Interpret Your Life As A Dream

The Work of Glenn R. Williston, Ph.D.

as published in

Body, Mind, Spirit Magazine, April/May 1994

by D. Rosen

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.

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