Pulling up the dirt

You’re in a dream and suddenly a strange otherworldly blue female child gets up out of a coffin. In the coffin she seemed rigid and asleep or dead but now she’s up and jerking around like a rag doll that has just been animated by jump leads. This is no ordinary child! She is very menacing and doesn’t seem human at all. She runs at you and and attacks you. You wrestle and after a battle you wake up highly unsettled.

If rather disturbed you quickly went online at 2am and questioned a few people on forums about this experience the first thing you would often hear would be:  “Oh what does the child represent within you?” If someone chose to counsel the above dreamer about their nightmarish experience they may go on to say “Ah you simply need to reclaim and integrate whatever the child represents. You’ll find healing if you do that. It’s just your shadow.”

There is a strong trend for people, especially those that have studied a bit about dreams, to see the dream characters that people meet in dreams as simply aspects of the dreamer’s fragmented personal psyche. I’m not a historian of dream theory but I would imagine that this viewpoint partly has its roots in Jungian psychology. This perspective also feeds into Jungian slogans like “What you resist, persists” and it also compliments a whole raft of practices and outlooks but I won’t go into all of them here. In an extreme form they are found in tantric practices like the Tibetan practice of Chod where people ritually offer themselves to their demons and thus somehow destroy their own ego/resisting/clinging in the process. The outlook also goes hand in hand with the view that is extremely prevalent in New Age circles that evil somehow does not exist and that if you experience it ‘without’ it is only because you have it ‘within’.

Now personally these viewpoints have always made me uncomfortable. On the surface they seem reasonable and even enlightened but they have always made me uneasy in a kind of shivery, not sitting quite right, kind of way.

In this article I want to focus specifically on offering an alternative to the viewpoint that dream characters always represent aspects of the dreamers psyche and I want to do this by giving the real life background to the above dream.

The above dream was a real dream that I had the night after doing a shamanic healing for a friend. I will call my friend Jane. Now Jane had been round my house and because I knew she had what in shamanic circles would be called ‘a negative attachment’ I offered to do a healing for her. By ‘negative attachment’ I mean a negative energetic intrusion in her energy body. Already I’m using a term that seems to go against the (It’s all just you) viewpoint but please bear with me me. The shamanic healing involved cutting the attachment from her and moving it on decisively but Jane was in a rush and we didn’t have time to do the healing properly. During the healing I sensed the attachment leave Jane and I felt its heavy, leaking, depressive presence in my kitchen.  

Now to give some more background to this Jane had stopped a young teenager from committing suicide (who was going to jump off a bridge) around three months before and it seemed like Jane had picked up something very nasty from this young girl. This nasty thing was the entity that was now seemingly floating in my kitchen. Later that night it appeared in my dream with the image of the coffin and the wrestling battle that ensued. Now I tend to be a spiritual literalist and when I was having the wrestle with it in the dream I believe the battle was actually happening there and then. For me a good definition of a dream is ‘an experience within or of the human energy body’ and this was what was taking place with the small female child creature.

I remember reading in a channelled book once that dreams were like ‘postcards from consciousness’ and although I’m rarely a fan of channelled literature this is quite a good image. For me though dreams can be a lot closer to the destination than a postcard, for me they can be situations, processes and occurrences that are going on right there and then in the energy body of the sleeping person.

I remember an old Thai meditation teacher once comparing the human mind/brain to be being like a radio transceiver. If the analogy is true what you’re experiencing then depends on what you’re tuning into or perhaps what is tuning into you! If you are having a dream about an encounter with something and you wake up and feel its presence in your bedroom, you could say you are dreaming about it because it is effecting your energy body and you’re ‘picking up/tuning into’ a presence that has an objective external reality.    

A few days after the above dream a friend (I will call Chris) who is very psychically open and clairvoyant was round my house at a development group I help to facilitate. I decided to enlist his help in clearing the entity that seemed to be effecting me from my house. I called the entity to come forward and my friend Chris immediately saw the creature. He went on to say that in fact he had seen it before in my house and we concluded that it seemed to be hanging around since I’d started seeing my friend Jane (who I was for a time in an intimate relationship with).

Chris commented that the entity was crazy and was definitely not human. He said it was blue, naked and like a small female child. This was just as I had experienced it in my dream. It proceeded to storm around my house, swearing and even trying to grab Chris by the throat. When I related to Chris the fact the entity and I had wrestled in a dream the entity proudly nodded in agreement.

I then went on the say to the creature that seeking to harm people and induce suicidal thoughts within them as it had done to the young teenager was not a fair thing to do at all and that effecting my friend Jane was completely unacceptable. The creature then seethed and said that it was only “pulling up the dirt”.

We began to counsel the entity and eventually succeeded in showing empathy and compassion towards it ourselves. I began to say that I would soon have to call on beings of the light to come and take it away but just as I was saying that the entity suddenly froze in its place, stood and staring at us suddenly said “thank you” before being pulled out of the room by a hand that seemed to come from nowhere.

Now I have told this story to hopefully indicate how in dreams there can be a lot more going on that simply the emerging of forces within the dreamers personal psyche and if I had gone online and asked someone about my encounter with the child, the answer that I was simply experiencing an aspect of my divided psyche would have been very inadequate, misleading and perhaps even just plain wrong. It would perhaps be reassuring and nice if all dream characters were simply aspects of the dreamers psyche but I feel that this is not in harmony with the way things actually are. For me we live in a physical world that is permeated by a non-physical world and this non-physical world is full of non-physical beings, and these beings definitely do seek to influence human beings for good or bad and they often seek to do this through dreams. The reason that this happens in dreams is that for me dreams represent a bridge between the physical and non-physical world. When we dream our consciousness and energy body expands and to some extent separates from our physical body. In this state, i.e. when we dream, we can see and experience more clearly what is happening in our energy field than we can while waking. It also makes us highly impressionable and to some extent open to influence from non-physical sources. This can be incredibly rewarding if you are experiencing a connection with beings of wisdom, love and light but can be less so if you are experiencing beings of a more unsavoury persuasion.

One of the issues with seeing everything as just an aspect of the dreamers psyche is that it often doesn’t square with the dreamer’s actual experience and it’s rarely the way the dreamer has first interpreted the experience. The first interpretation from the dreamer themselves is often far more literal. It’s also not just a case of how we interpret experiences in dreams with negative beings, because it also effects how we see encounters beings of wisdom, light and love. For me I think it is fine to interpret these encounters quite literally and if we are forced to see them as manifestations of our own psyche then this for me closes us off from rich experiences of guidance and healing that are available to us through dreams, lucid dreams and astral projections.

For many cultures through the ages dreams have always represented a bridge and a place of encounter between the physical and non-physical dimensions and I believe we would be better off keeping on seeing them that way.   Author Tom (this article has been published by www.luciddreamlife.com)           

 

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