The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (6 page)

As dreamers, we discover and inhabit the true nature of time, as it has always been known to dream travelers and is now confirmed by modern science. Linear time, as measured by clocks and experienced in plodding sequences of one thing following another, always heading in the same direction, is an illusion of limited human awareness, at best (as Einstein said), a convenience. In dreaming, as in heightened states of consciousness, we step into a more spacious time, and we can move forward or backward at varying speeds. We can also step off a particular event track onto a parallel time track that may also be a parallel universe.

A medieval scholastic, trying to account for Lucrecia's timetripping, might say, “She stepped into the Aevum.” The Aevum, in Thomist theology, is an in-between realm between eternity (the divine depth beyond time) and the corrupted world where humans live in sequential time. In the Aevum, duration is not determined by linear time but by movements of consciousness.

This is a medieval version of what has become a very modern idea: that if we can step outside our consensual hallucinations, we 'll discover that time is actually the fourth dimension of space. As H. G. Wells's Time Traveler says, with wonderful clarity, “Scientific people know very well that Time is only a kind of Space.”

Viewed from the fourth dimension, past, present, and future are in fact simultaneous and only experienced sequentially because of our mental perception of them. In the dream state the mind is not shackled in this way and is able to move between situations and probable events in the past and future with equal mobility.

But hold on for a minute — doesn't this mean that though we can travel to the past and future, we can't change them? That's how Wells's Time Traveler views the situation in
The Time Machine
. He regards our many selves at different moments in time — our baby self, our teen self, our current self, our geriatric self, and so on — as three-dimensional “cross sections” of our larger four-dimensional identity, “which is a fixed and unalterable thing.”

Much as I love
The Time Machine
, I must observe that time travel in dreams is more interesting than this. We not only travel to past and future; we travel between alternate timelines. With growing awareness, we can develop greater and greater ability to
choose
the event track — maybe one of infinite alternative possible event tracks — that will be followed through a certain life passage, or even the larger history of our world. This may be a case of the “observer effect” operating on a human scale. It is well understood that at quantum levels, deep within subatomic space, the act of observation plucks a specific phenomenon out of a bubbling cauldron of possibilities. It may be so in the cauldron of our dreaming: through the act of observation, we select a certain event track that will begin to be manifested in the physical world. By a fresh act of observation, or re-visioning, we can then proceed to alter that event track, or switch to an entirely different one.

Dreaming Can Save Your Life

Let's get serious about the survival aspect of dreams: they can save your life.

I once dreamed I was driving up a hill in Troy, New York, heading east. As I approached a fork in the road, everything stopped. I then entered a series of new scenes in extraordinary locales, and became aware that I was traveling through a series of after life transitions. When I came out of the dream, I knew I had to take special note of the place — near the fork in the road — where the action took place, because (in my personal mode of dreaming) entry into afterlife situations in this way is a signal that literal death is a possibility.

Three weeks later, driving up that hill in Troy, I noticed that a delivery truck parked on the right side of the road had created a blind spot. Remembering the dream, instead of pulling out to pass the van, I slowed almost to a stop. This may have saved my life when an eighteen-wheeler came barreling down the hill at sixty or seventy miles per hour, hogging the whole road beside the parked van.

We not only get advisories days or weeks before a possible future event; we can get an early warning dream
decades
before events start to catch up with it. The case of Celia is highly instructive.

In her youth, Celia, a woman from Up state New York, dreamed that while she was driving a bright red truck she crashed into the rock face of a sheered mountain. She died in the dream and woke feeling that it was a premonition of a physical event. She took the dream very seriously and heeded its warning. Though she loved red cars (and trucks), for twenty years she didn't buy one and avoided riding in a red vehicle because of her dream.

Twenty years on, she still remembered the dream, but thought she had traveled far enough in life to have left behind the danger it foreshadowed. She bought a red car — not a red truck — and determined to be careful. She was fine in the red car. It grew old and she replaced it with a white car. Another ten years went by. She divorced and began a relationship with a new friend, who had a red truck. As she was driving through the mountains in her friend's truck one fall, Celia veered to the side of the road to avoid a deer.

She looked up and saw the sheered-off rock face of a mountain a few feet away.

It was the dream.

Because she remembered her dream, she knew what to do. Her dream recollection guided her lightning-fast reflexes. She wrenched the wheel violently, turning as hard as she could. The red truck scraped along the side of the rock; doors and bumpers were torn away, but Celia walked away from the accident. Thirty years after the dream, her recollection of its exact details — and the way that it prompted her to act immediately to prevent the worst part of the dream playing out — saved Celia's life.

3. DREAMS HOLD UP A MAGIC MIRROR
TO OUR ACTIONS AND BEHAVIOR

Have you ever dreamed that you looked at yourself in a mirror and noticed you were quite different from the way you think of yourself in waking life? While we look in a mirror in some of our dreams, the dream is also looking at us. The whole of a dream may function as a mirror in a larger sense, showing us sides of ourselves and our behavior that we may prefer not to see, or have simply been shutting out, in ordinary reality.

A great game to play with many dreams is to compare the behavior of our dream self with our waking self. If you are wimping out of situations in your dreams, passively following courses others set for you, or tending to remain an observer when action might be desirable, then you'll want to ask yourself where in waking life you have a tendency to behave that way. If you are forever catching a bus (a collective vehicle that runs according to other people 's schedules and makes lots of stops that have no interest for you), you may want to ask yourself how often in waking life you submit to agendas that are not of your making and don't allow you to give your best.

Alternatively, if you find you have strength and magical powers in your dreams that you generally do
not
exhibit in waking life, you'll want to try to reach into the dreamspace and bring those powers through, to work for you in your physical life.

Funhouse and Magnifying Mirrors

If what we see in the mirror of dreams sometimes seems like a funhouse freak show or the work of a Hollywood special effects crew, it's because we've been failing to look at something we need to see. The drama and the magnification ensure we pay better attention.

During a dream workshop on a chilly fall day in Madison, Wisconsin, three people in succession shared dreams that reminded me of the image of the Lightning-Struck Tower in tarot — an image of violent, unavoidable, and unwanted change, bringing the overthrow of established structures.

Despite the similarity in mood and imagery in these dreams, each dream brought a distinctively personal message (this is true of
all
dreams, which is why we should never go to dream dictionaries for their meanings).

In her dream, Bea was terrified by jet fighters swooping down from the sky, firing rockets. She rushed into an underground concrete bunker, only to realize, to her dismay, that nothing could be done to fix the situation from down there. I asked her whether she ever had a tendency to behave in waking life the way she had done in the dream. She was a quick study. She rapidly identified both work and family situations in which she tended to “hide in a bunker,” leaving problems unsolved. Her action plan was to stand up — and speak up — for herself.

Liz dreamed she was on the porch of her childhood home with close family. She watched five old propeller planes fly by in military formation. Then an enormous modern jet fighter swooped down. She knew it was coming down and would destroy the old neighborhood. As we talked about the dream, Liz recognized that it might be telling her that it was time for old structures to come down.

A third dreamer in that workshop shared a dream in which a lightning bolt hit the roof of her car while she was driving. The car in the dream was her actual car, and she recognized the location, so we discussed the need for her to use the dream as a literal advisory to be careful on that road in the event of a thunderstorm. We also explored the question of what might be coming up in the dreamer's life that would strike with the force of lightning.

Magnifying mirror dreams often show us strong emotions moving with the power of natural forces — rage or grief may erupt like a volcano, or tear up the neighborhood like a twister, or drown the whole scene like a tsunami. Working with such dreams, we want to remember that they may relate
both
to a literal phenomenon
and
to an emotional or symbolic condition. Indeed, sometimes a dream previews a literal event that will also have great symbolic resonance for the dreamer. We need to take dreams more literally, and the events of waking life more symbolically — which is the theme of part 2.

Dreams Show Us Our Life Roads —
and How We Are Driving

Our dream mirrors reflect how we are conducting ourselves on the roads of life. If you see yourself driving too fast in a dream, that may be an advisory to slow down and pay closer attention to what is ahead of you and around you — when you are at the wheel, and also in other ways.

Maybe the road you are on, in a dream, ends with a road closed sign or an impassable obstacle. Then you'll want to consider whether the road you are on is actually going where you think you are headed.

Watching your dream mirror is the antidote for going through life with your eyes fixed on the
rearview
mirror — which is what many of us tend to do, trapped in personal history and old patterns and issues.

In showing us how we are driving as we go
forward
in life, the dream mirror can give us very exact guidance. I dreamed I was driving fast and smoothly and felt very confident. I sped down to a crossing where a yellow drawbridge opened and closed at rapid intervals. Because I was going so fast, I missed the right moment to make the crossing. As I drove onto the draw bridge, it was going up. The car slowed as the gradient steepened and — unlike a movie hero in a chase sequence — I knew I did not have the speed and power to jump the car across the gap. I realized I would need to back up to give myself momentum, and time my crossing very precisely to get over while the drawbridge was down — or be able to make the jump when the gap was not too wide.

I do not intend to use this as a
literal
advisory on approaching a bridge! But I was able to use it, in very helpful ways, as an advisory on approaching a more important crossing in my life. I understood from the dream that I would need to temper my frequent tendency to charge ahead with careful attention to timing and developing the necessary resources to bring a project to fruition.

Dreaming and Course Correction

Mirror dreams recall us to fundamental values when we are being pushed and pulled by rival pressures and agendas, and in this way help us to make necessary course corrections.

Carl Jung tells an illuminating story about how a businessman got clarity on the ethics of a certain situation. The night after receiving an attractive proposition, the businessman dreamed that his hands and forearms were covered with disgusting black dirt. Though reluctant to relate the dream to waking circumstances, he accepted that the dream was a warning that he was in danger of getting involved in “dirty business” and bowed out of the deal.

The Bible contains a marvelous story of a dream that invited a king to make a course correction. In his dream, Nebuchadnezzar saw a tree that grew all the way up to heaven, and he gave orders to chop down the tree but leave the roots intact. Daniel warned him about hubris, but Nebuchadnezzar disregarded the caution, with disastrous results.

The dream advisory on the need for course correction may come in less dramatic ways.

Dave, an airplane mechanic, shared his personal version of the very familiar “late for class” dream. A recurring theme in his dreams was that he was trying to get to class on time, but felt his legs dragging, as if fettered or coated with cement.

We've all had that “legs in cement” feeling. I get it when I am pushing myself — or letting others push me — to do something that in my heart I really don't want to do. Dave agreed, after discussion, that he would think about ways in his life in which he might be struggling to get to the wrong class, and how he might want to shift his focus.

Jack was expending a great deal of energy trying to stay in a situation that had become very conflicted and was draining him both emotionally and financially. Then shortly before the November 2006 U.S. elections, he dreamed that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was hiding out at his house. Rumsfeld was weary and sick, and, wearing his pinstripe suit, he got into bed with Jack. Jack said he was aware in the dream that “I don't feel this is right.”

Jack had once admired Don Rumsfeld and thought him a brilliant man, but he had become strongly opposed to the Iraq War and Rumsfeld's policy of “staying the course.” Looking into the mirror of this dream, Jack concluded: “I have to get out of this situation. If I try to stay the course, I'll end up hemorrhaging blood and money.”