There are lots of guides and groups around which focus on the meaning of dreams. No doubt most of those are well intentioned and, in the case where dreams are a message from one's guides/Higher Self/subconscious, appropriate (dreams could also be memories - possibly garbled - of astral travel, or simply meaningless mental "static", as well as valid messages in my experience). That's not what I want to write about in this post: what I want to cover is one's conduct in dreams.
How, in whatever category of dream you are having, do you conduct yourself as a human being? Are you open minded, patient and always conducting yourself with selfless honour, or are you, perhaps, angry, vengeful or spiteful? (This question is particularly relevant for those who do sentient dreaming.)
Dreams can indeed be a useful tool for gaining insight: one of those insights is into our innermost/"natural" character/personality, without all the shields and barriers we have in everyday life. I have to make it very clear that quite a few of those shields and barriers are good things, so I am NOT advocating for change to those in everyday life necessarily. I don't consider it a good thing to start behaving vengefully or spitefully in everyday life simply because you do that in your dreams - the appropriate, mature response is to continue behaving like a civilised adult, while doing something constructive about your inner self.
Dreams ARE indeed a potential source of information: it's high time people started paying attention to one of the most valuable of those sources, which is is what sort of person you are without social mores and constraints.
I also don't advocate simple acceptance of your "inner self" personality. As I've written before (http://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2007/08/personality-and-lack-of-permanence.html), personality is a malleable construction - it may take a lot of effort to change a few hundred years of influence, but it CAN be done.
It is also important to be sensible about how you change your personality. What works well for one person won't necessarily work for another, and what works for someone in one area may not necessarily work in another area. Hence, for example, one person may find affirmations work well for changing their dream self, whereas another person may need counselling to deal with repressed issues affecting their dream self - and maybe both can use past life regressions to improve the character in the workplace. I don't consider that there are any hard and fast guides: you will have to work through the slow, tedious, often frustrating process of trial and error. One of my university lecturers used to insist we call this process "trial and correction", but it ain't so in this case - there will be lots of dead ends for most people, until eventually you find what works best for you.
There is a story about Edison's having 1,000 failures before finding how to make an incandescent light bulb; when asked about the failures, he said "I haven't failed 1,000 times, I've found 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb". That story works for some people, and it does NOT work for others. Don't worry if you're one of the one's it doesn't work for, 'cos I'm one of them too :) I've simply had to find my own ways of keeping myself in a balanced, well motivated state of being while working on this path of discovery - the things that work well for me are things like listening to music, going out bush, going sailing, and exercising. If I do enough of at least some of those, the whole issue of how I am thinking about the failures/frustrations becomes irrelevant, because I find my patience naturally increases under those circumstances.
See? Everyone's different.
Enjoy your dreams, and the journeys they lead to :)
Love, light, hugs and blessings
Gnwmythr
This post's photo was taken at Blue Rock Lake, where some stones have been set up in a scenic viewing area: on those stones are plaques telling the history of the early white settlers in the area.
Tags: dreams, personal characteristics,
First published: Friday 7th September, 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment