My Impressions Of Last Week's Conference

 

photo courtesy of nypsychicfair.com

Last week’s Expo

I’m back from an intense weekend at the Body Mind Spirit Expo. I lectured and stayed busy both days with many dreamers and their amazing (!) dreams. Some of these dreams helped clarify issues that the dreamer was working on. Others suggested changes in lifestyle or attitude. A few were even congratulatory, encouraging the dreamer to “stay on course” no matter what the rest of those in the dreamer’s world might think. The insights that came to dreamers were wonderful and inspired me to work even harder to reveal as much understanding as possible.

Also, I now have plenty of dream material to last a good long time—until the next conference  :-)

The individuality of dream symbols

One of the things I perpetually find extraordinary about dreams is how much each symbol is tailored to any given dreamer. There really is no such thing as a universal symbol. Even the symbols that have common associations to all of us are filtered through the individual experiences of the dreamer. For example, people frequently dream of houses. Houses have certain common associations with almost all of us. From the perspective of dreams, houses are “where we live”—not only physically, but in our thoughts, in our emotions, in our aspirations, in our minds, in our worries, in our privacy, in our sense of refuge, in our sense of security.

But now, let’s take the examples of two dreamers from this last weekend, both of whom dreamed about the houses they lived in. When I asked the first one to, “Tell me about your house,” she told me it was where she always went when the world got too stressful. It was where she could be herself, where everything in it was something that she had put there. Her house was where she went in order to feel safe and to feel at peace.

The second dreamer, when asked the same question, gave a totally different reply. She said she was raised by her grandparents who were truly loving people. But there was a sense, in their house, that everything was an antique. It had its place and it had been in that place for decades. Nothing was to be moved or disturbed. There was a sense of rigidity, of things being fixed, of stasis, and the dreamer had the feeling that she always needed to “tiptoe around, making sure I don’t mess anything up.”

Needless to say, when it came time to discuss what a house meant to each of these young women, the dialogue went in two, entirely different directions.

The weekend was full of those kinds of individualized dream symbolism. Take this as an unusual example: In the dream, the dreamer was concerned for two kittens that had wandered into a bird’s nest and were being threatened by the birds! How’s that for a switch? Most of us would be concerned for the birds, not the cats. But that’s the nature of dreams.

More on Wednesday.

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