Dreams and American Youth - School of Metaphysics

A FAMILY of YOUNG SOULS, dream interpretation

Dreams and American Youth
Damian Nordmann

The consciousness and decisions of the parents and all adults in our country have a huge impact on the consciousness of American youth. What the parents, adults, and elders decide to make right or to ignore molds and shapes the way children think and how they live. My parents divorced when I was fourteen years old. While this did not have a terribly detrimental effect on me, the attitudes and compulsive ways of thinking that each of my parents had did set the ground work for what became my attitude about life and what I would do or refuse to do to create and be happy. I always had some awareness of this, and I became very aware and clear as to how my thinking had been influenced when I started studying metaphysics, in particular dream interpretation.

I was eighteen when I met Oliver Seger, the director of the School of Metaphysics in Louisville, KY. He had given a lecture on dream interpretation at my high school humanities class one day. Unfortunately I missed that day of school, one of maybe four or five days that I missed during my Senior year. Everyone was telling me how they had had their dreams interpreted and this meant that and what meant what in dreams. Phooey! No one could tell me what my dreams meant but me. I had known that for a long time. I had always remembered many of my dreams and often times I was quite sure what they were conveying to me. I certainly didn’t need someone else telling me what my dreams were saying to me. I wasn’t too disappointed that I had lost out on our special guest, I just kept doing the usual high school stuff. You know, homework, special assignments, projects, my church youth group, and of course hanging out with friends. My opportunity to learn about my dreams would come later.

It was the middle of November and my humanities teacher was taking us to his farm for his annual two days of outdoor education. This was optional, of course, for anyone not going could stay with a teacher of their choice to do homework and busy work, yeah right. I had missed the opportunity the previous year when I was in Mr. Holden’s Junior English class and I had to listen to all the tales of fun, learning, and mayhem that went on. I was not about to let the chance get away from me again that year.

It was during the first night we were there that three men from the School of Metaphysics drove up. People were telling me that one of the men, Oliver, was the person who gave a presentation on dream interpretation. While we were still eating Oliver came over to my group of friends and sat with us. He said we all looked like a cozy tribe and a few of us laughed. I asked him if he knew anything about astral projection which was something I had gained an interest in during the last seven months. I thought he would shrug and say he knew a little bit of information on the topic. Instead he quickly replied with authority, “Astral projection is the process of consciously moving your attention away from your physical body and into the inner levels of mind.” I was amazed that anyone in Louisville actually knew something about astral projection, let alone have some authority on the subject. I was really wanting to tell him of my friend’s experience of being able to leave her body, but I wasn’t sure how to respond to his quick answer to my question, so I listened.

Later on Oliver talked to the whole group about meditation. He talked about aligning the conscious and subconscious minds and attuning them to the superconscious mind, which he said was everyone’s connection with God. I considered myself a very spiritual and religious person at that time, and I wasn’t sure if I believed what he was saying, or not. It did strike a chord with me, though, because he had such authority and what he talked about could give me more power, which was what I was seeking at the time. Oliver told us about the sound of the Aum and we all chanted the Aum and meditated. During the chant there were a few people giggling a distance away from me, however my friends and the people near me were all quite serious about trying out this chant. The vibration and the feeling it created was intense. When we were finished I wanted to try it again, but I didn’t want to look stupid for getting a bunch of people together to Aum loudly.

Even though I still wasn’t so sure I bought into the dream interpretation, I wanted to learn meditation, and I was curious to see if the School of Metaphysics could teach me astral projection. I wrote a letter to the School of Metaphysics expressing my interest in their classes. My letter was answered, but I put off going to the classes for some time. A month and a half rolled by then I received a call from Oliver about a class starting. I said I would try to be there, but again I didn’t make it. Oliver called me the next week and asked me if I wanted to be in the class. I said yes and he said I would need to come a half an hour early to catch up on what I had missed the previous week.

During the next several weeks and months a whole new way of thinking started to unfold for me. Much of it came from having my teacher, Oliver, interpret my dreams for me as I began to learn to interpret them for myself. It was after about the second or third week of class that I realized there was something to this dream interpretation. I had learned that my dreams were about me and my conscious state of awareness. I learned that we all dream in the Universal Language of Mind, which is a picture language. I learned some of the symbols such as animals represent habits or compulsions and that a car represents my physical body. What kept getting to me was how every week my teacher was able to tell me things about me that I had not told him. He could tell from my dreams if I had been undisciplined with my spiritual practices or if I had been thinking up some new idea. I was surprised and I wanted to know how he was doing it.

I was enjoying learning how to improve my concentration and understand the nightly messages given to me, then came the big dream. I awoke from it in the middle of the night and sat up straight in bed…

I’m just hanging out by the seaside with friends, and people from school. I climb down a cliff to some people playing a game in an out jutting no bigger than 5 X 5 square. I get frightened and stuck, but the two people down there a male and female my age say they will stay with me. Shortly thereafter I say I’ll climb down because it’s no big deal, but they find a way to make it even easier to help me.

I see people swinging as I sort of did to get up the cliff. People help each other. When I reach the top of the cliff overhanging the sea I notice there is a change. The air, the attitude has shifted. Someone new is there, a former friend of mine Matt Weckman. But he looks different. He’s wearing a light blue sweater and jeans and his clothes look cleaner and nicer than usual. His hair is also short which is different than he is in physical life. He seems to be acting the same, but creepier. I go to talk to him, yet he seems to blow me off, ignoring my genuine concern for him. He goes and talks to my friend Natalie. Many of my friends are around. I wander off by myself then Matt issues some sort of challenge. As I’m striding from the edge of the cliff to another place I cut my finger deeply, but with minimal blood. I see a huge deep chunk of flesh is now missing, and I wonder why there is no pain. Reapproaching the cliff I look for Weckman and I notice the sea, the sun, and many sailing ships great and small coming and going. Weckman has left and Natalie has gone with him.

The next thing I know, my friends and I are in a house. We get a call from Natalie. Natalie wants someone to pick her up at Matt’s way down on Taylor Blvd. I hear Matt yelling as if drunken and aggressive. He swears that we won’t make it and that we’re doomed. From out of the phone his voice shouts at my friends calling out his hatred of them. To Cali he says that she’s a precious rich girl and something about the two of them living on different sides of town and her wealth and his poverty. I don’t recall the others, and then I yank the phone cord out of the wall. I turn to a mirror and give a Kenpo salute. I say, “It has begun. We must now do what we must.”

Demons, hallucinations, and spirits immediately begin taunting us. I tell my friends not to be afraid and that they are only mind games. Cali and Rush are near and I forget who else. The taunts are brutal voices telling us how we will die, and terrible pain and suffering. I don’t believe a bit of it, even when the apparitions appear to me as people I know. We strike out to get Natalie, but my friends are forced to abandon me. I don’t feel lonely though.

It’s night and I am running along the streets with great speed, knowing that I can do anything with my mind, even change myself into a car, but that would be too easy. I must look like a car, because at first no one notices, and I use my will power to change the stoplights before I reach them. Some cars come up behind me and I’m forced to be me so I step onto the side walk as I see their headlights go by. I jump up onto the storefront out juttings and canopies because the demons are getting stronger. Two vampires appear one is Susan, the other is some other Oriental girl that I know from school. They tell me that I will die and that I will fail. They are bleeding and I feel for them. I tell them I will return.

I finally come up on the house quickly. It’s not really Matt’s house, but it could be. The demons and spirits are strongest here. I cry out, “In the name of God be gone! In the name of God be gone! In the name of God be gone!” Nothing harms me. As I enter I see Natalie and she gets behind me. Matt approaches about to attack, but I say the true name of Jesus, “In the name of Yahushua be gone!” four or five times. Each time it sends waves of pain into him. He looks different again. He’s got bigger muscles then before, much more, and evil. He has people digging things up in his smelly, musty, broken down house, but they stay away. The men look fairly normal, Matt doesn’t. I count 12 men before I turn to leave. As Natalie and I exit, Matt stands and swears he will not be beaten, he swears he’ll destroy us. My friends are out on the street. I tell them that this is only the beginning, but we will succeed.

I didn’t know if I should be shocked or amazed. The dream was one of the most real and vivid dreams I had ever had. I knew the dream had to have some very important meaning so I wrote it down immediately. Afterwards I noticed it was after three o’clock in the morning.

I found out later that the dream was about how I was motivating my Self and how the way I viewed my life was changing. Matt represented an aggressive conscious aspect of me that sometimes would get out of control. I had learned from my father to let things build up inside me until I was very angry or frustrated and then to dump everything out in an explosion of emotion. Each of my friends represented different aspects of me. Natalie represented an inner aspect of magnetism and attraction. In the dream I rescued this aspect from my more sporadic quality. There were many other symbols in the dream and I learned what each one of them meant. The cliffs represented a challenge that was before me. The vampires and demons represented negative or unproductive aspects of me that needed to be changed or healed. My ability to run very fast was showing me how I was starting to learn to create much greater forward motion in my life. My ability to change the stop lights and jump high indicated an awareness in the power to use my mind to cause what I wanted. Matt wanting to kill me represented my need to change. Death in a dream represents change. The approach of both of my parents was usually to wait until things got bad before they would change. I adopted this attitude in many areas of my life. I wasn’t sure yet how to cause changes to occur in my life so it all seemed very brutal and somewhat scary like in the dream.

After I had this dream I became much more determined to write down and interpret each of my dreams that I remembered. Each morning was exciting for me as I looked for something new to learn from my previous night’s journeys. Every dream is about the dreamer. Dreams relate to us our conscious state of awareness. The dreams will always present truth, and they are showing what we were thinking and learning the day before we have them. This became more evident to me as I started to make connections between the interpretation of my dreams with what I knew I had actually done the day before. It became very important for me to pay attention and remember what I was thinking and feeling from the previous day. Sometimes I immediately knew what the dream was offering me, even before I wrote it down.

I was so excited about this new skill that I was developing, I started interpreting dreams for everyone I knew. I would spend my lunch period at school interpreting dreams for people I ate with. I would interpret the dreams of my friends in my youth group and friends that went to other high schools. I would even interpret the dreams of my family members when they would ask me to.

A couple of months after I started learning to interpret my dreams, I became acutely aware of how scattered and out of focus I often was. I had a dream that gave me much insight into this.

I’m at school. I see Laura and I give her a hug, but she gets mad because she thinks the hug is superficial and I don’t care about her. I promptly give her another one and tell her not to worry. Later school lets out and I’m in a mad rush. Mr. Davis all of a sudden assigns a bunch of homework out of the blue. I’m scrambling to get my stuff together because I am afraid I will miss the bus. At one point many of my books and my binders are scattered on the floor so I have to waste even more time picking them up. I run down the stairs only to see that it is dark and rainy outside. The buses are already pulling away and leaving me behind. I yell and run after them, trying to find mine. Mine is gone and most of the rest leave. I see Rebecca Sherman merely standing outside. I go up and ask her if one of her parents will take me home. She suggests that we take one of the buses that is still running and unattended. We jump in and the front seat is like that of a truck’s. She drives the bus and I notice how attractive she is looking. She is wearing a nice outfit, white or pink with a short skirt and lacy stockings. I put my hand on her leg and try to get close to her. She doesn’t seem to mind so I get closer. She points out several other buses going to a compound nearby. I ask her a question about something. She refers my question to a University of Louisville watch I have on my wrist and something to do with Speed School.

Being in school indicates an attitude of learning. This is very important because life is a continual learning process. When we stop learning we stop creating, then we start to deteriorate mentally and physically. In this dream I was scrambling and hurrying. I wasn’t prepared for the assignment that one of my teachers gave me. The hurrying in the dream showed me how hurried I was in my daily, conscious thinking. If you notice the more you try to hurry at something, the more mistakes you make and the longer it takes to do anything. This is how I was at that time. I could see how I had learned this from my parents as well. They were often procrastinating and then would try to accomplish a task in a rushed often scattered manner.

Mr. Davis, my Calculus teacher, represented an aspect of my Superconscious Mind. Superconscious Mind is the division of mind that we all have that connects us with all of creation. Within Superconscious Mind is our plan for being compatible with God and learning to be creators with God. In the dream Mr. Davis assigns homework that I am not prepared for which shows how I was not prepared mentally for responding to my own inner urge that comes from my superconscious Self. When I go outside in the dream the sky is dark which indicates how I was ignoring something in my conscious state of awareness.

The school bus represented an organization that was moving me towards learning. At the time I thought this was probably my high school youth group or the School of Metaphysics. Me running represented my desire and attempt to keep up with the organization and the learning it provided. Laura and Rebecca are both female which represents subconscious or inner aspects of me. There was affection for and an attempt to harmonize with these aspects of my Self. Rebecca represented an aspect of excellence and high standards. Because she was driving the bus this represented how I was using this aspect to help me get to where I was going. However, because I was not driving the bus, this showed how I needed to take more conscious control of where I was going with my life.

All of this made sense to me at the time. I was often putting off projects or goals then I would try to complete them in a hurried and inefficient manner. I was trying to gain the most I could from my high school, church youth group, and from the School of Metaphysics, but I never seemed to be able to keep up with all the ideas that were being presented.

Unfortunately, often times the youth of our country are not sure what to think, what the difference is between right and wrong, or how to learn. With television, movies, magazines, and all manner of other stimuli and outside influences, children and adolescents can develop some rather bizarre ways of thinking. This dream showed me how my own thinking was somewhat backwards:

I find myself in my car with a thin, tall, straight-dark-haired man with brown eyes. He seems fairly nice if not a little weird. He keeps talking and talking. His demeanor gradually shifts from one of frightened kindness to psycho perversion. He mentions that he called my house. He asks me to take him home because he lives on Hurstbourne Ln. He even offers some money. When we get to a gas station he gets really weird. He takes some dollar bills off my dash board and says, “This is compensation,” I tell him to give it back immediately and he does. He also has one of my mom’s blank checks. I make him return that as well, but I lose all trust in the man. I tell him to give me gas money so he brings out two huge handfuls of quarters. He tells me to take them but that he’ll burn down my house if I do. He tries to do something to me so I punch him three times. I’m not sure if I make him get out then or not, but he makes references to the fact that he knows where I live. That is all I can remember.

The main symbols in the dream were the unfamiliar man, my car, gasoline, and money. I did not know the man so he represented an unknown conscious aspect of me. My car represents my physical body. Gasoline represents energy, and money represents value. This dream was showing me how I didn’t know how to use value or respect it. This is something my parents tried to teach me, yet they were not disciplined enough themselves to make sure I followed through on my commitments. Had they taught me early on the joy and value of working and accomplishment, then I think this dream would have been different, or would not have come up at all.

There is also an attitude of taking and stealing represented by the man trying to take my money and get a free ride home. There was conflict and distrust with this aspect of me which indicated how I distrusted and had conflict occurring within my Self during the day. Mistrust was the attitude I had as presented to me in my first intuitive health analysis I received from the School of Metaphysics. It was true that I had very little trust in my Self because I rarely followed through to completion on the many ideas and desires I had. This all made sense because I had been refusing to get a job and earn my own money. My parents also had a hard time getting me to follow through on things I said I would do so my overall sense of value and trust in my own ability to create was very low. After this dream and some related dreams I began to take greater actions to get a job I liked and looked for ways I could be of assistance to others.

Since those first months in the School of Metaphysics I have used my dreams for many wonderful transformations. I have come a long way from believing that no one could tell me what my dreams meant to now being a teacher who interprets other people’s dreams, helps them to understand their meaning, and shows how they can be applied to their daily life. I have a great respect for what my parents taught me and an acceptance in knowing they did the best with what they had. By using my dreams to understand my waking consciousness I have the opportunity to learn what my parents did not teach me. I envision a time when all parents learn dream interpretation for themselves and perhaps more importantly for their children. When parents value the messages of their own dreams they will see how desperately each soul that is in a young body wants to learn and to reach their full potential. Fears will be dispelled. Strengths will be recognized and fostered. Dream interpretation is the simplest and most accessible tool anyone has for understanding themselves. As adults and parents teach this to the youth we will see a generation of leaders and world servers come about, and we will have taken a giant leap towards peace for the whole planet.