Royce’s random ever-changing thoughts, tips, trips unsubstantiated rumors, absolutely true facts and suggestions about dreams…
(please know that these “tips” are from my many years of mindful thinking, mindless contemplation, hours of reading, intimate conversations with countless beings, consultations with my dream mentor and deep friend, the late Dr. Jeremy Taylor, and so many, many others….)
Dreams are “always” bare, naked and in-the-raw…there are no other kinds…that is why they are, to our waking life logic, so bizarre.
“the dream never lies…” Jeremy Taylor (www.jeremytaylor.com)
Bare, naked dreams may be too much for the conscious/ego self to remember, the waking self may not be ready for the full truth and/or we may be too embarrassed to remember the “real dream…”
The “dream maker” does not care about the rules of the waking world…about being appropriate, or being careful to censor images, thoughts, actions or anything else that makes the waking world function as it does…the “dream maker” will use all images necessary, break any waking life rule to seek health, wholeness, healing and wisdom for the dreamer…
Why share dreams with trusted others? You and I are not objective about ourselves, ever…that is an illusion…
“Just because it is true, does not mean it is not a projection…and just because it is a projection, does not mean it is not true…” (Jeremy Taylor)
Dreams always address all levels of our being….emotional, spiritual, health, relational…and tap into the collective consciousness of the world, commenting and trying to help us in the larger, universal world.
One level of some dreams may be waking-life memories…
Dreams are not “magic”, in that dreams rarely, literally tell us what to do…like, who to marry, where we should move, what jobs to take…our wounded inner, maybe unconscious selves may want an “outside authority”, like a super-parent,
God, a belief system or ideology, etc., to tell us what to do…but dreams generally don’t speak that way.
Dreams offer options of the choices we have in waking life, choices we may not be aware of…
Dreams sometimes offer “time-markers” of our life…like, where we have been at certain ages in our development, or life experiences and memories of a certain time period and compare where we have been with where we are going.
Dreams sometimes offer “worst-case scenarios” of what might happen in our waking life to assist us in not being caught off-guard.
The older, more primitive, lower regions of our brain “wouldn’t know a dream if it saw one!”
Remember, our brainstem, amygdala and other “lower regions” of our brain, have evolved to help us survive as a species…and do not know the difference between a genuine waking-life saber-toothed tiger chasing us and a dream of the same! The goal of that part of our brain is to help us ‘fight, flight or freeze’ to assist in our survival. Yet, that part of our brain does not “know” we are dreaming. That is why our limbic system reacts to what we are dreaming, why we are terrified, or have a racing heart, or any other physical reaction, while we are dreaming.
Feelings in dreams are not as important as the feelings want us to believe. Feelings are from the “older” brain and are designed to help us survive in the waking world. Over emphasis on feelings in dreams is a huge error many of us make as we try to understand our dreams. It is an error many psychotherapists, dream analysts and others make as well. Feelings are so powerful that they override the deeper and more profound messages in our dreams. We need to “notice” and respect our dream feelings, but not treat them as the main message.
Some dreams are outrageous! And…we remember them! How crafty of our dream-maker…
Sensuality, sexuality, spirituality in dreams are from the same energy. This is often about our longing and depth, yearning for connection, longing for oneness, union w/ the Other, w/ the deeper, inner being, the self… And, as is true in the waking world, there are many forms of sensuality, sexuality, spirituality.
We do not know where any dream will take us, until we explore the dream. Each one of us in a dream group who offers a dream will have the grace-given, no questions asked option to stop exploring a dream if the dream goes into a place
that the dreamer is not yet ready to go.
When a dream is shared, the dream automatically becomes a dream for the community…
What does the dream want of you, your community, your world?
Pay attention to puns, humor, symbols…dreams love using these methods to get
our attention and to help us see ourselves from a different perspective.
Notice the “shadow” images in dreams…the parts of our dreams that show darkness. There may be places where we are unconscious and can’t see yet.
We have “dark shadow” projections and “light shadow” projections.
“Light shadow” may be places in us that are so positive, so full of light, and we project them, in the dream, onto others, still not owning those projections w/in us, about us. Oftentimes we see the “light shadow” in people we admire. These qualities are in us, yet we see them in the Other.
As we work with dreams with others, be adventurous, bold, playful, humorous.
Own your own projections…do your best to use the word “I”, rather than “you”.
What about “telepathy” and “fore-knowing” in dreams? Do dreams project or predict the future? Obviously, this is a controversial area and many dreamers have strong divergent opinions. I believe that dreams show how time (past,
present and future) “folds” in on itself, that the past, present and future “folds” and blends. For me, dreams are powerful metaphors and it does not necessarily matter if a dream is speaking about the future or the past. Metaphors are not
literal, yet, metaphors have literal meaning.
Wonder about your waking world influences on your dreams…like, what has happened in the days or weeks before that might be influencing your dreams?
What were your “pre-sleep” and pre-dream thoughts?
As you journal your dreams, you may notice recurring themes.
Recurring dreams…what messages are you not getting and the dream maker is needing to repeat the dreams?
As a gift of compassion and grace to each other in dream groups, we will all offer each other, and especially to anyone sharing a dream, privacy and confidentiality of the dream. We are free to talk about ourselves and what we have learned from the dream. We agree to not talk about a specific person, other than ourselves.
“Appropriate Literalism” – sometimes the energy of “dream death” (profound psycho-spiritual growth & change) is SO strong that it constellates up in waking life experiences & events as synchronicities. (Jeremy Taylor, 10/2014 www.jeremytaylor.com)
