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    Your Dream Arena - A Unique Guide to Dream Interpretation
    Your Dream Arena - A Unique Guide to Dream Interpretation
    Your Dream Arena - A Unique Guide to Dream Interpretation
    Ebook198 pages4 hours

    Your Dream Arena - A Unique Guide to Dream Interpretation

    By Carole Somerville

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    About this ebook

    Night after night we are ushered through the doors of sleep into our own personal dream theatre. As the curtains close on the external world, they open onto that great internal playhouse of our dreams.

    There are no tour dates for your Dream Arena. Tickets to these fabulous productions are free; all you have to do is welcome sleep. There are no concert reviews because the only performance will be for you alone. Any reviews will be yours as you start to record and analyse your dreams following the exercises in this book.

    Within this book you will discover how similar dreams can have very different interpretations depending on the dreamer. How similar dream scenarios can take dreamers in different directions and how comparative life experiences may in dreams be symbolised quite differently.

    The dream language is the language of our inner landscapes and the aim of this book is to make the language you use while sleeping as familiar as the language you use when awake. Through the many real dream examples collected over the last decade, you will read how modern dreams can share similarities with Classical myths and how modern-day problems can be depicted in dreams. How nightmares may scare us but they can also help us face our fears and how lucid dreams can have their pros and cons.

    The many aspects of dreaming include predictive dreams, ESP in dreams and dreams of health. In Children’s Hour there is a section on how to interpret youngsters' nightmares.

    This book will take you into your own Dream Arena and suggest how to understand the messages and heed the warnings in your dreams. Through interpreting your dreams, you will learn not simply to understand a dream, but to understand yourself.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarole Somerville
    Release dateAug 21, 2014
    ISBN9781483912820
    Your Dream Arena - A Unique Guide to Dream Interpretation
    Author

    Carole Somerville

    Carole is a qualified astrologer and has a degree in Psychology, Education and English Literature. She is also a Certified Reiki Master. Astrology is Carole's main subject. Psychology, the tarot, dream interpretation, history and spiritual realms fascinate her too. Carole has been addicted to writing from the moment she could hold a pen and counts her blessings to have been able to make a career out of something she loves.In the 1980s Carole was the leading writer for key astrology magazines in the UK including Destiny, Your Stars, Exploring the Supernatural and Your Future. In the 1990's Carole's print media clients extended to include The Daily Mirror, The People and Destiny. Carole's work began to incorporate problem pages, dream analysis and information booklets. Between 1994 and 1996 she was astrologer for the Scottish newspaper The Sunday Post. This led to Carole becoming astrologer for a number of other regional newspapers.Carole has also worked as a consultant for the Psychic Friends Network and helped them establish and then write their quarterly magazine Destiny. In recent years along with Carole's astrological work, she has been studying complementary therapies and Reiki. Her books include fiction as well as non-fiction.

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      Book preview

      Your Dream Arena - A Unique Guide to Dream Interpretation - Carole Somerville

      A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that has not been opened.

      The Talmud

      Contents:

      Prologue ... page 4

      Act I ... page 16 -

      The Dream Traveller’s Guide Book

      Act II ... page 52 -

      Pillow Talk

      Act III ... page 87 -

      Can Bad Dreams Ever be good?

      Act IV... page 117 -

      Science Fiction or Dreaming Fact?

      Prologue – Behind the Scenes

      Setting the Stage

      Night after night, as we lay down to rest, we are ushered through the doors of sleep into our own personal dream theatre. As the curtains close on the external world, they open onto that great internal playhouse of all our thoughts and memories, our fears, our fantasies, our strengths and weaknesses, our deepest wishes, our knowledge of things we barely realised we knew, and our innermost secrets – sometimes secret even from ourselves. All of these things are the raw materials that make up the plays that become our dreams – our plays, plays we write for ourselves, direct ourselves, perform in ourselves and finally, sit back in the audience to observe ourselves. It is a private performance, enacted by yourself, for yourself. It is both an entertainment and a message: a message written in the language of dream.

      And there is the rub. For the dream language is a language rich in symbols. In the same way that ‘a picture paints a thousand words’, so a single symbol carries so much more than one simple translation. A symbol can carry simultaneously a multitude of overlapping meanings and references, any or all of which can be relevant in interpreting a given dream. This is what makes dreams so complex to interpret. As our illustration on page 12 shows, a single dream can be understood on different levels. Some dreams will carry more import than others, but none are completely without significance. There is always an underlying text, – which we may not hear if we don’t pay attention.  In this book we hope to help you to hear that hidden text.

      ––––––––

      Imagine yourself on a visit to some foreign land; suddenly you are surrounded by a crowd of noisy, gesticulating natives all enthusiastically shouting and signalling to you. What are they trying to say? Who knows – you can’t understand a word.

      Perhaps you don’t care, and can wander away without ever finding out what they were trying to tell you.

      Or maybe, because you can’t understand it at once, you’ll dismiss it all as so much nonsense, absurd gibberish ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’

      Or maybe you are more open-minded; perhaps you’re willing to pay attention to the speakers and their gestures; perhaps you’re willing to try to make connections and consider what they could be trying to convey to you in their own native fashion. It may take a little patience and perseverance, you may find yourself – to express it in the language of symbolism – taking a few wrong turns, but gradually the meaning and the message will begin to unfold. And as any traveller knows, our appreciation of another country is richer when we can understand the native language.

      So it is with dreams; many have been quick to dismiss dreams as meaningless nonsense simply because they don’t automatically make sense to them. Yet if only we take time to listen, time to think about what we are seeing and hearing, time to make connections, then the rewards can be immense – for we learn not simply to understand a dream, we learn to understand ourselves.

      For the dream language is the language of our inner landscapes. Just as a language is best picked up by hearing it and speaking it on a regular basis, so we aim to guide you in understanding the language of dream by example, by escorting you through many dreams and their interpretations, by indicating what to look for, and by occasionally setting you exercises of interpretation to do yourselves.

      In this way we hope to make the language you use while sleeping as familiar as the language you use when awake.

      And so to sleep ...

      For, when in bed we rest our weary limbs,

      The mind unburthen’d sports in various whims,

      The busy head with mimic art runs o’er

      The scenes and actions of the day before.

      Jonathon Swift, from On Dreams (1727)

      Modern day research and experiments have helped provide us with a vast amount of information on sleep. We know what happens to our bodies when we sleep and what happens when we don't get enough sleep; scientists have studied the working of the brain and out of this a number of new theories have emerged on the function of sleep and dreaming. As yet, despite all that has been discovered through the use of electroencephalogram (EEG) machines and other concentrated methods of research, there are still no absolute answers.

      One thing we do know is that sleep seems vital for survival. We live in a dangerous and competitive world where it is not always advantageous to drop our guard, and yet one third of our lives is spent in this altered state of consciousness which leaves us oblivious to our surroundings. If we think of evolution in terms of survival of the fittest, while in times of danger sleeping might put us (and other animals) at risk, we might imagine that animals that did not need sleep are the ones which should have evolved to predominate over their drowsy competitors. Clearly this is not so. From the beginning, it seems, sleep (and perhaps dreaming) has been as necessary for living as the food we eat and the air that we breathe.

      Most adults average about eight hours sleep per night but some seem able to manage on as little as three hours of sleep. We can do without sleep for long periods and on the surface we may appear to be performing as well as normal. However, sleep deprivation can cause irritability, difficulty concentrating, confusion and misperceptions. Junior doctors working 48-hour shifts reported feeling less confident in their decision making in that they would look only at the immediate problem without considering other associated factors.

      In one study, people who had been without sleep for up to five days experienced mild visual hallucinations and began to show paranoid tendencies. These symptoms were similar to those of schizophrenia; yet they vanished once the person had slept again.

      We sleep even before we are born. Research in the seventies showed that foetuses have periods of EEG activity which indicate quiet sleep, active sleep and waking. Quiet sleep produces an EEG pattern in regular wave-form whereas active sleep shows fast, irregular activity.  The patterns of a 36-week old foetus are remarkably similar to those of an 8-month-old infant. New born babies spend up to 90 per cent of their sleeping time in active sleep and this gradually declines to around a quarter of their sleeping time by the time they are one year old.

      Birds and mammals also show these two different levels of sleep. But was quiet sleep the first to evolve before active sleep or was it vice-versa? This is rather like asking what came first: the chicken or the egg?

      The Physiology of Sleep

      Sleep schedules vary from person to person. There are the early-birds who go to bed early and rise early and others who prefer to go to bed late and rise late. Once asleep, however, we all share the same sleep patterns. 

      Research in sleep laboratories has shown that there are four stages of sleep. We first enter stage 1 sleep, where the EEG shows the irregular patterns which correspond to the relaxed waking state. As sleep gets deeper, we enter stage 2; the EEG now shows rapid bursts of activity lasting about 25 seconds.

      This is still a fairly light sleep and the person can be easily woken.  At stage 3, a more sound sleep, the EEG pattern shows slower wave-forms known as delta waves; heart-rate, blood pressure and body temperature all drop. By stage 4 (an hour into sleep) the sleeper enters deep or 'quiet' sleep where delta-waves become more common. It is difficult to wake a person from this level of sleep.

      A reversal of sorts then takes place. The sleeper will re-enter stage 3 and then stage 2, but instead of returning to stage 1 we enter a new kind of sleep: a sleep where pulse, respiration rates and blood pressure increase and the EEG patterns look more like those of the waking state showing an active brain. At this level, the sleeper’s eyeballs begin to move back and forward. It is this outer sign of ‘rapid eye movement’ which indicates to any observer that the sleeper has entered a dream-state. Initially researchers thought that dreaming occurred only during REM sleep. Now we know this is not so. The dreams of N-REM sleep may be more fragmentary – and perhaps also more emotional and terrifying, whereas most of our longer ‘narrative’ – and therefore more memorable dreams – remain associated with the REM state.

      During the course of a night we pass through the different stages of sleep several times, the cycles lasting in adults approximately 90 minutes and in children between the ages of 5 and 10, approximately 60-70 minutes. As the night progresses, however, the deeper levels of sleep tend to occur less frequently and, towards the end of the night, sleep cycles become shallower. REM dreaming, therefore, occurs more frequently during the early hours.

      While we do dream in NREM sleep, people woken during REM sleep will most often report that they have been dreaming, and because REM dream-sleep is so different physiologically to the other non-REM stages (being nearer in fact to wakefulness) some researchers have suggested we designate it as the ‘third state of existence’. This leads us to the question: why do we dream?

      Dreaming

      Dreaming is an altered state of consciousness in which memories and fantasy are temporarily confused with reality. Every one of us dreams, even if we don't remember doing so. (REM-sleep evidence shows that those who don't recall having dreamed do as much dreaming as everyone else.) Man has always dreamed. Early records from Celtic, Greek, Indian, Egyptian, Chinese, Hebrew, French and Russian cultures show that the need to understand sleep and the mystical qualities of dreaming has long been a major preoccupation of mankind.

      Do we need to dream as much as we seem to need to sleep? For five nights, in a dream laboratory, people were allowed to sleep but the moment they entered the REM stage, they were woken up. When they were allowed to sleep without interruption, they spent 60 per cent more time dreaming than normal and on some nights, they doubled their REM time as if making up for their lost dreams.

      People deprived of REM sleep also began to hallucinate, they became nervous, irritable, unable to focus and paranoid, displaying all kinds of unreasonable suspicions.  These studies suggest that dreaming is a vital aspect of sleep and perhaps one of the most important functions of sleep.

      How long do dreams last? Some dreams seem to last only for a fleeting second, coming to us like a drifting snowflake on a winter's day; if we don't grasp them immediately, they will vanish into the deep snow of our unconscious. Other dreams develop into scenarios that are easier remembered when waking, one aspect tending to trigger off further recollections until a good percentage of the dream is recalled. Studies in dreaming actually suggest that the length of a typical dream lasts about as long as the story-line would have done in real life.

      Do people know when they are dreaming and can people control the content of their dreams?  The answer to both these questions is 'yes'. – People who have ‘lucid dreams’ are aware that they are dreaming and they might try to influence how the dream plot develops. Such dreams are rare, but people can be taught to recognise that they are dreaming.

      Researchers in the seventies trained people to close an open switch when they noticed they were dreaming. People who have these types of dreams might remark that they try doing experiments within their dreams to prove that they are just sleeping. 

      In studies on 'pre-dream suggestion', people were asked to try and dream about a personality characteristic they wished they had and most dreamers had at least one dream in which the intended trait could be discerned.

      The question, however, remains: why do we dream? Is it so that our brains can process and assimilate the stimuli it receives, while awake, from the outside world – a type of cleaning up process – readying our minds for new input?

      Or is there a deeper, more spiritual meaning ... a meaning which perhaps long ago, our ancestors had hold of, nurtured and developed, but which we, in our material world, have all but lost? The answers lie in our dreams.

      Your Dream Arena

      Your Dream Arena

      Entering the Arena

      Welcome to the Arena of Dreams. If you look at our illustration, you will see that on either side of the arena there are steps leading down through the auditorium. With each step on the left we descend deeper into the subconscious, until we reach the stage where the dreams themselves are performed. On the right we re-ascend to the waking state.

      Starting at the top, the outermost step is that of wakefulness and alertness. This is the stage in which we all conduct our everyday lives. We are aware of what is going on around us; our five senses: touch, taste, sight, smell and hearing are active.

      Sometimes, however, whilst in the waking state, we might take a step into the world of fantasy and daydreams. Our minds will wander and we might lose the drift of conversations; we could be driving and suddenly we reach our destination but can’t remember how we got there. Generally, in such instances, we can be alert again in a second, but during these ‘reflective’ moments, our minds are focused inwards, rather than out.

      Meditation is a means of entering this inner world while still fully awake and aware.

      One step further still, usually taken

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