Yesterday, today, tomorrow

I met two strangers at a party a year or so before I began my work in dreams, almost 30 years ago now. I say strangers, because when I asked around afterwards, nobody else remembered seeing them.

Both men, and both a lot taller than me (I am quite tall), they seemed to act in unison. “We have three questions for you,” one or both of them said.

“Who are you?” they began.

This must be a trick question, I thought, because their intonation didn’t come across as a friendly enquiry about my name. “Well,” I began tentatively, “I’m me.”

They looked quite satisfied with my answer. “What is the time?” came the next question. This one seemed easy. “The time is now,” I replied, getting into the swing of it.

After all these years, I cannot remember the third question, or my answer, but I do remember them saying something about choosing me to bestow their gift, each giving me a hug before promptly leaving the party, as if their mission were done.

I wasn’t drunk or drugged or dreaming. I was totally conscious and aware. But I was slightly spooked. More so when I asked around about who they were, but no-one else seemed to have noticed them. I wondered what gift, if any, they had bestowed, and I still wonder. My life experiences are so extraordinary at times – or my perceptions of them are – that I would be hard pressed to distinguish where or how their intended benevolence may play out.

There are years when I forget about them, and then, at odd moments, like right now when I sat down to write a blog about something else entirely, the memory returns, which is why I find myself sharing this story with you and wondering where it will lead.

Back then, after the party, I didn’t look for signs of the gift. Maybe, I told myself, they were just two men at a party playing a game, or maybe the gift and their ability to bestow it was an illusion they both held dear. Or maybe they were drunk or stoned. Or maybe they, and the gift, were for real. I just let it be. After all, I am me, the time is now, and although there is a third truth that would be nice to recall, I was happy to simply let all that be.

Yet between that time and today my journey into my personal dreams and my professional dream work has transformed everything. I am still me, the time is still now, but the ‘me’ is far more encompassing and the ‘now’ is far richer and deeper. Or is that the other way around? Me, now: same thing.

I sat at my desk today to write a blog about paying attention to the different levels of interpretation and meaning gifted within a single dream. I got as far as the title, Yesterday, today, tomorrow, and that’s where the memory of the party came to mind and different words to those planned appeared on the page.

So let’s see what happens when I return to my intended theme for today’s blog.

For those of you who have studied my work, or done my courses, you’ll know that the entry point for the way I interpret a dream is the understanding that a dream reflects your conscious and unconscious experiences of the day or two before the dream. During dreaming, you are processing those very recent experiences to try to make sense of your world. You’re comparing those experiences of the last one to two days with all your past experiences, sometimes updating your mindset as a result, sometimes consolidating it, always projecting slightly ahead into the future, trying out today’s updated or consolidated mindset on possible future scenarios.

Worried about a job interview you have scheduled for tomorrow? Your dreaming mind will not only process those worries and all your previous similar experiences, feelings, and beliefs, but it will also project ahead and do a test run based on your current mindset.

All your yesterdays, triggered specifically by the last two yesterdays, meet today (while you are dreaming) to try out possible tomorrows.

Of course the dream story might not seem to be about the job interview because it will be richly expressed in the unique symbolic language of your dreaming brain and unconscious mind, but if you are skilled in interpreting your dreams you will be able to pick any limiting beliefs, fears, attitudes, and patterns that may trip you up at that job interview.

It’s easier to get accurate, meaningful insight from a dream if you can identify the experiences in the last two days that triggered all relevant resonating past experiences. We can all remember roughly the essence of the last couple of days, and once you have related your dream to these recent yesterdays, it’s easier to mine the many yesterdays of your past to find the origin of any limiting beliefs, emotions, attitudes, or patterns of behaviour that may be blocking your best future.

Yesterdays are not in the past if they are still influencing the present, and if they are influencing the present, they are influencing the future.

And it’s not only the yesterdays of your conscious memory that influence you today and tomorrow. Far more insidiously, far more powerfully, it’s the yesterdays buried in your unconscious mind that heavily influence your current mindset and the way you respond in the world today.

Your dreams, once interpreted, help you to discover more about the ‘me’ you are, way beyond your daytime conscious understanding, and they help you to discover the enormity of the ‘now’, that timeless place where yesterday, today, and tomorrow co-exist energetically within you while also playing out in your waking life.

When you have the tools to interpret and work with your dreams, and to create and use dream alchemy to reprogram (or heal) aspects of your unconscious mind, you can change the energetic mix of all those yesterdays to create a ‘now’ that is more in alignment with your best intentions.

So, you see, I have still not delivered my original blog idea about paying attention to the different levels of interpretation and meaning gifted within a single dream. I will reserve that for another time. The blog, instead, was high-jacked by the title I chose, or by my unconscious mind, or by the rumblings and resonances of the gift bestowed upon me by those two strangers all those years ago.

You and I might not meet at a party, and might not share a hug, but we can each share with strangers (and with people we already know and love) the gifts bestowed through understanding and working with our dreams.

 

You might also enjoy