Flash of Spirit

If you find yourself in a survival job that seems to have nothing to do with your gifts, nothing to do with who you really are, consider this.

The more crazily out-of-whack your job is, the more likely it is that you are there by design. You may be learning a single invaluable skill that will help you bridge into your true work, or you may be repeatedly “drafted” by circumstance to perform functions that are not part of your job description, but which are aligned with your true calling.

I once labored in vain to master a book-keeping system in a medical office. I had a terrible time because math is not my strongest skill. That job was fairly short lived, and there was little about it that I celebrated or appreciated. Years later, I was hired to tutor a group of women who wanted to work in healthcare offices. These women had little education, little confidence, and were doubtful of completing their training. I was brought in because of some counseling skills as well as my background in a medical office. Those 18 women, (some of whom were dealing with domestic violence at home) all graduated successfully and wept with joy and disbelief that they made it through their training. I realized then, that my struggles with the book-keeping job had nothing to do with book-keeping, and instead had occurred simply so that I might, years later, help those 18 women.

Many people who are now doing work they love will tell you that part of what made it possible were the “off road” activities that they learned during years of survival jobs. The newsletter they were suckered into editing, the new employees they were forced to train because no one else could be bothered, the negotiations between different personality types, the events they planned, the research they performed: all little things they “fell” into or were dragged into, during which they discovered their true gifts.

One woman worked in a quirky gift store that also sold exotic foods. She began catering on the side, the catering got “out of hand” and she began to cook for restaurants, and then opened her own little place. She is now an extremely wealthy and successful woman, running a well-known restaurant, doing what she loves. It all started when she was a clerk in that funky store.

Wherever you are, your talents are there too. People will respond to your gifts if you tinker around with them and help where you can. Many people feel they are on the wrong track because they are working in a bill-paying job and not following their passion. But your passion is following you! Take on the extra work, do the newsletter, spruce up the website, cater the party, help the new guy. The Universe has seeded your environment with threads that lead right into your destiny, regardless of where you are or how much you have been resenting it.

Follow the destiny threads, try to love your job, love your opportunities. Have faith that it is all happening for a reason and keep moving toward your passion, because without question, it is moving through you.

Have you wondered why there is so much rough stuff in your dreams?

Our dreams use the physical body to depict psychic and emotional events. We tend to abandon the protracted analysis of day and just pounce on the person who bugs us. Similarly, if you are experiencing attack energy, such as put-downs, criticism or jealousy, you may well dream of violent attack in your dreams.

When we are under attack, (particularly by someone close to us) that sense of assault is devastating and confusing. Many spouses feel free to put down their mates, and many parents see nothing wrong with criticizing and denigrating their children. This pattern is so prevalent that it is seldom recognized or discussed. However, in dreams, the psychic violence experienced is fleshed out and shown as bodily harm, shocking us into remembering the scene and  causing us to wonder what caused such horrors to appear.

Blood Loss: Many clients report dreams of being wounded and losing a great deal of blood. They even awaken in the morning feeling woozy and tired, as if the blood loss had been real. Blood loss dreams can reflect a sense of being drained by a negative person, a difficult experience, or a protracted conflict. The blood loss seems to mimic how we can feel drained of all vitality and spirit when we are under attack or bombarded by someone who endlessly draws upon our strength.

Wounds to Hands: Women are particularly prone to dreams of wounding to their hands when they are being restricted (even in subtle ways) from expression of their authentic gifts.  When someone is “dismantling” your gifts and separating you from your enthusiasm, you may dream of some wound or devastation happening to your hands.

Amputation: When a part of you is severed in a dream, this is a shocking signal that something truly unwholesome is happening. While the hands and arms can represent our ability to create and connect with the world, our legs and feet can reflect our power to feel grounded in life, to support ourselves, and to be free to come and go.

Responding to Warnings: Every dream has the potential to help us become more awake in our lives, and to handle the challenges we face more effectively. If you dream of being attacked or wounded, your first task is to take the implications of the dream seriously. This is not a time to panic or over-react, it is a time to use the dream to validate the truth you already know on some level.

Resources for Understanding: If you are living under some sort of verbal or emotional assault, you already know the effects, and may have spent a great deal of time trying to determine the truth of the situation. I recommend the work of the pioneering author and speaker, Patricia Evans, who has written expensively on the topic of verbal abuse, and its corrosive effects.

If you are not in a relationship, but are having dreams that reflect a kind of attack energy in your life, you may want to read Evan’s book: Controlling People which gives vivid and simple examples of how people subtly manipulate, define and control others in subtle and socially routine ways.

Remain Hopeful: Though this is a dark topic, understanding emotional assault is critical to being able to avoid it and to maintain strong boundaries, particularly if you are in the helping professions, if you are an empathic personality, or if you have difficult personalities in your immediate circle of family and friends. Use your dreams as detection devices, like psychic evidence, to help you validate your feelings and know when it is time to shore up your boundaries and take better care of yourself. Those who are working on the side of good, must also make sure to take excellent care of themselves.

There is a process I’ve been using and teaching for a of couple decades now, with wonderful results. Although not all of us believe in angels, or even have the slightest interest in them, it seems to be extremely healing and freeing with or without belief.

Overview: The process of writing to the angel who protects and guides someone is drawn from an old Unity Christian teaching; yet it also draws upon the tradition of shamanism to some degree, as well as the findings of narrative therapy and acts of forgiveness. The process can help you to find peace, closure, forgiveness, expression of your truth and most importantly it will lift the tangle of emotions and conflict from your heart.

The Person: Is there someone with whom you have had conflict, become estranged, had a misunderstanding or ultimately had to drop from your life? Perhaps there is someone who crossed over before you could work things out, and instead of feeling freed, you now feel burdened by that lack of communication. If there is someone that you just haven’t been able to iron things out with, yet still feel a push and pull over the situation, that would be an ideal person to choose for this process.

The Angel: The concept of this process is that you can write a letter to the angel who watches over the person with whom you feel conflict or pain; particularly if you cannot otherwise communicate with that person for any reason.

Ask the angel to convey the essence of your message and to help release the person and the situation into healing, wholeness, forgiveness and the evolution of good for all. If you feel silly writing to an angel, you may feel you can write to the guides or to the soul of the person in question.

Typically, if you write to an angel, you will be coming from a higher vibration, a soulful place in yourself, and will not be drawn to write a litany of complaints, but rather truly express your wish for closure and release for all concerned. You may even be able to express your gratitude for the lessons learned and the adventures experienced.

The Letter: The writing of your letter and the “sending” of it are spiritual and psychological processes. The writing of the letter should be done with a certain innocence and reverence. You may well feel the beginning of a new peace and lightness as you write, many do.

The Ritual: Begin your letter: “To the angel of _____,” or “To the soul of _____,” I ask the spiritual favor that you convey the essence of my truth to _____.  Please help _____ to realize that he is forgiven and can go on with no ill will between us.”  Speak from your heart and say what you need to say or acknowledge, asking that it be transmitted spiritually to the person in question, with no harm to anyone, and for only good.

When you have said your peace, (literally) express your appreciation for the help in the delivery of this communication and close the letter. You may want to sit in the stillness of your peace for a while. When you feel ready, the next portion of the ritual involves “sending” the letter spiritually. The easiest way is to burn the letter. You may want to release the ashes over running water, consciously sending it into the atmosphere. Alternatively, some wish to bury the ashes in a beautiful spot, perhaps including some cornmeal to symbolize the nourishment of experience, or with seeds, to symbolize the closure of the past and the fertility of the future. You can come up with any ritual of spiritual release you wish; it is the intention and the beauty of your ritual that matter.

Expectations: Many students have told me that they carried out this exercise to please me, with some embarrassment and self consciousness. Yet when they moved through the process, they immediately felt so much better, freer, happier and more hopeful that it stunned them. Many followed suit by writing more of these letters, clearing the list of people for whom they held hard feelings. One woman wrote an angel letter each night for 50 nights. She found that during this time, she was accepted into graduate school, she paid off her debt, and she began dating a new and very kind individual. While she could not directly attribute these changes to the letters, she said something fresh and hopeful was allowed to blossom in her as she released the past and no longer ruminated on what she had held as “wrongs” done to her.

Take this beautiful teaching and use it to clear your mind and heal your heart. Sometimes an act of simplicity is far more powerful than the cutting edge of cynicism we assume when we have been hurt or disappointed. I wish you peace and power as you move forward in your journey.

One of the characteristics of intuition is that it often arises whole into our experience. Whether your style is to hear a voice, experience a thought bursting into your mind, get an emotional reaction, or have a physical feeling—intuition comes with no explanation, no apology and no strings attached. It can seem sometimes that a full blown knowing, or truth has been inserted into your awareness or has arrived into your heart carried by the wind. If you dismiss the knowing, it will go away briefly, but then return again, very much in the original form. It is like a signal or a sign—almost like a flashcard from the Universe. Intuitive signals tend to be complete, whole, and get to the point.

Worry, on the other hand, leaks all over the place in our thoughts, moving in a circle, triggering inner arguments and fantasies. Worry triggers anxiety and moves like a fast growing vine in the wilds of the imagination. It has favorite stopping points: our worst fears, and our “what if…” scenarios. The quality of worry is circular, spreading, irrational; fueled by catastrophic examples that represent melodramatic improbabilities.

Intuition validation: If you get what you believe is an intuitive impression (which is not about emergency safety) then get quiet and clear your thoughts briefly. Address the topic in question again. If you are receiving an intuitive signal, you should notice that the same knowing pops into your experience yet again, whole, complete and without doubt. Make note of the quality of your signal, the date and time. If it is practical and benign (harming no one), act on your signal and accept it.

Intuitive signals return to your awareness when you contemplate the topic in question, and they contain their conclusions when they come to you. Worry hijacks your energy and takes you on a wild roller-coaster ride that never arrives at any destination. Keep this simple distinction in mind for future reference and it may help you to claim the nuggets of wisdom when they pop in!

THE MYSTERY OF LOST ITEMS

In our dreams we search for things we have lost or forgotten. Some of us search for our cars, having misplaced them through carelessness or a bizarre parking snafu. Women discover they have dashed off to the next adventure and left their purse behind; then they double back, heart pounding with suspense, hoping against hope that they will find the missing purse right where they left it.

In some dreams there has been a mysterious theft: a laptop, a favorite pen, a pair of eyeglasses, a wedding ring or even a beloved pet has been taken. The rest of the dream revolves around actions taken to trace the missing item and hopefully recover it intact.

BROAD IMPLICATIONS:  The missing item can be emblematic of some energy, some function or facet of the self that has gone missing in action. We obsess and struggle in these dreams with far more zeal and determination than the item might objectively warrant, precisely because the purpose of the journey is a kind of soul retrieval. The blocked writer must recover her laptop, the heartbroken lover must recover her purse (her sense of independent identity), the urban shaman must locate her special eyeglasses which will permit her a large enough view of life to accept her calling and follow it.

KEYS RECOVERED:  The dreaming mind, so closely attuned to the heroic journey of life, provides us with empowering epics in which we strive to recover what we have lost, or what we have never before dared to believe we possessed. The mind is transmitting wisdom to us through these dreams of recovery. One wisdom message is this: The plot for this chapter of your life is more important than you realize, it is one of redeeming something sacred in yourself that was laid aside.

 The second wisdom message is that of simplicity and nearness. We typically do not take off in search of the Holy Grail; rather we have a great adventure searching for our car keys. This is because individual talent, giftedness and destiny are already sitting on our desks, waiting for us in our coat pockets, or storage compartments. We already have our brilliance, our assignments, our purpose, we simply have lost track of it. When we become willing to search, interested, awakened to meaning, we find the key to the puzzle was literally always close at hand, and probably long overlooked because it was so modest and familiar.

The third wisdom message is that of miraculous timing. When these dreams of search and recovery begin appearing, it is the spirit of life itself nudging us to awaken to the rhythm of the miraculous in our lives. At any moment, we can make a choice, even and perhaps especially a tiny one, of such quality and purity that it sets in motion a symphony of circumstances. Everything can change, as it does in a dream, when we pick up the threads of our purpose and wonder why we did not see them before. I believe that dreams shift abruptly and strangely not merely because of our brains, our sleep patterns and our neurons, but also because this is somehow the way life really works. We are in some part at the point of power in every moment, and the choice as well as the grace and goodwill with which we make each choice, matters tremendously and influences which doors may then open.

THE YOGA OF CHOICE:  Whether you are searching for a clean bathroom, your missing car, the diamond in your ring, or for something else, consider whether the dream item mirrors an important energy in your life, missing in the fray or simply overlooked for too long. You have only to acknowledge its loss, to be willing to search for it and retrieve it, and to grant yourself permission to have it in your life again. These are choices of willingness, not of demand or control, not of the ego but of the spirit. These choices, in dreams and in waking life, are one form of magic that truly unlocks our stuck places and helps us open to life.

Even if we do not quite know what is going on, what will happen next, or what we ought to do, we can meet our uncertainty with the intention to do the best we can, with a kind of friendly Beginner’s Mind. This goodness and honesty will go a long way to place us in harmony with our lost bits, and to vibrate them back to us, not tarnished by their storage, but oddly better than ever before. Our dreams are encouraging us to pick up the sparkling jewels in our untidy lives, to let go of trying to endlessly strategize, control and outguess our stories.

Carry your gentleness in one hand and your courage in the other as you discover what seemed to be lost, but truly has always been with you. Look for the poetry in your dreams as well as your days, and you will find it more beautifully wrought than you could have imagined!

You may already know the power of asking for dreams to address a specific problem or mystery in your life. As you drift off to sleep, request dreams to help you make a decision, to reveal what you most need to know about a question in your life, or to help you understand why your thoughts and feelings may be at odds. The technique has been used for decades (if not centuries) and many people refer to the process as Dream Incubation. Think your request silently, like a mantra or a prayer as you drift off to sleep, and make a concerted effort to jot down what you remember about your dreams when you awaken.

Another form of dream incubation that I recommend frequently is what I call Affirmative Dreaming. The process is the same, asking for dreams to meet your question or problem or need during the night, but instead of asking for a topic to be addressed, you simply choose an affirmation that gives you a sense of strength, certainty, or peace. As you drift to sleep, silently repeat your short affirmation – rather like a prayer or mantra – to match the inhalation and exhalation of your breathing. Let your affirmation saturate your consciousness and your body, so that as you slip into the sleep state, your have potentiated your acceptance of the truth of your affirmation. Intend that your dreams will then match the affirmation and help to infuse you with the quality and vibration of the truth you’ve been repeating.

Over the years, this has proven one of the most effective, healing and transformative techniques I’ve ever used, and my students report it is extremely healing and soothing for them as well. Some people dealing with the aftermath of trauma or loss, as well as clients who are trapped in “busy” minds, say this affirmative dreaming tool has helped them when few others things could.

Make sure your affirmation is short, and can be recited silently to match your breathing. If you have a long affirmation you have grown to love, you may wish to take simply the first line, or the most compelling line and use it alone as you drift to sleep. If you are struggling with an ongoing painful issue, you may be soothed and strengthened by working with a few different affirmations, finding some more penetrating and effective at catalyzing healing dreams than others. This technique also has the added power of working well regardless of whether you are able to capture your dream memories. If you intend that your dreams will carry energy into your being and into your life, then they can and will.

No matter what you are dealing with, or how weary you may be of your troubles, this process can be a helpful friend with far-reaching and immediate effects. One of my favorite statements for affirmative dreaming is this old saying: “I bless this situation, and this situation blesses me.” That way, I am not aroused or agitated by the specific details of the situation, I can focus on the mysterious way that, if we grant spiritual permission, the blessing behind the situation can emerge and come forth into our experience.

Teaching dreams are my favorite kind of dream. They illustrate a principle, provide an answer or simply encourage us on our path. Many of the techniques and ideas I share with students and clients began through a teaching dream that made something click or showed me a different perspective.

One such dream was of a woman who was trying to forgive someone who had wronged her. In the dream, I watched from a separate vantage point as the woman prayed, affirmed and meditated. She kept repeating that she forgave the person for this, that, and the other thing. In the way of dreams, I observed that energetically, each time she stated her forgiveness, she added to a bridge that stretched from her painful past into her more open future. Everything she said, felt, or thought during this process helped to build this bridge. The implication in the dream was that when she completed her process around the forgiveness, the bridge too would be finished and she would cross it into a chapter of her life when she was no longer encumbered by the wounding she had experienced.

I awoke from this dream very moved and also stirred by it. I had always considered forgiveness to be as worthy and as unappealing as a stalk of celery. Yes the fiber is good for you, but the virtue hardly seems worth the effort of chewing all that sinew.  The dream implied that forgiveness is more than just letting go of hard feelings, it is about freeing and coalescing energies adhered to an old wound so that we can take them forward.

Constructive Forgiveness: Being a product of my time (goal oriented) and my education (a thinker), I loved the idea of forgiveness as a creative process, rather than the traditional view of something spiritually “good.” Since this dream, I’ve applied the process of forgiveness a great deal in my own life, and have shared this idea with students and clients as well. If the notion of forgiveness or transition is coming up for you now, here are two techniques that have been enjoyable, effective and empowering.

Talk Turkey:  One thing that kept me on grouchy terms with forgiveness for years was the namby-pamby way you’re expected to go about it (or so I thought.) If someone has hurt you, it just doesn’t feel right to wax eloquent about the soulfulness of the experience and how it is all okay. A simple technique for staying authentic yet getting the job done is to keep it informal and speak from what you experienced. “I forgive Bob for being a complete dunderhead.” “I forgive Lucy for being so shallow.” “I forgive Rachel for getting on my nerves so much.” If you include language that expresses your truth, even as you forgive the person, it relieves the oppressiveness of the process. Do this with the person or situation that wounded you, and list and forgive all the small, mean, snarky, and varied things. As you do this, you will literally feel your heart grow light. I’m not saying that more traditional approaches to forgiveness are without value, but if you feel you need to get cracking with this process and can’t summon up a rosy glow about it, this is a great place to start.

Validation by Proxy: The second technique is something I call validation by proxy. The notion is that spiritually, we are all one, and so the words of healing you say on behalf of another can heal both you, and the one for whom you speak. This has nothing to do with controlling another person, it’s about getting the sticky places out of your spirit, by validating yourself….as that person.

One of the biggest reasons we stay glued to a painful experience or relationship or memory is because we are holding out, (holding on), until we get someone to validate us. If someone hurt you, and did so in a way that illustrated how little they understood you, how little they ever saw you, that’s a killer. It’s much easier to be slapped by a stranger than to have someone close fail to see what you’ve been trying to show them for years! So after the wounding, when you try to forgive, there is a stuck feeling, a glue, that doesn’t seem to give way even though you genuinely wish it to. That “glue” is the sense of wanting that person to validate you, to get it, to acknowledge your truth and the vastness of your being. Through validation by proxy, you can speak on behalf of the other person, and express the validation you have always wished they might offer. This works even, (and perhaps especially) if that person is no longer alive.

Here is the technique: “On behalf of _____, (the one who hurt you) I validate myself as ________, (whatever you wish they had seen.) You can also speak your name in the third person if that feels more natural to you. That is all there is to the technique. You can do it in a meditative state, when walking, when exercising or doing housework. You can do this as many times as you like, and you can change the descriptors and add new dimensions as much as you like. I suggest you focus on only one person at a time. You may find more and more abandoned, unwitnessed aspects swimming to the surface as you do this. Don’t feel  you have to tackle your entire life in one sitting, but do as much as you like.

Does this technique change the other person? Well, not at the personality level, nor is that the point of the exercise. The point is to get your sticky places unstuck! For whatever reason, this technique can and does often work like magic. Do try and keep it all wholesome and clean, doing harm to no one, and giving your spirit what you have been waiting for all of these years.

Build Your Bridge: If these techniques get you started building your forgiveness bridge, you’ll start feeling better immediately.  You may still have some more to do, but the relief and the joy do start to roll in within the first five minutes. It’s not a very sexy process, I’ll grant you, it’s just one of the most healing things around.

Get Creative: There is no reason why you should not craft your own forgiveness techniques and processes. Maybe one of the reasons the topic is controversial has to do with stylistic postures and  expectations that are not always congruent with how we feel and what we need. If you find a layer of something you need in order to forgive, then incorporate that into your own process. Remember, as you let go, you also build; as you intend, you make real. In writing this post, I’ve brought up a situation I would do well to forgive…I’m on my way to do some outdoor chores and work these processes. Maybe I’ll meet you out there now, in the field of forgiveness.

Yikes! Dreaming of murder is so disturbing. Nobody ever talks about these pervasive dreams, and so the tendency is to worry that you are the only person who dreams of bumping people off. It’s strange to ask about these things–who would you ask?

There are two important things to understand about murder dreams. The first is that they are extremely common. They are not a sign that you are on the road to ruin. The second important point is that murder typically represents not an actual death, but rather an abrupt ending that may not be well integrated. Here is what I mean.

X-ing Out: Have you ever gotten mad at a friend, acquaintance or lover, so mad that you simply X’d them out of your life? That is one thing the psyche depicts as murder in our dreams. When you cancel someone’s existence in your life, then you effectively “murder” them. You are free to do this, we all are, and in some cases perhaps it is the thing to do, only you can decide. In most instances, we X someone out because we are furious or outraged and it is a kind of psychic revenge.

Among my students and clients, people giggle when we discuss this, as if everyone knows it is a tad adolescent, but it seemed somehow right at the time. Especially during teen years, 20s and 30s, a great many people choose to have serial relationships and then X out their former sweethearts. This is so common, it has become normalized. But to the psyche and spirit, this seems weird. Last week you were making love to this person; this week, you cancel their ticket and they no longer exist. This striking change is like an emotional amputation, and the deeper mind seems to depict it in truly shocking terms because the whole thing is not an integrated change – it is like the ravages of a sudden storm.

It may be fruitful, when possible, to process such changes to the extent it is safe and doable, either with a therapist, friend, or in a journal, or perhaps by writing letters to the party in question which you do not mail. Any processing on your part is a kind of digestion of what has happened. It will not only help you survive the emotional storm, it will help you grieve in a mature way, and reduce the tendency to engage in future temporary love/hate cycles. I recommend the book Getting Past Your Breakup by Susan J. Elliot, if you or a client or friend are having difficulty processing a break up. Elliot practices tough love with her clients, but her book is full of excellent suggestions on journaling, processing, and supporting yourself and your life as you make a fresh start.

Amputating Your Parts: The second most common catalyst for a murder dream, is when you are about the process of cutting off parts of yourself, either your past “identity” or some potentials that you feel are not optimal or acceptable. In The Complete Dream Book I tell the stories of people who are haunted by recurring dreams of having murdered and buried someone; in the dreams they continue to try to keep the bones buried. In working these dreams, it emerged that these people had all felt they simply could not “be” their gifted self (artist, writer, psychic) and instead had to ditch those aspects of themselves in order to fit in with family and career expectations. The psyche takes this kind of elimination seriously, and at the soul level, sees it as a crime. In a sense, eliminating or burying the brightest star in your spirit is indeed a crime against life itself. This is not to imply that we all should become starving artists; the crime lies in the amputation, the cutting off, the murdering of our own energy. It is entirely possible to make a third choice.

The Third Choice: The pressures of life conspire to foster a belief that  you must go with your talents and live as an artist, (for example) or chuck all that, enter the corporate world, and never paint or draw again. Both of those extreme choices are not integrated, they represent the sacrifice of one energy and the elevation of another. If you find yourself wedged painfully between two opposite and fairly ghastly choices, take that as a sign that you are devouring an illusion, and are missing the third sometimes less visible choice. Rather than “murder” some energy that is trying to live through you, consider how you can nurture it at the same time you take care of the practical considerations and other needs that are very real and also important. The Buddhists call this “The Middle Way” and others call it a wise compromise. Your happiness does not hinge upon “what” you choose to do as much you think. It hinges upon how well integrated, how thoughtful and how soulful is your choice. Choose from your center, in a balanced and embracing way, and you will not make the “mistake” you so dread. When we make dramatic decisions that amputate life, we are always haunted by the sense of having taken the wrong path. But it is not the road taken that was wrong, it is the annihilation of spirit that seemed so necessary at the time which creates an ache that never ends.

Rather than make your life tidy by killing off the parts of yourself that seem impractical, consider how you can let their essence live by embracing them as important and valued aspects of yourself. It can be unfair to expect these sparks of genius to provide you with a livelihood, necessarily, or to gain you recognition in the eyes of others. Some of your most sacred aspects exist as an invitation to explore and express, to open and change. It is indeed a crime to hold them to a standard of industry or reality-television-fame and then murder them when they fail to meet that standard. The purpose of a gift is to express it, to understand life through it, and to share it to the extent possible.

Its Never Too Late: The great news, of course, is that even if we have bumped off aspects of ourselves in order to be more appealing or fashionably correct, those energies are not lost to us. They are still alive, still ready to spark back into existence. (You are not dreaming of the crime because you killed them, you are dreaming of them because they did not die.) If you have had the murder dream, reflect on your history and consider what sides of yourself you may have ditched for the sake of expedience. Now, consider how you can bring them back from exile and let them flow and come to life. This choice will allow you to integrate and be nourished by the marvelous facets of yourself: this is a process that restores and heals no matter when we come to it. Be gentle, persistent and open, and your psyche and dreaming mind will meet you along the way!

Falling dreams come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The whoppers, such as going over a cliff, are rare; the milder versions like stepping off a curb and falling are much more common.

The Stress Sandwich: Falling dreams reflect our dislike of losing control. When we take a wrong step, it is typically due to overload and stress. My research indicates an increase in falling-off-the-curb dreams around the holiday season, and sometimes just prior to family vacations (when madness strikes many of us). People who have become the designated grown up in their clan are prone to the slip-and-fall dreams, particularly early in their sleep cycle. There are physiological factors contributing to this pattern, but the struggle to manage variables and time often pushes us over the edge into a simmering sense of crisis. It is useful to register the slip-and-trip dreams as a marker that you have moved into auto-stress, so that your internal sense of pressure is adding to the experience of being scrunched and braced against life.

The Downward Slide: Another prevalent version of the falling dream is more of a downward slide. This is the dream where your car goes out of control, the breaks or steering fail, and you are rolling down hairpin turns trying to avoid a crash. Often during this crisis you recognize for the first time that you are actually driving a refrigerator, or that your car has no body, only a frame. This is very much the predicament of life: it is when things go terribly wrong that we do a quick assessment and recognize previously invisible factors that may be involved. Sometimes these quirks have made the spiral worse, but in other cases our very oddities are the magic that help us come to no harm.

The downward slide dream does not mean that all is lost; it is a time to reorient and redefine your priorities, as well as deepen your connection with what truly matters and remain constant to your source of hope and renewal.  There is a cycle to life, and falling dreams can indicate the movement into a time of letting go of things you have outgrown or which no longer hold meaning and energy.  Manage as you must, but also place equal importance on resetting your compass to your truth.

Cliff Hangers and Mighty Mountains: The big falling dreams are the ones we remember. Typically these falling epics occur when we are losing the foundation of one life, and moving into another. This is particularly true for people who seem to live multiple lives in a single lifetime. Some of us have larger-than-life transitions from one identity or story line to another.

People who are highly identified with powerful careers often have recurring cliff-hanger dreams when they near retirement. They stand to lose a huge aspect of identified self, (or so it feels), and they don’t want to let go of something that has seemed so solid for so long. Yet uncertainty is not an indicator of a bleak future, but those who have worked a lifetime to eliminate uncertainty find this truth elusive.  This passage seems to invite us to become willing to let go of the solid, known, familiar ground beneath our feet when life signals it is time to do so. In dreams, air and water can seem non-supportive, unknown, while earth and ground seem reflective of the familiar and the literal. Sometimes the best part of life, and the best parts of ourselves, become available when we move off the platform we have constructed and investigate the essence of our story and the original Self who has been living the adventure.

Suggestions: Whatever the falling dream, and whenever it appears, rather than considering it a portent of doom, try to open yourself to the more subtle message it brings. Part of responding effectively to crisis is a constant connection with higher wisdom (wherever you believe its locus). Put as much energy into connecting with meaning as you do with grabbing at the controls. If the earth is moving beneath your feet, then ground yourself in love, in purpose, and in your faith (or philosophy).

If you fall off your mountain, it is almost certain that you have also outgrown what it had to offer you. The more flexible you are, the more multi-dimensional your view, the easier the shift to your new landscape will be. If you are grieving the loss of the familiar, then grieve freely. As you take each day, carry with you the awareness that you have not been cast out from paradise; you have been set free to begin the most fascinating, rewarding and meaningful time of your life.

There are few things as troubling as a recurring nightmare or anxiety dream. We all hope that a troubling dream might be a one-off, some fluke of fatigue or stress that we can shake off by being busy or upbeat the next day. But when you notice a theme or image repeating, it has a sobering effect. It’s happening more often, it’s upsetting you, it must mean something but it just doesn’t make any sense.

More people contact me for private dream interpretation sessions regarding recurring anxiety dreams than for any other type of dream (although life purpose dreams come in a close second).  Pervasive stress, exacerbated by individual and collective challenges, tends to create a split in the psyche. We get busier, we move into auto-stress mode, (a kind of fast paced crisis style of thinking and living), and we dream vividly and wildly, yet cannot seem to recognize the patterns in our dreams. It is as if you are having nightmares that belong to someone else, because the images are supercharged and surreal.

Here are four steps you can take to crack the code of your nightmare, understand both the trigger that caused it and the message or implication it contains to improve your life.

1. Accept The Theme: Resist the tendency to make your myterious dreams into “the other.” It’s easy to be irked with something that repeats yet does not make sense to us. You will start to crack the code the day that you switch from hostility to friendliness. Try to position yourself into an emotional posture of friendliness and interest, rather than irritation and fear when the dreams occur. Don’t judge, don’t condemn, don’t resist, don’t be squeamish. Look at the dream as a work of art, and assume that the message it contains is worthy of your attention.

2. Look At Your Other Dreams: Your psyche is hard at work, exploring your options, uncovering your gifts, highlighting what is most important in life itself. Your other dreams which occur around the time of your nightmarish dreams are also exploring the same issues, even though they look entirely different. These dreams may be much more palatable to explore, and can give you clues to crack your nightmare code. Make it a priority to record your other dreams that fall in the same night or week, and to explore them for meaning. Make sense of them, and you will be well on your way to understanding your “tough love” anxiety dreams too.

3. Incubate Special Task Force Dreams: Your dreams escalate in intensity and frequency when you miss the point or tolerate something toxic in waking life. Just as a person might raise their voice when they are not being listened to, so your dreams increase the dramatic volume when you do not pay attention in a meaningful way. One way to handle this is to ask for dreams to explain your nightmare, or to present the same information in a different way. Your psyche is already engaged in trying to get a message through, or to reflect something vital. Engage this part of your mind in creating task force dreams, to help you understand what is going on.

Technique: As you go to sleep, talk to your unconscious mind. You might say something like this: “Thanks for the serial killer dreams, you’ve got my full attention. Could you create some dreams to give me the same message, without scaring me so much? I’m so shaken by those dreams that I don’t understand what you are trying to say. Send me the message more gently, and I promise to pay attention.” Then, move heaven and earth to record or capture even the fragments you recall and to decode them when you have time. The messages of your task force dreams will help you understand what the louder and more violent dreams have been all about. Make no mistake, this is a powerful and immensely effective technique. It sounds simple, and it is, but it truly works.

4.  Share: One of the best ways to understand your dream messages is to share your dream, as if it were a story, with someone you can trust emotionally. This may not be your best friend, your partner or your co-worker. The temptation to get a laugh by joking about the situation may prove too great to someone who always goes for the comedic moment. But if possible, do share your dream story with someone who is able to listen and be present, to allow you to have and articulate your experience of being in the dream and your experience of worrying about it afterward. This person does not need to decipher the dream, but they need to be your witness, emotionally and spiritually. Just having someone who will listen changes your relationship to the dream and to the material it pertains to in your life. Tell the person you choose: “I want to tell you about my dream, if you have time to listen, and I don’t expect you to interpret it, I just need to talk it through with someone, and to share it out loud to help myself relate to it.” When you tell a listener what is expected of them, this relieves them of the burden of responsibility or rescue, and permits them to be more wholly present and open. Their openness will affect your openness, and the lid will come off the subject matter in a very safe, gentle and intelligent way. You may not get an intellectual flash about the dream’s meaning, but you will have an energetic shift in your relationship to the dream, and this can make all the difference in the world. We must first move out of the stuck, fearful, biased and worried place we have built, in order to meet the dream with a fresh perspective and then “see” what has been there all the time. We sometimes cannot interpret a message until we are willing to be present and meet the message in an open way. Then the job is not so difficult after all.

These four techniques can make a huge and relatively easy difference in cracking your nightmare code:

1. Accepting.

2. Looking at other dreams in the same time frame.

3. Asking for special task force dreams to explain the dynamics in a gentler way.

4. Sharing your dream with someone who can be your witness.

If your usual method for understanding your dreams is not working with a special theme, try the above techniques to move closer to the important meaning your dream holds for you. There is a gift in there, it is meant for you, and you will be able to unwrap it, if you are persistent, gentle and open.

If you want a resource for examining dream images, get a copy of my book: The Complete Dream Book.

If you need to reach me about a question, or to book a session to work with your dream, I can be reached at this email:  gholloway@lifetreks.com

Don’t give up, and don’t turn away. The more charged the dream, the more important and empowering the gift it holds for you! You can do this.

~ Gillian