When Reality Knocks

Over this week, I am going to be doing a kind of simple introductory workshop on dreams. To start off, let me say that I don’t think anyone has all the answers about dreams or understands them completely. I very much want to hear from you. If you have different ideas than mine, please let me know. If, on the other hand, your experience is similar to mine, please let me know that as well. Otherwise, doing a post like this is like giving a workshop in an empty room- not much feedback.

First let me say something that we all should know: some dreams are crystal clear. And as my first analyst said, “any dummy” could understand them. He told about a beautiful woman who came to him in a dream and held up a calendar. She took a red marker and crossed out the next two weeks writing “VACATION” across them. He took a two week vacation.

Abraham Lincoln had a similar dream. A few days before his murder, according to The Oxford Book of Dreams, he dreamed about his future. “Before me, “He reports dreaming, “was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of he soldiers. “The President.” Was his answer; he was killed by an assassin! Then came a burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream.”

There is a long history of such dreams. There were many pivotal moments in history which hinged on a dream by one of the protagonists. One immediately thinks of Abraham leaving home for a distant and unknown land because of a dream. Perhaps best known is Jacob and the spiritual “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder,” which is sung around so many campfires. Joseph was a great dream interpreter. We also have the birth stories of Jesus, with all their dreams. The emperor Constantine is said to have had a dream which determined that Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire. The list of such dummy dreams goes on an on.

I remember a 92 year old lady who had lost a library book in her nursing home room. “Where can you loose a book in a nursing home room?” she asked me “Then she said. “I’ll have a dream about it and that will settle it.” That night she dreamed that the lost book was in her closet in her housecoat pocket.

We will be talking much more later about the dreams that seem to make little or know sense, but to begin with I am eager to hear about more such dreams where the message was crystal clear. Have you had some of those dreams? Was it a helpful message or a warning one like President Lincoln’s? It seems to me that generally we do not have a lot of those but the ones we have carry a lot of power. They get our attention and my make us make fundamental changes in our lives. I am eager to get your ideas and to compare notes with you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 18th, 2005 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Personal Growth, Dreams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.