La vida es sueno. "Life is a dream," said Pedro
Calderon de la Barca, the national dramatist of-Spain. And
Shakespeare is famous for his "All the world' s a
stage." More than just interesting metaphors, these
statements question the relative importance of what we call
'reality' and what we quickly dismiss as illusion or symbol.
Further, these epigrams suggest that life's events carry meaning.
But how might we uncover the hidden meaning in the commonplace
and not-so-commonplace events of our lives?
Dr. Glenn R. Williston, educator, consultant, and author of
numerous books and articles, including the international
best-seller Discovering Your Past Lives, teaches his clients and
students how to interpret the meaning of events.
According to "Dr. Glenn," as some clients address
him, the events that make up our lives are suffused with meaning
and message. This important concept helps us understand why
"bad" things happen to "good" people, why
some people seem to have lots of "good" luck, while
others have just as much "bad," and why events, even
tragedies, sometimes repeat themselves.
Dr. Williston's method is as direct as it is comprehensive.
Here is how he describes a typical example: "Route 395, the
monotonous highway going through hundreds of miles of desert from
Reno to Las Vegas, provided the setting for Harry's daymare. He
was driving south to Las Vegas to close a real estate deal. Since
he loved to drive, the eight-hour drive was no problem. Besides,
it was a rare opportunity to be by himself for awhile.
The first few hours of the drive passed uneventfully, but
suddenly just outside the small town of Lone Pine, Harry was
pulled over by a state trooper for speeding. He was shocked,
since he did not see himself as a speeder: 'I've only gotten a
couple of tickets in the past couple of years,' he commented,
'but this was the toughest, because I wasn't even in a rush. I
just wasn't paying much attention to my speed... and I was only
going 62.'
"In previous consultations, Harry had talked about the
pressures of his extended family, the demands of his work
responsibilities, and the stress of his recent divorce.
He arrived at our consultations late, always with excuses
about how much he had to do before he arrived and after he left.
'Well, I guess laws are made to be broken,' he said defensively,
not realizing the message in the ticket.
"If the messages about rushing through life and not
paying attention were not clear enough with the ticket (one of
six in the past two years as it turned out), Harry experienced
something else, which reinforced the message.
"He happened to mention that at a gas station about an
hour after getting the ticket, he stepped out of his car onto a
dead bird. It was a crow as he described it. He thought the
incident strange, but did not give it another thought until
mentioning it to me.
"In Native American teachings the dead crow would be
called a 'contrary' crow, and represents the rebel, the outlaw,
the person who is stepping into the space of another. It is a
message aimed at someone who is not paying attention.
"When we discussed the message behind these incidents,
Harry began to see how the seemingly small and insignificant
events of his life were trying to warn him to slow down and pay
attention. In effect, by [ being inattentive, he was endangering
himself and others. His own experiences grabbed his attention
better than his ex-wife's nagging about rushing or his mother
telling him that he was always playing 'Beat the Clock."'
Dr. Williston employs a variety of traditional and New Age
evaluative tools and processes in his telephone and in-person
consultations. At the same time, he is not bound by these tools
in his interpretations of the images that confront us, and he is
most creative in his philosophy of interpreting the
"real" events of our lives as images and dreams.
Recently, for example, a client related a tale of woe
involving baffling problems with electrical wiring in her home.
Dr. Williston helped Linda to see that these events could be
interpreted like a personal message about the "electrical
wiring" of her own body. He explained to her the latest
developments in neurotransmitter research, and referred her to a
specialist in the field of neurobiology.
To make an interesting story very brief, the interpretation
of her house's electrical problem as a meaningful dream, and her
subsequent referral to a specialist, resulted in an effective
treatment that literally and figuratively lit up her life. Her
comments after a month of treatment for RADD (Residual Attention
Deficit Disorder) are enlightening: '"I had no idea that
anything was really wrong with me. I knew I was always forgetting
things and spacing out for hours at a time, but when you don't
know anything is wrong, you just don't know!"
Indeed, Dr. Williston frequently finds messages about
physical health and well-being in the events that his clients
relate to him from their daily lives. What is more important,
after all, than health? And so, many of our dreams, and daily
events as well, speak to us about health issues in general. More
particularly, they sometimes speak about our denial of injurious
stress (disease).
"It is curious how these messages manage to appear just
at the time we need them most, and often without the kinds of
cause and effect relationships we expect from 'reality."'
In the case described above, for example, electricians had
been unable to find any defects in the electrical wiring of the
house. As it turned out, the problems disappeared after medical
therapy began. As Dr. Williston has teamed, the disappearance of
an annoying external problem often coincides with the solution to
a personal problem.
Quoting from A Course in Miracles, Dr. Williston says,
"waste no experience."
His teaching of personal messages in dreams and events
provides a practical application of this important concept.
Interpreting an event as a dream means that there really is no
essential difference between dreams and other experiences in
terms of their meaning and significance. In some ways, it
represents the oneness of all life that we find difficult to
accept. We feel safer putting everything into its own separate
category.
Linda was concerned with "real" electrical wiring
problems, but she might as well have had a dream about them. The
possible interpretations and directives for action would have
been the same.
Dr. Williston points out that even though a dream happening
at night is a microscopic electrochemical event, it is not
insignificant compared to the seemingly larger and more important
events of the normal waking state.
Lame Deer, a Sioux Medicine Man, once said, "What you
see with your eyes shut is what counts." I asked Dr. Glenn
about this comment. "What we see with our eyes open can be
just as significant," he said. "But what is more
important to understand, is that we must train ourselves to look,
with eyes open or closed, into all kinds of events, understand
what they mean, and then act rather than react to them."
"Jack came into my of fine," he continued,
"with worry and tension written all over his face. Moments
later he was describing the fire that had destroyed his store the
previous week. He still wore bandages on his arms from where he
had tried to confront the flames. We spent some time on the
details of the tragedy before I asked him about any dreams he'd
had recently, especially before the fire. At first he said that
he didn't remember his dreams, but then interrupted himself as he
recalled fragments of a dream he'd had a month earlier.
"He was on a roller coaster. As he went around the comer
he saw the big drop ahead. He turned and said to his wife that he
didn't want her to be afraid. She smiled at him and looked
straight ahead again. When he looked back to the drop ahead, he
realized the track had disappeared. They were off the track and
heading for disaster. His wife screamed and he wanted to scream
also, but he couldn't. Instead he told her everything would be
all right. It was Jack talking, but to him, it sounded like
someone else. He believed what the voice said, however, and so
did his wife. Next thing he knew, he was hearing ambulance sirens
and he and his wife were calmly exiting the roller coaster.
"Since I had discussed the concept of interpreting his
life as a dream in an earlier meeting, we discussed the dream and
his tragedy in terms of possible meanings. His personal message
seemed quite apparent: he was off-track, stressed, and burning
himself out in the process. As we discussed the possibility of
this interpretation, he mentioned that he was being treated for
high blood pressure and migraine headaches. Even his
deteriorating health was speaking loudly to him."
Was Jack's night-dream a premonition of catastrophe, later
fulfilled in the burning of his store? Were the night-dream and
the fire both prophetic anticipations of a heart attack or
stroke? Or were all of these phenomena different carriers of the
same information?
What is most important to understand is that messages from
our own minds, and messages from Divine Mind, unconsciously
during sleep, but also in the fantasies and events of our waking
lives.
Basically, Dr. Williston talks about three different
categories of meaningful experience: true dreams (including
nightmares), personal daily events (including the crises that Dr.
Williston labels "daymares"), and fantasies or
daydreams.
They are really all the same in terms of purpose and
interpretation: they all alert us to seeing something we are not
wanting to see. They urge us to do something we should be doing
or implore us to stop doing something that is hurting us or
others.
Inherent in this concept is a fact of nature: an
ever-present, all-pervasive tendency toward healing, normalcy,
equilibrium, balance, homeostasis. It is what Dr. Williston
refers to as "Divine Healing Action-." As he says,
"Every living being is, at all times, automatically moving
toward healing. This Cosmic Energy works ceaselessly in
establishing, reestablishing, and maintaining balance.
"Even the human brain is devoted to five primary
functions: balance or normalcy, healing, survival, simplification
and creation.
"Information of all kinds appears in all our waking and
sleeping dreams; it guides us into balance and healing."
According to Dr. Williston the information comes to us in
increasingly powerful ways to "wake us up. " First, we
are granted intuition, through our sixth sense, by which we are
welcomed gently into an understanding of issues around denial,
dangers, willfulness, control, and needs. If we fail to perceive
this most subtle level of formation, we experience, in turn
discomfort or uneasiness; then pain; then cellular or
psychological breakdown; then disease or dysfunction; and
finally, we face debilitation and/or death.
In his work with clients, Dr. Williston emphasizes the
acceptance of intuition so that the messages we receive do not
have to become louder, more dramatic, and more demanding on the
physical, emotional, and psychological levels.
Martin Buber said, "All suffering prepares the soul for
vision." But suffering is not necessary for vision if we are
willing to look to see in the dreams and events of our lives, the
all-important messages that are designed to bring us out of
victim roles and into victory. Most suffering is the result of
not seeing.
Effective dream-event interpretation and subsequent action
lead us down the path of increasing health and empowerment. It
does not eliminate all tragedies in our lives, but it does help
us prevent many and handle the rest more effectively.
Dr. Williston's broad background in education, science,
psychology and metaphysics, has provided the basis for his
development of numerous unique Personal Growth tools. As a
retired psychotherapist, Dr. Williston now writes and works with
individuals, couples and groups as a coach, tutor, teacher,
consultant-specialist in personal growth work. He has published
more than two dozen books.
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