When Dream Visions Blend With Life

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Dream Visions and the Waking World

by David Rivinus

A distressed young man recently attended a lecture I was giving on dream interpretation.

During the question and answer segment, he related a problem he often experienced: he had difficulty distinguishing between what was real and what he saw on the screen of his inner vision. For this reason, he liked to have his fiancée along whenever he went out; she could help him: “I see a grey Toyota in the intersection. Is it really there?”

People speak of the veil that exists between what occurs in the outer world and the perceptions from our own consciousness. For most people, this boundary seems not so much a veil as a thick, impenetrable wall. Many have a hard time accessing their inner visions at all. It might surprise them to learn that being aware of them is less critical than they might imagine.

While most of us try to live life in as normal a fashion as we can (taking our kids to school, paying our bills, and trying to find time to enjoy ourselves), there is another layer to our lives that is just as important and equally accessible. This is the understanding that those same mundane, daily experiences of real life can be viewed through another lens–the lens of metaphor and dream symbolism. When we begin to view our lives as a perpetual series of metaphors, we break down the barrier that separates our inner and outer perceptions. Almost invariably, the metaphors we experience in the outer, real world are delivering the same messages as those of our inner consciousness.

We dream when we are asleep, and if we have good recall, we can interpret our dreams through symbols. However, we are also dreaming while we are awake. It is the symbols we experience while going about the normal business of our days that we have better access to, because we have an easier time remembering them.

Here is an example. While asleep, a woman had a dream that a wood chipper she was using wasn’t working. She was trying to grind up dead branches that had fallen in her backyard, and she couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the machine. The dreamer thought this was an odd dream because never once in her life had she used this particular type of equipment. Nevertheless, she and I went through the symbols. To her, dead branches metaphorically were formerly living things whose lives had ended; they were useless in their current state. The wood chipper was a machine that would convert the dead limbs into mulch, which would eventually break down further, creating fertilizer (food) for new plant growth.

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