by Gloria | Feb 21, 2014 | Dreams
I had this dream in January 2000 when I was sleeping over one night at my then partner’s house. The setting in the dream was exactly as it was in reality and there was very little of the kind of fantasy-like symbolic imagery that dreams often employ. From the vantage point of understanding I have today, that indicates the issue is very close to the surface.
Even though I was having a lot of intriguing and dramatic dreams around this time, this one kept haunting me and did so until I finally understood it, a full four years later. It was an important lesson in the power of dreams as a life guidance system and was pivotal in encouraging me to take the dream life more seriously. Another important lesson from the dream is that dreams don’t lie, even though our understanding of them may miss the mark.
I dream that I wake up and get out of bed to find spider web wound round and round me, binding me. I move my arms away from my sides and find I can break out of the web easily. I start itching and realise I have been bitten. I look in the mirror and see I have raised bumps all over my body and face. It looks like I have chicken pox. I vaguely recall a little black spider being in the bed and somehow know it had bitten me to try and wake me up and when that didn’t work, it bound me up. I marvel at the fact that it was able to wind the thread right around me even though I was lying down, and can’t understand how it was able to get between my body and the bed. I am both amused and impressed by its attempts to get my attention but to what end I do not know.
I had no idea what the dream was about but I made a note to the effect that I was able to get out of the binding easily and that I was aware that the bites were no more than temporary annoyances. What puzzled me most was the sense of urgency and exasperation in the spider’s behaviour. It seemed determined to get my attention and yet its attempts were rather pathetic. I made a note that I thought it might be a prophetic dream and that turned out to be correct. A few days later, I had a dream about a cat being trapped in my bedroom in my own house and noted the similarity to the spider dream.
At the time I had the dream, I was in the process of returning to Uni with the intention of doing a Social Science degree and with so much else going on in my life as well, I had very little time to pursue a study of dreams. Truth was, although I didn’t realise it at the time of course, I was afraid of entering the deep waters of the unconscious mind. I was still wading in the shallows at the water’s edge and following my old pattern of trying to find myself in external activities. Eventually I quit the course and as I was doing it for enrichment rather than a career, from then on I chose to study on my own only the topics that really interested me. Ironically the final straw had come when I read a statement in the psychology textbook that dreams were just random firings of neurons. I didn’t know much about dreams at that stage but I knew from my own experience that that simply was not true.
The Uni course did have some benefits though and one of them was a requirement to connect to the Internet. I must have felt some motivation to work out the dream because I found a website that offered online dream analysis for about $25 and sent it in. It was a waste of money but a good lesson in the futility of this kind of simplistic approach. I also had a session coming up with my hypnotherapist and discussed it with her but still didn’t come any closer to cracking it.
Fast forward to September 2002 and in the interim my partner had become my husband and now soon to be ex-husband. I was having a very difficult time dealing with the rapid turn of events but I had lucked onto Jane Teresa Anderson’s dream forum a couple of months earlier and it was an invaluable source of support and help. There was some discussion on the forum about spiders in dreams and it resurrected the memory of my trapped spider, so I posted it. Through the discussion, it became obvious that it was related to the relationship in some way but I still didn’t get it. Finally, 16 months after posting to the forum, I had the Aha! moment. This is what I put in my journal, a full 4 years after originally having the dream:
This morning in the shower I was reflecting on the spider dream and it suddenly made sense. It was warning me not to get married – not to bind myself up.
Why didn’t I see it at the time? After all, I had made some effort to understand it. One reason is that at the time of the dream, marriage was not on the agenda. We had been together for two and a half years and had discussed it from time to time and though there was an expectation it would happen, we had no definite plans. By the time we made the decision to marry, the dream had faded from my memory. The other, more pertinent reason, was that I didn’t want to know. The biggest block to heeding messages from the unconscious is when it tells us things that conflict with our conscious desires and it takes some hard lessons to learn to pay attention.
I eventually learned that spiders are a potent symbol of intuition because of the fact that they extrude the silk from within their bodies. And of course black is also symbolic of the unconscious. Cats too are symbolic of intuition and spiders and cats are both symbols of the feminine – the inner dimension of being, or yin energy, as distinct from the masculine/yang energy of action in the outer world. I was definitely being called to attend to the inner world but old ways of being don’t yield easily to change.
Six months after the original spider dream, the decision to marry was hastened due to the priest at the church we had been attending getting a post as Dean of the Cathedral. His new post would take effect within eight weeks, which meant if we were to have the wedding in our church, with him officiating, we needed to make a decision quickly. Arrangements were made and everything fell into place nicely. We had quite a close relationship with this very progressive priest, even though we were only casual churchgoers. We were part of a group that met socially with him for in-depth and no-holds-barred discussions of contemporary spirituality. I was also seeing him privately for spiritual direction, which I had considerable conflict about, given my long standing, though recently challenged, atheism.
Twenty one months after we married, it was all over and I was feeling devastated. The dream forum became my lifeline because I was so emotionally fragile that I would only leave the house when I absolutely had to. The break up brought fully to the surface all the childhood loss, abandonment and betrayal issues that I had been trying to keep a lid on all my life. I had worked through some of these issues after my husband’s death 5 years earlier, due in no small part to the new relationship but now I was on my own for the first time in 34 years and faced with another loss that left me feeling totally confused and bewildered. Even so, in the midst of the anguish, part of me recognised it as an opportunity to really find out at last who I am as an individual and what my life is really about. These were questions that had been posed in one form or another through the upheavals in my life since my first husband’s death in 1997 but I had attempted to answer them by trying to recreate my old life. It hadn’t worked.
With the initial awakening experience my feet had been firmly planted on a spiritual path. Though I had believed my new husband and I were compatible in this regard, it turned out not to be the case and apparently a relationship not in alignment with my soul’s agenda had a use by date not of my choosing. Just prior to the split, there had been a lot of intense activity, consisting of what I can only refer to as psychic communication. As with the dream and for the same reasons, I just couldn’t figure out the message. It turned out to be the same as the dream – wake up! I will explore some of those communications in these pages.
The prospect of a divorce created a great deal of anguish within me but eventually I had a dream about meeting with the priest who had married us and all of the inner conflict was resolved. This dream too turned out to be prophetic, albeit with a much more positive and affirming message. The divorce laws required a 12 month waiting period before being finalised and during that period I had some interesting adventures with afore-mentioned spiritual communication. Though I was still somewhat sceptical and often a bit spooked by these happenings, I eventually realised that my fears were unfounded. I didn’t always like what was happening, or what was being communicated, but it became apparent that it was all for my support and ultimate benefit. In retrospect, the psychic communication had been there all along but my scientific materialistic worldview was a very efficient interference device. Dream work became the means for unblocking the channels of communication.
There is a wonderful poem by Rumi, which captures the essence of this dream and its message.
The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you
Don’t go back to sleep!
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep!
People are going back and forth
Across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,
The door is round and open
Don’t go back to sleep!
by Gloria | Jan 15, 2014 | Dreams, Mystories
Two and a half years after my husband’s death I woke during the night with an impression of him having been present. The way I recorded it in my dream journal was:
Not sure if this was a dream or a visitation. Roger appeared and gave me a message which I can’t remember clearly but it was as though he thought his mother hadn’t let go of him and he wanted me to see if I could do something about it.
This was not a welcome message for several reasons. Firstly, in spite of the many unusual experiences I’d been having which were pushing me into an awareness of a realm beyond the physical, I was in no way convinced that they had an actual reality beyond my own imaginative faculties. Secondly the relationship with my mother in law was strained at the best of times and I was most reluctant to deliver a message that I myself was unsure of. Most of all though, with my psychoanalytical reasoning, I had to wonder if it was really meant for me and not his mother and worried that I was inadvertently holding him back, even though I didn’t really understand what that even meant.
Later that day I had another one of those synchronistic events that often accompany significant dreams. I bumped into a friend and when I asked how she was, she said she was feeling sad because it was the 7th anniversary of the death of her son, who had died tragically in a workplace accident. We sat down and chatted and I asked her if she thought she had let go of him and she said she didn’t think she had. I told her about the dream/visit, half hoping, I think, that I was going to get rid of the problem that way. When I got home, no sooner had I got in the door than my mother in law rang, so without saying anything about the incident I tried to gauge how she was dealing with her son’s death. She seemed to be doing fine but she wasn’t one to show any sign of not coping, so it was hard to tell. I was happy to have a reason to let the incident go but unfortunately it wouldn’t let me go and I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be able to forget it unless I told her.
After several days of arguing with myself, I finally gathered the courage to ring her. To my surprise and relief she was not fazed at all about the possibility of a visit from her deceased son. She insisted that she didn’t have a problem but then in the next breath said that whenever she thinks of him, she is telling him off! I suggested that perhaps that was the problem and again to my surprise she didn’t argue the point. We chatted on a bit and then just as we were about to hang up, she suddenly burst out, quite vehemently, ‘well, that’s typical, isn’t it, they can’t tell you themselves, they have to tell someone else and then let that person tell you!’
When I put the phone down, I just sat staring at it with her words replaying in my head, hardly able to believe the conversation I’d just had. Suddenly another voice, in my head but not my thoughts, said ‘I’ve tried to but she won’t let me in.’ Rather sheepishly and thinking it can’t get any weirder, I said ‘is that you Roger?’ With that I felt a very strong tingling sensation in the top of my head that hovered there for a few seconds, then it whooshed all the way down through my body to my feet, followed by a sensation in the room like a change in air pressure. A voice in my head is one thing but like the meditation experience three years earlier, these kinds of physical sensations are hard to ignore. What to do now? In light of her earlier openness, I thought it best to call back and tell her what I had just experienced. Again she was receptive, taking what I told her quite seriously and after discussing options, said she would lie quietly when she went to bed and ask ‘what do you want to tell me?’
I had many mixed emotions on hanging up the phone, among them surprise at what had transpired and relief that I had delivered the message. I was also relieved that the original experience had been validated and that the message did appear to be for my mother in law and not me. On the other hand it raised a lot of questions in my mind about the nature of the non-physical realm, which I now could no longer ignore or doubt the existence of. One thing that puzzled me for some time after this event was that it didn’t seem to conform to a typical ADC (After Death Communication) in that frequently the deceased person appears to reassure those left behind that they are okay. This seemed to be the opposite but eventually I came to the conclusion that each experience is unique and tailor made to the individuals involved. Apart from convincing me of the reality of ADCs, even if it did open up more questions than it answered, it certainly convinced me that our relationships do not end with death and that the potential for healing unfinished business is a very real possibility if we only take advantage of it. Dreams are a most effective avenue for healing all kinds of relationships and not just with those who have passed over.
I spoke to my mother in law a couple of weeks after the phone call and she said there was nothing to report. I asked her from time to time afterwards but the answer was always the same and eventually the subject was dropped. A couple of years after this she moved to Sydney to be near her daughter and eventually our sparse communication ground to a halt. She is now living out her days unhappily in a nursing home, so I can only assume that she was never able to make peace with life’s disappointments.
Roger’s visit was certainly the most dramatic experience I have ever had in terms of appearances, although I have personally had a lot of what I can only describe as interference, especially objects disappearing and reappearing and interference with electrical and electronic equipment. These physical happenings are hard to ignore and I have heard too many stories from others to believe that they are all the results of my own fertile imagination. Who or what is responsible is anybody’s guess but that they are real events is unquestionable to me.
by Gloria | Jan 7, 2014 | Dreams
I recently had a dream in which my late husband was explaining himself for not attending a Jung Society meeting with me. His manner was a mixture of guilt and defiance. In the dream, his reasons were not clear but I intuitively understood that he was afraid of what it might stir up in him.
(more…)
by Gloria | Dec 30, 2013 | Dreams
I am in the study in my current house. Belinda is here and we are both working at our computers. I don’t know what she is doing but I am working on the James Hollis transcript when David Van Nuys arrives. There are other people in the house as well and someone has let him in.
I am very surprised and delighted to see him and happy that Belinda is here so she too can meet him. He has come to Australia in regard to doing some work in Brisbane and thought he would pop in to meet me. I wonder how he managed to just drop in to Adelaide and marvel that he somehow got through the security gates into the village and then found his way to my unit.
We chat very amicably as though we are old friends meeting up again after a long period even though it is the first time we have met in person. There is much hugging and laughter and shaking of hands as I introduce him to the other people around but he is on a tight schedule and can’t stay long. Belinda and I go with him to escort him out of the village but as we do we learn that he has to meet up with some people he is to go to Queensland with but he doesn’t have transport.
Belinda offers to drive him to his rendezvous but when I see her car, I think mine would be more comfortable. Her car is like the cabin of a ute except it has a regular trailer attached at the back rather than a fixed tray top. There is a tarpaulin over the trailer. We discuss it and Belinda reassures me that it will be fine in her car and so we head off. We sit in the front and David sits behind and between us, somewhat squashed in as there is minimal space in the back.
It is evening by now and getting dark when we get to where David is to meet the others. They seem to be part of a spiritual organisation and treat Belinda and I like outsiders. The whole thing is rather clandestine and somewhat tense as though they are on a tight schedule and they are obviously eager to be rid of us as soon as possible so they can bundle David off to his true destination. I gather his detour to visit me has not met with wholesale approval.
Belinda and I are somewhat bemused by the whole thing. All the intrigue seems somehow unnecessary and a bit contrived although they are deadly serious. My guess is that David is going to do a workshop of some kind, perhaps a dream workshop but I am at a loss as to why it’s so secretive.
A little background: Belinda is my dream buddy from the days of the dream forum mentioned on the Home Page, whose work includes website design. David Van Nuys is a retired American psychologist who has a long running and very popular podcast Shrink Rap Radio in which he interviews a wide range of guests in the field of psychology and related areas. I had been doing transcripts on a volunteer basis since the beginning of the year and the one I am working on in the dream is one I had been doing in reality for the SRR website the night before the dream. James Hollis is a Jungian analyst and the interview I was transcribing was about his latest book Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts That Run Our Lives. I had in fact done a teleseminar with James a couple of months prior, the theme of which was finding meaning in the mature stages of life. A question he had suggested participants ask themselves was ‘what does my soul want to birth through me?’ I had pondered that question from time to time but no definitive answer had been forthcoming, so I let it slide. The interview I was working on also broached that same topic, with the ‘ghosts’ being the fears that block us.
So what did the dream mean? At the time I was at a loss, although overall it did have a good feeling about it so I assumed it was something positive and didn’t feel inclined to try and work it out. The only thing that struck me initially was that there seemed to be a theme of work throughout the dream – David coming to Australia to do some work, albeit of an unknown nature, Belinda and I working at our computers – and then there was James Hollis. He had said in the beginning of the interview that he felt much resistance to writing another book as he was getting on in years, had written a lot of books and felt it was time to kick back and relax. It was his dreams that had kept prodding him to write Hauntings and a particular dream that made him finally surrender to the prompts. The clues were there for me but I couldn’t see them until events that led to embarking on this website unfolded over the next several days. I had been thinking for years of writing a book and was always writing and rewriting chapters, but I could never sustain the enthusiasm and motivation to put it all together. It would never have occurred to me to do a website and even if it did, I didn’t have the technical know how.
A couple of days after the dream I was talking to Belinda via Skype and somehow or other the idea of me doing a blog came up. When she asked me what it would be about I didn’t know but as we brainstormed the kinds of things I’m interested in – psychology in general and Jungian psychology in particular, spirituality, dreams, states of consciousness and various other related topics – it became apparent that dreams were the thread woven through all the others. So with that the decision was made and Belinda got to work setting up the website and giving me the necessary tuition in navigating my way around WordPress.
It was only after the wheels had been set in motion that I realised this dream had been giving me a nudge and a blessing. In dream interpretation, the way we relate to the various players in the dream, the attitude and opinions we have about them and their roles in life are important clues to what is in our own unconscious. Although there was an obvious theme of work, on reflection it was more about their work as an expression of purpose and meaning in life. Belinda, David and James are all deeply engaged in the kind of work in which they have a passionate commitment and dedication to what they are doing and in that they are showing me the way. Although I have been very passionate about the areas of study I have been involved in over the past several years there was a sense of wanting to do something with it and not knowing what to do.
In any good dream story as in all drama, there has to be a point of conflict and in this dream the conflict was represented by the unknown aspect of David’s business and the attitudes of the group of people he was working with. Dreams show us our unconscious limiting beliefs, i.e. fears and once I twigged that this dream was a forerunner to me taking the step of going public with my interest in the world of dreams and especially the very personal stories I would be using as a vehicle, it didn’t take long to realise what those fears were about. The fear of exposure and of not being good enough are demons that most people can relate to. I took heart from this dream in the fact that Belinda and I were not unduly fazed by the way the ‘in group’ marginalised us.
The reason I singled David out as the one giving me the blessing is that he has read my comments about his interviews out on his podcast from time to time – as he often does with other correspondents – and after one particularly heartfelt outpouring from me, he said that he appreciated my comments and the way I articulated myself. I was rather shocked at the time because I have always felt somewhat tentative about my ability to express myself but I was also deeply touched by his words and it made me realise that what was important in what I had expressed to him was the intention behind the communication and the sincerity with which it was offered rather than any artistic merit of composition. The other aspect of the David character in the dream was that he had gone to considerable trouble to come and see me, there had to be more to it than just saying hello.
One of the most important aspects of working with dreams is what we do with the information contained within it but that naturally entails having some understanding of what the dream is about. This was one of those rare dreams that didn’t require any effort on my part, it just struck me as a feel-good dream and events unfolded organically and almost effortlessly. I have a hunch that that is the result of honouring the process of taking dreams seriously.
by Gloria | Dec 30, 2013 | Dreams
This dream was relayed to me by a friend soon after my husband Roger died, although it would be many years before I would view it as I do now, that is as a spirit visit dream.
The background to the dream was that this friend and Roger had a discussion one day about the possibility of life continuing on after death. Roger was like me at the time, a confirmed atheist and had no prior belief in life after death, although he must have begun to wonder to even broach the subject. Our friend said that he doubted it because both his mother and his sister, who had died a short space apart, had been devout spiritualists all their lives and he felt if there was any ongoing existence he would have heard from them and he hadn’t. Roger said to him ‘well, if I survive I will find a way of getting through to you.’ They both had a chuckle and nothing more was said.
One day soon after Roger’s death this friend came up with his wife and his wife nudged him into telling me about a dream he’d had. This is what he told me:
In the dream I was lying in bed and Roger came through the wall behind the bedhead. I said to him ‘hey, Roger, you said you were going to let me know if you survived your death.’ Roger replied, ‘this is how it’s done – in dreams.’
I didn’t know what to make of it at the time but I remembered the conversation they’d had and I didn’t think it could be just a random coincidence. Some time later I brought it up with my friend and he had completely forgotten it, not even remembering it when I retold what I remembered. His amnesia was even more astonishing to me than the original dream although I have since had that exact same reaction from others when they have told me about a certain dream and I’ve brought it up in later conversation. In most cases though a memory will be jogged by providing details.
The dream brings up interesting questions – what exactly is the nature of the figures in our dreams, what is the purpose of such a dream as this, why did my friend have the dream and not me and why did he not remember the dream even when I reminded him of it? Some of these questions will be explored in these pages but I don’t pretend to have definitive answers to any of them. I have since had many of my own spirit visit dreams from various deceased people and will no doubt write about them as the blog develops.
I eventually came across a book about after death communications, called Hello From Heaven. It had coincidentally been published a few months before Roger’s death, although I didn’t read it until many years down the track. Since that time this particular field of investigation has blossomed along with studies of other related phenomena.
I really don’t know what I thought about the dream at the time but so many odd things had been happening and I had enough on my plate to deal with at the time anyway that I doubt I came to any conclusions about it other than to wonder what was going on. I don’t recall Roger ever talking about having dreams so it wasn’t as though there was any precedent for his statement that contact is made through dreams. Two and a half years later I had a visitation of my own from him, which was vastly different and somewhat disquieting but also convinced me of the reality of the continuation of life after death.
Eventually I learned, from study and experience, that dreams are not the only way we get communications from the non-physical realm but I have to wonder if the seed that had been planted regarding my encounter with the dream life was being nurtured along by hearing about this dream from another person.
