This Sunday November 16, is the 2nd day of this year’s Natural Living Expo at the Best Western Royal Plaza Trade Center and Hotel, 181 Boston Post Rd West (Route 20 West) in Marlborough, MA.
There are over 200 exhibitors offering a most fascinating diversity of spiritual practices and gift items. Admission is $12 which also gives you access to many free work- shops.
I gave my work shop\, “Meditation and Dream Interpretation”, yesterday at 6pm.
I was very gratified that there was such a good turn-out considering it was the last session of a long day.
It is interesting to me that so many people are intrigued by dream interpretation in general and the combination of dream interpretation with meditation.
In last week’s post I addressed some of the general attitudes that are helpful as one begins to make the effort to gain a better understanding of the dreams they have at night. I also touched on the steps people can take to begin to remember more of their dreams.
This week’s post is for those people that do remember many of their dreams.
If you have a sequence of several dreams in the night just pick which ever dream is the most vivid or the most beautiful or the most unsettling and write the dream out.
Here is a basic perspective to keep in mind:
Write out your dream with as much detail as possible in a matter of fact way. But while you are doing this see if you can summon a sense of honoring both the dream and the effort you are making to write the dream out in detail. This sense of honoring the dream is offered as a way to show respect for the importance and the value you ascribe to the dream.
Here is a basic technique to employ:
While you are writing out the details of your dream pay close attention to whatever thoughts arise as associations to the details in the dream. Whatever images or thoughts pop-up, take the time to right them out but put them in parentheses. Continue writing out the rest of the dream.
You can come back to those details and associations in parentheses when you are ready to interpret the dream.
For examples:
I was walking towards the sand dunes that led to a beach (Horseneck Beach). I saw others in the dream and they were walking on the sand dunes in a way that will make erosion of the beach worse…
I see a young man coming toward me with a knife (looked like the curved dagger an Arab Sheikh has in the movie “Salmon Fishing on the Yemen”) (looks like the paring knife my former wife has owned since the time I met her 40 years ago to the present)
My former wife is in a large closet (Like the one in the house I grew up in only bigger) She is sorting through a large batch of photographs. (The Memoir she is writing)
I am visiting my home town and see one of the baseball fields (riding a bicycle similar to the one I road to baseball practice at age 13-15)
I see three very separate and very large solid glass figurines each in the shape of a bull ranging in size from 18 inches to 2.5 feet (Doctrine of the Trinity merged with the Bull imagery of Egypt and Greek Mythology) and I see a wise confident man in green (Muhammad) (Comparison of Christian Trinity with Muslim view of One God.)
I am fighting in a church (Norse Saga story of violent battle in a church from the days when they colonized Greenland) (Thirty Years War).
Writing out the dream will help you remember more details. As you write out the details, associations in your memory banks will be triggered and will pop-up in your mind. Between the basic story of the dream, the characteristics of the people and places in the dream, and the associations that come up from the dream; all this will give you a good basis to begin interpreting the dream.
After you finish this process, see if there is a specific emotional tone of the dream. If so make a short comment about whether the emotional tone was anxious, or embarrassed, of feeling exposed, or neutral, or happy, or aggressive, or deeply sad, or just plain confused.
Understanding what is the basic emotional tone and coloring of the dream gives you another perspective on the dream that will also help with the process of uncovering the meaning the dream has for you.
More next week about those dreams that are not so much emotional in nature but which may be built around an idea or a vivid surreal symbol.
Will Raymond Author of “The Simple Path of Holiness” and Host of Meditationpractice.com
will at meditation practice dot com (written out to limit spam)
774-232-0884