Years ago when I was a guest on a talk show discussing dreams, a lady called in to ask for my analysis of a dream. In the dream, she was traveling alone along an ocean side highway. As she drove down the mountainside the car began gaining speed. Suddenly, the road sharply veered. She tried to slow the car but the brakes failed. Unable to safely negotiate the curve, the car continued its forward motion going over a cliff and crashing on the rocks below. She said she was so frightened when she awoke that she hadn’t been able to drive since having the dream. In fact, she hadn’t even been able to be in a car. Her fear revolved around the belief that this dream might be warning her of a future physical occurrence.
I asked her if this was a recent dream and she replied, “No, it was fifteen years ago.”
Fifteen years!
Immediately what flew through my mind was all the ways that her life must have changed in fifteen years. The little things that you and I take for granted, hopping into a car and going to the grocery store. Or being free to see relatives. The places she might have wanted to travel to but did not. How she must have become dependent upon others to accomplish the simplest errands we take for granted — going to the grocery store or to the dentist. The arts, or sports events, or classes she might have participated in previously, now removed from her life. Far from a mere inconvenience, her decision to stop driving because of one frightening dream experience, had indeed affected the type and quality of this woman’s life-style for the previous fifteen years. She had robbed herself of free will. Her desire to understand the dream had been colored by conscious fears of the dream “coming true”, so her conscious waking experiences had been seriously affected.
To think that someone would have a dream, be scared of it because they didn’t understand what it was saying, and would change their physical life to suit their fear was disheartening to me. And yet it made me realize that this is how the vast majority of the world exists, having dreams with little inkling of their raison d’étre or meaning. Most people still wrestle with unanswered questions, just as I had for two decades, not knowing what their dreams mean or their value to the waking mind. This woman and her misinterpreted dream added to my resolve to share the benefits of research so that she and others have a readily available means to understand and use the Universal Language of Mind.
What did the dream mean?
Her dream was indicating her need to slow down in her assimilation of the challenges she had met in her life at the time the dream occurred. Her dream was not telling her she should not drive. This dream was telling her about her physical health as symbolized by the dream-car being out of control. The crashing indicated an impending difficulty resulting from the construction of her attitudes at the time she remembered the dream. When asked, she did not remember what was occurring in her life at that time. Not only did she miss the import of the message at the time, but the fears she harbored in her lack of knowledge produced limiting handicaps in how she lived fifteen years of her life.
When I began explaining what the dream had been telling her in the language of mind, her fears were dispelled and the desire to drive again was rekindled which she verbalized. One of the benefits of learning to communicate in the language the inner minds speak is knowing how energy and substance functions in each of the levels of consciousness. I responded to her desire to drive again by suggesting she become familiar with controlling a car just as she had when she first learned to drive; to take the learning steps over again in order to have the freedom she wanted to regain. This woman was once again on her way to controlling her life.
The crashing of the car in the dream made this message a warning signal of disorders manifesting in her physical body, rather than a stimulus for a fear that the dream was a foreboding preview of coming events in her physical life. Even if the dream had been precognitive, it would still signify what was happening within her consciousness during the time of the dream. The woman had lived in Kansas City all her life, far from the ocean and mountainsides, so the probability that this was a precognitive dream was almost nonexistent. If she had found herself living out the dream, just as it had been revealed to her, she could use the memory of her dream experience to consciously cause a different outcome in her physical life. In this way a precognitive dream experience would serve as a signal to be more alert when she was driving so she could change the probable dream-outcome of crashing to a physical-outcome of safely controlling the automobile. Had this woman understood this she would have been free of fear, realizing the dream experience whether precognitive or merely symbolic in nature existed to offer her greater insight and thus more understanding of her Self and her life.
Health Dreams
Some dreams are considered health dreams because they concern the health and well-being of the physical body, symbolized by the working order of any small vehicle such as a car, small plane or boat. I’ve had people tell me about dreams where they walk outside to find four flat tires on their car or a car that won’t start. I had a dream one time where the water pump on my car was broken. I’d been studying and using dreams for years by then so upon awakening I knew it was a message about my physical health. I tried to figure out what a water pump on a car does so I could find the correspondence with my physical body, respond to the impending condition, and therefore assure my good health. I didn’t figure it out quickly enough because about three days later I was experiencing a terrible cold virus that set me back for several days.
For most people, however, a health dream will usually occur about three months before physical symptoms become apparent. This is because what is being reported in the dream is occurring in the inner levels of consciousness and are some distance-time away from being apparent in the physical body. The attitudes held in the inner levels go through a process which ultimately results in physical manifestation. While this process is carried on, physical time transpires. Because most people scatter the mind’s energies, the timing of the process is elongated. One of the benefits I’ve discovered in performing mental and spiritual disciplines is that the degree of distance between the time you think of something and when it actually happens decreases rapidly proportionate to the increase in your awareness. Thus how the mind reproduces desires is accelerated according to how the mind is utilized.
–from the Dreamer's Dictionary ©1995 School of Metaphysics