Part 1
Dreams as a Window to Your Inner
Selves
by
Hal Stone, Ph.D. & Sidra L.
Stone, Ph.D.
For us it is clear that there is in the universe, and within
each of us, a deeper intelligence that can be ignited as we
begin our journey of personal discovery. Once this intelligence
is activated it has the possibility of becoming an always-available
friend and teacher to us. And what a remarkable friend and teacher
it can be! With its help, we begin to make sense out of things
that were previously a mass of confusion. We experience meaning,
purpose, and direction in our personal lives that simply were
not there before. Our dreams begin to make sense to us and they
become an important part of our lives. New thoughts, new ways
of looking at things emerge.
As we plug into this newly developing intelligence, we begin
to experience the meaning and purpose that lie behind it. It
wants something from us. It drives us with inexorable power
and certainty toward a deeper understanding of our relationships
and ourselves. It replaces in importance many of the other concerns
in our lives. Our belief systems and the rules we have lived
by in the past are now open to examination and a deeper consideration.
We feel the purposive nature of this intelligence, we know that
it wants something from us, and that it is moving us in an entirely
new direction.
Our personal view is that this intelligence wishes us to become
all that we can be, to make use of everything that we brought
with us into this world. It wants us to embrace all of our selves
so that we can more fully enter into life and relationship and
learn to balance the remarkable array of energies that are within
us. It wants us to claim our full humanity.
It is a source of immense strength (and a relief, too, we might
add) to experience divinity as an integral part of one's partnering
relationship. Life in general, and relationship in particular,
can be pretty rough going at times. In their groundbreaking
book, Flesh and Spirit , Jack Zimmerman, Ph.D., and Jacquelyn
McCandless, M.D., write about "the third" in relationship.
They point out the need to always call in "the third"
so that divinity is present and available to us, not just for
our individual lives but also for our relationships. This third
is an important part of what makes relationship sacred.
What must we do to begin to connect to this divine intelligence?
Sometimes we do not have to do anything. Just beginning the
process of personal growth can activate this intelligence. Once
it is activated, it is there for us. We just have to know where
to look for it. Since there are specific ways in which this
intelligence manifests, there are also particular things that
we can do to support the connection to this divine intelligence
and to enhance the spiritual basis of the partnering process.
Let's now look at some of the things that you can do to deepen
your connection to yourself and to your partnering.
Perhaps the simplest, the most fascinating, and the most rewarding
place to begin is with dreams. Our dreams give us the most direct
experience of this deeper intelligence. They also bring us into
connection with our own spiritual reality, a reality that, in
our dreams, is untouched by the rules, feelings, and expectations
of others.
Your dreams can help you understand the amazing family of selves
that lives within you. Your dreams are remarkable friends; they
give you an objective, or unbiased, picture of how your selves
dance with each other and, we might add, dance with the selves
of your partner. Let's look at the dream process and see what
it can teach you about these selves.
We know that there are many useful ways of looking at dreams.
You may have studied dreams already and have your own interpretations.
The following is our own particular approach to dream work,
one that we have found extremely helpful over the years. As
you read this, remember that each of us has our own dream vocabulary,
so please be aware that yours may be a bit different from this
in some places.
There are some dream themes that are very common. We will
begin by looking at these and showing you how you might
(1) decode them and (2) how you can use the information
that they are bringing you .
Dreaming of being in a high place takes many forms. Sometimes
the dreamer is on top of a tall building or on a high mountaintop.
There is often a danger of falling, or at least there is
some sense that a person in this situation could fall. In
some of these dreams, the dreamer is in fact falling from
a high place.
When you are up high you are away from the earth. You might
be too identified with your mind or with spirituality which
indicates that either your rational mind or your spiritual
self is likely functioning as your primary self. You are
probably disconnected from earth and all that it represents.
This would mean that you disown your body, your feelings,
or your instinctual energies. Another way of looking at
this kind of dream is that people who are special, and who
disown the ordinary, are always high up. Their position
is precarious because whenever they stop being special,
they can fall down and they fear that when they fall down
they will become nothing.
We keep falling in our dreams because we continue to remain
too identified with our minds, our being special, or our
spiritual nature. So the unconscious shows us falling from
high places over and over again. It is basically showing
us where we are (up) and what we are missing (down). It
is as simple and clear as that. Carl Jung, founder of analytical
psychology, called this the compensatory principle of the
dream process because the dream is always balancing out
whatever we are identified with or whatever we disown.
In these dreams we are driving too fast or our car is out
of control. There is often an accident or a crash of some
kind.
Driving too fast is the classic dream of a pusher primary
self, one that is out of control. The crash stops us. For
example, Sonny, a very successful financier, dreams repetitively
for many years that he is driving on a freeway at high speeds
and his car crashes. This is an accurate picture of the
way he actually leads his life. He is always busy and never
slows down. After a number of years Sonny has a heart attack.
Pusher energy can be very dangerous and this amazing intelligence
within was sending him repeated warnings of this danger.
(His wife was also telling him he should slow down, but
that is another story.) If he had listened to his dream,
Sonny would have understood its warning and he would have
had the opportunity to separate from his pusher self before
he actually got sick.
The car image often gives us a general picture of how we
move through the world. If in a dream you are driving the
car you drove in college, then your general psychology now
is like it was then. If you are in a car and your father
is driving it, then your life is being run by your father
(either your real father, or the primary self in you that
resembles your father).
In these dreams, you are usually racing on a freeway. Again,
this is a pusher motif. You might find that, as you pay
attention to your dreams and you separate from your pusher,
you are now driving down country roads, or you have pulled
off the freeway to stop.
Dreaming that you are trying to walk but it feels like your
feet are in quicksand or sticky asphalt is another kind
of pusher dream. Here the dream is balancing, or compensating,
your primary self, the self that tries to push so hard all
the time. Dreams often try to balance our primary self in
this way. Here you are trying to hurry and you cannot. Your
feet are stuck. The harder you try to reach your destination,
the worse things get. Your dream is intent on getting the
message through to you. A variation of this dream is one
in which you are trying to catch a train or bus or ship
and, no matter how hard you try to make it on time, you
are too late.
Dreaming you are back in school or military service is a
very common dream. Generally it describes the fact that
we are living our life today the way we did when we were
in school or in the army. In these settings our lives were
not our own and we had to dance to a drumbeat that was not
our own. In these settings we had to do what was assigned
to us. It is very easy to fall into life patterns that are
psychologically very much like being in school or in the
army. This dream usually means that we are following a set
of rules and requirements that deny us our freedom. We have
no choice but are at the mercy of the rules that in this
case are usually the rules of a particularly demanding set
of primary selves.
A variation of this dream is being in prison or being locked
up in a concentration camp. These dreams reflect a loss
of personal freedom in our lives and often indicate a lack
of connection to our feelings. They usually come when we
are working too hard and life is becoming a prison.
The police represent control. Very often when the pusher
energy is out of control in our lives, we have dreams of
a police officer stopping us for a traffic violation. This
dream is also a compensatory dream. There is something in
your life that is out of control and your control side is
trying to help you regain control and, most likely, trying
to get you to slow down. These are warning dreams and you
need to learn to listen to them.
There are very many variations on the house dream. The image
of the home represents your personality and how it is operating
in the world. The house gives you a picture of how you are
living. Is there enough space? Is there enough light? Is
it cold? Is it magical? Do you have your own special space?
Dreaming of moving into a new home is connected to a major
change in personality. Many times when people are bringing
more choice into their lives, they dream of new and more
spacious houses.
Sometimes people dream that they are going down into the
basement where they feel fearful. In this case they are
moving more deeply into the unconscious as they explore
new aspects of themselves. Discovering new rooms or new
treasures in a house is learning about new parts of yourself.
Dreaming of living in a Victorian-type home might be related
to having a set of primary selves that is based on Victorian
values.
Being chased by dangerous people or things is one of the most
common types of dreams. Whatever is chasing you in your dreams
is essentially based on what you are disowning. Many people
disown their instinctual energies. They are afraid of their
anger, their sexuality, and their emotions. So in their dreams
they are chased by wild animals or by dangerous men who want
to kill them or have sexual relations with them. By examining
what is after you in your dreams, you have immediate access
to discovering your disowned selves!
Sometimes these disowned selves can represent parts of ourselves
other than our instinctual energies. If you are a pusher type
bent on success then you may find yourself afraid of people
who are not busy, like unemployed street people, people in
hammocks, or "ladies who lunch." We saw a woman
once who dreamed a dragon was chasing her. She crossed a small
body of water and there the dragon stopped and became a book.
She was a woman who had disowned the serious use of her mind
and that became the dragon that was after her. A few months
after this dream she enrolled in school and ultimately pursued
a professional career.
The unconscious needs a way to describe change in our personality
development. The image of people giving birth to babies is
a wonderful way to describe the development of new ideas,
new feelings, and new ways of being in the world.
Conversely, the image of someone dying is a way of describing
the end of a certain cycle, the end of a certain way of thinking
or feeling or being in the world. There is a Buddhist saying
that life is a thousand births and a thousand deaths and when
we look at the frequency of the birth and death motif in dreams,
we can certainly see how this is true.
If you dream that you die it is generally a time of great
change in your life. In these situations you are usually shifting
away from your primary self system. It is like a death. The
old you is dying and a new you will be born.
There are a wide variety of cataclysmic dreams. These suggest
that there is a big change coming. Here are some of them.
There is a huge earthquake and you know that it is the end
of the world. It is World War III and you know that the world
is coming to an end. There is a gigantic tidal wave that is
going to destroy everything.
In most of these dreams the dreamer is going to die. Keep
in mind that the dreamer in the dream is generally one of
your primary selves. Dreaming of a tidal wave may suggest
that your disowned emotional selves are getting ready to overwhelm
your rational, controlled primary self. An earthquake means
that your primary self that had everything in order is about
to be overturned.
This is also a very common kind of dream. To make sense out
of it we have to determine the primary self of the dreamer.
If someone is a very concrete thinker and a practical person
with a strong attention to detail, then the dream reflects
a readiness to move into his or her intuition, into the world
of the imagination, and, very possibly, into the spiritual
sphere.
If, on the other hand, the dreamer is very much identified
with intuition and spirituality, then the dream can reflect
an overidentification with intuition and the spiritual world.
It means that the dreamer is always up in the air and does
not have his or her feet on the ground.
Sometimes you are being chased in a dream or a situation is
extremely emotional and then you jump up and start to fly.
This would be a reflection of escaping into fantasy to escape
a situation that is too difficult to handle on a psychological
level.
For more on themes and symbols in dreams, and how you can
use their wisdom in your life, check out our videos and audios
in The Voice Dialogue Series
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