Daily Voice Dialogue - Issue 27

----- DAILY VOICE DIALOGUE -----

written by Astra Niedra, edited by Mark Belfanti

WELCOME to the twenty-seventh edition of Daily Voice Dialogue, a newsletter about using Voice Dialogue in your daily life.

Please feel welcome to forward this newsletter to a friend!

Best wishes,
Astra Niedra

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TOPIC OF THE MONTH

DREAMS

Your dreams can be one of your most valuable teachers on your path of personal growth. They allow you to experience another type of reality that can be an amazing experience in itself and the wisdom they offer is unsurpassable. Dreams are available to all of us, every night, or any time we sleep, and they are free. Everyone's dreams are equally wise, powerful, informative - they are probably the most universally available and undepletable resource there is. What a gift!
If you don't remember your dreams, research shows that that is a recall issue and does not mean you are not dreaming. There is information available about how to help remember dreams (look up "remembering dreams" on Google or at Amazon.com and you will find plenty of resources).

Dreams are mainly symbolic and many of these symbols are common to many people but each of us will also have a personal meaning attached to the symbols which will influence the meaning of a dream. So to find the meaning of one of your dreams you need to look at what the parts of the dream mean to you personally - this meaning will also be culturally and socially influenced.

There are many ways to interpret dreams but the one I have found the most meaningful and useful uses the Psychology of Selves. To interpret your dreams using this model, you basically look at the characters in your dreams as the various parts of your personality, the various selves within you. The person who is you in the dream, is your primary self, which is the part of your personality you identify with in waking life. How you interact with the characters in your dreams reveals how you interact with the other selves in you. So dreams are rarely about other people; even though other people appear in our dreams, they do so to represent a part of your self.

Your dreams can reveal to you which selves you are identified with, which selves you have disowned, how the disowned selves feel about their predicament, how your primary selves feel about things. Dreams offer pictures of your current state, of how you are handling a particular situation, and they give you guidance in what you need to do to become more whole and therefore happy.

Dreams show you where there is tension between the parts of you and give you indications of when and how to resolve this. Dreams go hand-in-hand with Voice Dialogue because they illustrate your current situation and offer suggestions of what issues to work on. You can even facilitate your dream characters and discover how they function in your psyche and then integrate them.

Following is a made-up dream to describe how you might go about interpreting a specific dream using this technique:

Magdalena dreams she is in a large house with many rooms that she has previously been unaware of, and in these rooms are various people - adults and children. She walks through the house and meets the various characters there. Some she likes but others she is afraid of. Some seem content and others are not.

With this type of dream, the house represents the personality and the rooms represent different parts of her personality. Because in the dream she is 'discovering' these rooms this would indicate that in her waking life she is in the process of discovering different parts of herself. In one room there is a happy child playing and Magdalena likes this child and has a pleasant interaction with it. This would indicate that Magdalena is in touch with her own inner playful child and her primary self is okay about this.

In another room the door is only slightly ajar and peeking in Magdalena can see a large angry snake locked up in a cage. She fears this snake but finds that the longer she is willing to be with it, the less angry it becomes. A snake traditionally represents sexuality/instincts and spirituality. So if this was your dream you would have to look at how you are identified normally in order to understand it. If you are not in touch with your sexuality then this dream would probably mean you are now able to be with it but it is still locked up and angry - yet becoming less angry as it realises you are paying attention to it. On the other hand, if you are normally a non-spiritual person, the snake might represent your spiritual nature requiring your attention and release. Snakes might also mean other things to you, such as cunning, slyness, power. So there is no one way to understand a dream - your own dreams need you to be the one to understand their real meaning.

The Psychology of Selves provides an excellent framework for dream interpretation, and is one that can be used by anyone once you become familiar with how to apply this framework to your dreams.

If you would like to learn more about your dreams and how to interpret them, I'm presenting a 10-week dream workshop in Sydney starting soon. We will meet on Thursday evenings at the cosy and starry-ceilinged Piccolo Padre Café in Darling St Rozelle, from 6.00pm until 8.00pm. Enjoy an excellent coffee, hot chocolate or fresh juice, as you discover how to reap the rewards your dreams bring to you. For details go to www.voicedialogue.com/workshop.htm

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EXERCISE

Choose a dream you remember clearly, or if you can't remember a dream pick a fantasy. Write this down. Now identify the characters in your dream and write a description of each of them. Describe how they relate with the other characters in the dream and how they relate to you and how you relate to them in the dream. Describe also the main objects in the dream and your feelings and thoughts about these objects.

If you are familiar with any culturally specific meanings of any of the symbols in your dream write these down too.

Now look at the characters and see them as parts of yourself. See if there is a correlation between how you feel in the dream about a character and how you would feel if that was a part of you.

Paying attention to your dreams in this way will give you answers. Some things will just 'click' as you go about your waking life and realise how your dream revealed a particular issue to you. Re-read your dream periodically - it is amazing how many new insights you can get from a dream just by reading over it from time to time. Often meanings become clearer later and you can also see different levels of meaning.

The more you pay attention to your dreams, the more dreams you will remember. It's as though the more attention you pay to the unconscious, the more it wants to communicate with you.

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ENERGY TIPS AND TRICKS

When you wake up from a dream and the dream is still clear - don't move. Stay in the position you find yourself in on waking and go over the dream before you move. That way you will remember more of it and will be able to write it down. If you move immediately on waking, the dream is more likely to fade. This is because as you move, the self in you who will be dealing with the new day takes over your consciousness, and this self is not the part of you who has access to the dream. On an energetic level, when you move, the energy pattern of a different self comes in and you lose contact with the energy of your dream state.

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BABY DIALOGUE

Examples from my experiences with my 4 year old and 2 year old daughters to illustrate how I try(!) to use Voice Dialogue in my life.

NIGHTMARES

Children often have nightmares, as do adults. The way to deal with them is the same for both. When we have a nightmare it means we are disowning a part of our nature so much that it is turning against us. The solution is to begin to look at and embrace whatever it is that is frightening you in your dream. The harder you are pushing a part of you under, the more angry it will be, and the more nightmarish your dreams will be.

This doesn't mean that if you have a nightmare about the Mafia coming to kill you that you have to become a Mafioso yourself. What it means is that you need to look at what qualities the Mafia have, consider what they are able to do that you are not able to do. Some examples might be that they can act with disregard for other's feelings, they disregard rules and break laws, they are able to make plenty of money, they can kill when required. If you have this type of nightmare, chances are you are identified with being loving, kind and considerate, you try to be good, you respect rules. So your work might be to get in touch with the part of yourself who can protect you from other violent people, who could kill if necessary - to defend yourself or your loved ones. Also that part of you who can think selfishly, so makes sure your needs are met. Another aspect to consider is the part who doesn't accept rules blindly but questions them, and can break them. On an energetic level, you might try to contact the part of you who is colder and more impersonal than your probably more personal and warm primary self.

Dealing with a child's nightmares: one of Athena's bad dreams is that there is a bad dragon trying to bite her. Inevitably, this type of dream occurs after we've had to 'socialise' Athena in some way, either teaching her not to grab toys from Tinkerbell while Tinkerbell is playing with them, or trying to get her to go along with our rules about something when she clearly doesn't want to - all necessary aspects of child-rearing but they do lead to the disowning of the opposite qualities.

What we do with Athena is try to have her pay attention to and respect the dragon in her dream. We ask her all about it, what it looked like, how she felt, how it felt. She now likes making dragons out of her Lego blocks and role plays situations with them. She makes 'good' dragons and 'bad' dragons and as we play, to alleviate her fear of the 'bad' dragons, I suggest that maybe the bad dragon wants to bite her because it wants her to play with it, it wants her to say 'hello', and it's angry at her because she's running away from it. As a result many of her dreams have transformed. She still has bad ones but often she'll turn around in the dream and say to the dragon 'stop trying to bite me or I'll bite you back' - in this way she is embracing her own 'dragon nature' as she is able to face the dragon and even use its type of power herself.

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COMING UP IN FUTURE ISSUES

Attractions to particular material things - eg that fabulous dress I just have to have!
Relationships and how having children affects them
Fantasies

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IMPORTANT NOTE

This newsletter is not to be taken as psychological or medical advice. If you require such advice you should seek it from an appropriate health care professional. This newsletter is also not intended for you to use in making life-altering decisions without communication between you and the appropriate health care professional.

Copyright 2000-2004 - Astra Niedra. ISSN 1444-6022. PO Box 1266, Rozelle NSW 2039, Australia. No part of Daily Voice Dialogue may be reproduced, in any form, without the written permission of the author, Astra Niedra, except for forwarding an issue, in its entirety and complete with copyright information, to a friend.