next crisis. Or perhaps there is simply a feeling of things not being how they should be; a grey world of 'what if' and 'I wish'. There is no mandate that requires us to
understand ourselves if we don't want to.
But there is danger in this attitude. When psychic energies are denied and pushed away into the abyss of forgetfulness they become distorted and can become powerful
because they attract the energy of emotionally similar situations. They can rear up into consciousness unannounced or, more usually, find expression in our behaviour or
beliefs. They can trap you in a world of self-delusion, self-denial and destructive patterns. You become your own jailer. By analysing your dreams you can free yourself from
this self-imposed prison whilst you're still able to enjoy your life to the full.
We trap ourselves in the prison of our own beliefs and then spend our life searching for the person or thing that will show us the way out. The doors of the prison are wide
open and we have the key to step into our freedom. We simply need to take the risk to drop from our head to our heart and follow what has always been calling to us.
Michael Stone - Well of Light
So this is the first obstacle; and it takes courage to overcome it. Often we feel safe within the narrow confines of our projected persona; safe within our own illusion. When
you strip this away you are exposed and vulnerable; the iron bars that once kept the demons at bay are gone.
The second obstacle is to have the courage to face those demons and, in facing them, find the inner strength to either vanquish them or accept them as a part of yourself
and begin to heal and integrate them. It is only by doing this that we can hope to achieve inner peace and harmony. It's always worth remembering that those things in our
past that may have caused us pain, actually may hold within them the seeds of new growth. Take the child whose natural talent or ambition was stifled because the
childhood environment in which she grew up was not conducive to developing that talent. This may have caused a great deal of sadness at the time, to such an extent that
the child may have started to hate the thing she loved the most, or maybe diverted her passion into something more covert. Re-discovering the pain associated with that
denial can result in the rediscovery of a dormant talent that can now be brought back into full consciousness and enjoyed with the heart and mind of the child who was
denied it.
There are many roads to self-knowledge; analysing your dreams is only one way. It is not an easy option but I believe it is more honest and more powerful than many other
methods. It can be done at your pace and in the privacy of your own home.
Are you are ready to face the truth about yourself and your life?
"In myths the hero is the one who conquers the dragon . . . . . Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon, and is not overcome by it, wins the hoard, 'the treasure
hard to attain'. He (she) alone has a genuine claim to self confidence, for he (she) has faced the dark ground of his (her) self and thereby has gained himself (herself)."
Carl Jung, Word and Image.
You need to seek out and slay the dragon before you
have a hope of finding the treasure.
When you first start to pay attention to them, it's common to experience alarming ones, sometimes even nightmares. This is nothing to be afraid of; it happens because you
are bringing into consciousness, experiences that you have accumulated over a lifetime and not all of those experiences will have been positive. Those that frightened or
unsettled you may be represented in your dreams by monsters that chase you through dark landscapes. Those that hurt you may appear as vicious dream characters that
seem to want to do you harm. Such things appear in dreams when something has, or is, happening that is causing your subconscious to experience the underlying emotion
in a literal way. So for instance, if you're frightened that your business is going to fail and you're not facing up to it, your fear could manifest in your dreams as a pursuer who
seems intent on killing you or stealing your possessions. Situations that cause emotional reactions in the present attach themselves to similar emotion from the past and this
results in some aspect of the past experience being brought into the dream. This is a clear indication that the emotion is still active in your life and, if this is a negative
emotion, there is the opportunity to examine it in full consciousness, transform it and integrate it into your psyche. Nightmares are a gift - they allow you to move forward and
make informed choices about your life. Some people have no interest in what's going on inside their head and have no wish to find out. That's fine, the unconscious
tendencies will play out in their lives anyway. When things go wrong they can call it fate or blame someone else for their trouble, pick themselves up and run away towards
the next crisis. Or perhaps there is simply a feeling of things not being how they should be; a grey world of 'what if' and 'I wish'. There is no mandate that requires us to
understand ourselves if we don't want to.
But there is danger in this attitude. When psychic energies are denied and pushed away into the abyss of forgetfulness they become distorted and can become powerful
because they attract the energy of emotionally similar situations. They can rear up into consciousness unannounced or, more usually, find expression in our behaviour or
beliefs. They can trap you in a world of self-delusion, self-denial and destructive patterns. You become your own jailer. By analysing your dreams you can free yourself from
this self-imposed prison whilst you're still able to enjoy your life to the full.
We trap ourselves in the prison of our own beliefs and then spend our life searching for the person or thing that will show us the way out. The doors of the prison are wide
open and we have the key to step into our freedom. We simply need to take the risk to drop from our head to our heart and follow what has always been calling to us.
Michael Stone - Well of Light
So this is the first obstacle; and it takes courage to overcome it. Often we feel safe within the narrow confines of our projected persona; safe within our own illusion. When
you strip this away you are exposed and vulnerable; the iron bars that once kept the demons at bay are gone.
The second obstacle is to have the courage to face those demons and, in facing them, find the inner strength to either vanquish them or accept them as a part of yourself
and begin to heal and integrate them. It is only by doing this that we can hope to achieve inner peace and harmony. It's always worth remembering that those things in our
past that may have caused us pain, actually may hold within them the seeds of new growth. Take the child whose natural talent or ambition was stifled because the
childhood environment in which she grew up was not conducive to developing that talent. This may have caused a great deal of sadness at the time, to such an extent that
the child may have started to hate the thing she loved the most, or maybe diverted her passion into something more covert. Re-discovering the pain associated with that
denial can result in the rediscovery of a dormant talent that can now be brought back into full consciousness and enjoyed with the heart and mind of the child who was
denied it.
There are many roads to self-knowledge; analysing your dreams is only one way. It is not an easy option but I believe it is more honest and more powerful than many other
methods. It can be done at your pace and in the privacy of your own home.
Are you are ready to face the truth about yourself and your life?
"In myths the hero is the one who conquers the dragon . . . . . Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon, and is not overcome by it, wins the hoard, 'the treasure
hard to attain'. He (she) alone has a genuine claim to self confidence, for he (she) has faced the dark ground of his (her) self and thereby has gained himself (herself)."
Carl Jung, Word and Image.
You need to seek out and slay the dragon before you
have a hope of finding the treasure.
Copyright J.C.Harthan, PhD 2002
