The Spirituality You Can Recover from Dreaming

 
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Hello, my name is Henry Reed and I'm a recovering intellectual.

And from what addiction are you recovering your spirituality?

The "recovery movement" has spread to almost every human weakness. In a similar fashion people are recycling spirituality out of most any form of garbage (e.g., "How I lost the lottery but found God"). There's a good reason for these developments. Our attachments, especially recovering from our attachments, can teach us about spirituality. For extra credit, we learn the larger lesson that within most every adversity there is a spiritual teacher ready to initiate the sufferer.

I have my own story of recycling. I had the privilege of sharing it in the inaugeral issue of this magazine, over ten years ago ("Getting Help from Dreams"). It was about my initiation into the higher power of dreams by alcoholism. A turning point was a dream encounter with an old wise man who pointed to a bottle of wine and indicated that it was soul bait.

The founders of A.A. credit Carl Jung for the gift of the secret formula, spiritus contra spiritum, Spirit against spirits. Here we have the deep wisdom underlying homoeopathy: the purpose of illness is to cure. I am grateful to be a recovering alcoholic (among other things) because what it has taught me about spirituality. I would advise everyone to find some attachment (any will do) from which they could recover a spiritual gift.

To help you in this endeavor, there is a new book which you'll find useful. Although it's aimed at a specific reader, I would recommend it to a wider audience. Your Dream of Recovery: Dream Intepretation and the 12 Steps (A.R.E. Press) will help you with a spiritual approach to dreams more than many of its peers. The author, Shelly Marshall, has had her share of adversity and has recovered a great amoung of spirituality and blessing s from her struggles. Introduced to an Edgar Cayce Study Group by her mother, she learned about dreams and spirituality and found it helpful in her 12-step path.

There is enough overlap between the 12 step philsophy and the Edgar Cayce material for a book titled "Edgar Cayce and the 12 Steppingstones to Spirituality." The first steppingstone would be, "Everything has a purpose." The purpose lurking behind events, or hovering over them, can often be revealed in dreams. Marshall's book is filled with examples of such revelations, and her personal stories establish her expertise to write such a book.

She begins with a special "serenity dream prayer": "God, grant me the serenity to accept all guidance revealed through my dreams, the courage to change the things I'm asked to, and the wisdom to interpret according to Your will for me." The overt purpose of her book is to show the person committed to the 12-step process how dreamwork can be included. Just like some Search for God students are shy about straying too far from the original text and processes, so are dedicated 12 steppers leery about introducing new material beyond the "Big Book." But as Marshall points out, our "religion" is meant to be just a bridge to our spirituality. We shouldn't worship the bridge, but cross it and live in spirit.

Her book serves a secondary and larger purpose, showing that the recovery perspective has a lot of spirituality to teach the average dreamer. There is a special spiritual connection between dreaming and drinking. The dark Goddess, for example, transformative in her secret void, rules over both the mysteries of intoxication and the mysteries of dream incubation and transformative, healing dreams. Dreams will transform the ego, but the ego fights it and tries to turn dreams to its own purposes. Our typical attitude toward dream interpretation is ego-heroic:.we wish to conquer the dream with our interpretation. We discard the dream and keep our interpretation. Marshall's approach teaches us the humility to respect a dream on its own merits. Even while detailing the techniques of dream interpretation, her focus is always upon finding God's will.

While she sets a high ideal, she is also practical and down to earth. Though guided by a distant star, we must find a firt step as well, and take it. She has many simple methods to help a person find something usable from a dream.

Her presentation on wordplay deserves special notice. Many dream books briefly mention the presence of puns in dreams, and the play on words that the dreaming mind enjoys so much. Marshall has an entire chapter devoted to several hundreds of examples of many different forms of wordplay. We learn that homographs are words that have two meanings: bear, foot, or nut, for example. Homonyms are words that sound alike but are spelled differently: sun and son, won and one, or steel and steal, for example. Puns involve sound-alike play on words: Alaska (I'll ask her), spirit (spear it), toupee (to pay) and their visual presentation may reflect a verbal message.

Marshall's exploration of punconsciousness in dreams reveals a deep secret: sober is not somber. Let go of an attachment and you'll recover a new humor. Do it in your sleep and see how dream cents can add up to spiritual riches!

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This page was last updated 04/28/02