If some of our dreams are sent to us by the Spirit World in order to teach us a lesson, why then are they so covered by symbolism?

The Guide: In the first place let us not say a dream is “sent.” Dreams are not really sent. This is difficult for my human friends to understand, but there is a difference between the so-called psychological dream and the spiritual dream. The dream that is given by the Spirit World is really a memory of your sojourn in the Spirit World while your body was asleep.

You know that often you experience events in sleep. You are taught or advised about something and then you can take a memory along to help bring out what your soul has been impressed with. Even without such a memory, this soul-impression from a spiritual experience will eventually affect your life, your endeavors, your attitudes. Often it is helpful and more effective if this is a fortified picture.

The reasons that dreams are blurred by complicated symbols are manifold. I could not go into that thoroughly in a simple answer. It would need at least a lecture on this subject, which I may give at a later period. But for now, I would like to say this: there are so many levels of the human personality, as you all know, and they all have their various messages to convey. One blurs into the other. That is one reason for the distortions.

The second reason is that the language in the Spirit World is a picture language. When you are in the human state, accustomed to a completely different mode of expression, the symbolism of the pictures is something you have to translate. This, incidentally, is one of the reasons why it is so very hard for a spirit to express itself in human language. It is a limitation.

Imagine it in the sense of translating a text from a foreign language. If you are not very familiar with that language and you have to translate the meaning into the language that is familiar to you, it will sometimes be a difficult, laborious task. It needs effort. You have to think. Perhaps you have to look up a word in a dictionary. That is the difficulty here also. The phenomenon in itself is not confusing. In fact, it is much less confusing than your human language, which is so much more limited.

And a third reason, last but certainly not least, is another element. Again, you all know that people have resistance to finding out truth about themselves. That resisting part may interfere when your soul wants to convey a message to you.

One part of your being wants to give and show freely to your consciousness what the inner problem is. It projects these pictures, but then there is this other part in you at work that tries to blur such messages, whether they are from the part of your personality that wishes to advance and become more aware and conscious, or memories from the Spirit World that wish to serve the same purpose in a different way, by a different method that often you do not know how to distinguish. It is not important that you do so, as long as you get the message itself.

The resisting part desires to cover up, to camouflage messages that lead you toward self-recognition and inner change. That is all it can do, if your will is strong enough. It cannot prohibit – even if the outer will is still paralyzed – the higher self speaking and working and showing you the way.

This often happens through dreams. But the lower self always interferes. It sends in disturbances. Radio messages can be interfered with in a similar way. All these elements are responsible for the difficulty to interpret dream language.

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Can you give us suggestions for interpreting dreams?

The Guide: One of the most dangerous things in dream interpretation is generalization. Beware of it. Always use the personal, subjective associations – what you think, feel and experience in connection with dream events.

The tendency to escape from unresolved problems, from conflicts, from that part of you that has remained in illusion and immaturity, makes people sometimes read into dreams a high spiritual meaning that may or may not hold true. You objectify rather than probe the dream for its subjective meaning.

Be careful of that, my friends. A dream always contains a special message to you from your own soul. To find this message is infinitely more constructive than looking for a consoling, pleasant message from outside yourself.

Your fear of facing yourself makes you turn away from the constructive messages your soul delivers to you constantly. And you refuse to read these messages. Not only because they are not always easy to read – it may take time, effort, patience, and a great deal of real inner will, as well as help from others who are qualified to help – but also because you like to hear nice, pleasant things.

When you perceive a much more constructive and productive voice of love that sometimes says momentarily not so pleasant things, you become so blind that you do not even perceive the love. You are blind to it because deep inside you connect love with what is pleasant and easy – and, unfortunately, that is not always the truth.

Productive love sometimes has to criticize. Whether this applies to another person or to your own dreams, your reaction to both is often the same. You turn away from it.

Your own dreams are messages of love, although they sometimes reveal something to you that, at first, you do not want to know. Go to the trouble of deciphering them, even if at first you cringe away trying to forget them, trying to belittle their meaning because of their apparent nonsense, or trying to put a very glorious, beautiful, flattering message into the dream from the Spirit World.

The true message that comes from your soul is instructive rather than flattering. That kind of message is from the real Spirit World. It points to what really goes on in you, what is immediate.

To answer your question with rules and regulations would be impossible. There is too much to dream interpretation. I have done this with my medium in a constant training process over the years. The fruits of this training are constantly being used, and this is the only way to learn. You cannot learn something that is constant and alive by learning a few rules, by hearing a few words. That would only be misleading.

Were you to ask someone who speaks a foreign tongue to tell you something about it so that you could begin speaking it, what could they say that might be helpful to you? Your dreams are a language, and to learn it takes considerable time. Until you have learned this language, you need a translator. Then little by little you begin to learn it yourself, depending on how much talent you have for this language and how much effort you make.

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Sometimes when one has an unresolved problem and one goes to sleep relaxed, intending to have the problem resolved, one wakes up with the solution. Is it correct that then one’s unconscious mind has solved it?

The Guide: Whatever terminology we use, there is really only one thing important to know about the meaning of the unconscious, and that is lack of awareness. When you are unconscious, you are not aware. Now, there are degrees, of course. Do not imagine that your unconscious mind is either a perfect and wise super-creature or a monstrous animal.

Many people have extreme attitudes toward their unconscious. The unconscious mind does not necessarily have anything to do with your real self, the higher self, or with the lower self, the part that you deny. Both sides of your nature can be partly conscious and partly unconscious.

For instance, you may be conscious of certain aspects in yourself, or about general concepts, but you are not conscious of their entire significance. Your awareness is neither completely absent, nor is it completely present. There exists, then, a degree of awareness.

That you can resolve certain problems during sleep by instructing your unconscious mind happens because you have knowledge of which you are not aware. In certain states of relaxation and concentration, such as concentrating on the will to find a solution before going to sleep, the unconscious knowledge can reach surface awareness.

Your entire striving on this earth sphere is to increase your awareness of what is already stored in you. In such a state of relaxation, it is also possible for spirit helpers to aid in bringing your own knowledge to the surface. In other words, it is a combination of the Spirit World working with your own real self.

What is necessary for such awareness is the constructive functioning of your inner will. Therefore, when a person goes to sleep facing a confusion or a problem and wholeheartedly desires to resolve it in the best possible way, even if this means giving up a selfish aim, then that person creates a state of inner openness where productive universal forces of truth can get to work.

When the confusion is not tackled, when one is not fully aware of what one is confused about, then such answers cannot come. Hence conscious effort has to be made most of the time. Sometimes, of course, an unconscious desire may exist of which the person is unaware.

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