R. J. Cole MS LEP - Morpheus Speaks: The Encyclopedia of Dream Interpreting

MORPHEUS
SPEAKS

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DREAM INTERPRETING

R. J. COLE, MS, LEP

MORPHEUS SPEAKS

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DREAM INTERPRETING

Copyright 2019 R. J. Cole, MS, LEP.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture quotations marked RSV are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-7006-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-7007-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019942698

iUniverse rev. date: 07/26/2019

Contents

I would like to acknowledge all those who have shared the images of their dreams with me over the last thirty or so years. There have also been many teachers who have shown me how to read the enigmatic narratives of the dream world, some who have left their wisdom behind them through their books and lectures, such as Carl Jung and James Hillman, and some whom I have worked with directly, such as Jeremy Taylor and Stephen Aizenstat. I also thank my wife and children, who opened their hearts and dreams to me over the years and helped me to refine my craft.

Finally, I wish to thank the deep wisdom of the psyche and the playful way it has revealed itself through my own dreams and visions. This journey of self-discovery has opened new worlds, perspectives, realities, and understanding, making the world I live in so much richer than I ever imagined it to be.

My first memory of a dream happened when I was four. I dreamed of something trying to hurt me, and I couldnt scream or turn on the light. Sometimes I would wake clawing at the walls, bloodying my fingers, and watching the room pulsate around me.

At eight years old, I watched balls of light flitting about my room from my bed. At eleven, creatures and comic book characters flew through the sky as I lay on the grass during a summer evening.

As I grew older, the dreams grew more sophisticated and complex but continued to delight and haunt me across the next few decades of my life here on earth. I didnt always know how to read their enigmatic narrative, and I am still learning how to probe into their deeper meaning and how their symbolism applies to the days of my life.

Over time the symbolic world in dreams has transformed my relationship with the waking world. I now see the collective psyche of humankind playing out a fantastical mythology that I didnt know existed up until the last half of my life.

What have I learned? Ive learned that we are much more than we seem. We are not just skin encapsulated egos as the late philosopher Alan Watts once said during one of his radio shows. In fact, these egos and bodies with whom we identify may very well be the tools through which our true selves interact with and create reality.

Be Gentle with Your Dreams

Be careful as you walk through the hidden forests of your dreams. They compose the unprotected essence of who and what you are. They are the messengers of your soul and your deeper self.

They harbor all your worries and fears, your dislikes and rejected aspects, your hopes and desires laid bare. They are born of the irrational, the imaginative, and the intuitivea world of being as real and as informative as the rational world of science.

Both the outer masks that we all present to the world and the masks turned inward so that we dont look too deeply at the mysterious inner self are stripped away during our sleep, allowing us to see our most beautiful faces and darkest shadows.

Through our dreams we get a glimpse of what God sees in each and every one of us without judgment or condemnation. Dreams are a grace unearned and a gift to those who learn to accept and interpret them.

Treat them with care, respect, and compassion, for they reveal the best of us and the worst of us. They represent our guide through life and the equilibrium and balance that all living creatures need in order to survive in what is often a chaotic world. Our dreams are our inner saviors.

Dreams reveal a truth about our emotional state of mind, our physical well-being, our psychological health, and our sense of the spiritual. They are our deepest connection with everything, one another, and God or the universal spirit.

Dreams create a nightly map to the experience of being human, and if read properly, they can guide us to worlds not dreamed of through the conscious mind.

And they do all this uniquely for the dreamer who has them. Interpreters can hold our hands briefly and point to the way of the psyche, but the individual needs to walk this path alone. It is about the persons story and life narrative, and only he or she can know the true meaning of dreams.

In a way, how we interpret our dreams may be about how we interpret ourselves and how we think and imagine ourselves into being.

Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

C. G. Jung ( Memories, Dreams, Reflections , 1961)

Is all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe, A Dream within a Dream

First of all, heres a little background on what qualifies me to write such a book. As part of my graduate school training in educational psychology, I learned the technique of using childrens dreams as part of a therapeutic and diagnostic workup early on. I honed these skills through work with such dream analysts as Jeremy Taylor, James Hillman, and Stephen Aizenstat, as well as working the dreams of several hundred children assigned to me over twenty-eight years in working with the Santa Clara County Office of Education, special education, and alternative schools divisions.

I have also helped to decipher the dreams of more than three thousand individuals who sent me their dreams through my website and blogs this past decade. In addition, I have journalized and interpreted more than four thousand of my own dreams and presented several workshops on dreams, meditation, and dream interpretation.

I have authored two books on dreams titled The Dragons Treasure: A Dreamers Guide to Inner Discovery (2009) and The Archipelago of Dreams (2011).

Though I have written books on the subject, one of the complaints by those who have read them is that I have not provided enough detail for the process of interpretation or a broad enough list of possible dream image interpretations to help the beginning analyst (recreational or professional). I hope that this book will correct those oversights.