Dreaming for Health

Dreaming for Health

HEALING

 

 

Dreaming for Health
by Mari Hamersley

For the past several years I have noticed that I am healthier than most people my age. I rarely get sick, have lots of energy and feel younger than my middle-aged years might indicate. I’ve observed that many people of my age (and some younger) complain about health conditions, notice themselves being in pain more often and believe they are losing their mental abilities. Having had an interest in wellness for many years, I decided to try to identify what I was doing differently than others were. I examined my nutrition and exercise. These were about average. And I never avoid being around people who are ill because I have little concern with “catching things”. What I did notice that I do differently is that I seek self-awareness. I listen to my inner and outer thoughts through meditation by interpreting my dreams. Then I respond quickly to their “good advice”. This has been very beneficial in my efforts to live a happy, productive, and healthy life.

Having meditated daily for several years, I have come to know the peace of mind that it affords. Regular and deep meditation can aid anyone to experience and live spiritual unity within themselves and with others which is very conducive to creating a whole state of mind and body. In addition, our nightly dreams provide feedback from the subconscious mind. From these we are able to tell how we’re doing in our daily lives because the dream messages occur for the purpose of revealing the conscious state of mind we’ve held the day before. I didn’t realize the full import of these dream messages in being able to help us to remain healthy or to heal a disorder until an old friend helped me see it. And this occurred unexpectedly.

Through my participation with the School of Metaphysics, I am very fortunate to be able to meet many new people and tell them about what we offer at the School. This includes opportunities to be a guest on radio and television shows to educate people about dreams. One such experience really gave me insight into the revelatory quality of dreams as they relate to healing. 

I was doing a Saturday morning show on a local radio station when I received a call from a woman named Cecilia. She had heard me helping people to understand their dreams and she called in to the station to have her dreams interpreted. Although she was put on hold for over 15 minutes while the news and advertisements were read, she held on the line. I could tell that she really wanted to know what her dreams meant. When I saw her first name on the computer screen, I received the impression that I knew her from somewhere. When her turn to speak to me finally came, I recognized the voice. She was a woman I had worked with 20 years earlier. Yet somehow she sounded different. 

She proceeded to tell me that she had two recurring dreams in the past few years. In the first, she kept losing her car. When I told her that a symbolized her physical body and her thoughts about losing it, she related that she had severe asthma and had almost become an invalid. She could hardly go outside and her life had become a sad existence as a result of this. 

I could hardly believe it, because in my memory Cecilia had been one of the most lively and vibrant women I had ever known. She prided herself on actively helping people to meet their needs for personal and career growth. While I was still thinking about this, she related the second dream in which the recurring theme was that she kept losing her money. This made a lot of sense for it represented her thoughts about losing her value, the money. She saw her value to herself and the world as that of helping people. This was the identity she had created for herself and how she had expressed her value. 

In the short time that I had to respond on the radio, I was able to tell her that she is more than her body and that she can have value in new ways in her life. In changing her thinking about this, she would in fact aid herself to heal, to create a new identity of a person with value. She could begin having reason to live again. Although our conversation was very brief, I believe that she may have benefitted from hearing that her dreams have clues as to what is really at the heart of her health problems. She certainly helped me to pull together the connections between wholeness in our thinking and bodies and how our dreams can make that awareness clearer. 

To create health, one must understand the unity of the realms of life that make up the whole. Those realms are the mental, the emotional, the physical and the spiritual. Without the unity among these elements of the self, there is a lack or a misunderstanding. Used together by you the thinker, wholeness can be produced. All disease begins with a misunderstanding in our thinking producing a limitation. Over time, this wakens the body. For example, cancer, one of the most feared diseases in our world today, is caused by a hatred or lack of love for the self and others. This is a spiritual misunderstanding as well as a conscious one, for truly God is love and so must we be. 

The cells of our bodies respond to each and every thought we have. Cells literally take their orders from the conscious thinking that populates our waking state. When recognized, these limitations can be replaced or changed as needed to produce different and better cellular responses in the body.

We create ourselves every day. When an illness or disorder shows up in the body in terms of pain, we simply need to have a more complete picture of what wholeness, or health is. This insight from the inner self is very needed and can be one of the best reasons for remembering and recording our dreams.

Each night the Subconscious mind provides feedback or a message, on our daily state of consciousness in dreams. It is up to us to recall and then seek to understand these symbolic messages. When this is done, the best orders can be given to the mind and body, enabling the cells to respond and make the right product, a whole, healthy mind and body. 

Self awareness is the key. It gives us a leg to stand on for knowledge is power. With accurate information, we are able to make choices. I’ve always thought that it was better to know than to be in the dark, which is a state of a lack of awareness or knowing. Because what we know about ourselves can help us and because knowledge is power, then it makes sense to receive all the information we can in order to make the best decisions in thinking, the ones that will take us forward to living our highest ideals in life and creating fully.

To gain the greatest awareness, we need to realize that all parts of Self provide information. Physically the body shows us the effects of our thinking. In it we can recognize “signs” of what is going on. Symptoms show up here–the pain in the neck, the heart attack, the skinned knees, or perhaps even tuberculosis. 

Emotionally, we might identify the feelings we have, such as sadness, depression, or apathy, as indicators that something isn’t quite right with us. And sometimes it is a thought that comes to mind that helps us to understand that we are on the right track with our lives or not. Or Spiritual awareness comes when we pray or meditate or have a life-changing experience. All of the levels of the vehicle of the mind aid us to know ourselves if we will listen and pay attention. Because we dream nightly and often remember them, let’s look at how they can be used as a diagnostic tool for health.

Since the majority of people think of their body when they think of wellness or illness, let’s take a look at some of the ways that dreams reveal what is going on here. Thanks to Cecilia’s dream, you know that a car in a dream represents the individual’s physical body. This could be a car, a small boat, or a small airplane. (The larger vehicles, such as an airliner, a bus, or a large truck represent an organization.) In fact, dreams containing these small vehicles are often called health dreams because the condition of the car, boat or plane shows the condition of the body. It also shows how the body is thought of and is being used. As well, they give clues to what is likely to occur within the body if the thinking is not changed. The body responds to the driver, the thinker’s own mind.

A dream I had several years ago illustrates this very well.

Both cars represent how I was using my physical body at that time in my life. I was moving forward too rapidly toward my destination, my goals in life, and that I had pushed myself toward them at such a pace that my body was going to crash. I thought that I couldn’t slow down. Fortunately, I didn’t crash in the dream. It would have indicated that a pretty serious disorder would be likely to occur.

I had learned to interpret my dreams as a student at the School of Metaphysics. I knew that I had to cause a change very soon. I recall that I was quite intent on accomplishing what I saw as my duties in life. I had been pushing my body and could see that I needed to relax more and see things clearly. As I had been driving in the car, it was the action of the conscious mind, the racing in my thoughts, that had caused the situation. Knowing this, I immediately began to still my mind each day through concentration exercises and meditation. It was a matter of being aware of the state of my mind each day and slowing and focusing my thoughts so that I could move forward and respond in ways that I chose. It worked and I stayed healthy. In fact, I felt a much greater sense of peace and direction than before.

Another dream also indicated a potential health problem in a dramatic way. 

To say I woke up suddenly would be an understatement. It was a dream that I can still see vividly today. The gasoline represents how I was using energies within my physical body, which I valued. And there was a great expansion in the use of energies, but it was uncontrolled and I was reacting to it. The dream indicated how I needed to gain greater control and to direct my energies productively so that I could move toward my goals in life.

Again I realized this and made changes in how I was using my energies so I prevented a health problem. Since I have never had another dream anything like this, I know that I learned a valuable lesson about how the mind, body, and energies work together to enable us to be where we want to be in our lives. We need to use these messages in our dreams with full awareness and direction.

A healthy body depends primarily on how the dreamer is using the mind. The emotional level of mind is the part of Subconscious mind that aids us to move our thoughts all the way out to the physical, so the emotions in a dream are important to pay attention to. Dream messages are neutral. The Subconscious mind simply and objectively presents information we need to know. Likewise, thoughts in the Subconscious mind are neutral. It is how we receive them as they move out to the conscious mind, that we give them meaning, seeing them positively, negatively or indifferently.

We create our thoughts consciously or unconsciously every moment of every day. Some of the things that influence how we think are what we have been taught as a child, what we have chosen to believe, and the experiences we have chosen to participate in. You’ll notice that I put the responsibility for these on the Self rather than on others. We are the creators of our lives. Our inner self, the soul, provides opportunities for each of us to see to enhance our growth as spiritual beings in order to aid us to progress. Yet, in addition, we always have free will in how we choose to view and use those opportunities.

If we choose to respond to a situation habitually or compulsively rather than with imagination and attention, our Subconscious mind will often present animals in our dreams. Whenever I have a dream with animals in it, I take it seriously. I realize that this is where I am following habitual ways of thinking, or perhaps unproductive ways of thinking, that cause me to stay the same. They keep us from responding fully and growing.

In this dream, each person in the dream was an aspect of myself. Consciously, I was observing how I was challenged in life, both in responding to the potential change of habitual thinking, the puppies, and the desire to prevent this. These (puppies) were forms of habitual thinking that I considered to be helpless and cute. Yet my inner, Subconscious aspects I saw as perfectly willing to play with them. This shows the neutrality of the Subconscious mind. I interpreted this using the Universal Language of Mind to mean that I could use this type of thinking more productively and yet I was resisting this consciously, shown by the strong emotions I had in the dream. This was a time in my life when I was identifying who I was and who I wanted to be. I had to determine if some of the ways of thinking that I engaged in were to be played with or would be changed. 

What does this have to do with health and healing? Habitual thinking is a pattern of thinking which has to do with what is the least line of resistance. It is often old patterns of thinking. While thought directed with imagination of who we are and who we want to become moves us forward providing the ability to respond to our inner desires. If we resist building this true self, we literally stop the growth and renewal within the body and mind. This sets up a condition where we are weakened or susceptible to illness. I knew I had grown in my thinking when I had another dream with an animal in it.

I was watching two circus performers on a beach near a city. There was a couple, a very tiny man and woman who looked liked acrobats or tightrope walkers. It was their job to gain control of a huge alligator, maybe 25 times their size. Heroically they did their best, and working together, they wrestled the giant alligator’s head until they gained control of it. I was amazed.

In this dream I thought it was incredible that I was able to gain control of what I thought was a tremendously powerful habitual way of thinking, the alligator. With my conscious, the woman, and Subconscious, the man, minds working together, I succeeded in using my thinking more productively and with control. This was a time in my life when I was deciding to create more positive thinking, even though I didn’t know if I could actually do it. This dream showed me that I actually was capable of changing them and that I had done it the day before I had the dream. From it I identified a new kind of strength in using the Conscious and Subconscious together. I felt great inside and out. In identifying our own strengths, we bring about ideas that we are capable of change and this aids in bringing about a state of wellness.

Nightmares are another type of dream which reveal times when the Conscious mind is full of fear and worry. These are misunderstandings. They are states of mind in which we are in ignorance of what is Truth, and they produce a kind of stress that brings about a host of illnesses as a result. Darkness, or a lack of awareness, is often prevalent in nightmares.
I rarely have nightmares, but in this one I vividly recall how I felt.

I was at a time in my life when I feared an inner part of myself that I didn’t know. I saw this aspect of myself, the threatening man, as being angry with my conscious self and I feared this anger would cause a change in me. I wanted what I saw as the most beneficial aspect of my inner self, Clint Eastwood, to come and help me to overcome the anger and blame. This was a time in my life when I had to realize that all parts of myself can be used productively. The key was to learn more about the Subconscious aspects, because it was only the Conscious mind’s perspective that what is within is harmful. The Subconscious mind only holds Truth. It will present that Truth to the Conscious mind for its own information and benefit. I decided how I would change myself as a result of that dream, by using imagination, working in a movie studio and aligning with an actor, rather than thinking I was unable to have what I desired.

Very close to this time, I had an intuitive health analysis done through the School of Metaphysics. The mental attitude revealed that was the prime factor in holding me back from wholeness was that of fear that I wasn’t good enough and had never been good enough. As I received this awareness, I looked at it and started to imagine myself being able to accomplish that which I desired. Although it took a lot of mental effort to think differently at first, I persisted in imagining myself being able to accomplish what I had desired for a long time. I followed through with action and soon saw how much happier I was with myself. This eased the frustration and put me in a much better state of health.

To be healthy and at peace, the optimum condition for producing wholeness is to be creative and creating. This is our reason for being in the physical. When we create with awareness and on purpose, our bodies have a reason for being. There is a newness to life. The energies flow smoothly, the organs serve us, and we feel great. On the other hand, if we are creating in ways that don’t serve a greater good for ourselves or others, or even if we refuse to create, our bodily functions begin to slow and we begin to die. It is up to each one of us to choose to fulfill our purpose in life. To do this we need to listen to what the Subconscious mind is telling us.

 

This dream reveals how I was creating in my life. In fact, I was fighting creation at that time concerning a new idea, my daughter, concerning receptivity. I consciously thought that an aspect of my subconscious mind was trying to force me to create. But really my need was to cooperate with my inner self and to create productively. I acted on this, and soon creation became so much easier, more harmonious, and more fulfilling for me. I didn’t need to be angry with myself any longer. If I had continued to hold in my thoughts about creating and the resentment or anger that I had for a long period of time, (and I might have done that without the awareness this dream provided), I could easily have developed cancer, which several close relatives in my family, including my own father had died of. Although it scared me initially, this dream proved very valuable.

At the opposite extreme, you may have had a dream which reflected beautiful love-making with someone you are committed to. This shows you have engaged in productive creation in your daily, waking life. These types of dreams reflect harmony that you are creating in yourself in using your conscious and subconscious minds. Think of the times in your life when you had this type of dream and attempt to recall what you were creating. And also remember the state of your health so that you can identify and repeat the harmonious mental state over and over. This is the a beautiful state of well-being in which you love yourself inside and out.

Finally, there are dreams that reflect a higher quality of thinking. These are the dreams that reveal what is occurring within our spiritual growth. Religious leaders, churches, and teachers, as well as governmental leaders all represent the superconscious mind, the most spiritual part of mind.

This dream revealed how I was exploring my spirituality , represented by the churches. I hadn’t decided how I would use this new awareness yet, but the discovery of it unexpectedly was wonderful and peaceful for me. It was a time in my life and in my thinking when I consciously was moving forward and attempting to know myself as a spiritual being. I wanted to be closer to God and was meditating daily to realize this. Although I didn’t have all the answers as to where this journey would lead me or how I could respond, I knew that I wanted to know more.

This is the ideal state of consciousness to have to create total wellness in our lives. We are spiritual beings in physical bodies for the purpose of learning to be creative like the Creator. When this awareness is part of our daily thinking, we develop a spiritual consciousness. When our attention is on more than our physical lives, when we have a realization of a reason for our existence, we truly are able to align with God and the healing abilities in ourselves. We are able to face any difficulty, to surrender any in harmony, to give our all, and to know that life is eternal. Then no thought or thing has the power to cause us harm. We are ready to build understandings which are permanent rather that gain information that is temporary. We are willing to create peacefully and productively, rather than feel anger or blame. We are able to love rather than to be in pain with the love that we are not receiving. We become whole.

All of this can be known through the act of interpreting the messages in the Universal Language of Mind, the language the subconscious speaks to the conscious mind. Dream interpretation is a wonderful diagnostic tool for your health. There is so much that can be gained from interpreting your dreams and responding to their messages. You can create a state of mind where every day is full of well-being. This is the way to create health and wholeness permanently.

 

copyright© 2002, School of Metaphysics