The Hidden Treasures of Dreaming - Spirit of Ma'at

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The Hidden Treasures of Dreamingby Catherine Shainberg, PhDWe live in our body, but we often forget how connected to our body we really are. Weact as if our body were an alien being, inaccessible to dialogue, which must be takenelsewhere -- like an object -- to be fixed. We experience the usual plethora ofsensations, emotions, feelings, and even pains -- yet we don't seem to grasp thepossibility that we may directly and powerfully affect the health of our own body.Instead, we give our power away to medicines and drugs, or to the doctor, therapist,chiropractor, pharmacist, healer, or even our friends. And we often do this without evenasking ourselves, "Can I heal myself?"The Treasure Is in Our DreamingWhen speaking about, or to, the body, it is best to speak in images. For images are alanguage the body understands far better than words. To illustrate what I mean, let metell you a story:Once upon a time in Cracow lived a Jew named Eizik, son of Yekel. Riddled with debtand responsible for a large family, Eizik longed for someone or something to relieve himof his burdens. But nothing seemed forthcoming.One night, Eizik had a strange dream. He saw himself in Prague, the distant capital,standing under the bridge that spanned the Vltava River, just next to the king's palace."Dig!" said a voice in his ear. "On this very spot is buried a treasure. All your problemswill be solved." But upon awaking, Eizik dismissed the dream as just a figment of hisimagination. He felt that he had neither the strength nor the resources to travel so far.But the dream would not go away. Night after night, he dreamed the same dream.Finally, Eizik realized that there would be no peace for him until he journeyed to far-offPrague to verify its truth.Upon arriving at the capital, exhausted and hungry, Eizik went straight to the king'spalace. There, he recognized the bridge from his dream, the exact spot he had visioned.But soldiers were guarding the bridge. How was he to approach?He decided simply to tell the truth. And, as you may imagine, Eizik's revelationsprovoked the soldiers to great hilarity and teasing. "As for myself," one of themmockingly said, "I dreamed there was a treasure buried in Cracow, under the chimney inEizik the Jew's home! And I'm leaving right now to get it!"Upon hearing these words, Eizik had a sudden illumination. He hurried back to Cracow,removed the stones in his chimney, and, lo and behold! there was the treasure.
That the treasure lies inside ourselves, always within reach, is the first and mostobvious message of this famous Hasidic story. But that the treasure lies in our dreamingis a message that is less often understood or realized.But if the moral of the story is carried to its fullest extent, we can see that we are beingtold that dreaming itself contains the answer to our problems. In this story, dreaming isthe magic wand that disperses our clouds, opens our locked doors, moves our landmasses, cleans our cobwebs and dusty mirrors, and reveals the treasure hidden withineach of us.Is this true? Can we actually use our dreams to clear our own physical, mental,emotional, and spiritual bodies? To answer this question, we must ask another one:"What is dreaming?"Two Warring BrainsWe have only one body, but we have two arms, two legs, two eyes, and two brains.Without these ''twos'' we could not strive for the tension of balance. Unfortunately,however, one side of our mind and body will often become atrophied, thus weakeningand undermining the other side. For example, if your right arm is used too frequently,the natural symmetry of your posture can become unbalanced.Our two brains (to simplify matters we'll call them the left and right brains) havetraditionally not lived happily side by side. The left brain has dominated our way ofthinking since the advent of Scientific Enlightenment. It deals with logic, language,abstraction, mathematics, physics, problem-solving. Its thinking is sequential, linear,rational, and objective. Its progression is dependent upon the laws of cause and effect.The left brain tends to underrate and debase the subjective right brain.The right brain, on the contrary, is essentially involved with the body and all of itsattendant manifestations, sensations, and emotions. The right brain interprets facialexpressions and body movements. It deciphers lightning-speed, complex signals,reconstructing them to gain knowledge. In this way, for instance, not only does the rightbrain report on other people's appearance and state of well-being, it also makes anassessment of their deeper emotional landscape.The right brain operates instantaneously, holistically, and intuitively. As the Englishlanguage so aptly puts it, we are ''in-formed'' by the right brain, which picks up pattern,shape, and interacting forms. Thus, our smell cilia are ''in-formed'' by the shape of themolecules that waft towards our noses. Our ears are imprinted with the wave patterns ofsound, our eyes, with the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation.The right brain not only receives, but also responds to the outer world and to thefluctuations within our own bodies. It does this by bringing clusters of pattern, shape,and movement into our awareness. Our interactive right brain is actively dreaming dayand night.
Page 1: In Search of Ancient KnowledgeThe k
Page 5 and 6: How can we in-form the right brain
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