DREAMS ARE ABOUT YOU

Dream Interpretation: Dream Study Class Two

We can have a burst of insight and in an impulsive, impatient moment tell the dreamer what we have gleaned. This may sadly and resolutely shut the door to the unconscious of the dreamer with a resounding clang! It’s better to listen to the dream as if it were your dream and follow your own associations to the dream images and symbols. Allow another person’s dream inform your life and share with the dreamer how it affected you. It’s frightening to have someone figure out what your dream is pointing to before you do.

“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 own capacity for reason. Carl Jung voiced much the same thought when he said that, if one understands symbols, one can understand the dream as much by empathy as by formal analysis.” Edgar Cayce

Always keep in mind that all Western interpretive methods approach the dream from a waking life point of view, which automatically skews our ability to truly understand these products of the natural world.

Not knowing is hard to bear. We wake up and attempt to get a grip on our dreams. We tame them with interpretations. We attempt to render them harmless, not able to accept them as the wild creature they really are. We tell our dreams they are our dreams, that we created them. We convince ourselves they are metaphors, a subtext of our existence, that they are a reshuffle of unbearable childhood experience. We bind them in weavings of reason, until they are butterflies pinned to the grid of self knowledge.

Each Dream is an Act of Genius

Each dream is an act of genius. A dreamer creates an entirely real world, to the most infinitely amazing detail. Each dream arouses within us the conviction that we are awake. This fully awake dream state has precision; it has detail; it has shapes that are likely and sometimes unlikely, yet realistic enough to make us certain as to the status of our consciousness.

The more tolerance we show for our knowing nothing about dreams, the more profound dreamwork we will do.

Freud had said, “Where id was, ego shall be,” indicating that the denizens of the land of dreaming should be conquered by waking consciousness, pulled up to the surface” by their hair, like a caveman’s chivalry or like the colonizer with his thirst to exploit the raw materials of the lands he conquers. The dream was to be milked for insights and discarded like an empty old bad in order that we in the waking life might be the wiser. (Freud also said that if he had his life to live over he would have studied the esoteric sciences!)

But when we take our waking life emotions and import them into the dream transformation can take place.

Arranging an Individual Dream Interpretation with Kathleen

To arrange an individual dream interpretation with Kathleen, make a payment directly using your credit card below. Processing can take up to 2 hours depending on time of day and internet traffic. Once your payment has been made below email Kathleen at tarotbykathleen@gmail.com to arrange a time to do your reading. Kathleen will respond to your payment within 24 hours to arrange an appointment time.

NOTE: Kathleen does NOT make appointments with clients until payments have been received. If you prefer to have your reading immediately you would be better served using the Ether method. Ether is Kathleen’s immediate and emergency response service. Just press the blue button in the upper right hand corner titled ETHER and if Kathleen is taking calls your call will go immediately through. If the button says, ARRANGE you can arrange a time within hours to peak with Kathleen.

Example: A middle-aged man dreams that he is sitting by a refrigerator. He feels lonely and rejected. His wife has left. The refrigerator is empty.

This man is guided by the dream worker to return to the dream kitchen. He first experiences the isolation as an icy feeling at the pit of his stomach, and a sense of emptiness. Through dreamwork transit he comes to identify with the refrigerator- and remembers his “icy” mother. He then recalls the moment when his mother left home to go back to school in another city and realizes that, since his wife will go back to school now that the kids have left, he is afraid of being left once again.

Dreams are More Easily Understood in Series

Dreams are more easily understood in series. You know a dream is related to a series by the similarities in symbol, metaphor, characterization, and action.

The meaning of a dream will not be found in a theory, but in the dream itself.

The unconscious not only liberates emotions through dreams, but seeks to bring them to the attention of the conscious mind in order to maintain mental and emotional stability through change in activity and/or character. (balance – homeostasis, yin,yang) What would be the opposite to the dream? If you are very happy in the dream, how are you sad in waking life? Meaning it could be a compensation dream – balancing the opposite that is going on in waking life.

Be practical to start with in your interpretations. Always look first for a lesson. What question is the dream asking?

Dreams come to guide and help, not to amuse. They direct your attention to errors of omission and commission and offer encouragement for decisions that are right for you. They also give us opportunities to pray for others and to help them bear their burdens.

Your Dreams are about YOU

Dreams are primarily about you – very occasionally they relate to family, friends, and world events.

A phenomenon was noted in the First World War that soldiers seldom dreamt of their experience on the front line. Military psychiatrists considered it a basic principle that a man should be pulled out of the front lines when he started dreaming too much of war scene, for that meant he no longer possessed any psychic defenses against the impressions from outside. This tells us that what we are dreaming about is slipping below our defenses which is why dreamwork is so powerful.

Remember that persistence is necessary to learn any new language; and dream symbols are the forgotten language of the unconscious. Much of dream interpretation is dream symbol translation – dream symbols that are personal and collective. Dreams can give us an objective perspective on what we are thinking we are experiencing in waking life which is often skewed.

Higher Self and lower self. The ideals, values and ethics of the Higher Self maybe giving direction to the weaknesses, addictions and vulnerabilities of the Lower Self.

Symbols of the Higher Self – look to the Major Arcana of the Tarot (archetypes).

Numbers in dreams – numerology.

Mandalas – symbols of the Self – the circle as a sign of wholeness, the sun, the moon, an ascending spiral, a halo.

Squares – balance of the material.

Past, Present and Future

Approaching objects denote the future, and receding objects the past.
Some psychologists suggest that the right side of a scene tends to relate to the future, and left side to the past. Other clues are of course age of buildings, style of dress, old things or old person, a date in herstory, or a scene from childhood.

Plato believed that the liver was the seat of dreams and in particular prophetic dreams were received through the liver.

It is a good idea to enter a dream at a point of low resistance- generally, an area in the dream where the dream-self feels comfortable- and move to a point of high resistance which is usually felt as discomfort. The dreamer first needs a sense of safety before she can enter into more alien psychological territory. This makes working with the dream in chronological order not ideal. If the narrative opens at a point of high resistance and ends in a safe place, it is better to work the dream backward.

In dreamwork we constantly modulate pressure in order to keep a balance between the imperative of the dreamwork to press deeper into the sensitive areas that repel consciousness and the need of the dreamer to feel safe.

Ask yourself, “What might the dream be blowing up 10 times its size in waking life?”

Beginning, middle and end shows the direction of the energy (e-motion is energy in motion).