When Dream Visions Blend With Life
by David Rivinus
A distressed young man recently attended a lecture I was giving on dream interpretation.
During the question and answer segment, he related a problem he often experienced: he had difficulty distinguishing between what was real and what he saw on the screen of his inner vision. For this reason, he liked to have his fiancée along whenever he went out; she could help him: “I see a grey Toyota in the intersection. Is it really there?”
People speak of the veil that exists between what occurs in the outer world and the perceptions from our own consciousness. For most people, this boundary seems not so much a veil as a thick, impenetrable wall. Many have a hard time accessing their inner visions at all. It might surprise them to learn that being aware of them is less critical than they might imagine.
While most of us try to live life in as normal a fashion as we can (taking our kids to school, paying our bills, and trying to find time to enjoy ourselves), there is another layer to our lives that is just as important and equally accessible. This is the understanding that those same mundane, daily experiences of real life can be viewed through another lens–the lens of metaphor and dream symbolism. When we begin to view our lives as a perpetual series of metaphors, we break down the barrier that separates our inner and outer perceptions. Almost invariably, the metaphors we experience in the outer, real world are delivering the same messages as those of our inner consciousness.
We dream when we are asleep, and if we have good recall, we can interpret our dreams through symbols. However, we are also dreaming while we are awake. It is the symbols we experience while going about the normal business of our days that we have better access to, because we have an easier time remembering them.
Here is an example. While asleep, a woman had a dream that a wood chipper she was using wasn’t working. She was trying to grind up dead branches that had fallen in her backyard, and she couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the machine. The dreamer thought this was an odd dream because never once in her life had she used this particular type of equipment. Nevertheless, she and I went through the symbols. To her, dead branches metaphorically were formerly living things whose lives had ended; they were useless in their current state. The wood chipper was a machine that would convert the dead limbs into mulch, which would eventually break down further, creating fertilizer (food) for new plant growth.
Several evenings later, while the dreamer was home cooking dinner, she realized that there was water dripping from the ceiling of her kitchen. She rushed upstairs and found that the water pipe behind her toilet had broken, the bathroom floor was flooded, and water had seeped through the floor and into the kitchen below.
Even though this was an experience she had while she was awake, we worked on the symbols exactly as if she had experienced a dream. Something in the plumbing was broken, and the water to her, an essential life-giving substance, was being wasted and was creating damage not only to the area where waste was normally processed, but also in the area where she created food.
It did not take her long to see that the messages of her sleeping dream and her waking dream were nearly identical. Something that processed waste material was malfunctioning and was interrupting the subsequent preparation of food.
It is a principle of dream interpretation that all symbols in dreams are aspects of the dreamer, so the dreamer took the next step. She personalized and owned all of the symbols. It was she who was not processing the food. She wondered if she was being warned of a medical issue. She subsequently sought treatment, and polyps of concern were, in fact, found in her digestive tract.
Like the distressed young man who had difficulty distinguishing between what was real and what was coming from his inner vision, this experience led the dreamer to see that there was far less difference between what went on in her consciousness and her outer life. It was the beginning of an understanding that these worlds blend together more than most of us realize, even if we are unaware that they are doing so.
In the case of the dreamer, we went further. I reminded her that her medical examination was also a waking dream, so now she had three dreams saying the same thing. There was something in her digestive process that was inhibiting her absorption of food.
I asked how her spiritual life was, and she responded with a small outburst, exclaiming how disappointed she was with a series of discourses she had recently signed up for. She had walked away from that whole aspect of her life, disgusted with it.
All at once, the pieces of this complicated puzzle showed her a larger picture. She realized that on many levels of her life–conscious, unconscious, physical, and spiritual–the same communication was going on.
Where did the truth of all this ultimately lie? Did she have a sleeping dream involving a wood chipper, a prophesy warning her of a future burst pipe? One could certainly say so. Did she have two dreams, one waking, one sleeping, that were notifying her of a medical issue? That, too, was the case. Yet it was also true that she was admonishing herself not to give up on her pursuit of spiritual matters just because she encountered an obstacle.
Even for those of us who have no problem distinguishing between images from our subconscious and those of our outer lives, the two worlds blend together far more than we realize. This is true for every kind of metaphysical experience: lucid dreams, past life memories, visions, and intuitive communications, to name but a few. In regard to the distressed young man, the real illusion was not the confusion he experienced; rather it is the compartmentalized-seeming worlds of the rest of us. In reality, everything we perceive blends together to paint a comprehensive picture of our own truth.
That being said, a young man will have difficulty in life if he doesn’t know whether the car he sees in an intersection is real or imagined! He could use some help. It has been my experience that many instances of extreme psychic merging, like the one he was having, are attempts by our higher selves to make us aware of the blending phenomenon in the first place. Once we understand that there is essentially no difference between our inner and outer worlds, the confusion subsides. I have seen this happen repeatedly, especially with those whose dreams are prophetic. When they see that both the prophesy and the subsequent, predicted event are all metaphors, the prophesies subside.
Note: I have had no further contact with the young man at my lecture, but based on what I have seen in the past, I am confident that he will experience a similar clarification.
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About the Author
David Rivinus has been a dream analyst since the late 1960’s. His subsequent discovery that one can analyze startling daytime events as dreams revolutionized his approach, and he has lectured and facilitated dream workshops internationally ever since. Recently, he documented his findings and methods in the book, Always Dreaming. For more information, please visit www.teacherofdreams.com
