The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams (33 page)

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Authors: Phyllis R. Koch-Sheras

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BOOK: The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams
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Dreams: Expanding the Inner Eye,
suggests sleeping later than usual one morning a week, which she says "will provide an additional opportunity for a broader spectrum of spiritual insights to be previewed by the dreaming mind." Continue with the dreamwork exercises we discussed in other chapters, and pay careful attention to the messages your dreams contain. In these messages, you may find the answers you are looking for, even if they do not at first glance seem to be direct responses to your incubating questions. The next sections offer a closer look at using both spontaneous and incubated dreams to enhance your creativity, productivity, and healing capability.
Your Creative Dream
Amateur and professional artists alike can use dreams to enhance their work both in direct ways, such as recreating on the canvas some actual imagery from a dream, and indirect ways, such as applying a dream message to a project. A novelist who was struggling to achieve richness with her characters decided to incubate a dream that would tell her what to do next. That night, she dreamed about a crooked housecrooked staircase, crooked railing, crooked walls and floors. Upon waking she realized that what her novel needed was characters with a little crookedness! A part of her knew her characters were all too "nice," but it took a dream to make it clear to her.
A graphic designer was charged with the task of creating a logo for a local crafts fair, but could not seem to get it right, despite numerous tries and several discussions with her client. Asking her dreams to help her, the artist dreamed very literally about her problem:
"The Logo"
I am working on my sketches. I begin work on a new idea. I draw two hands carving a rabbit out of
 
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wood. To emphasize the impression of the rabbit as something only beginning to come into being, I draw the artist's hands in great detail to contrast with the broad lines and unfinished surfaces of the rabbit.
Figure 7.1:
The Logo
Immediately after waking up, the artist repeated in waking life what she had done in her dreams, creating a logo that was exactly what she wantedthe logo of her dreams!
To use your own dreams to create art, literature, music, dance, or other inspired results, try these tips:
 
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After each dream, note any particularly vivid dream images, words, or feelings. You may wish to use them later in a drawing, painting, dance, story, play, or novel. They may even provide material for a slogan, logo, or joke.
Use dream interpretation techniques to determine the extent to which your dream symbols reflect creative parts of yourself.
Examine your dreams for any relation to the creative process. What are you working on now? How does your dream suggest a way around it? Sometimes a dream offers a comment on your creative self as a whole, rather than on a current project. For example, a songwriter who lacked confidence in her singing voice had a dream in which she sang out in a strong, beautiful voice; the dream seemed to suggest to her that vocalizing with more confidence would improve her sound.
And finally, use dream incubation techniques to ask specific questions about your work, or to seek inspiration on a new direction to follow, or even a new medium to try. Always be specific, because dreams tend to answer the precise questions you ask them.
Your Productivity and Dreams
Creativity finds its way into our decision-making processes every day, as we weigh our options, imagining different scenarios, and then selecting the action we believe will bring us what we want. On the job, in volunteer committees, within the family, brainstorming is a daily occurrence. Why not do some of your
 
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brainstorming during the 20 percent of your life you spend sleeping? As history shows, the results can be powerful.
If you have ever tapped your dreamworld to enhance your working productivity, you are not alone. For example, computer genius Alan Huang found what he needed in a recurring dream that led to a major breakthrough. According to
Success
magazine, Huang's dream featured two battalions of sorcerers who marched steadily toward each other, pails of data in hand. After dreaming that these armies were able to move right through each other, Huang saw the light: In order to create the optical computer he was striving for, he would need to utilize currents that could intersect. In time, he developed a laser computer model.
According to creativity expert Charles ''Chic" Thompson, who himself uses dreams for creative problem solving, research shows that "while falling asleep or waking up" is the fifth-best "idea-friendly" time; "after waking up in the middle of the night'' ranks eighth. Thompson, who has consulted for such major corporations as General Electric and NASA, discusses creative dreaming in his book
What a Great Idea!
"A dream is our moment of pure creativity," he says. "It's like five hundred ideas all Scotch-taped together." Thompson has these suggestions for collecting your "dreamed-up ideas":
Use dream interpretation techniques to remember and document your dream.
Free-associate during your hypnagogic and hypnomonic dreamsthe falling-asleep and waking-up stages of sleep. After you awaken, continue to lie still, eyes closed, and see where your mind takes you.
Write down as many dream ideas as you can recall. "Do not be discouraged if some of your ideas do not make
 
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any sense," writes Thompson. "Remember, you're after large quantities of ideas. Just throw the bad ones away."
Dream incubation is a particularly useful problem-solving technique. To incubate a solution to something that has been on your mind, follow this procedure:
Gather as much information as possible, and spend some time thinking about it before you go to sleep.
Just before bed, narrow your question down as much as possible, then focus on it in one of the ways we describe in the section Dream Incubation: The Technique (page 193). Be specific. For example, asking your dreams "What would change the way I interact with my boss?" is more precise than "How can I do better at work?"
Your Healing and Dreams
We have talked before about personal health as a common dream theme. Because our minds take in so much information every day, far more than we are consciously aware of, we are often more in sync with our bodies than we think. Subliminal perceptions, the bits of information our unconscious takes in, appear from many different sources: news reports we watch, articles we read, conversations we overhear, our physical feelings and experiences, advertisements we see. Everything we take in has the potential to speak back to us in a dream, sometimes offering a new perspective on our physical health. According to psychologist Joan Borysenko, "Dreams are often an attempt of the unconscious to promote healing."
Many dream researchers have reported instances of healing dreams. Krippner and de Carvalho describe a woman who was
 
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diagnosed as prediabetic at age nineteen and told that she would become insulin dependent. Shortly thereafter she dreamed of her dead uncle telling her that if she would eat heart of palm daily for one month, she would cure the condition. "My tendency was to dismiss this experience as 'only a dream,'" she said, "but I eventually decided that I had nothing to lose by trying the remedy." By the end of a month, her symptoms had disappeared, and after twenty-five years, she still had no signs of diabetes. Of course, the authors point out that this anecdote could be explained as "coincidence, misdiagnosis, the placebo effect, the intervention of her dead uncle, or self-healing.'' Whatever the explanation, it is interesting as an example of how healing is related to dreams.
You need not be ill to have a dream point the way to better health. For example, a woman with a slight vitamin deficiency had ignored this health concern until she had the following dream:
"The Iron C"
I'm looking at my naked body from outside of myself. A zipper appears in my belly and unzips. An object comes out of my body that is shaped like the letter C and made of iron. It disappears inside my body and the zipper closes.
After this dream, the woman decided to increase her intake of these nutrients, which she says she "never seemed to get enough of."
For whatever reason, dreams may be able to point the way to better health, sometimes even "diagnosing" a previously unidentified condition. Since ancient times, medical professionals have used dreams to diagnose and treat illness. Renowned physicians in Greece such as Hippocrates, Galen, and Aesclepius used information from their own and their patients' dreams to make diagnoses or to receive guidance on performing operations. Native American and African tribes still use dreams frequently as a diagnostic tool.

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