Dreams, Signs, Illusions and Reality

Hi there and aloha. Good morning and welcome to the Secret Art of Huna Live video on dreams, signs, illusions and reality. So I thought I’d talk about that today because I get a lot of calls from my clients about this very question.

I’ve seen something in a dream. How do I figure out what it means?

And the other reason I thought that I would talk about it is that actually the way we interpret dreams, we can use that as a way of interpreting things we see in our life to bring us more awareness and more understanding of what might be going on.

So let’s start with the dreams bit.

A lot of the time if you go into a Facebook group or you ask somebody for help with interpreting a dream, they will give you a universal meaning for it. And certainly Jung and Freud and Adler, some of the great fathers of psychology, were really into dream interpretation.

The description of dreams was the royal road to the unconscious. And in the Hawai’ian system, the idea is that the dream is a communication from your higher self, your connection with spirit or source, from your higher self to your unconscious mind for interpretation by your conscious mind.

Now the problem there is that the unconscious mind is highly symbolic, so the dream, the meaning, the message comes in symbols, and then your conscious mind has to decipher the symbols, which is the tricky bit. So that’s what I’m going to be talking about.

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious

If you look in the dream books, even if you go to the dream books, you’ll find a lot of the time that they’re really inconsistent. So I thought I’d do a little Google on this.

I Googled eagle, symbolism of eagle. So you see an eagle in your dream. The dream of a flying eagle is a good fortune or victory. It could be that the symbolism of an eagle is nobility and pride. It could be that it’s powerful, strong hunting-ness.

Here’s one. The eagle soaring in the sky symbolises career success. The eagle in your dream is a symbol of ambitious goals or a yearning for career success.

So it’s very complicated.

When we go on Google, when we read the dream books, we can often see very many different meanings for a simple symbol like an eagle, or a snake, or whatever. If you then have a really unusual thing in your dream like a five-headed eagle with the tail of a donkey and legs like a chair, for example, how do you interpret that?

The way that I’ve learnt to interpret dreams is not to go with these archetypal interpretations.

That was very much Jung’s thing. An archetype is a blueprint. It’s an energetic blueprint that can be understood across many cultures. So, for example, a warrior is an archetype.

If you talk about a warrior, most cultures have a sense of an energy, a fighting energy, an energy of action, an energy of… quite often a warrior will have a weapon in their hands depending on what the culture is. But the idea of a warrior, it brings up common feelings, common sensations across cultures. So that’s how it’s an archetype.

A lot of these archetypal meanings, this is the kind of thing that Jung was very into, have the problem in that each of us has personal meanings that we ascribe to things. I’ll give you a for instance.

When I was small we lived in Malaya, as it then was. And one day we got a king cobra in the house. Now king cobras are poisonous, very poisonous, very fatal and the whole place went into complete and utter chaos. It was just everybody running around trying to figure out what to do with this snake.

And for years afterwards I was terrified of snakes. I remember a guy coming to school with a couple of pythons in a bag for kids to handle them. There was no way I was going to do that! I was out of that room faster than you could say boa constrictor.

I used to have a recurring dream about being thrown into a pit of snakes. I was really frightened.

Roll forward the years and when I was at university, the sister of my flatmate decided to invest in two reticulated pythons. They were babies. They were, I don’t know, three, four feet long at the time. So she invested in these things and I decided it was time to overcome my fear. I knew they weren’t venomous. A three-foot python, not going to kill me.

First I touched it because I figured that would be easier than looking at it, and then I started to look at it. And as I did that, I realised that these were amazing, amazing beasts, incredible beings, not just venomous but symbolically, they’re symbols of healing. They’re symbols of transformation. There’s so much to do with the snake that’s not harmful.

In fact, I managed to resolve my fear to the extent that when the owner of said snakes went off to Europe to do her PhD and we got to look after the snakes in our house, I was able to handle them; I was able to take them out to clean their aquarium, the tank they lived in; to feed them; and so forth. And I haven’t dreamt about snakes since.

We ascribe different meanings to dreams depending on our experience.

My experience initially was very fearful because of all the chaos when I was very small And then when I actually got to handle a snake, my experience changed, my meaning for snake changed.

The first thing about dream interpretation is really looking at all the different pieces in your dream and asking yourself; what does that mean to me? Not what does that mean to the whole great world out there, but what, me personally, what meaning would I give this thing if I wasn’t looking for advice outside myself?

You can then take your interpretation, or the technique for interpreting dreams, you can then apply it to real life experience. And this is how I’m doing it at the moment.

So I was hesitant about whether I’d be able to do the Facebook Live because I thought maybe the plumber was going to come round because I’ve got a situation in one of the rooms in my house.

The back wall’s been damp for years. It’s below ground. It’s about three foot below ground, a metre, metre, metre and a half below ground. So it’s below ground, so it’s always had damp. But recently there’s been water. So I wanted to get the plumber in to help me identify where this water might be coming from.

While I’m waiting for the plumber, and that probably won’t happen until next week now, I thought it would be good to interpret that experience.

I asked myself, okay, what does water mean to me?

Water to me means healing; it means emotion; it means fluidity and, not flexibility, but fluidity; it means coolness. It’s got some lovely meanings.

What does unwanted water mean to me?

Well, unwanted water means to me, it’s a nuisance, it’s fluid from somewhere, it’s discomfort for me. It’s some energy coming in from somewhere that I don’t want but it’s also probably me not paying attention.

So where in my life am I experiencing unwanted fluidity? Where in my life am I experiencing unwanted emotion? Where in my life am I experiencing unwanted coolness?

And what I realised is that the big one for me at the moment, is unwanted fluidity because I have recently noticed that my diary has become so fluid I can’t manage it anymore.

People are cancelling appointments. They’re putting in appointments. My diary, it is like a pond of water that’s moving all the time. So the message for me from my dampness, apart from getting the plumber in to help me try and fix it on a practical, physical level.

Energetically, I need to pay more attention to where else in my life this unwanted fluidity is happening and start to constrain it and bring it back.

So that’s how you can use dreams and that’s how you can use a dream interpretation technique with actual, real experiences that you’re having every day.

You can also use it for signs that you see.

So, for example, I drive every Friday over to do some work in a hospice chaplaincy volunteering. And the other day, I saw four red kites.

Now we do have red kites but this is not an area where we usually get many, and to see four is amazing. If I wanted, I could interpret that sign, the four red kites, using the dream interpretation technique asking myself what do red kites symbol to me? What does four red kites symbolise for me? And what might that mean in other areas of my life? What’s the message I need to bring in?

Now dreams are also useful when we think about illusion and reality because all the things we think about, just about everything we think about as reality, isn’t.

If I think about my body, my body seems to be physical. It seems to be solid. It moves, but it’s kind of solid. You knock my knuckles and there’s quite a noise there. But actually, in physical terms, my body is really more space than it is anything solid. It’s this collection of atoms held together by a sort of energetic bonds. It’s all space.

If you took out the space and took the actual physical atoms, you’d have a handful of dust, maybe a thimbleful of dust.

So my perception of the reality is that I’m solid, I’m in solid form. Actually, I’m not. This table, perception is that it’s solid. I tap it. It seems solid, but actually, it’s space with a few atoms running around in it, rather than lots of atoms and a little bit of space.

So even those things that we perceive as real are not necessarily real.

Our beliefs, our beliefs are true until we choose not to believe them.

I’ve recently written a post about the perception of the world as round or flat. For many, many, many hundreds of years, the perception was that the world was flat and that was the truth. People got killed, tortured for trying to claim that the world was not flat. But now we know that the world is round, but there’s still people out there who believe that the world is flat, which is quite extraordinary.

So just because our current level of scientific understanding says something is true, even that is not necessarily true.

In terms of the application of dreams, in terms of interpreting our reality and our illusions, if we treat every waking, real experience as a dream, we can interpret it and so bring ourselves greater meaning and greater understanding.

I hope that’s been interesting for you.

In terms of not recalling dreams, one of the questions you might ask yourself is what stops you recalling them? Because you definitely do dream. There is a condition, there are a few people on the planet who actually don’t dream, but it’s a very minority condition. So it may be that you have that but it’s unlikely as it’s very rare.

So a question for you might be, what stops you recalling your dreams? And I look forward to seeing comments, any observations, any questions you might have here or on the Facebook page. Talk soon!

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