Due to unexpected circumstances, this blog and all of my other blogs will be on hiatus until after August 10th.
I am fine. There is just something that came up suddenly that will be taking most of my time for the next few weeks.
See you after I get back!
Thursday, July 18, 2013
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Does God Speak Through Dreams?
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| English: Joseph made ruler in Egypt (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
For God does speak—now one way, now another—
though no one perceives it.
15 In a dream, in a vision of the night,
when deep sleep falls on people
as they slumber in their beds,
16 he may speak in their ears
and terrify them with warnings,
17 to turn them from wrongdoing
and keep them from pride,
18 to preserve them from the pit,
their lives from perishing by the sword.
Job 33:14-18
New International Version (NIV)
If you are familiar with the Bible, you can probably recall many references to dreams and dream interpretations. There are significant stories about Jacob, Joseph, Daniel, and many others who had dreams or interpreted the dreams of others. Most believers would acknowledge that God does speak to some in dreams and perhaps has even spoken to them.
While I have had dreams that were very spiritual and others from which I awoke feeling as though I might have been given a spiritual message, I cannot say for certain that I have ever had a dream where God or any spirit has communicated to me through my subconscious mind. Therefore lacking that experience, I will submit this to the readers.
Have you ever had a dream where you believe God or some spiritual entity has spoken to you? Do you know of anyone who claims to have had this experience? What are your opinions on this matter?
While I have had dreams that were very spiritual and others from which I awoke feeling as though I might have been given a spiritual message, I cannot say for certain that I have ever had a dream where God or any spirit has communicated to me through my subconscious mind. Therefore lacking that experience, I will submit this to the readers.
Have you ever had a dream where you believe God or some spiritual entity has spoken to you? Do you know of anyone who claims to have had this experience? What are your opinions on this matter?
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Who Knows My Naim? and Other Dream Confusion
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| Part of the tunnel complex at Củ Chi, this tunnel has been made wider and taller to accommodate tourists. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
If you're scratching your head in confusion then you are experiencing what I experienced during and after a dream. This is the question asked in a peculiar dream Saturday morning of November 17th of 2012. The details of the dream were lost, but here's what I remember:
I am looking through a catalog with toy sets where all the pieces (cars, animals, dolls) look alike. A man with a large black mustache gets out of an official looking vehicle and speaks to me about a certain person. At first I am puzzled because I think he is that person, but then I realize he is not.
I'm not sure who the person is who the man is inquiring about. I get the impression that the person's name is Naim. For some reason I am under the assumption that Naim is Vietnamese and may have had some connection with something that happened during the U.S-Viet Nam war. I find myself trying to recall who this person might be.
I awaken thinking of a story where there is a search for clones. My thoughts are of people who are killed or disappear and then reappear in a different form, but they are essentially clones of earlier beings. I'm not sure whether my thoughts upon awakening actually have anything to do with the dream I've had or if my mind is merely free associating my dream with other ideas. I am confused about the dream and the story and forget most of it not long after awakening.
Dreams are typically disorienting and filled with peculiar references. Often there seems to be a familiarity with a topic during the dream that totally disappears upon awakening. When awake I might make other connections that confuse me even more. The dream I've recounted here almost has the ingredients of a comedy routine. These types of dreams can seem beyond any logical interpretation.
Are these types of dream experiences worth dwelling upon? Have you ever had a disorienting dream that left you confused after you woke up, but curious about the significance of that dream? Do you have any idea what "Naim" might mean?
Dreams are typically disorienting and filled with peculiar references. Often there seems to be a familiarity with a topic during the dream that totally disappears upon awakening. When awake I might make other connections that confuse me even more. The dream I've recounted here almost has the ingredients of a comedy routine. These types of dreams can seem beyond any logical interpretation.
Are these types of dream experiences worth dwelling upon? Have you ever had a disorienting dream that left you confused after you woke up, but curious about the significance of that dream? Do you have any idea what "Naim" might mean?
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Would You Like to Have Your Dream Interpreted?
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| Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I’ve been having strange and vivid dreams for as long as I can remember, which is to say since I was five or six years old. One of my earliest dreams involved Captain Kirk lying dead on a black slab with lasers set up around his body to keep anyone from bothering it. (I really liked Wrath of Khan as a kid.) Another that I had when I was ten or eleven was about a dog-eating sunflower. Sounds funny now, sure, but at the time it was terrifying—I had a dog, after all, and awoke concerned for its welfare.
I got in the habit of writing down these dreams in a diary someone had given me, at first only in passing with one or two lines, but eventually I began logging the dreams in careful detail. Some were easy to shrug off as a kind of “data dump” in which my mind was simply discarding old information or making bizarre connections between otherwise unrelated things. But some dreams felt weighty and somehow important. These I would puzzle over, trying to understand them. I would read this and that dream dictionary and attempt to cobble together the meaning behind these nightly teleplays.
After a while, I got pretty good at it. Taking what I’d learned, I began to apply a certain amount of intuition to interpreting dreams, until eventually it became second nature. And before long others began to ask me what their dreams meant, too. My cousins, my friends. Until one day a friend suggested I do it more widely. So I recently started a website titled Sculpted Dreams (http://sculpted-dreams.blogspot.com) where I do dream interpretation for free. Because I enjoy it, and why not?
As I’ve noted, I’ve only just started the site, but I’ll talk about some of the most common dream questions I receive from friends and neighbors. Places, for one. Usually some kind of distorted location along the lines of: “It was like the house I lived in as a kid, except . . .” Houses often (but not always; there is no “always” in dreams) represent the dreamer, and the rooms represent various aspects of that person. A childhood home, then, may be a way of showing an “old” or “outdated” or even “immature” aspect. The fact that it is distorted makes sense—the dream house has been manipulated to reflect the dreamer, not the actual location.
Airplanes are another big one, or really any form of travel. This generally symbolizes the dreamer’s life journey. How difficult or easy the travel may be indicative of how difficult or easy the person is finding life to be. If in a dream you find yourself stuck at the airport, you may be feeling stuck in a kind of limbo in your waking life as well, as if you’re not getting anywhere. Travel can also represent transitions in life, moving from one stage to another. After all, when you travel you leave something (and sometimes someone) behind.
So what good does knowing a dream’s meaning do you? It can be therapeutic to some degree, allowing you to understand yourself, be in touch with your own inner workings. It’s self-therapy. Dreams, when not a simple data dump, are your subconscious trying to get your attention. When you open those lines of communication, you begin to feel more balanced. The flow of information from subconscious to conscious and back gets easier, and the more you do that, the more you’ll dream because it becomes an ongoing conversation with yourself.
Still, sometimes you need someone to translate the strange language of dreamspeak. Or maybe you just want a second opinion. If so, send me your dreams, and I’ll post them (anonymously) along with my take on them on my site. Be aware that I do edit for grammar and punctuation. (I’m a writer in my day job, so I can’t let these things go by untouched.) The e-mail link is on the site, or you can reach me at methos [at] gmail (dot) com.
Thanks, Lee, for having me. And happy dreaming!
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Strawberry Jesus and Other Enigmatic Dream Phrases
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| English: giant strawberry (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
On the morning of Memorial Day 2013 I awoke with the phrase "Strawberry Jesus" on my mind. I had slept in since it was a holiday and my wife didn't have to wake up early to go to work. I had been dreaming intensely throughout the morning, but cannot now recall what I had been dreaming. Only the phrase "Strawberry Jesus" stuck with me.
Since this peculiar juxtaposition of wording had stayed with me I decided that this should be an exploration on this dream blog. Why would I dream of such an odd term? And why would it stand out for me as something that had significance?
Before I began writing on the topic, I looked up "Strawberry Jesus" on Google. I found some references to a musical artist or band from Rome, Georgia. There were a few other odd entries for the term that I did not explore. I saw nothing that would indicate that I would have seen this term mentioned elsewhere sometime in my past. The origin in my mind is a mystery. However, the fact that others have thought of the term makes it seem less odd that I would have thought of it.
I will add "Strawberry Jesus" to other peculiar dream references such as "Dynamic Flow" and others that I cannot remember at the moment. There are also the references to songs, movies, or other creative things that I cannot connect to anything in real life. These references undoubtedly come either from my subconscious memory of tanget encounters with these experiences in my life or some sort of connections that would randomly connect words or other sensory experiences to create something that seemingly made sense in a dream.
The questions remain. What are these references? Why did they seem significant in the dream? Why did these terms enter my dream-state thinking?
Have you ever woken up thinking of a particular phrase or idea that felt very familiar or significant to you? Did you ever figure out why or what the dream image may have signified? Have you ever had a dream that was influenced by a phrase or concept that you'd heard before?
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