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Dream Dictionaries & Life
This morning I had a dream that I was doing pull-ups. Pull-ups aren’t something I’ve ever been able to do more than a few of in real waking life. But in my dream, I was going totally nuts. I did at least twenty really rapidly, and just kep going. I felt like I could do them forever. For some reason, there were also people sitting on a mat behind me, like in a gym class, and they were cheering for me. And I felt like I could just go and go, and I knew that I’d finally “broken through” whatever had been blocking me from accomplishing that in the past.
A few days before that, I had a dream that I was in a back yard which was full of dirt. And I was digging holes, because I was either planting flowers or seeds of flowers.
Both of these seem like pretty positive dreams. Between them and Garrett’s recent pieces on interpreting everyday events and objects as though they were dreams, I got to wondering - how do people write dream dictionaries? You know, those big books or websites where you can look up a keyword and it gives you what the dream “means”? How do they know? Who decides? How can you learn that skill for yourself or teach it to somebody?
Here’s an interesting example from an online dream dictionary, for what a cell-phone means in a dream:
In the world of dreams, a cell phone represents a barrier to communication, not a convenience. To dream of a cell phone conversation means you are feeling a status barrier between yourself and the person on the other end of the line, and you should attempt to express yourself more clearly. If you are using the cell phone to communicate with spirits or otherworldly beings, the opposite is true.
I realize this is just one author’s opinion and not set in stone, but why is it considered a barrier rather than a convenience? Why only in dreams? Couldn’t your use of a cell phone in waking life also mean there’s a barrier between you and another person? It seems like in cultures besides our own, these types of symbolic interpretations of actions and objects pervaded the entire world. Everything was an omen. Everything could be read. It reminds me of David Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous. He talks about how before the invention of the phonetic alphabet, humans used their powers of literacy to engage with and “read” the world around them.
How much of the occult and alternative religious practice is actually simply intended to get this ability back, to at least some degree? As Robert Anton Wilson writes:
To the Cabalist, the whole universe is a network of meaningful connections. The seemingly coincidental is as full of meaning as anything else. To begin thinking like a Cabalist you must regard everything as being just as important as everything else. All that seems “accidental,” “meaningless,” “chaotic,” “weird,” “nonsensical;’ et cetera is as significant as what seems lawful, orderly and comprehensible.
An elementary Cabalistic training technique is to try every day to “regard every incident and event as a direct communication between God and your soul.” Even the license plates on passing cars are such communications-or can be considered as such-by the devout Cabalist.
So how do you go about building this ability? How do you write the “dream dictionary” of your life?
September 5th, 2005 at 5:15 pm
like the joke about how to get to carnegie hall. practice, practice, practice.
but practice what?
practice a quiet meditation. the colours lead to images which lead to impressions and ideas. sometimes you find yourself in that expanded void rushing up and out into insight and the answers appear, fully formed and you laugh because it was so obvious. but impossible to percieve without the practice. like a golf swing.
September 5th, 2005 at 8:18 pm
That’s all well and good, but it’s a little vague, isn’t it? I know personally I didn’t used to be good at interpreting things like this, but I somehow got good. But looking back, I’m not sure how I did it. I definitely practiced, but what did I practice? From an NLP perspective, what are the successful behaviors to be modeled here? I certainly didn’t do it though meditation.
September 5th, 2005 at 9:08 pm
yes, it` a little vague. from an nlp perspective the successful behaviours to be modeled are the behaviours of the gurus, mystics and shamans. when we model the behaviour of student we get more student habits. studying, searching, analysis, confusion,etc.
when we model the mystic we get trance, ritual, ingestion of substances, beating of drums, sensual overload, seeing images, talking to coyotes, actually having insight and answers. if we dare.
a direct divine knowledge.
it is a lonely and marginalised existance. people think you`re crazy. if you believe them you will become crazy.
i think you did it through a synthesised meditation made from inquiry, scolarship and determination. your 40 days in the desert was made of squinting at code and reading posts and journals and books.
September 5th, 2005 at 9:58 pm
I get connections when my thinking is feeling (I guess that would be play, probing relationships between senses) . Like lately, I’ve been developing my intuitive sense of electromagnetics (eg magnetic field due to a current in a conductor- I feel/visualize a stream of aligned vortices (electrons) in a frictionless fluid (ether, whatever), and can feel their emergent effect (the rings of magnetic flux surrounding the wire)), and now I’m seeing this kind of emergent spiral action in all sorts of things. I would go into them, but I’m tired of typing in this box, because it is so slow on my computer.
September 5th, 2005 at 10:10 pm
interesting that you mention the spiral action in things. electrons spin.universes spin. motors spin. helixes spin. rising and falling can be seen as a two dimensional look at spinning. everything seems to be spinning except our view of the world.it is still and constant. we look and look away and when our gaze returns the image is constant. it is the only place in the universe where this is true.
September 5th, 2005 at 10:15 pm
On a related note, Have you heard of global scaling?
September 5th, 2005 at 10:24 pm
yes but math and german aren`t areas i know much about. there are many theories of harmonics though. cymatics suggest that matter is formed through manipulation of sound. that appeals me as a linguist. words/organised noises making matter. maybe there is more to mantras and chanting ritual than merely relaxation. the tradition of the mystics and shamans include humming, singing and whistling. my personal thesis is that we are the creators of everything by the mere act of consciousness and that we can become more focused in the art and more effective as a result. i have no absolute proof yet though.
September 5th, 2005 at 11:40 pm
Ha, awesome. I have to say, I’ve really identified with the whole 40 days in the desert bit for quite some time now.
September 6th, 2005 at 12:40 pm
re: cell phones as barriers, I can totally see that. Every time I use a cell phone, I find myself straining to hear and often repeating things loudly for the benefit of who I’m talking to.