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Tom Paine’s Nightmare by James Gillray, 1756-1815, artist.

Ongoing dreamwork and consistent intuitive meditation will acquaint you with not only the dreamwork symbols archetypes we share in common as humans but will also reveal the personal vocabulary used by your unconscious mind to communicate with your waking mind. You will find certain symbols being used over and over again in a way that is unique to you. This vocabulary seems to draw on each person’s own life experiences, culture and language. For example, in waking life I have lived in Japan, Taiwan and many places in the United States. I also traveled to China and the Middle East. It was natural that I had many dreams about being in these countries or traveling to them. However, after a while, I realized that my dreaming mind presented countries overseas as symbols for the foreign and unknown parts of my own inner psyche.

Therefore my dreams presented Asia and anything connected to Asia, such as the Chinese language or a Japanese teacher, as expressions for the unconscious.  Along these lines, Chinese characters in my dreams came to symbolize intuitive messages that needed deciphering.

Traveling in Familiar and Strange Places

Because I had lived for so long in Japan and was familiar with the language and culture, Japan came to represent a new place within myself I could travel with relative ease, a place inside myself where growth wasn’t so difficult because I was already somewhat familiar with the territory. Using this analogy, a very common theme in my dreams has been trying to find my way around Tokyo, something that in waking life wasn’t difficult because I spoke the language and read the signs. So when I had a Tokyo dream, I knew I was entering new but not necessarily challenging emotional and psychological territory.

A place like Thailand was more exotic; and represented stranger, unexplored parts of myself. Because I have only been to the Middle East once and found it very “foreign” and different from anything I personally knew, the Middle East represented an even stranger place inside myself, where things began to get scary. Since I have not been to the jungles of Africa, they came to represent some of the most unknown and mysterious parts of my deepest self—places that were so totally foreign and scary I had almost no known associations with which to get a handle on them. I was quite blind to the situation and my dreams of Africa let me know it.

What is important is to recognize your personal dream themes and symbols of this interior journey you are making that oddly coincide with the outer journey of your life. You will come to know these unique expressions by their repetitive synchronous appearances in your inner or outer life.

Landscape with the Dream of Jacob by Michael Lukas Leopold Willmann

Dreams are a great way of connecting to one’s own inner wisdom. Edgar Cayce thought it was so important to remember dreams as part of an overall plan to stay healthy in mind, body and spirit that in Reading 5754-3 he says failure to remember dreams “…Indicates a very negligible personage!”

Remembering dreams is a great challenge for many people. I have come across numerous suggestions on how to improve dream recall but here is what I found works well for me and people I know:

1. On a daily basis, especially before going to bed, tell yourself that dreams are valuable and you want to remember them. If you are so inclined, even say a prayer requesting help in remembering dreams. These practices will offset any negative input you’ve experienced that suggested dreams are not important. It will also break you of the habit of ignoring dreams. The more you do this, the more you will remember your dreams because you are reprogramming your mind to work better on your behalf while enlisting the powers of higher consciousness and spiritual beings to help you do it!
2. Join a dream class. Just by doing this, many of my students reported that taking the class prompts them to remember their dreams.
3. Keep a dream journal (digital app or old fashioned notebook) next to your bed to record your dreams. Seeing a notebook there will prompt you to ask to remember your dreams.
4. While half asleep, before you move a muscle or before you are fully awake:

• Review the dream as if it were a movie you saw the night before. Make sure you note the action, plot, story, characters, colors, feelings and important symbols. This is perhaps the most important point if you already remember dreams but want to get better at the practice. After a while doing this, you will find the practice not difficult and often pleasurable, as if you are watching a TV show while you are half asleep on the couch.
• Give the dream a title that has a strong association with the dream. For example, you dream that you are walking into a room filled with red roses. Call it something graphic like The Room Filled With Red Roses.
• Review the dream once more to let it sink in, again connecting your title to the dream. At this stage an experienced dreamer can fall back to sleep, knowing he or she will most likely remember the dream upon rising or later in the day.
• Write down the dream in the dream journal soon after rising from bed.

Edgar Cayce circa 1910

Edgar Cayce is considered by many to be the father of holistic medicine. This course will explore how Edgar Cayce intuitively diagnosed and healed, viewed dreams and intuition and show how his tradition continues today in the methods developed by the Edgar Cayce Institute for Intuitive Studies.

Sponsored by the Osher Life Lifelong Learning Institute, Univ. of Hawaii
Instructor:  Fran Kramer, Intuitive Heart™ Trainer, certified by the Edgar Cayce Institute for Intuitive Studies. (2011)

Dates: June 12, 19 and 26, 2014
Time: 10:30 AM to Noon
Place: Honolulu, Hawaii.  For specifics, inquire on registration.

To register call:

Rebecca Goodman, Director
Phone: (808) 956-8224
Email: [email protected]

Keeping a Dream Journal

If you are serious about developing a deep connection with your inner self, this task is perhaps the best practice you can do. Keeping a dream journal involves writing down your dreams as they occur. Ideally, this would be just as you are waking up while the dream is still fresh in your mind. So keep a notebook and a pen (or digital diary–there are apps for that now if you can get technical while half awake!) next to your bed. If you are one of those people who can’t seem to remember your dreams, then try keeping a journal of whatever comes to mind that is important to you on a daily basis. For any kind of journaling, keep it simple. That will be the best assurance for encouraging you to be faithful about making regular entries into it. At a minimum each entry in a dream journal should include:

• The date
• A title for the dream (this will help you remember the dream as you remember a movie)
• A detailed description of the dream written in the present tense. Include every color, character, object, background, place, emotional feeling, and emotional nuance. Pay attention to the number of things occurring such as recording if there are 3 books or 2 people. It is important. Find and use a good dream dictionary—one that gives many meanings to each symbol and teaches dreamwork exercises. I like Cloud Nine: A Dreamer’s Dictionary by Sandra A. Thompson.

This practice will usually be all you have time to do on a regular basis. However, depending upon how thorough you want to be, you can do the following:

• Reserve a section either below or next to the dream where you make a note of any dreamwork done on the dream such as making associations with the dream symbols or make notes on what the dream may be about by using the other dream methods described below.
• If you have asked to have this dream prior to dreaming it, you should by all means write down the question or intention before having the dream. The point isn’t to be so thorough in analyzing every dream but to keep an ongoing consistent recording of every important dream and even the minor ones, if you have the self-discipline. You can always come back later and do additional dreamwork on any dream if you have done a good job of recording the dream in detail.
• If you have seen how this dream has helped, you may want to reserve space to add a note about this in the margin or in a space below the dreamwork section.

Also, what appears to be a minor dream to your waking mind can actually end up being of profound importance for the rest of your life, so please pay attention to the very short dreams and ones that don’t seem important. It might not be apparent at the moment, but you will see the dream’s significance in ten or twenty years down the road. You will see that your deeper consciousness is already preparing you for the major tasks that lie years ahead. Also you will want to record dream encounters with healers and guides whose presence you might want to honor later