Dreamwork and the Power of the Unconscious Mind

 

Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me but it did. This is the power of the unconscious mind.  It took only moments but I was left disturbed.  I had been working at editing my book An Irish Heritage and the story within it entitled Return to Tir Na Nog.  In this story there is featured a women called George.  This led me to consider that I might dedicate this book to my father George Cuckson.  I thought no more about it and took a nap.  During that time I had a dream.  This was a very short and disturbing dream.  Even writing about it now after some twenty four hours I can feel the power of its vehemence and hatred.

 

 

In this dream I am sitting at a desk.  My father stands over me and he has with him a considerable sum of money.  He tells me in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t give a little sh*t like me a penny of his money.  I reply with some heavy expletives of my own and stand up in order to punch him.  What surprises me is the degree of hatred we both feel for each other.  It felt that we might be happy to kill each other and that anger wasn’t really what it was about.  It was more about rage and violence.

 

 

The other emotion involved in this exchange was fear.  I felt disturbed and afraid of this degree of vehemence that I felt within me.  I say that this was unconscious because I did not realise the depth of this hatred and this rage that I felt.  The symbol of the money and his refusal to give me any of his wealth is the representation of his emotional abandonment, not only of me, but all his children.  This is the symbol that represents a kind of worthlessness.   I thought that I had been through this cycle before but it seems that life very often takes us spiralling back and forth in order to alchemise unresolved emotional issues.

 

 

Over the last week I have felt strangely disembodied and still do to some extent.  This may be the reason. I want to detach from this emotionally powerful dynamic of hate and rage.  The work of integrating this dynamic is that of the 1st and 2nd chakras and the use of the will (3rd chakra) to unify those disparate aspects of the psyche.  This is the process of personal integration that takes one higher and into the true peace of the heart chakra.

 

 

One of the prayers I pray as a daily spiritual practice is the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi.  It is a prayer that I feel to be a universal prayer and the first two lines ask,

 

 

Lord make me an instrument of thy peace.

Where there is hatred let me so Love.

 

 

 

This request contrasts so much with the experience of the dream and dreams do not lie.  There is that less than conscious aspect of my psyche that feels the worthlessness invoked by the abandonment by the father.  This is a key dynamic within my family.  In Jungian terms it is the living of the archetype of the Orphan.  This is the individual who lives from the pattern of exile.  This is why I love stories and tell stories.  They are for me a way in which I empower the Orphan and in a truer sense the way the Orphan has empowered the archetype of the Magician within me.

 

 

I ask myself, “Do I feel worthless?”  Off the top of my head the answer to that question is, “No.”  However, I feel physically unwell and that is not usually something I experience.  Usually within any physical sense of illness there is an element of emotional disharmony. This may be a result of the deepening of the prayer.  It is also likely to be a result of moving into the role of becoming a workshop leader.  This role I am finding opens up my psyche in ways unimagined.  It opens up on a deep level the question,

 

 

Am I worthy to be a guide to what is worthy in all of us

 

 

That is a question I am less willing to say “Yes,” too.  What is worthy in each of us is so beyond our wildest imagination.  To even touch it, and to have it touch ones life, is the greatest of graces.  How am I to say that I could ever be worthy of being a guide to such a revelation.  The more important aspect of this question isn’t whether the answer is “Yes” or “No” but the willingness to be available to that grace.  This is the process that we are all travelling through.  It isn’t some form of examination of our worthiness.  It is more a test to see if we can stand the revelation that comes through the physical body and the psyche.  Any impurity of thought that we are attached to in conscious or unconscious way is burned up in this light of revelation.

 

 

This dream shows me the depth of the challenge before me if I would continue to work with my Living the Wild and Precious Life process.  In a real sense it reveals to me what I feel about myself and in some way my unconscious relationship to my earthly father and my Heavenly father.  This is that I feel unworthy.  I was also taught this unworthiness by the ecclesiastical establishment that taught me when I way growing up in Northern Ireland.

 

 

I am learning just how much I hated I feel at being made to feel wrong.  I do not use this word hatred lightly.  The  power of this feeling scares me.  I found  within that dream that I would literally speaking kill.  This is where the role of the healthy ego comes in.  The will (3rd chakra) can be used, and is intended to be used, to reconcile the opposites discovered in the 2nd chakra.  Those opposites that I am discovering within myself at a more powerful and dynamic level are in a real sense making me feel sick.

 

So I am praying to be made an instrument of peace and instead of peace I am feeling the vehemence of an now arising rage and hatred brought on by a sense of unworthiness.  So what to do?  I could simply run away and not do the work.  This wouldn’t necessarily resolve the conflict.  Life would find a way for me to return to it in order to be at peace.  It would also mean I was refusing to be made an instrument of peace.  It would mean I would be, in the words of the great poet Goethe, refusing to enter the fire and be burned to death for the sake of love.

 

This burning to death is a metaphor for the alchemical work of processing opposites within the psyche.  It is the work of the 3rd chakra and is referred to in mythological stories as the City of Jewels and also as the Road to Hell.  It is likely that the more I sincerely pray to be made an instrument of peace that the more I might process that which is not at peace within myself.  The modern mystic Andrew Harvey outlines this process in the Sounds True audio series entitled Radiant Heart from which I learned the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi.  Given the vehemence of the dream experience I look forward to moving to the other side of this experience and learning to reconcile the opposites within me so that when I ask,

 

 

Where there is hatred let me sow love

 

 

at least I will have some degree of authority to allow that dynamic to move through me because I have reconciled these dynamics in my own heart.  I have thus processed the opposites within that then allows the peace beyond understanding to arise within the heart centre.  This is the way of Love.  It is a kind of figure eight that spirals upward and downward at ever more refined levels and burns up in the fire of Love that which is unloved within ourselves that we are unwilling to make a conscious part of who we are.  Thus in this way one might become a worthy instrument of Love and be willing to be used for Love’s purpose.

 

One of the most powerful of languages that you can ever learn is the language of dreams.  The language of dreams will give you benefits that no other language can ever hope to give you.  These powerful benefits include

 

1. Deeper powers of intuition and integrity.
2. A fuller body awareness that is beyond sensational.
3. Feel more deeply aligned with Source.
4. Literally and superconsiously follow your dreams.
5. Discover your key life patterns.
6. Feel connected to your true life’s story.
7. Reveal the true meaning and purpose of your one wild and precious life.

 

You can become an skilled interpretor of your dreams. In this way you align the inner with the outer which is a major key in the process of real personal and spiritual development. Rather than experience life as a kind of emergancy one’s life becomes a life of emergance. Dream interpretation in a very real way is a course in life long learning.

 

Take the journey into true integret by make your committment to begin a course in dream interpretation here. Dream interpretation is a skill that will help you on through key transitional stages of the spiritual journey that we are all undertaking in our various ways. This is an affiliate program that I endorse. Dream interpretation is one of my key spiritual practices and I invite you to learn a language that will over time begin to integrate you in personal and spiritual development ways that you might only ever dream off.

 

Course Lessons

Lesson 1: Why We All Dream and Why We Should A dream well dreamt can prompt us to question the world around us, what we are doing in it, how we view it and what we do, as well as, defining what is real and what isn’t.

Lesson 2: Dreaming Through History The point is that dreaming is a fundamental part of all our lives, one of the very few universal strands that unites all human beings.

Lesson 3: Freud/Jung/Perls Described as the “royal road” to understanding the unconscious mind by Sigmund Freud — DREAMS — were the centerpiece of his highly controversial book The Interpretation of Dreams

Lesson 4: Dream State, Levels and Logic In this lesson we will be covering several of the better known, and more widely acknowledged dream states, as well as some of the very important points in relation to levels of dreaming.

Lesson 5: Dreams Across the Cultural Divide Dreaming is a truly universal experience, however, cultural factors and religiousness do play a significant part in how people regard the significance and consequences of dreams.

Lesson 6: Your Own Dream Lexicon Our dream pictures and feelings are generated by our unconscious and for our own benefit — you can find comfort in that. Our unconscious talks directly to us through our dreams, one-to-one.

Lesson 7: Dream Symbols The messages contained in our dreams are typically conveyed as symbols — representing an idea, concept or emotion — something that is difficult to put into actual words.

Lesson 8: Dreaming About Yes, we often dream about things, and occurrences, which are common in our every day lives.

Lesson 9: Analyzing and Interpreting Your Dreams In practically every culture and during practically every Age in our history, dreams have both enthralled and mystified us and had us scrambling to find bigger and better ways to understand their implications.

Lesson 10: An Eclectic Approach to Dream Interpretation Everything changes over time, so naturally the approach to dreams and their interpretation is no exception.

Lesson 11: Dreaming Creatively The real meaning of what it is to be creative is frequently mis-stated and misunderstood with so many people thinking and saying things like “I’m not creative at all”.

Learn to truly follow your dreams.

OTHER GREAT CONTENT Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.

power of the unconscious
KARMA TUBE is a collection of inspiring videos. This website brings inspirational stories to light, using the power of video and the internet to multiply acts of kindness, beauty and compassion
SPIRAL DYNAMICS - Another map of personal and spiritual development for your consideration
SPIRITUAL THEMES IN YOUNG ADULT BOOKS - Many young adult books can provide the spiritual information young adults need to assuage the loneliness of their passage; some of the possibilities are presented here.