Re (1): truth & dreams

The best link out of three I included was Psychologists Explore the Dream by Morton T. Kelsey. The other two links (that is, the ones involving Synesius and St. Augustine) were excerpts from the appendix of the same book from which all three links were culled. In fact, to the person who wants to get a good overview of the history of dream interpretation from the past up through the present, Morton T. Kelsey's book (from which these excerpts derive) comes highly recommended. The version I read was entitled Dreams: The Dark Speech of the Spirit but it has since been reprinted in paperback under the title God, Dreams, and Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams. One Amazon reviewer suggests that while the book was "very well written and researched" (for virtually no one would dispute that point), he was disappointed because it "has extremely little to offer when it comes to interpreting the symbolic language" of dreams. I think there is good reason for this factor, however, and that is namely that the symbolic language of dreams tends to be as individual and personal as the dreamer dreaming the dream. In fact, I think that Kelsey made that quite clear in his book, though this reviewer suggests he was misled by the (newer) title's "A Christian Interpretation of Dreams," which, for that matter, is justified criticism. I think that the original Dreams: The Dark Speech of the Spirit is a thousand times more apropos—and catchier to the ear and imagination at that.

I don't often reference the link to one of my earliest pre-college articles in which I attempt to demonstrate the improbability of reincarnation through an appeal to what is known about dreams and hypnotism (mainly because it devolves into some highly speculative flights of fancy and ends on a somewhat weaker note), but in the opening paragraphs I go into some detail unraveling a dream of a primarily erotic nature which has been consistent with my experience in examining my own dreams and in conversations I've held with others as we attempt to get to the bottom of why they've dreamt what they've dreamt. You can read all about it at The Validity of Reincarnation: A query into the various aspects of past live. (It also features an excellent appendix written by Morton T. Kelsey on the nine levels of Jung's dream archetypes.) Now then, I've long believed I would eventually be conned into posting an example I've driven my friends up and down and all around the walls with by using it countless times in conversations about dreams, but never got around to setting it down firmly into print, at least that I can recall.

ONCE UPON A TIME about four years ago, I had a fifty minute commute between home and work and the same back again. It was a spiritually dry season and I felt the need to "reach out to God." Therefore, I was delighted to find KADI 99.5 FM, a Contemporary Christian Music radio station. There was a problem, however: while the lyrics were often inspirational, I found the music itself impossibly poppy, sentimental, and sappy: optimism that made you want to slap its face.

After a week of listening to this music in the fifty minute commutes hither and yon, I had a dream one night in which my Sunday school class (for whether I was then teaching or had recently taught, my pupils were still fresh in my mind) and I were all rooming together in an exceptionally large house—surrealistically large, in fact, almost like a tiny city. My dwelling was apparently up at the top of the carpeted, double wide stairs where I could retreat in near total privacy. I noticed that while everyone acknowledged me as "the leader," it was not because I possessed any certain special quality—it distinctly occurred to me in my dream that anyone who lived there could have been just as much a leader. (Really the only thing that set me apart there and in real life was that I was several years older than my students.) No, it was rather that someone had to be the facilitator and it so happened that such was my duty, a duty no better and no worse than anyone else's responsibilities there.

Retreating down the stairs, I noticed a group of three or four of the older male students congregated around the stereo in the living room, which I remember faced out from an inner wall. They were kind of "bee-bopping" around to the beat and when I approached, I was immediately struck by two things: the music seemed like it had some true depth to the lyrical content, but it was a soundtrack of the Singing Squirrels, which it doesn't take much reflection to realize was essentially childhood memories of Alvin and the Chipmunks being (further) warped in my dream world. There was more to the dream, as I recall, but that is the important part for our purposes here.

I had no idea why I had dreamt that dream until I was explaining it to a fellow Christian at work the next day. Suddenly, I just knew why I had dreamt it; there was no question whatsoever in my mind; there were no other possibilities that would be true, though my dream was obviously very individualized, drawing on my own unique repertoire of personal experience and emotion. The Contemporary Christian Music station did seem at the time to be making a truly positive difference in my life, but I found the music as hard to take seriously as I would the singing Chipmunks. I did not consciously come to that symbolism; it was once again a pairing of the present with the personal symbolism of the past. And to some degree, even though the content of the Chipmunks blasting from the speakers is not as obviously emotional in nature, it still has an emotional element to it, for it was as much as anything how the music made me feel: intellectually, many of the songs had a message to them but psychologically I derived about as much musical satisfaction from them as I do from the Chipmunks. Of course, we know that there is a strong emotional element to music, which has much to do with why it draws us. And the other parts of the dream in which I was the leader but realized that such did not make me particularly special were more, if not emotions, then intuitions of the truth. Perhaps that is the better term: dreams are a very intuitive language and when they deal with the subject matter of knowledge (as opposed to that of emotions), it is generally intuitive knowledge even if it deals with empirical particulars. Now with the chipmunks in place, I would again refer the interested reader to the sexual symbolism in The Validity of Reincarnation and how that played itself out.

There is one last thing I wish to share: an e-mail written recently—18 January 2005—when I was having abdominal pains I believed to be gallstones and I'd been experiencing infrequent bouts of insomnia and nightmares. I was trying to get to the bottom of it, so I penned this note to a longsuffering friend:


You see, the dirty princess was (apparently) a personification of the parts of myself I did not want to face: filthy, matted hair, urine soaked: some rather strong symbolism of disdain. (We might pity such a person—indeed, I never disdained the princess herself in my dream—but one of our first prerogatives would probably be to get her to the showers.) And yet when I saw her again—and accepted her for who she was dirt and all (and in this case as my own bride)—she became beautiful to me: the symbolism behind the fact that however dirty she was, she was, in fact, a princess (and dirt washes off). It was as though there was a part of myself I loathed and feared that had to be accepted, and once I accepted it—once I was (re-)united with it—it became my ally and friend rather than an object of fear. Thus, the internal parts of my psyche were no longer pitted against one another, but working in harmony again: wholeness had been restored.

Yet having said all that, in truth this dream did not seem to have as much long-term significance as I had attributed to it at the time, but I don't think I had any more nightmares later, suggesting a possible end to that aspect (perhaps that was the wholeness that was restored?), but it is, at least, a telling indicator of how I go about interpreting dreams and the factors I consider in the process. I am, of course, only an amateur, but at the very least an eccentric and eclectic one that presumably has given interested readers like yourself much food for thought.

And now I must go.

God bless,
Eric

• Re(2): truth & dreams - By Eric July 8, 2005 at 08:23:50 AM
• Re(2): truth & dreams - By Sara March 12, 2005 at 06:31:22 AM
  • Re(3): truth & dreams - By Eric March 12, 2005 at 11:22:27 AM
    • Re(4): truth & dreams - By Sara March 12, 2005 at 05:12:12 PM
      • Re(5): truth & dreams - By Karen March 12, 2005 at 07:58:59 PM