Secrets of Power Dreaming
Tony Crisp
How can you find your way through the good dreams and bad dreams you meet while you sleep? What can you do to move on from anxiety dreams and nightmares? How can you open up the possible wonders of dreaming?
Research and human experience over many years have shown ways we can work with the wonder of our dream process. From such research Dr. Nielsen and Levin suggest that dreaming attempts to create 'fear extinction' to deal with painful or fearful past experience. The dream process succeeds at this when we do not wake from a fearful dream. When we wake from a nightmarish dream it has failed. As Dr. Nielsen points out, 'If you feel yourself falling spread your arms and learn how to fly'.
This is not a crazy suggestion. Dreams are simply feelings put into images. Nothing can actually hurt you while you dream. If you really take that in and decide to confront your dream fears - don't confuse this with externally dangerous things - you can transform your inner world of anxieties, heal past hurts, and open up the treasure house of your potential. When this happens it flows into confidence and pleasure in daily life. The steps to doing this are:
- While awake and relaxed imagine yourself back in the dream and continue it as fantasy or a daydream and move it toward satisfaction. Alter the dream in any way; experiment with it; play with it, until you find a way to fully feel at ease with it. In doing this you must not ignore the feelings of resistance and spontaneous emotion and fantasy that may occur. Satisfaction comes only when you have found a way of integrating these into your conscious imagining.
- Recognise that every part of your dream is an expression of some aspect of yourself such as sexuality, creativity, ideas, fear, and so on. So even the monsters of your dreams are part of you. If you run from them you are actually afraid of yourself, of your own emotions and memories. So, in this step, you gradually meet, change, and even imaginatively become the fearful image. In that way you transform your anxiety into available energy. You overcome your fears.
- Your dreams are a unique area of self expression. They are a safe area to experiment and experience things in any way you wish. Often we introvert, or take into our dream life, rules and fears that have no place there. For example, while dreaming, you may fall into the sea and be terrified you will drown. But that is impossible because you are only experiencing images of your feelings and thoughts. All you can do is to feel fear. You can easily breathe under water in a dream, or fly, or die and be re-born. So remove such limitations from your inner life by visualising such changes into your dreams when awake.
- Recent research into how the brain works shows that it creates an interpretation of what you take to be a real external world. We each create our own internal reality in that way. Take time to wonder what reality you have created unconsciously and what your dreams portray of it. In doing so remember that any evil, any good, any demon or any god that you meet in your dreams, is any expression of your own potential to create. So what world do you want to live in? One dominated by internal fears and demons? A life restricted and imprisoned by old habits and rigid rules of right and wrong? What about moving toward one that allows you to love and unfold your potential?
See: Magical Dream Machine; Levels of Awareness in Waking and Dreaming ; Lucidity - Awake in Sleep; The Waking Lucid Dream.
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