May 2008 Issue
IN THIS ISSUE:
Feature Article:
-- Paranormal Dreaming
Cross Cultural Dreaming:
-- Psychic Dreams Throughout History and the World
Famous Dreams:
-- Mark Twain, Anne Rice
Readers Dreams & Analysis:
-- none this issue
Symbol of The Month:
-- Light
Reader Comments:
-- None this issue
From The Editor:
-- Major issues with my autoresponder service
Submission Instructions:
--See bottom of newsletter
** NEW **
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Quote of the Month
Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions.
~Edgar Cayce
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Feature Article:
Have you ever dreamed something before it happened in waking life? Have you ever awoke from a dream (or sleep) and known something? Have you and someone close to you ever had similar dreams? These are just a few types of paranormal dreams that aren’t really paranormal at all.
There are basically five types (categorized) of “paranormal” dreams:
1. Precognitive Dreams
These are dreams which correctly represent (or show you) unlikely or unknowable future events.
2. Telepathic Dreams
These are dreams in which the dreamer becomes aware of someone else’s current mental state.
3. Clairvoyant Dreams
These are dreams in which the dreamer obtains information about the location or physical properties of some distant object/s, but not from someone else’s mind. These dreams are sort of like remote viewing while dreaming.
4. Premonition Dreams
Premonitions are experiences, (eg dream, waking thought, etc.), which appears to anticipate a future event that is mainly unpleasant. This is reflected in the term premonition itself, which derives from the Latin word praemonere - to warn in advance.
5. Shared Dreaming
Shared dreams are dreams in which two or more dreamers have uncannily similar dreams at, or around, the same time.
Paranormal or psychic dreams clearly pose a challenge to current scientific conceptions of how things are supposed to work in the world. Though you don’t read about it in the journals or newspapers, there is actually a staggering amount of research to support the existence of psychic phenomenon in general, and psychic dreaming in particular. Several prominent dream theorists, such as Freud, Jung, Stekel, Boss and Van de Castle have strongly asserted the existence of paranormal dreams.
Although paranormal dreams cannot be scientifically validated through repeated experimentation, they can, nevertheless, be authenticated by dream reports and records from dreamers throughout history and the world who have kept a journal of their dreams.
If you haven’t (or haven’t yet) awakened to the fact that we dream the future, you may be inspired by some of these replies to the question: Have you ever dreamed something before it happened?
I dreamed Grandpa visited me on the night he died. He told me he loved me and was going to a better place. Nobody in the family wanted to believe me, even though we got a phone call in the middle of the night telling us he’d died.
I dreamed the space shuttle Challenger disaster before it happened. I saw the problem was with some kind of seal on the left side, though I didn’t know it was called an o-ring until they told us that on the news.
I dreamed my husband returned a shirt, I had never seen, to a department store and they’d only give him $32.99 for it. The next afternoon, my husband called me to tell me his mother had sent him a shirt he didn’t like for a birthday present. He took it back to the store, but they’d only give him $32.99—the sale price, not the regular price—because he didn’t have a receipt.
I dreamed that Fergie (Duchess of York) was cavorting topless by a swimming pool. Then the tabloid papers in England published pictures of her, topless with her boyfriend.
It’s fascinating to look at how we wake up to the fact that we have a natural ability to dream things before they happen—and then awaken (if we’re lucky or thoughtful, or simply ready to push the envelope) to the deeper realization that if we can see the future, we might be able to use the information to do some good. My all-time favorite example of this is the story of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad.
The Underground Railroad:
Harriet Tubman’s Dreams
Harriet Tubman was literally jolted into awareness of the gift of psychic dreaming (precognitive dreaming). She was a young, black girl, known as Minty at the time, on a slave plantation in Tidewater Maryland. She may have been around eleven years old in 1831, when the gift hit her. She didn’t know her exact age. Where she lived, slaves were prohibited from learning to read and write, and they followed time through changes of seasons and crop cycles, through death in the family or the sale of loved ones to other masters.
On one particular day, Minty bravely (or foolishly) blocked a barn door to delay an angry overseer who was going after a black man who was running away. The overseer grabbed a two-pound metal weight and hurled it after the man. It struck Minty full in the forehead, opening a fissure through which blood gushed out. She was not expected to live, but somehow—treated only with the herbs and roots from the woods that her mother knew—she survived, with a huge dent in her forehead that marked this tiny but stocky and powerfully muscled woman more clearly than any slave brand.
Marked though she was, she succeeded not only in escaping her own slave master—despite the violent opposition and threatened betrayal of her husband—but in returning to Maryland from the North again and again, to help other slaves make their escape. Harriet began her quest, her divine purpose if you will, by first leading out family members in small, careful groups.
As the situation in the South grew more desperate and the Civil War loomed, she became bolder, bringing out larger parties of complete strangers. She came and went safely through the gauntlet of bloodhounds and patrollers, bounty hunters and hired guns. Traveling without maps or compass, she found her way from the Maryland shore to Pennsylvania and New York and later—when the Fugitive Slave Law made it necessary to seek safety beyond U.S. territory—all the way to Canada. She conducted more than 300 slaves to freedom, never losing a single “package.” On the Underground Railroad, they did not call her Harriet or Minty. They called her “Moses,” the one who gets you to the promised land.
By her own account, Harriet Tubman’s astonishing achievement was the gift of her dreams.
She had been a dreamer before, but that horrific gash to the head kicked her experience of dreaming to a new level of clarity and power. At first her newly acquired abilities seemed more like a curse than a blessing. She would experience an urgent need to go to sleep for an hour or two, like a violent narcolepsy. If she failed to obey this urge at once, she might fall where she stood. It could happen at any time—when she was tilling the field, holding the master’s baby, or later when she was exposed and vulnerable, leading a group of frightened runaways along a back road. But she did not simply “black out.” She dreamed, and the dreams gave her specific guidance and directions. The things she saw in her dreams seemed more real than ordinary scenes, the colours more vivid, the senses more richly alive.
While she was still enslaved, she dreamed that rough men on horseback came riding among the cabins, ripping mothers away from their children and husbands away from their wives to send them off to the Deep South in chain gangs. Waking, she could still hear the echo of the women’s screams. She learned from a dream like this one—she had many—that her master was planning to sell her to slavers from the Deep South. She knew she had to get away, and dreamed of following the North Star to freedom north of the Mason-Dixon. She talked about these dreams with her husband John, but—though he was a freed man—he did not want to hear them. He ridiculed the idea that she could find her way through the woods. He even told her the fact she kept having the same dreams over and over meant she was simple in the head. Who but a fool would dream the same dream again and again?
It was one of these recurring dreams that convinced Harriet that she could do it, despite what her husband said. In this dream, she was flying. She flew over cotton fields and corn fields, and saw the corn tassels floating in the breeze. She flew over the Choptank River and saw the crystal clear gleam of the water below her. She flew over hills and forests. She would come to a barrier—sometimes a fence, sometimes a river—that she couldn’t fly over. “It appeared like I wouldn’t have the strength, and just as I was sinking down, there would be ladies all dressed in white over there, and they would put out their arms and pull me across.”
Harriet’s dreams showed her the specific route she would take, and the houses and barns where she would be given shelter along the way. She had no conventional map, and would not have known how to read one even if she did. But her dreams gave her an aerial map, as well as close-up views of places along the trail. And the vision of the women in white gave her deep confidence that all the help she needed was available—not only from the network of Quakers and Abolitionists who actively supported the Underground Railroad, but from spiritual powers that supported her life as well.
Harriet’s biographies contain many detailed and convincing stories of how she used dreams to get slaves to freedom as a conductor. There is one episode, from November 1856, that is especially revealing.
Harriet had returned to Maryland’s Eastern Shore to bring out a small group of four slaves that included Joe Bailey, a strong, handsome man who had been brutally flogged by his master with a rawhide whip the day before, and was still bleeding profusely from his wounds. Bailey’s master was determined to get him back, and the little group with the bleeding man and the tiny woman with a hole in her forehead, badly disguised by a mannish hat, was anything but inconspicuous. To top it all off, as she marched her party down a country road, Harriet’s head started to ache violently. She crumpled to her knees, and collapsed there, in plain view, into one of her involuntary “sleeps.” Bailey had trouble convincing the other frightened slaves not to abandon her.
When Harriet came to, she ordered her charges to follow her along a completely unexpected course that seemed to be taking them deeper into the slave dominions. They came to a river that looked far too deep to wade, and nobody could swim. Harriet insisted they must all go into the river; she was sure there was a place where the water was shallow enough to wade across. The other slaves were not convinced. Joe Bailey asked if she had crossed the river before. She told him she had crossed it in a dream, the dream she had just had when she fell asleep at the side of the road. Her dream had shown her that they could get across, and that crossing the river would mask their trail from the patrollers and bloodhounds who were homing in on them. She had seen a cabin on the other side where they would be given food and shelter. Only Bailey followed her when she stepped into the icy river. The water was up above Harriet’s chin before the stream got shallower, but she found her footing. The others followed her, and they were greeted on the other side by a black family who sheltered them in their cabin. When Harriet led her group back the way they had come the next day, they found evidence that hunting parties had tracked them all the way down that country road; if they had followed their original route, they would have been taken.
Harriet dreamed that President Lincoln freed the slaves three years before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. She was staying in the home of a New York minister at the time. She came down to breakfast in high excitement, singing “My people are free! My people are free!” Her host, the Reverend Henry Garnet, tried to calm her, cautioning her that emancipation would never come in their lifetimes. Harriet trusted her dream. “I tell you sir, you’ll see it, and you’ll see it soon.”
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Harriet declined an invitation from her abolitionist friends to join a grand celebration, telling them, “I had my jubilee three years ago. I can’t rejoice no more.”
Harriet Tubman’s story is a remarkable example of how we can dream our dream in the most literal sense. And how, if we can learn to trust in them, they can guide us to where we need to go.
Harriet saw people and places in her dreams before she encountered them in waking life. So do we. As a matter of fact—a fact you can very easily check for yourself—we do this every night. We are gifted psychics in our dreams. We are not confined by conditions of space and time. We see around the corner. Sometimes we see people and events we won’t encounter in waking life until years later. We foresee world events; we know what’s in next Tuesday’s newspaper. We see things that hare happening at a distance. We know what other people are thinking and feeling.
It’s sad that in modern Western societies, we have fallen into the habit of speaking of dreams as “only” dreams, as something less than real. The materialists of the Victorian era dismissed dreams as vain fancies or wild conceits, shadowy and insubstantial. The reductionist scientists of our era try to convince us that dreams are merely the product of random neuronal firings or the wash of chemicals in the brain, or part of a nightly flushing-out of waste products from the day’s ingestion of information. When I read research reports along these lines my blood begins to heat up, I cringe and wonder how much time the authors have spent with their own dream journals.
We not only see the future in dreams. We can use dream information about the possible future to create better futures. It’s true we often dream of future events in dreams that we may seem powerless to influence. Common examples include natural disasters, major public evens or the death—maybe sudden or violent, maybe the cumulative effect of a whole life history—of another person. But even when we can’t change an outcome we’ve foreseen, we can work with the information. If you dream a tornado flattens a specific neighborhood in Oklahoma, for example, you may find it possible to pass on a helpful advisory—or at any rate adjust your own travel plans. If all you remember from your dream is a tornado in Oklahoma, on the other hand, you had better not go running around yelling about it; nobody in tornado country is likely to be very impressed. And if your dream is a generic tornado dream, without clear indication of time or place, you’d probably do better to work your dream another way, by asking yourself where in your life something with the emotional force of a twister is likely to blow up.
I believe that many of us have the ability to become practicing psychic dreamers, bringing through life-helping information for ourselves and others, providing we are willing to set aside self-limiting beliefs and practice.
This belief comes from personal experience. When I was just ten years old, I awoke in the middle of the night in terror. I was incoherent and crying uncontrollably. My mother came to my room to soothe me, but I would not be soothed. I’d dreamt that my very best friend, Kari, was dying. She was screaming in agony (in the dream) and an ambulance was coming to take her away.
After all attempts to calm me down failed, my mother finally had to call Kari’s house (it was very early morning, rather than late at night). Kari’s mom answered the phone in tears. Kari’s appendix had burst and she was being taken to the hospital by ambulance as she spoke with my mother.
This dream stayed with me my entire life. And because of it, my passion and search for understanding of dreams and the mind have continued and grown for three decades.
Did my dream help Kari? No. Did it help me? No. Not directly. I believe that it was a life dream showing me what is possible, and where I was heading. And because it has always stuck with me, it has guided me in my choices and decisions throughout my life.
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Cross-Cultural Dreaming:
Our Western and mechanistic society has, until recently, relied upon the vision, or version, of physical reality that has been put forth by science as the one and only valid truth. And on the other hand, organized religion has offered up its version of the truth of what non-physical reality is. But, both science and religion are populated by human beings. Human beings offer human opinions which, like all opinions, are fallible and prone to change. Their conclusions are based on information and attitudes available and prevalent at a particular time, which are never complete or objective, and are affected by personal, professional and cultural expectations and prejudice, and by beliefs about what constitutes valid evidence and/or truths.
Not so long ago, science offered evidence of a flat planet and religion insisted that the Earth was the centre of the universe. At that time, both seemed like irrefutable truths. So what do science and/or religion say is the truth about dreams today? Are dreams messages from God or the Devil? Are they repressed urges, or random electrical impulses in the brain? Or are they perhaps our connection to spirit? At the end of the day, only you can decide what dreams are and what your truth is. All anyone can do is offer you information, examples “evidence” and anecdotes. You have to come to your own conclusion based on available data at this time.
There are many cultural events that have been set in motion because a dreamer decided to commence a project or pursue a goal because of directions or counsel received in a dream. The end result may have been the development of a structure or the destruction of a city, the beginning or ending of a war, or the development of a different form of social organization.
The following classic account should probably be considered something of a folktale, because it has come down to us from the fifteenth century with many variations. It was described in a history of Norfolk County in the eighteenth century, and the author had transcribed if from earlier written accounts. It involves the dream of the Swaffham tinker, John Chapman.
Chapman had a dream indicating that if he journeyed to London and placed himself at a certain spot on London Bridge, he would meet someone who would tell him something of great importance regarding his future affairs. He thought about making the trip but was at first dissuaded from doing so by his wife, who laughed at him for being so foolish. However, when the dream recurred the next two nights, he decided to go to London, regardless of how much his wife belittled him. Upon arriving in London, he stood for three consecutive days at the bridge. Toward night on the third day, when his confidence in the dream was beginning to wane, a stranger came up to him and asked him why he had been at that spot for so long. The tinker told him but did not let him know where he came from. The stranger smiled tolerantly and suggested that he return home and pay no more attention to dreams. To emphasize how silly dreams were, the stranger told him that he had recently dreamed that if he went to a place called Swaffham and dug under an apple tree in a certain garden on the north side of town, he would find a box of money. Astonished, the tinker returned home and began to dig on the spot he thought had been indicated by the stranger. After he had dug down a few feet, his spade struck something hard, which turned out to be an iron chest. He carried it home and found it to be full of money. Engraved on the lid of the box was a Latin inscription, which some schoolchildren read for him: “Under me doth lye another much richer than I.” Digging deeper in the original hole, the tinker found an even larger treasure chest, full of gold and silver coins.
The tinker’s story sounds fanciful and probably has become more impressive with each successive telling. Whatever actually happened, Chapman’s dream achieved fame because he showed his gratitude for it by donating a sizable sum of money to the construction of a church in his hometown in 1454. Pew carvings and stained-glass windows depicting the tinker can still be seen today in the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul at Swaffham in Norfolk County.
One of the most dramatic examples of prophetic dreams, and dreams that would have had the power to change the world if only they had been taken seriously if acted upon, was a dream recorded on the morning of June 28, 1914, by Bishop Joseph Lanyi of Grosswardein, in Hungary. He had once been a tutor for Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The bishop arose early in the morning from a disturbing dream in which he had gone to his desk to look through some letters. On the top was a black-bordered letter bearing a black seal with the coat of arms of the archduke. The bishop recognized the handwriting as that of the archduke and opened the letter. On the upper part was a light blue picture, somewhat like a postcard, which showed a street and narrow passage. The Archduke and his wife were sitting in a motorcar with a general facing them. Another officer was sitting next to the chauffer. A crowd was assembled on both sides of the street. Suddenly two young men jumped out from the crowd and fired at the archduke and his wife. Accompanying this picture was the following text:
Dear Dr. Lanyi
I Herewith inform you that today my wife and I will fall victims to an assassination. We commend ourselves to your pious prayers.
Kindest Regards from your Archduke
Franz, Sarajevo, the 28th of June
3:45 am
The bishop jumped out of bed and, with tears streaming from his eyes, noted that the clock read a quarter to four. The bishop went to his desk immediately and wrote down everything that he had seen and read in the dream. About two hours later a servant entered and noticed the bishop saying his rosary. The bishop requested that the servant call the bishop’s mother and a houseguest because he wished to offer mass for their highnesses. The three of them went to the chapel and the mass was held. The bishop drew a sketch of the assassination scene because he felt there was something peculiar about its imagery. He had his drawing certified by two witnesses, then sent an account of the dream to his brother Edward, a Jesuit priest. Appended to the letter was a sketch of the narrow passage, the motorcar, the crowd and the murderers jumping toward the car and firing the shots. The drawings were in close agreement with the photographs published in the press several days later, except that there had been only one assassin rather than the two in the bishop’s dream.
Questions had been raised as to whether the bishop was really so thorough in recording all of these events on June 28. A reporter from the Weiner Reichspost investigated the matter; he apparently examined the drawing and talked to the two witnesses, who confirmed the story. The bishop’s brother, Edward, had been questioned immediately by the editor and writer Bruno Grabinsky, who stated that the priest confirmed receiving the letter and sketch. This dream is of considerable historical significance since the assassination of Franz Ferdinand set off World War I.
On October 21, 1966, a massive coal-tip slid down a mountainside and engulfed the Welsh mining village of Aberfan, killing 144 people, mostly school children. A young girl, Eryl Mai Jones, often tried to tell her mother about her dreams, but her mother tended to dismiss them. One morning, however, Eryl Mai managed to get her mother to listen to one of her dreams. In her dream, “We go to school but there’s no school there; something black has come down all over it.” She told her mother, “I’m not afraid to die, Mommy. I’ll be with Peter and June.” When the huge slag deposit slid down on the school two days later, Eryl Mai, Peter, and June were among the 118 children crushed or buried alive. Had Eryl Mai’s mother not been programmed to dismiss dreams as ”just dreams,” she would have been able to take action to save her child’s life.
In 1986 Dr. Walter D'Souza, an Indian physician living in the United States, had a series of realistic dreams in which his deceased father, who had been buried in India three years earlier, appeared to be leaving his coffin and trying to communicate something to him. After Dr. D'Souza had had three of these dreams, a letter from India informed his mother that his father's bones had not been adequately disposed of. Dr. D'Souza then believed that his dreams had some connection with the matter of his father's bones. He urged his mother to go to India and attend to the burial, but she and his sister minimized the difficulty, and did not wish to spend money on a journey to India. Dr. D'Souza then had a fourth dream similar to the previous three. He told his family about his dreams and insisted that his mother go to India and attend to the disposition of the bones. She agreed to go and the dreams ceased. It seems unlikely that Dr. D'Souza before he had his dreams had any normal awareness that anything further needed to be done for the proper disposition of his father's bones.
The following account was reported by CNN:
More than five years ago, Rod Spraggins made a sensational charge at a candidate forum, publicly accusing a political opponent of murder with nothing to back up the allegation except, it turns out, a vision.
Now police say Spraggins was right.
Barry Waites, Spraggins' opponent in the 2000 race for Lanett City Council, was arrested this week on murder charges in the 1998 slaying of his wife, who was found dead in their split-level home in this sleepy town of 8,000 along the Georgia line.
In 2000, Spraggins, a bail bondsman, stunned a crowd of 100 when he accused Waites of killing his wife and dared the man to sue him for slander if he was wrong.
Waites who was not at the forum, never responded publicly to the accusation and never sued.
In an otherwordly turn to the saga, Friday, Spraggins disclosed that he never had any evidence to make the accusation and that it was based entirely on Mrs. Waites' appearing to him in a series of dreams.
"She started appearing to me within the first weeks of her death," said Spraggins, adding that the dreams prompted him to enter the City Council race for the sole purpose of making the accusation.
Both he and Waites lost their bids for the City Council amid the controversy, but Spraggins said he got what he wanted in the end.
"I hate it for his family. ... I hate it for Charlotte's family. But I'm glad justice is finally going to be served," he said in a telephone interview.
Waites, 58, was arrested Thursday at a clothing store he runs with his current wife. He was jailed on $150,000 bail. It was not immediately known whether he had hired a lawyer.
Police Chief Ron Docimo would not comment on exactly what led to the arrest, saying only that it was a "culmination of years of following up on leads and tips."
Waites was serving as interim mayor when 49-year-old Charlotte Waites was found strangled and with a blow to the head.
The victim's brother, Gene Brown, said police told him within a week of the slaying that Waites was the prime suspect.
Brown said that the couple had numerous financial problems during their 28-year marriage and that he believes an argument over money resulted in her death.
In 2002, Waites was sentenced to six months in jail after pleading guilty in an ethics case that was uncovered during an investigation of his wife's killing. He admitted taking money from a National Guard armory where he worked.
Brown credited Spraggins with keeping up public pressure on police to solve the murder case.
"Rod had it pegged from the beginning," Brown said. "I had doubts about his methods. But he's got guts."
Dreams have not only led to the capture of killers, world-changing events, and scientific and artistic development, but have also served as channels for spiritual inspiration. Some form of dream imagery is embedded in the beginnings of most of the world’s major religions.
Most of the events surrounding the birth and early years of Christ were announced in dreams. Joseph was told the source of Mary’s pregnancy in a dream, and instructed to name the child Jesus (Mathew 1). A dream was also associated with events surrounding Christ’s death. Troubled by her disturbing dream about that “just man,” Pilate’s wife unsuccessfully urged him to release Christ (Mathew 27).
Muhammad received his divine mission in a dream. Much of the Koran, the scared book of the Muslims, was revealed to Muhammad in his dreams over a period of several years.
The establishment of the Church of Latter Day Saints has been attributed to dream revelations received by Joseph Smith in upstate New York.
Aside from their role in the development of specific religions, dreams have suggested answers to many enveloping and eternal questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? Of what are we made? Where are we going? What is death? Etc. People of all times have asked these same questions. What is seldom recognized is that dreams have helped to provide some answers.
Long before the advent of sacred texts, our ancestors’ dreams gave them inklings of a realm beyond the physical and inspired their first spiritual strivings. Belief in the afterlife also probably arose from dreams, since dreamers often encounter deceased individuals who exhibit their same behaviours.
That dreams have had a profound effect upon our history (and possibly our evolution) seems inescapable. Dreams have enriched our culture through the arts, stoked the fires of freedom, led to the invention of labour-saving devices and life-saving cures and treatments, changed philosophical premises, and served as a source of spiritual illumination and an expanded vision of our very nature and essence. Yet they are still dismissed by the majority of the populace as insignificant by-products of the brain, or unsubstantial and unreal.
I could easily write twenty pages of reports and examples demonstrating the power of dreams to affect people and their world, but either you’re going to believe that dreams are powerful messengers and guides, or you aren’t. Until you experience a precognitive dream yourself, you may remain a skeptic. But when you do dream your first psychic dream, don’t be surprised if it changes your whole world-view and belief in what’s possible.
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Famous Dreams:
Mark Twain
At age 23, before he became famous as Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens dreamed he saw a metal coffin resting on two chairs in his sister's sitting room. As he approached the coffin, he saw the body of his brother Henry. One detail in particular caught his attention: a bouquet of white flowers, with one crimson flower in the centre, lying on Henry's chest. A few days later, a Mississippi riverboat blew up and many of the passengers and crew were killed. Henry had been one of the crew members. When Clemens rushed to the scene, in Memphis, he found his brother lying unconscious on a mattress in an improvised hospital. There was some hope that his brother would pull through, but six days later, he died. When Clemens arrived at the room which was being used as a temporary morgue, he found that most of the dead were lying in plain wooden coffins, but there was one metal coffin lying on two chairs. Henry's struggle to survive had inspired such interest among the Memphis ladies that they had taken up a collection and bought a metal coffin for him. As Clemens approached his brother's casket, an elderly lady entered the room carrying a large bouquet of white flowers with one crimson red rose in their centre, and laid them on Henry's chest.
Anne Rice
One day in 1972, Anne Rice had an eerie dream in which her five-year-old daughter Michele died as a result of an unusual blood disorder. Shortly thereafter, Michele Rice was diagnosed with leukemia.
[In the five weeks following Michele's death, Rice - in a grief-ridden haze - completed Interview with the Vampire. Claudia, the book's six year-old immortal vampire child, was inspired by her beloved daughter. "I want people to carry dog-eared copies of Interview with the Vampire in their backpacks," Rice once said. "I want my books to live, to be read. That will be justification enough for all the pain and work and struggling and doubt."]
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Reader’s Dream & Analysis:
None this issue.
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Symbol of the Month:
Light can be represented in many ways in dreams; a lamp or ceiling light; sunlight, a flashlight or even an unknown source. The symbol most often represents enlightenment, illumination or understanding, however, as always, don’t limit interpretations to just the most common possibilities.
Light in General: Great lessons and great truths, knowledge and its application that brings understanding; The throne of God’s presence, the rays of God’s love, peace and happiness; A higher force and/or power; That directing force as would show the way to gain more perfect knowledge; Hope; One’s conscious awareness of individuality; Conscious intellect; Conscious attention; Understanding.
Moving toward the light or reaching in any way to turn on or bring in more light is usually showing what you need to do, not what has already been done. This symbolizes moving toward greater enlightenment and/or your spiritual source. A well-lighted place is always a good sign that you have the needed information to work with, and the action may guide you as to what direction you need to take. You may need to consider the type of light: bright, dim, blinking, flashing, and so on. A bright light moving toward you is most likely a high spiritual being.
Lamps, Lights: Generally, lamps or light fixtures of any kind, denotes enlightenment. Notice the degree of light or darkness and the area involved, since you can be very knowledgeable in some areas and totally unaware in others. Lights can also denote awareness, insight or perception and can represent instruments or channels of light or illumination which can be turned off or on at will. To turn off would be to shut out the light or the flow.
Moving Toward the Light: This may symbolize your need to move toward more light, or show your progress and direction in becoming enlightened, depending, of course, on the feeling in the dream.
Moving Away from the Light: May be warning you that you are moving in the wrong direction, that something you have chosen is a step toward darkness.
Turning Off Lights: This can imply shutting out your source of enlightenment, refusing to “see the light,” or not wanting to know, understand, or look at the situation.
Flashlight: Depicts your ability or need to bring light into a situation, to direct a flow of light in a specific direction, to enlighten.
Light Bulb: Symbolic of an idea, sudden inspiration, and illumination; That which brings the light of understanding; one’s own intuition
Spotlight: May simply say that the spotlight, or attention, is focused on you or that you feel that everyone is looking at you. On the other hand, it may be highlighting what it is you need to be, or should be, focusing your time and attention on.
Rays or Streams of Light: This is quite often a symbol of God’s light, guidance, protection, or the presence of an enlightened being.
Sun-filled Room/s: Spiritual enlightenment pouring in (to your state of consciousness). Often this is prelude to a lucid experience.
Sunlight Shining In: God’s love, light, and wisdom pouring into your state of consciousness, or can depict an enlightened state of awareness. Often bright, sunny dreams are spiritual in nature and can be preludes to lucid dreaming.
Sun-lit Area: Area of enlightenment, illumination, closeness to God, understanding
Sun’s Rays: Sign of illumination, blessings, and/or approval of the place or person the ray touches.
Sunrise: Special time when God’s blessings are poured out on all beings; time of prayer and mediation; new day, new opportunities, new star, new conditions. Promise of better things to come, blessings, or call to worship.
Sunset: End of the day, a cycle, an era, or condition. Time of receiving special blessings, thanksgiving, worship, completion, period of rest and renewal, evaluation.
Lightning: The higher forces, which may be destructive to many people, but can be a life-giving flow; Fear; A sudden realization; Revenge; A sudden discharge of tension; Instant karma; An epiphany.
Word Play
Light may also be a synonym for light weight (not heavy); light-footed
A light situation, as apposed to a serious or dark situation; light-hearted
A lightning fast action, movement or situation
A flashlight might represent a flash of insight, intuition or brilliance.
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Readers Comments:
No comments this issue
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From The Editor:
I just want to say thank you to readers that have sent me emails and whom I have begun a lasting (hopefully) relationship with. It's always rewarding to hear from readers.
I have been experiencing “problems” with our current autoresponder service. For most of April, I wasn’t able to log into my account to send notification to readers that the April Issue was ready. Actually, I couldn’t get in to my account period…so I couldn’t do anything.
I have moved The Nocturnal Times to a new autoresponder service. I can’t support a company that leaves it’s customers high and dry and then doesn’t even apologize about it.
If you received an email requesting that you re-subscribe to our new autoresponder, please just click the link inside. You won’t receive a bunch of crap from me. If you would rather not receive new issue notifications by email, you can use the little automated notifier that sits in your task bar and notifies you when I’ve upload a new issue to the blog. Your choice.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Talk to you next month,
Dream Well,
Terry
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