If you spend a night at Cottarton, you can be sure that the
first thing that Amber will ask you in the morning is not whether you slept
well. Most people sleep soundly here. But, “Did you have a dream?” If you did,
then we’ll sit down and talk about it. If you didn’t, then why not??
On June 8 we’re holding a workshop on dreams and dream
interpretation at Cottarton.
We take dreams seriously, even if our culture tends to
ignore them. How often do you hear someone say, “It was only a dream”
Emphasis on only meaning fictional, made up. Untrue. Or we point to
someone we regard as totally unrealistic, out of touch with the real
world and say about them, “She’s a dreamer.”
“Dream on!” “He dreamed it up”. “People
who dream need their heads examined.”
In our world,
dreaming has certainly got a bad rap. Like seeing UFO's, it’s something that respectable people
don’t do. You wouldn't ask a candidate for a job whether he is a good
dreamer and then hire him based on that strength. Unless his job was to sleep
on beds, to advertise them as giving you a good night’s sleep. People who pay
attention to their dreams certainly ought to be doing something more productive
with their time.
Chagall: Time is a River without Banks
Most psychiatrists also share this attitude toward dreams.
If you’re bluesy or you hear voices, the last thing a psychiatrist wants to discuss with you is
your dreams. They wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway. More and more, modern
psychiatry has become wedded with neurology and pharmacology. In the sixties we used to say,
“It’s all in the mind” but these days the psychiatric mantram is “It’s all in the brain”.
Dreams are caused by misfiring of neurons, bad connections. They're a result of something
electrical gone haywire; of no diagnostic use. Yet all the brain scans, electrical traces and other brain studies have yet to help us understand
ourselves: who we are and what we need to be doing.
Is the brain good for anything other than frying?
Is the brain good for anything other than frying?
It wasn’t always that way. In the Bible, dreams were the way
that God communicated with people. Remember Jacob’s ladder, Pharoah’s dreams,
interpreted by Joseph, the dream of the three wise men, Pilate’s wife. In those days dreaming
was serious business . Not only people had dreams but they acted on them.
The few times that they didn’t, resulted in misfortune. Didn't Caesar ignore Calpurnia's mightmare, go to the senate and get assassinated?
Blake: Jacob's Ladder
Each morning Amber and I discuss our dreams from the
previous night. At times the meaning is plain. You’re in a car moving too fast,
with no brakes. Of course, you need to slow down in your real life. But more often we’re faced
with a language that initially makes no sense to us. A dinosaur pulls a bus,
changes into a gangly man called, Ronnie. A shark about to swallow you turns
into a lion. It’s not that you’re crazy, but your deepest self is trying to
engage you in conversation. Unfortunately your Self doesn’t speak English. It uses the only language it knows, the language
of the night.
Sometimes in a dream we fly to far away places, speak to
friends who have died, visit exotic localities. And different times, even the
future. I’ve had a few dreams that certainly foreshadowed events to come.
Many people say that they don’t dream. I suspect that
dreaming is like a muscle that needs to be exercised. Pay attention to the few
dreams you remember and you’ll find that more will come. The more you
correspond with a friend, the more that friend will be inclined to write to you. Interpret dreams and you’ll discover vast spaces inside you that you didn’t know were there.
And the adventures? Flying is one of them. If you want to fly like Superman or exercise a super-power,
try it out in a dream.
