5 Ways Spending Time with your Dreams Improves your Life.
{Photo: thedreamtribe.com}
By Crystal Hoffman.
I’m gripping a cobra by the neck…again. It wrenches its mouth around to try to bite my hand.
I can’t put it down or pass it off to anyone else, because it would surely bite the minute I loosen my grip — this is a very pissed-off cobra. I’m looking at a Yoga schedule on the wall, and notice that I’m due to teach a class in ten minutes.
I quickly erase “Vinyasa Power Flow” and write “Yoga for Avoiding Cobra Bites,” because it is the only class that I can think of teaching considering my situation.
This is my primary recurring dream. I go about my basic day-to-day dream tasks: book-thievery, dead-friend-wrestling matches, bi-located camping, all while carrying a cobra about by the neck.
It took me two years after this dream to finally understand on a cosmic/root level what/who the cobra is — I had to accomplish lucidity in the dream world, recognition of the cobra in my daily life (both symbolically and tangibly), and discernment of the voices beyond myself that could control the cobra, such as Shiva, who came to me twice in erotic dreams around the time that I learned to turn the cobra into a balloon and fly with it.
After all this, I’m finally resolving my issues with accepting my power, and my place amidst the cycles of death and rebirth in my waking life.
You may be thinking, “Control issues, pshaw! I know I have them. I don’t need to spend precious morning hours having sex with Shiva in order to know that.”
However, even if the idea of consummation with gods doesn’t titillate you, I beg your leave to let me convince you otherwise. And If I can’t, perhaps Carl Jung can convince you to read on.
In Liber Primus of The Red Book, he wrote, “Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?… Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language.”
1. Your sleep becomes more exciting. You’ve just been flying through great gold and glass cathedrals, trying to peel back the ceiling, because you know there is something greater on the other side.
You’ve just been trudging through the ruins surrounded by swamp land with your mother, trying to remember which way the path goes — you swear there used to be a path here.
You’ve just been circling a giant rope web between men and women in straitjackets in an attempt to avoid the clutches of a big-bellied god of desire. You’re panting, you’re displaced, you’re maybe a little confused. You smile, it has all been a dream.
Whether or not at this point you reach for a notebook to write them down, close your eyes and meditate upon them, or tell them to your partner, it doesn’t really matter.
These, as your first thoughts of the day, have to be more exciting than, “My neck is cramped,” “I need coffee,” or “What should I should I wear today?”
Simple acknowledgement of the adventure, beauty, and even chaos of your dreams, is a gift in and of itself that should not be undervalued. With the appreciation that you develop for your dreams will come understanding and clarity. And your conscious mind will slowly move from simple appreciation to taking a greater part in them.
2. You learn to read codes that your subconscious/higher self leaves for you. As you pay attention to your dreams, you begin to realize the effect that certain images, symbols, animals, colors, patterns, places, situations have on you in your dream world.
These are things that can serve as guides to you in your daily life. Think of them as arrows, stop or proceed with caution signs, or affirmations that you are on the right road. These are tools from your higher self to help you develop your intuition and your heart intelligence.
No one else can help with developing this knowing for you, because as you learn to read these codes, you are granted a gift in your waking life: you begin to feel any resistance to these codes forming a pattern. You take note of your blind spots and your chaos.
You may be able to also see what you are avoiding making sense of in your dreams.
How do you feel when the snake appears? What were you doing when all the doors burst open? Who were you running from when you started to fly?
By meditating on how these dreams make you feel, you can find resonance in your daily life. At what point in conversations with your partner do you blank out? When are you distracted when trying to complete a project? Where do you always lose your house key?
3. You develop tools for healing wounds that you didn’t even know you had. As you crack these codes and unravel these patterns, you simultaneously begin to acquire the tools to deal with your anxieties, your irrational fears (and they’re all irrational), as you finally begin to understand their roots.
Psychologists have long recognized that dreams are a place where we “trial run” ways to deal with stresses or dangers in our life.
“What would happen if we forgot to do our homework and didn’t get dressed for class one day? Oh, whew, wasn’t all that bad, after all.”
However, if we pay attention to these dreams, we can also interpret these scenes as symbolic of our more deeply rooted fears and desires. We may then develop methods for clearing or actualizing them.
Without these dreams, you may have never realized that you always feel like an impostor in professional situations, are constantly running from opportunities to wield authority, or that you feel shameful when you enter into intimate situations instead of feeling vulnerable.
Where is your dream self telling you these anxieties started? Looking into the wound and the darkness of our being is the first step towards healing and discovery of who we are — and it is the hardest one to make.
This is why we often need our subconscious/dream selves to make it for us. But once we look in, it takes our conscious mind to find the antidote. Of course, it is the search itself that is the healing.
4. You come to terms with your own cycles and begin to learn to ride your own waves of energy. Through the work of peering into, mapping out, and uprooting our wounds, we learn that there are seasons for everything.
And as you pay attention to your personal cycles, you bring to learn when to rest, when to sow, when to reap, when to give in, when to fight, when to indulge, when to fast, and so on and so forth. Your horoscope will only get you so far. Who better to listen to for advice than your higher self?
As you begin to sort through the codes, the patterns, and get in touch with your own inner language, or dream speak, it becomes easier to see and, more appropriately, feel your inner seasons changing.
As you do this, you will be able to be more productive, less triggered, more certain in your decisions.
5. You are more able to create, as you’ve tapped into your true source of creativity. Though one of their highest functions is to act as codes designed to help you better navigate your life, your dreams are also there as images, stories, and rhythms in and of themselves. Meaning that they exist on a very real level, and should be allowed to exist in your conscious mind and in the world at large through you.
Paint them. Create stories around them. Sing about them.
In doing so, you will find that your life and your dream world blend together quite nicely and the product may serve as a key or inspiration for others.
We’re dreaming this together, after all.
*****
Crystal Hoffman is an instructor in the English Department of the University of Pittsburgh, a Yogini (Kundalini, Bikram, Vinyasa) of ten years, an avid traveler and adventurer (lived twice in a war zone), a performance artist, and a sketch comedian. Her poetry has been published widely online and in print, and she has presented scholarships on women and spirituality in the turn-of-the-century avant-garde movements at national conferences. She spent five months walking alone across the country and writing poetry for strangers this past year. You can follow her adventures at Poetry Pilgrim and CrystalJeanHoffman.com.
*****
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