Philip Dunn - Dream Finder: Discovering the Divine Through Your Dreams

Dream Finder: Discovering the Divine Through Your Dreams copyright 2004 by The Book Laboratory Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews. For information write:

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E-ISBN: 978-1-4494-1313-2

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This book is designed to help you find the key to understanding the incredible world of your dreams. By unlocking your dreams, you can open up a vast reservoir of information that you might not yet be aware of; information that your unconscious brings you every night. If you sleep eight hours a night, you sleep ten days out of every month. In an average lifetime a person sleeps for about twenty-five years. During that time you have an average of five or more dreams every night, even if you cant remember them. The time you spend sleeping is not just downtime useful only to rejuvenate you. Its a time of intense creativity, and your dreams contain a gold mine of information for your life, your health, and your spiritual development.

Sometimes we think of dreams as not real or less real than our waking state. It was only a dream, we say. But for people of ancient times and for aboriginal people today, there was and is no such distinction between dreams and reality. These people believe that dreams provide them with important information and sometimes even allow them to speak directly to God or other supernatural entities. According to legend, the whole course of history was changed in the fourth century B.C.E., when the Roman Emperor Constantine had a dream on the eve of a major battle. He dreamed that Jesus was telling him to put the monogram of Christ on the shields of his soldiers. He did that and won the battle. As a result of the victory, Constantine legalized Christianity and eventually made it the official religion of the empire. This change, which has affected the entire development of Western civilization, happened because Constantine believed that his dream was a real message from Jesus.

We are becoming more aware that our dreams are real in that they give us a means of self-exploration, access to important information, and insights into what we should do and what may happen in the future. And best of all, this exploration can be a lot of fun. The worddream comes from the Middle English word dreem, which means joy and music. This book is a guide to having fun while you realize the full potential of your dreams.

There are clay tablets dating back as far as 3000 to 4000 B.C.E. that discuss dream interpretation. If those ancient people took the trouble to record that information, it must have been important to them. In Egypt the priests were the interpreters of dreams, and dreams were sometimes recorded in hieroglyphs. People who had vivid and significant dreams were seen as gifted and special. In the Greek and Roman cultures dream interpreters would accompany the military leaders into battle, where dreams, such as the one Constantine had, were considered extremely important.

The ancients not only believed that dreams contained important information but also thought that dreams foretold the future. There are over seven hundred references to dreams in the Bible, many of them related to biblical prophecy. In other cultures, dreams dictated the course of politics and government as well as plans for individual lives.

Ancient people also used dreams for healing. In some cases the patient would dream and the healer would interpret the dream to determine the best course of treatment. In other cases the healer would dream and receive information needed to effect a cure.

In ancient times there was no theory of the conscious or unconscious mind to explain dreams; people believed that dreams were actual communications from another realm: from God, a variety of gods, demons, nature, or ancestors. These were messages that they couldnt afford to ignore, for fear of offending the messengers or of bringing bad fortune on themselves.

In the European Age of Enlightenment, when science began to replace what was called superstition, dreams were disregarded, along with belief in gods and demons and messages from beyond. Many people came to see dreams as nothing more than the results of physical discomfort or maybe indigestion. This perspective changed with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century work of Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries, though the psychological interpretations that followed tended to see dreams in terms of only the mental processes of the individual dreamer. As we will see, this theory of the purely psychological origin of dreams isnt really sufficient to explain all the information people receive or experiences they have in their dreams.

Why pay attention to what you are dreaming? Because your dreams have a lot of very valuable information to give you. Your dreams bring you information you dont usually have access to in your day-to-day life.

Insights Into Something You Arent Seeing

Your dreams can tell you things about your life you arent consciously aware of or that you dont want to see. Your unconscious mind records everything, even things that you dont consciously notice. Your conscious mind can hold only so much information at a time, but information isnt lost; it just goes into the unconscious. So, for example, your unconscious mind records what you have done and can remember where you lost something, even if you have consciously forgotten where you put it. Your unconscious mind will also record all your emotions and the body language of everyone around you. So if your new lover is giving you signals that hes unreliable, you will know it unconsciously, even if youve been trying to convince yourself that hes the one. Youll know if you need to change your job, even if youre too worried about the job market to consider changes.

You might dream of being chased, of violence, or of some other danger if you are worried about some unresolved issue. You might dream of being involved in a conflict when you are torn inside about something. Dreams give you insight into yourself and insight into your relationships. If you dream that you can fly but someone keeps holding you down, that person, or whomever the person in the dream represents to you, may be holding you down in some psychological or energetic way.

Nightmares, especially recurring nightmares, can give you important insights into where your anxieties lie or what incidents in your life are unresolved. In this and all other circumstances, your dreams are an incredible gift, allowing you to access the resources of your unconscious mind. In dreams you are able to sort through the information you couldnt take in consciously while you were awake and to draw important lessons from it. You are able to see things that you might resist or not want to see but that are important for you to know.

Information from Beyond the Individual Unconscious

Sometimes you get information in dreams that you have no way of knowing, even from the observation of your unconscious mind. In the nineteenth century Dmitry Mendeleyev presented the world with the periodic table of elements after seeing it in a dream. People have also dreamed how to resolve a nagging physical complaint. Where does this information come from?