Dream Visions

More on Dreaming Phantom Bells | Blog Your Blessings

In the original post on being awakened by phantom doorbell sounds, I mentioned that I have also experienced being awakened by the sound of a telephone ringing, but not for some years. I was surprised to hear from comments on this blog that lots of you have had the same phantom doorbell experience.

I think there are at least a couple of reasons why people are not awakened by phantom telephone ringing these days. One is that in the past 20 years or so we have become used to answering machines and voice mail, so we are not the slaves to the telephone that we used to be. Instead, we rush to answer the door.

Also, with the prevalence of ringtone options on mobile phones, the sound of a ringing phone is no longer distinctive. The sound a mobile phone makes can be anything from a baby’s giggle to a hiphop hit. Phones no longer literally ring. In fact, some make no sound at all to announce a call; they just vibrate.

Recently, in a book called Magical Uses of Thought Forms, by Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki and J.H. Brennan, I ran across the statement that people often hear a bell or ringing sound that is their own inner self trying to get their attention. It is a call to listen to their own inner voice and to pay more attention to spiritual messages.

Wow! Just like our dreams, which are our inner self trying to communicate with us through sensations, stories, images, and sounds. The phantom doorbell may be spiritual wake-up call, a message from the inner us (our spirit) to the outer us (our conscious mind) to wake up to our own inner life.

In other words a helpful message from us to ourselves, a dream that calls attention to what is really important: our spiritual life, “waking up”. I would call that a blessing. How about you?

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

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Dream Interpretation Books | BYB

I have never much liked dream interpretation books. You know the kind: “If you see black dog, it means…”

Experts and personal experience both say that the same symbols mean different things to different people. They even mean different things to the same person at different times.

Dream symbols are culturally based. So the same symbol may mean a lot to people in one culture, and nothing in another.

Some of the dream books I’ve seen are clearly old and out of date, featuring objects that modern people would never dream about, because they are not part of our lives. Maybe our grandparents (or theirs) would have dreamed about gaslights, or ice delivery men, but we would not.

Most of the old books are quite sexist, and many contain racial stereotyping that is just unacceptable today. So they are not only useless but also unpleasant.

As I have written here before, the dream studies and research done over the last few decades by psychologists and other clinical researchers have shown that whatever symbol system you feed to your subconscious mind—whether consciously studied or absorbed from your culture—will be used to communicate with you in dreams.

So another way to look at dream interpretation books (and people, courses, and web sites) is this: Are these the symbols and meanings that you want to store in the deepest part of your psyche and use to communicate with your inner self? In some cases, the answer would clearly be, “No!”

On the other hand, I’ve been thinking lately that if you do find a set of symbols that you like, a dream interpretation scheme that you are happy with, why not deliberately study and absorb it?

Why not chose a set of symbols that will be beautiful, meaningful, and uplifting for you? Why not choose a set of symbols that are relevant to your own life? And then study them till you make them your own?

Giving your inner self a large vocabulary of meaningful, relevant, and beautiful symbols with which to construct your dreams might make your dreams not only easier to interpret but more pleasant, too.

Sounds like it could be a real blessing, a blessing that you can give yourself. What do you think? Please share your thoughts.

Meanwhile, I hope you are blessed with beautiful dreams that are meaningful and helpful for you.

Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss | BYB

Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss is currently my favorite book on dreams and dreamwork. You can see that my copy is pretty battered. I not only use it; I also carry it around and share it with others.

Born in Australia, Moss has recorded, studied and followed his dreams for decades. His dreams led him to England and then to the United States, from a career as a successful journalist and best-selling novelist to a teacher of dreamwork and author of dream books.

His dreams even led him to buy a particular house in a particular town in Upstate New York. Then they led him to Native American elders who could help interpret them. The elders told him that he was dreaming the traditional shamanic dreams of their people.

Moss’s books are clearly and simply written, easy to read, and filled with vivid, true stories of people and their dreams. There are lucid dreams, shamanic dreams, and dreams of future events.

Best of all, he explains clearly how to work with our dreams, how to help others interpret their dreams, and how to work actively with dreams, going back into the dreams to get more information. It is amazing how so much information and instruction can be so entertaining to read.

Moss and his dream groups use a nine-step program for understanding and working dreams. They use contemporary techniques derived from indigenous cultures around the world. His method helps you understand your past, shape your future, get in touch with your deepest desires, and receive guidance from your higher self.

Moss believes that dreams prepare us for future events, so that we can avoid disasters or at least be prepared to cope with traumatic events. And he tells some compelling stories that seem to prove his point.

His skills as both a top journalist and a best-selling author show through in his writing. It is clear and easy to understand. You won’t notice his skill perhaps—this is not showy writing—but you will enjoy the book more and understand the concepts more easily because of it.

He takes ancient wisdom and methods that have stood the test of time and makes them easy for modern people to understand and use. That is quite an accomplishment, and he can do that because he has experienced it himself.

Robert Moss is not just reporting on other people’s ideas and experiences. He is a master of dreamwork (though very unassuming about it), and he is able to explain it so that we can understand it.

After reading any of Robert Moss’s dream books (and you’ll be happy to know there are others), you will probably want to gather a few people into a group to work with dreams together. By following his instructions, you can do that—and have fun doing it.

If you do start your own dream group, or if you have one now that you work with, please stop by and leave a comment to let us know what you are doing and how it is going.

I hope to someday be able to take one of Robert Moss’s dream workshops. Now that would be blessing! Meanwhile, I feel wonderfully blessed just to be reading his books.

Dream Symbols and Living Spirits

Dreams and symbols are both vast and interesting topics. There is a lot to think about, and both subjects touch on many disciplines: psychology, anthropology, mythology, and so on.

Cyber Celt wrote an interesting comment Sunday on my post about dream symbolism. This comment made me stop and think:

As you study symbols, do you notice how many are similar across different cultures. The raven, the wolf, the whale, the sun . . .

Well, I consider Raven, Wolf, and Whale to be spirits, not symbols, so cultures that actually interact with them both as real animals in nature and as spirits might have similar impressions of them.

The Sun, another spirit, shows very different faces to different cultures. She was the harsh and fearsome lioness to the predynastic Egyptians, a lovely female spirit to the ancient Japanese, and a dazzling young man to late pre-Christian Mediterranean cultures.

In modern cultures it appears that the spirits get turned into symbols, and the symbols often stray far from actual experience. Sadly, modern people don’t seem to realize that—or even miss having actual experiences, as opposed to making assumptions based on abstract ideas or commonly accepted symbolism.

Also, one symbol set is often derived from another, as symbols are passed from one culture to another, and as the needs of cultures gradually evolve.

So, yes, I do see similarities among some sets of symbols, but I try to accept each symbol set as a whole system, on its own merits, and not assume that the meanings that appear similar to me are universal—or even related to each other—if that makes any sense.

Archaeologist Mariya Gimbutas wrote some interesting things about the difference between living spirits and symbols (though not specifically about dreams) in her final book, The Living Goddesses.

It seems to me that most books and most of what is taught in school are too oversimplified. They make so many assumptions of universality (conveniently skipping the many facts that do not fit), that they are very misleading. The simplest cure for that, I guess, is to read the authentic teaching stories and mythologies of many cultures from every part of the world.

But if you read anthologies, you are often reading stories that were chosen (perhaps unconsciously) for how well they fit into the belief system of the author. So naturally they seem similar. And often the stories are also “retold” to make them fit even better.

I recommend reading books and papers by anthropologists and folklorists who go out and interview actual members of each culture and translate the stories as accurately as they can, without “retelling” to suit themselves.

A recent favorite book is Singing Story, Healing Drum, by Kyra Van Duesen, a folklorist who spent years interviewing shamans and storytellers in several different cultures and language groups in Siberia, letting the people speak for themselves. Siberia is a vast region of Asia that includes quite a few countries, some of which come from entirely unrelated language groups, so the cultures are different as well.

Van Duesen seems to have done a good job, as both the essentials of shamanism, shared by many cultures, and the specifics of the different cultural groups shine through. I love that book and highly recommend it.

Another great book on symbolism and spirits is The Spell of the Sensuous. One of the essays is on how becoming literate completely changes the way cultures think. The author shows how the thinking and the language changed rapidly even between the time of Socrates, who taught orally, and his own student Plato, who was a writer.

The author points out that preliterate cultures think concretely, based on actual experience of the senses, while literate cultures become more and more abstract, farther and farther from actual experience. That makes sense to me.

It is very hard to enter into the worldview of another culture. In many cases, you would have to learn a very difficult language and actually live with the people for years, participating in their culture, to begin to understand their reality. Without doing that, there is no way to know for sure if what appears to be the same dream symbol actually means the same thing.

For example, to some cultures the spider is a male trickster, called Iktomi by the Lakota and Anansi by some African peoples. Does that mean he has all the same characteristics? Not necessarily.

The nomadic peoples of the Great Plains observed the trap door spider, which tricks its prey into falling into a hole. I don’t know what kind of spider the Africans had observed, or how what they saw fit into their way of thinking.

To cultures that weave cloth, the spider is often female and benevolent. For example, to the Pueblo peoples, the Navajo, and ancient Greeks, spider is the weaver of the world (Grandmother Spider) and the patroness of weavers (Ariadne).

But there again, we are talking about spirits, not just symbols. The people believed that the spirits actually spoke to them in dreams and visions. They didn’t consider them to be symbols, though they often used symbols to represent the individual spirits.

Wow, this stuff is complicated to discuss…but it is the kind of stuff I think about much of the time. I love it!

Thanks, CyberCelt for your thought-provoking comment. I originally replied in another comment, but I ended up writing so much that it was too hard to read (because I can’t format comments properly with this blog theme). So it seemed best to just make it into a post.

I love it when blogging becomes a conversation, and I hope there will be more of that here. Dreams and dreaming should be discussed from many perspectives.