I’ve learned to pay close attention to my dreams.  As stories of the sub-conscious mind, they, if interpreted correctly, are fascinating indications of human behavior and feelings.  Though no expert in the field of dreams, I would call myself a hobbyist of dream analysis.

One of the most famous dream analyzers or dream interpreters was, of course, Joseph, from the Bible who had a colorful coat.  He was pretty good at it and even got himself out of prison with his talent when he interpreted the Pharaoh’s dreams correctly.  How he ever came up with the answers that he came up with, I’ll never know, but his deduction of famine was a doozy.  Very impressive.

Dream interpretation is really pretty easy if you just follow a few basic rules.
1.    Pay little attention to the stories.  In the attempt to express itself, the sub-conscious mind makes up these usually funny, strange, obtuse stories just to speak through.  It’s not the plot that’s important; it’s the behavior, the doing, the feeling that needs the analysis.
2.    It’s not a story about you and a bunch of other people.  They’re all you.  It’s your dream.  All the characters are manifestations of you or some part of you.  Learn to look at all the characters, not just the central character.
3.    It’s the sub-conscious speaking, so learn to get beneath the plot and rather, into the emotions and underlying feelings of the characters in the story.  If it’s convoluted, so what?  That’s just the sub-conscious struggling with the writing, trying to tell the story in a number of ways.
4.    Think like a writer.  Writers of stories ask, “What does my central character want in this scene?  What is the essence of what he is doing?  How does he feel about it?  What is his motivation?  What is his quest?”  Then answer those questions for all the characters in the dream.  Remember they all represent, in some way, parts of you.
5.    Learn to see under the plot to the universal doings of the characters.
6.    Apply these doings and feelings and fears to your conscious life.  Remember, it is the sub-conscious trying to express itself and let out its fears, worries, expectations, joys, feelings, anticipations, etc.
7.    Your dreams are you.  They are simply you going on while the other parts rest.  Pay attention to the essences.  You’ll learn a lot about yourself.

Last week I had a dream that spoke deeply to me.  In it, it was night.  I was on a yacht in the middle of the ocean.  I slipped and fell overboard.  No one knew.  The yacht sailed on over the horizon leaving me in the water alone.  I began to swim for shore, but I had no idea which way the shore was, so I just began swimming, knowing that If I stayed there, I’d drown.

The waves were huge.  I would swim up one side of them and down the other.  I was not afraid – just determined to make it to the shore.

Suddenly, while I was swimming, a ghost rose up from the bottom of the ocean to the right of me and hovered, standing in the water and watching me.  It was a naked man and I knew it was a ghost because he was very white and translucent.  I knew he was waiting for me to drown and he would take me back down.  I swam on.

Then there appeared on my left a woman in 1890s dress, complete with hat and parasol – she too a ghost, she too watching me and standing in the water.  Then rose up two children, a boy around five and his older sister around eight.  They were holding hands and watching me as well.

Lastly there arose a World War two fighter pilot.  I could tell all this by his uniform and his headpiece.  I knew immediately that they had all drown there in the ocean at different times and that they were all coming up to watch me struggle on, waiting to take me down.  They were not menacing, just patient and curious.

I swam on.  I had the feeling that they wanted to go with me; that they all wished that they were alive to try to make it.

The entire dream was scored with music that accompanied my efforts — a song actually, with lyrics.  The ocean and magnitude of it was reflected in the strings and dramatic synth pads and my energy and efforts to make it to shore were reflected in a driving percussion track that juxtaposed the magnitude of the orchestra.

I woke up.

I remembered the song, quickly analyzed it, saw that it was in a modal scale, wrote down the melody on a post-it and scratched out a few of the lyrics that I could remember.  I then wrote down the story of the dream and it’s characters and described to myself its musical arrangement.

I had no idea what the dream was about.  All this note taking took me about an hour.  I then went back to sleep.

I’ve spent a solid week in the studio since finishing the writing of this song, recording the arrangement, doing all the drumming and percussion and describing the dream in as much detail as I could remember.  I also added to the detail of it from my imagination.

I finished recording the song yesterday and I shall offer it to each of you cherished readers as a free download on Watchfire Music after I mix it at the end of the week.  A present for hanging in there with me through this 5 part series.

So what did the dream mean?  Throughout the writing and recording process I’ve had the opportunity to dig deeply and figure it out.  I have an interpretation that makes sense to me, but you’ll have to wait.  If you think this is like one of those old Tom Mix television serial shows that stop right at the climax and make you have to come back tomorrow for the ending, you’re right.

Tomorrow we discuss dream study in more depth.  Stay tuned.

Even More Inspiration

• Experiments of the Sub-conscious Mind / A Five Part Series — Part 1 – Sleep
• Light At The End Of The Tunnel
• WFM Listening Room – Series II Finale
• The Road To Inspiration — Peter Link and Julia Wade
• A Change Is Gonna Come
• The Ira Awards Part 4

I’m not at all an expert on the subject.  But I do have nearly 20 years of experience.  Trouble is, while I’ve been experiencing it, I’ve been asleep.
)

I know one thing for sure: I don’t get enough of it.  Also, for the last 10 years my sleep patterns have really changed.  I used to get my 8 straight as a boy, then as a young man I moved to 6 a night.  I seemed to do just fine with that, but if I got even 5 on one night, then I’d have to get in a couple of 8 straight to get on top of it.  Otherwise I’d just be wasted for days.

Then, in my latter years, my sleep patterns changed again.  I think it was when my son was born and I used to take the middle of the night feeding so that my wife could sleep.  Waking up around 3 or 4 was excruciating for me.  I was a 6 straight guy and I would crawl out of bed when the baby would cry and stagger around like a drunk.

After the feedings stopped, I kept waking up anyway and laying there trying to go back to sleep.  I began, at those times, to suffer from insomnia.  It was not fun.  No matter what I did, I could not go back to sleep.  I tried everything.

And then one day I solved it.  I got up.  I’ve been doing so for 10-12 years now and I just love it.  As soon as I wake up, I get up.  I don’t lie around and try to go back to sleep.  I get up and go.

I usually get to bed around midnight, sleep for 4-5 hours and then get up.  This gets me up at around 4 or 5 in the morning.  The house is quiet, the phone don’t ring, the city sleeps.  It’s my time and mine alone.  I used to make a cup of hot chocolate, read for an hour and then go back to bed and immediately back to sleep.  I enjoyed the reading and the time so much that I began to stay up 2 hours.  It was a great time to write lyrics, get organized, think deeply, pray, meditate.  Then I began to write my blog.

Now I get up every night for 3 hours and write.  It’s my favorite time of day.  I go back to sleep then and usually complete my 7 hours.  I love the schedule and flourish in it.  These hours between 4-7 are precious to me and I’m excited every morning when I wake up around 4.  I have absolutely no ill effects from getting this kind of ‘broken’ sleep.  I just make sure that when I get up, I do something positive.

I’ve always been blessed with the ability to go immediately asleep at night – usually within a minute or two at the most.  However, within the first 15 minutes of that sleep, if something wakes me up, it’s nearly impossible for me to go right back to sleep.  It’s as if the 10 or 15 minutes that I got was enough and then I’m wide-awake.

I don’t like to nap during the day.  If I do, I’ve learned to do this:  I lie down on the rug (not the bed) on my back.  I place the elbow of my right arm on my chest extending my forearm and hand vertically toward the ceiling.  I then shut my eyes and let myself fall asleep holding my arm extending up from my body.  When I do fall asleep, my arm naturally falls and my hand whacks me gently.  It always wakes me up.

That’s all I need and so then I get up and move on with life.  I’ve been told that I go, in those moments, to my sub-conscious Alpha level and that the visit there just for the few seconds is all I need to relax and get what I need from my 3 minute nap.  It works.

Digression:  The whole purpose of my blog is to get us all thinking about Inspirational things.  I’m not suggestion that you do what I do.  That’s up to you.  I’m just suggesting that you think about it.  If you read this blog on a daily or even ‘sometimes’ level, then you’re clearly interested in some of the things that I’m interested in.  I do this just to get us all thinkin’.

The Russians did a lot of sleep research in the 50s.  I used to keep up with it.  They did experiments with people allowing them only 2 hours a night.  Though some very interesting details came out of this, most of the people went crazy.

Also they did experiments with people dreaming.  When the subjects would start to dream, and the scientists could tell from their REM (rapid eye movements), they would immediately wake them up and not allow them to dream.  All of these unfortunates went crazy as well.

How brave we are to go to sleep.  We crawl into this funny place called bed, turn the lights out so that it’s very dark, close our eyes and shut out any light leftovers and let our lives slip down into this black hole of unconsciousness.  We make a conscious decision to give up consciousness.  We allow ourselves to retreat from the consciousness of this experience into the nothingness of a whole other experience that we know nothing about.  We trust that in the morning we will wake up – and we do.

And yet we’re afraid of death.

There seems to me to be a great similarity at this moment.  The only difference is that with sleep, we are practiced.  We learn in childhood that it’s all right.  In fact, Mom sings to us as we do so.

Perhaps on my own deathbed I shall hire a group of my favorite singers to sit around the bed and sing me out.  Not a bad idea at all.  Perhaps we’re getting a little morbid for you, but the whole idea of a lullaby for the passing is a concept that I could really get into.  What a way to go.  I lived with music.  Why not transition with it?

But I digress for the second time.  Over the next 4 nights we will explore dreams, dream study and finally astral projection – all fascinating junkets started in sleep.

Sleep:  To rest and restore.  To trade consciousness for unconsciousness.  To trust your life to the unknown.

We move from unconsciousness to sub-consciousness to consciousness and hopefully to higher consciousness in this earthly experience.  I believe the goal should be spiritual consciousness.  We’re allowed, in this earthly experience, to move fairly freely from one to another.  I don’t know about you, but I sure would like to understand it all a little better.

Once again, I invite your thoughts.

Even More Inspiration

• Experiments of the Sub-conscious Mind / A Five Part Series — Part 2 – Dreams
• Light At The End Of The Tunnel
• WFM Listening Room – Series II Finale
• The Road To Inspiration — Peter Link and Julia Wade
• A Change Is Gonna Come
• The Ira Awards Part 4

2.    The Breath You Take – (See above) Also, I think of the complex machinery that activates this life activity.  What a miracle!  We slap a baby’s bottom and it starts.  Then it continues with relatively no input from us for a lifetime. The average respiration rate for a person at rest is about 16 breaths per minute.  This means on average, we breathe about 960 breaths an hour or 23,040 breaths a day or 8,409,600 a year. If a person lives to 80, then that means on average they will take 672,768,000 breaths in a lifetime!  That’s you.  That’s me.  Cool.

3.    Those We Love – Why is this?  These are the folks we should appreciate the most, but seldom do.  These are the people we should count in our blessings every day.  But these are the people that we expect to love us back because we love them.  Perhaps it’s the nature of love.  We love and expect love in return.  And you know, it almost always does – return, that is.  In fact, I’ll bet that it always does when our love is pure.  That’s the nature of love.  It’s a circle.  Instinctively we know this and so we tend to take it for granted.

4.    Water – This one’s unfortunately soon to slip out of the top 10.  But most of us who read this blog are still pretty blasé about it.  We turn the tap and the water comes out.  When it doesn’t, we groan. “Oh no” knowing what inconveniences that means for our day.  It’s still free – well in restaurants anyway.  We stand under it in the shower and it wakes us, cleans us, feeds us, grows our plants, keeps us alive.  It’s good stuff.
5.    The People Who Shell The Sunflower Seeds – When I was in grade school I used to love to buy those little packs of sunflower seeds in the shell, put a few in my mouth and separate the seeds from the shell with my teeth and tongue, store the seeds over on the right in one gum and then when I had 10 – 15 shelled, spit the shells out and eat the seeds.  Chomping down on those shelled seeds was always a pleasure.  A lotta work for that simple pleasure.  Then one day I walked into the store and they were selling bags of salted sunflower seeds already shelled!  I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.  I’ve been eating handfuls every day since then, never thinking about the work it took by somebody to shell those little guys.
6.    Waking Up – What a concept!  Sleep.  We get tired.  We shut down.  We close our eyes to the world around us and enter into another world, another dimension that we really know very little about where we, for all purposes, cease to be, wallowing in deep sleep, sailing off on the wings of strange, often nonsensical dreams, for about a third of our earthly lives.  And we always expect to wake up!  It goes without saying.  It’s a lot to assume if you think about it.
7.    Elimination – We take it in; we put it out.  In between our pipes strip from the matter what we need and send the rest on to hopeful oblivion.  Both inner and outer plumbing processes are totally taken for granted by most of us more fortunate ones.  With the push of a handle, all is well.
8.    Driving Between The Lines – I just got back from LA.  I’m constantly amazed by the swarms of cars on the freeways.  Basically, they all make it home in one piece.  They all do it right.  All those human beings staying in their lanes, thinking their thoughts, listening to their music, hating their bosses, dreaming their dreams, weeping and laughing, yakking and sitting alone spaced out –  driving between the lines.  Essentially we all want to live.  This is the basic principle behind this miraculous action.
9.    The Internet – This is a new one for the top 10.  The information highway, this wondrous cyber space library of fact and figure, google and twitter, instant satisfaction, endless knowledge is fast becoming our new way of life.  Are we amazed by it? Absolutely!  Are we already beginning to take it for granted?  You bet!
10.    Life

Even More Inspiration

• The Road To Inspiration — Peter Link and Julia Wade
• The Ira Awards Part 1
• Experiments of the Sub-conscious Mind / A Five Part Series — Part 2 – Dreams
• Experiments of the Sub-conscious Mind / A Five Part Series — Part 1 – Sleep
• Grieving In Silence
• A Walk In The Woods