Your Yoga. Working Through Dreams.

What is a dream? There is no single answer, just as there is no single answer to “What is a Human Being?” It is an immense world. Even if someone could one day define it and fit it within certain boundaries, I can say with certainty that a moment later this world would change beyond recognition. What value would the elaborate attempt to explain and characterise it then have? Let us leave this fruitless pursuit and direct all our attention and aspiration towards development, so that instead of viewing our own infinity from outside and trying to fit it into the narrow confines of the mind, we become that infinity ourselves. Only then will the question dissolve in the profound depths of our answer through experience.

Most of us divide dreams into good and bad. We can all recall the impression made by a vivid, beautiful dream and the pleasant mark it leaves upon the following day. Sometimes it is difficult to say which continues which: ordinary life continuing our dream, or the dream continuing ordinary reality. Rather than deciding which is more real and dividing the One into fragments, let us accept everything as a whole, just as it is and as it appears when we are calm and free from bustle.

Wishing to be whole and unified Beings, we decide to see the surrounding world as whole and unified too. We will simply observe and become as aware as possible of what is happening. Perhaps this alone is what we need to be truly free.

Our frantic lives often bring frantic dreams or nightmares. On waking, many people try to push the nightmare away and forget it quickly. This is unhelpful, like trying to forget that a brick is falling towards your head. Our inner world, our inner Being, tells us of a problem, while we dismiss the dream as nonsense to be discarded. Yet if it is nonsense, why does recognising this not make our lives wiser? Perhaps because we rush to final conclusions about the complex, unimaginably vast world in which we live.

Few of us can yet control our dreams. What, then, can we do after a bad dream? Is it too late to change anything? I believe much can be changed, through working with our dreams.

Practice

Here is how. Suppose you have what you consider a bad dream: someone gives you a black cat in a black room. After waking, or at any convenient time, though sooner is better, sit down, close your eyes and relax. Re-enter the part of the dream with the cat, recreating its details in memory. Instead of the cat, however, imagine something else, such as a white lotus. You can transform the surroundings too: picture in detail a white temple on the summit of a snow-covered mountain, for example.

This applies to any dream. If you tend to overeat and dream of constantly eating too much, recall the dream after waking and imagine firmly refusing the food. I am sure that after practising for a while, this will affect your later dreams and your waking life: you will stop overeating.

If you have erotic dreams and realise on waking that they serve no purpose for you, recall the dream and change it to what you would have preferred.

If you dream of being beaten or insulted, know that an astral attack is taking place. This need not be deliberate. It may result from an argument at work or in the street. Someone has attached an energetic programme to your aura that continues harming you long after the brief exchange has ended and everyone has forgotten it. After the dream, picture the attacker again and either create a situation in which you prevail, which is easier, or imagine the attacker becoming a luminous Being, which is harder but better.

Recurring nightmares indicate a powerful problem reaching back to childhood or a past life. Suppose you dream of walking on a roof and falling. After waking, imagine that just as you are about to fall, you rise and fly, or at least climb safely down to the ground.

To prevent or reduce the influence of a hectic day upon your dreams, I recommend another simple practice:

Immediately before falling asleep, imagine moving upwards through a tunnel, preferably white. Here “upwards” means along the continuation of the spine, regardless of your body's position relative to the ground. It is very good to fall asleep with this sensation of upward movement. I am sure you will have very good dreams.

Continuation

Since I recently began publishing my dream dictionary, this page has attracted particular interest. As almost ten years have passed since I first gave this practice, I decided to add to it.

In ten years, people and the world have changed, unfortunately not for the better, and stronger methods have become necessary.

A Powerful Technique with the Ocean of Light:

Suppose you have an outright nightmare with nothing good in it. You wake with your heart racing, perhaps sweating, while the nightmare keeps turning in your head as though part of you remains in that hell. Working through individual negative details, scenes or characters is largely pointless because the entire dream is hellish. I therefore offer a stronger version that works with the whole dream at once.
Immediately on waking, or when you find time, though sooner is better, recall the dream. Imagine its events unfolding in a world, region or space. You can picture everything inside a vast sphere. Usually you will see it in dark colours, perhaps entirely black.
Then imagine all the dream's events, its whole dimension or the sphere containing it, sinking into a radiant Ocean of Light.
Now comes the most important part: keep watching as all the darkness in the dream dissolves in this Ocean of Light, like a black stain disappearing from white paper. Everything in the dream becomes made of Light, white and pure. It is a transformation: darkness becomes light, malice becomes kindness and love, aggression becomes calm, and ugly forms become beautiful.
You need not focus on individual details. Simply immerse the sphere in the Ocean of Light and see everything dark within it become bright and pure. This is a very quick practice that works with all the negativity at once.
Immerse your dream in the Ocean of Light in this way and watch the transformation. Imagine a beautiful gold statuette that has fallen into mud and become covered in it. You immerse it in perfectly clean water and watch it become a beautiful golden creation once more.

Remove Yourself from the Dream and Burn It in the Sun:

Recall the dream and remove yourself from it. Imagine it did not happen to you and that you are not in it at all. It is like watching a film in which you were the main character, then watching the same film with yourself edited out of every frame. Everything else remains as before, but you are absent.
Next, crumple the dream's space like a black sheet of paper and throw it into the Sun. Perhaps you have seen science-fiction films in which space breaks apart. Imagine something similar: fold the space into a ball like paper and cast it into the Sun, where the dream flares brightly and burns away. Picture the Sun as a fiery sphere, our actual Sun.

Continuation 2

All the cases above concern dreams you can remember. Often, however, you wake knowing that you had a bad dream but remembering nothing of it.

I would now like to give you a way to work with such dreams.

A typical situation: you wake knowing that you dreamed something unpleasant, perhaps sweating or having jolted awake from something disturbing. Yet your memory seems cut off. You only feel that the dream was unpleasant, weighing on your consciousness and psyche and perhaps making you anxious.

As I said above, do not pretend that it was merely a meaningless dream and that the best thing is to lose yourself in everyday life and forget the feeling.

Your subconscious and intuition, particularly active during sleep, are telling you that something important is happening, perhaps an energetic influence from a person or situation. Yet you try to ignore it, dismissing it as nonexistent because it was “only a dream”.

Recognise that you have received an important clue. In sleep you were more clairvoyant, and your subconscious showed you a problem or external threat, sometimes an internal one, such as the energy of a developing illness appearing as attacking dark animals or people. If you cannot recall the plot, use this technique.

After waking, relax and feel as though you are still asleep. Imagine a dark sphere before you, a concentration of energy. Symbolically give it the consciousness of the negative force that created the unpleasant feeling from your dream. Although you cannot remember who attacked you or what happened, you can enclose all the negativity within this form and work with it according to the practice described above.

Veretennikov's Dream Dictionary

Information