by Dr. Barbara Condron
It is said a French soldier lost all his money gambling. He challenged anyone to a fight and no one responded. Exhausted, the soldier threw himself beside the tent and fell into a sleep.
Within a few hours, another soldier who had met the same fate was passing by the tent and heard the other snoring loudly. "Get up!" he prodded the first soldier. "I have lost my money as have you. Quick, draw your sword and let us fight!"
"Fight! Fight?" said the sleepy man. "Not yet. Lie down, take a nap, and then we will fight as much as you want." Such is the story of how the phrase "sleep on it" entered into English speech.
The first soldier, angered by losing his fortune, was ready to wound and possibly kill anyone foolish enough to fight him. After a bit of sleep, however, he saw things differently and believed the second soldier would as well, if he would merely sleep on it. Through the years and cultural exchange, sleeping on it has come to mean “let it go”.
Sleeping on it actually gives us an opportunity to consciously release a preoccupation and turn it over to another part of Self, the part that breathes while we sleep and sometimes communicates to us in our dreams. History is filled with stories of how people’s dreams changed their own lives, and our own. The modern sewing machine owes its existence to inventor Elias Howe’s dream. India owes her independence from colonial rule to one of Mahatma Gandhi’s dreams.
Although not usually noted for being metaphysical, scientists have often been known to turn a problem over to their subconscious mind with great results. The structure of the chemical benzene, was revealed in a dream to German chemist Friedrik Kekule in 1890. The Periodic Table of Elements came into focus for Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev while napping on vacation with his family. Even one of young Albert Einstein’s dreams began his lifelong quest to understand time, space, and relativity.
Dreams have inspired many artists. The main character's dilemma in Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus came to the authors in dreams. The last movements of The Messiah were first heard in Frederic Handel's dream.
In more recent times, composer Paul McCartney was staying in a small attic room of his family's house on Wimpole Street while the Beatles filmed the movie Help! in 1964. One morning, in a dream he heard a classical string ensemble playing, and, as McCartney tells it:
"I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, 'That's great, I wonder what that is?' There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th -- and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it. I thought, 'No, I've never written anything like this before.' But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing!"
According to the Guinness Book of Records that tune has appeared on the most cover versions of any song ever written. The song, the hauntingly beautiful ballad Yesterday.
A few believe our dreams are meaningless, just the brain cleaning itself from a busy day. These people think trying to remember, record, and study dreams is a waste of time. Just think where India might be today had Gandhi thought this way!
Others think these flashes of brilliance which find a universal application are rare. Perhaps not.
What American inventor Benjamin Franklin, Indian mathematician Ramanujan, and golfer Jack Nicklaus had in common was dream-incubating solutions. Whether consciously or unconsciously, these men created a desire sufficiently strong enough to be acknowledged by subconscious mind. Since the early 1970s, researchers at the School of Metaphysics have learned that this is not an ability held by only a few, and a 1990s study at Harvard Medical School proved that we all have this potential.
When I think of dreams that change our lives, I remember my own nightmare at the age of six. It was this dream that ignited my desire to understand the inner worlds of existence and being. That was 50 years ago, and here I am today heading up the GLOBAL LUCID DREAMING EXPERIMENTS (GLiDE) at the College of Metaphysics and overseeing internet work at www.dreamschool.org.
I wonder what dreams have influenced other’s choices and what choices have influenced their dreams. Communicating those night time visions has become a means for unlocking our potential as individuals and as the dominant species on our planet. This weekend dreamers from around the world are dream-incubating solutions to the current fluctuations in the world economy. What GLiDE researchers will learn remains to be seen. What studies to this point tell us, is that all dreams will be relevant to the dreamer, and some may find a much wider application. What we know is that dreams have changed the course of history many times. Perhaps now, through the power of the internet, they will again.
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Your dream holds the answer
Your dream holds the answer within it. We have found through 40 years of research that every dream is about the dreamer, and every person in a dream is an aspect of the dreamer. The things in a dream all symbolize some part of the dreamer's consciousness or state of awareness.
It sounds like you had an intuitive grasp of your dream and how it related to your identity. Yes, the secret person in the dream is you. Hair symbolizes your conscious thoughts, and clothing is a symbol for how you express yourself outwardly. So this dream was about you being self reflective, looking at yourself and being aware of how you wanted to change your conscious thoughts, to change your identity (your face), and to change your expression. The shift that probably produced the healing was from changes happening to you, to you deciding to face yourself and make conscious choices to change.
So, for example, maybe you were always a shy, soft-spoken person and were becoming aware that it wasn't working any more. Maybe you had people around you who were loud or aggressive talkers, and you felt forced into having to admit that you had something valuable to say, or that you needed to speak up even though it might not have felt natural to you. Around the time of the dream, perhaps you decided that you WANTED to be more outgoing, more expressive, and visualized yourself being that way. This could have produced healing.
It makes sense that making purposeful changes caused healing. In the School of Metaphysics, we teach principles of healing and have learned that permanent healing comes from changing one's way of thinking, since it is out-of-balance thoughts that produce dis-ease or disorder in the body. There is even a book published by the SOM entitled Permanent Healing that describes particular diseases, the thought patterns that cause them, and suggestions for attittudinal changes that cause healing.
I hope this helps, and again, I encourage you to become a Dreamschool Scholar to pursue your understanding of your whole Self through dreams.
Best wishes,
Laurel Clark
dreamschool staff
That completly makes sence
That completly makes sence that the french man would be calm after a nap. Sometimes when I sleep I wake feeling calm and relaxed with a dream still in my head. I was wondering if you could help me with this one.
I took a late afternoon nap on Sunday. Sometimes I have these dreams that seem to pull from me and this was one of them. I wake up remembering everything about the dream with the same feelings that I felt in the dream. This one is not that exciting but I felt like it had meaning. I was in the place where I grew up in the country. I walked to school, which is odd because growing up the school was nowhere near my home. I walked in and went to class. I felt as if I was in a daze just as if the way I went threw high school. I sat in a desk and recognized people except they all looked younger than what they normally looked. I cannot place any of the people just to say that I have seen them and they were too young. The male teacher called on me while I was in my desk and asked me to answer a problem on the board. When I got to the bored, I became lucid. I realized that I was not supposed to be in school and I was too old to be here. I expressed my feelings to the teacher and he told me to go to the principles office to sort everything out. I grabbed my things and then left the building because I was afraid of being in trouble because I was not supposed to be there. I left and then started another dream. I normally have very weird dreams about needing help and nobody helping me. Sometimes I have had the stairs dreams where I feel like I am looking for something. Every time I have one of these dreams, I feel like they are trying to tell me something but I cannot figure it out. I know this has meaning I just can't figure out what meaning.
Researchers at the School of
Researchers at the School of Metaphyhsics have come to call this a health dream. In the Universal Language of Mind, the picture language used in dreams, small vehicles symbolize the physical body. When the car is not working properly or the dream, like yours, involves a wreck, the message is telling the dreamer to pay attention to his or her health.
The detail in your dream does indicate more information that you might find useful. You are aware of something you have done/are doing that affects your health. This is not a condition that will strike you out of the blue. It is probably brought on by worry or impatience, concerns about your future. Maybe you are pushing yourself too hard, or worried about the economy and how it will affect your life in the years to come.
Side note: There are links between mind and body, and much of our research here since 1973 has been in this area. What we have learned about how thought influences emotion, and then the physical body, goes far beyond the blanket idea of stress-related illness. My husband, Dr. Daniel Condron has catalogued hundreds of attitudinal causes for physical ailments in his book Permanent Healing if you want to explore this area in more detail. The book is based upon thousands of intuitively-accessed health analyses and is very empowering for the individual who desires to accept responsibility for his/her health.
In your dream, you switch cars. This indicates how you deal with pushing yourself too hard. You let it go, and become more disciplined.
This dream is informative for you. It tells you about the demands you are putting on yourself physically and reminds you to care for yourself in the present moment. It could be something as simple as getting adequate sleep or eating more nutritious food as both of these support emotional equilibrium, the need for which comes through in the frantic tone of your dream. Hope this helps and gives you information you will use the rest of your life!
I was wondering if you could
I was wondering if you could shed some light on this dream.
I an involved in a car accident. I bump into the driver side of a car ahead of me. I'm driving a blue Honda. I make a small dent on the rear right side. I am frantic. I don't carry insurance. I back up and turn around and leave the scene of the accident. When I look at my car next, I don't have a front bumper and it seems my driver side panel, above the bumper is also gone. I am looking to park my car somewhere. I can't turn right into a neighborhood because there is a long and wide construction zone with several
Bulldozers and lots of people working, preventing me to turn into the neighborhood. I'm finding a way to turn left and I park the car. I'm in another car now, worried about the accident. I know that nobody got hurt in the other car I had bumped into earlier be because all the people got out of that car watching me as I drove off. An off duty police man is now catching a ride with me by jumping into my car as I am driving.
thank you for responding. I
thank you for responding. I have thought about that dream many times knowing there was a message there, but couldn't get what it was trying to tell me.
Your question is insightful
Your question is insightful and perhaps this will help you answer it. The fight is within yourself. It is long-standing by virtue of the duration of the dreams. The repetitive nature of your dream says the same message has been pertinent during this time. The alligators symbolize the habit you have been trying to conquer. The habit hasn't changed so the dream-alligators keep coming back. This is the answer to your question.
There are clues as to what the habit might be. Since the alligators are in "every building I have ever worked in" the habit is related to what you value in life. "All the people I have befriended" are involved, although they do not assist in the fight. This indicates expectations of self that have not been met. Next time this dream occurs, look for how you feel thwarted in living up to your own expectations. Instead of letting old ways of thinking get in your way again, affirm your values by choosing to be faithful to them. This should produce a different outcome in the dreams.
i have for 20 yrs had dreams
i have for 20 yrs had dreams of being a warrior woman fighting off alligators through every building i have ever worked in, with all of the people i have befriended and worked with. I however am the only one ( i think) who is fighting back the alligators. what am i really fighting?
What new ideas are you
What new ideas are you considering? In dreams, babies represent new ideas the dreamer is pondering. If the babes are the same sex as the dreamer, they are conscious ideas. If the babies are the opposite sex, they symbolize ideas growing in subconscious mind. For most people this is a difference between what you are aware of and what is still below the surface of your everyday thinking.
Children are ideas you've been growing for a while. If they are your children in the dream, they symbolize ideas you created and are nurturing along.
In today's climate of economic change and shifting, we've seen an increase since the beginning of the year (here at dreamschool.org) of pregnant-baby-children dreams. This indicates dreamers are coming up with new ideas and new ways of thinking and living. They are inventing aspects of their lives. Perhaps this is what has been going on in your world the past two weeks.
Well.. I keep having these
Well.. I keep having these dreams of babies and children. Each dream I've had in the past two weeks had either a baby, a toddler or a group of children in it. The children were singing, the toddler was following me and the baby was sleeping. What is my subconscious trying to tell me?
He must have been hungry when
He must have been hungry when he woke up!
It's a variation of people eating pizza before bed and dreaming about pizza which happens because the last thing on the dreamer's conscious mind is the food. What the conscious mind fills itself with, the subconscious mind – purveyor of all dreams – will seek to manifest. This is actually how and why dream incubation works. That's the story going into dreams. The scrambled eggs idea is the story coming out of dreams.
Great article! I read
Great article!
I read somewhere that when Paul McCartney awoke with that lovely tune in his mind, he also had the words running through his mind with the music, "scrambled eggs, oh, how I love those scrambled eggs ...." and he realized he had to use his conscious mind to compose a different lyric. I have no idea if that part of the story is true or not!