C3/CCC Sermon Transcript for December 23, 2007
“The Power of Dreams for Illumination"
By Ian Lawton

Sweet Dreams are Made of Cheese

Researchers have refuted the wives tale that eating cheese before sleep will give you nightmares. In fact studies have shown that if you eat cheese before going to bed, your dreams will be more pleasant. Not surprisingly, the studies were undertaken by the British Cheese Association.

According to the research, it matters what cheese you eat and what gender you are. Women eating Brie tend to have very pleasant dreams, such as Jamie Oliver cooking dinner in their kitchens, or relaxing on a sunny beach. By contrast, the men who eat Brie experienced odd, obscure dreams, such as driving against a battleship, or having a drunken conversation with a dog.

Eating Cheddar tends to lead to dreams about celebrities, such as forming a human pyramid with Johnny Depp.

So it turns out that Jesus was right- Blessed are the Cheese makers.

Today I am talking about the dreams that stuff is made of. Are you a big dreamer? Do you remember your dreams? Do you have nightmares, and wake up in a cold sweat?

I have a recurring dream that always leaves me feeling eerie. I often have it on a Saturday night. I dream that I am standing in front of you, ready to begin the service, only to realize that I am wearing my pajamas. So I researched pajamas as an ancient archetype, symbolizing the need to relax and get more rest. Dreams about wearing pajamas in public indicate that you are unaware of something very important that’s right under your nose. Well I made that up, but for those who know me well……!

The reason I’m speaking about dreams at this time of year is because dreams are central in the Christmas story. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the dream that warned Joseph not to go to Israel, there might not have been a Jesus. If there was no Jesus, there would be no Christianity. If there was no Christianity, well……. I’m sure people would have made up some other very similar religion. Anyway you get the point. Dreams are a key part of the Christmas narrative.

So it seems worth spending some time thinking about dreams, dreams as they were understood in the first century and dreams as we understand them today.

Dreams in the First Century

First century Jewish and Greek beliefs around dreams were primitive or in other words, part of a magical worldview. They believed that dreams were symbols of divine guidance. Every significant human action was controlled by god through dreams. So if you were writing a story, and wanted to lend a certain credibility or authority to the story and its characters, you would include dreams in he details.

In Hebrew and Greek culture, you didn’t have a dream. You saw a dream. It was to be understood literally as being a message from God. When leaders had nightmares, that led to apocalyptic literature such as Revelation and parts of Matthews gospel.

So dreams serve two purposes in the Bible;

We know a lot more about dreams today, thanks to Freud, Jung and modern science

Freud- Its All in the Dreams
100 years ago, Freud revolutionized the way we think of dreams by suggesting that what we dream has meaning, but not literal meaning. He said, in dreams, you allow yourself to think and feel things that you will not allow to come into consciousness in your waking life. You kill your husband, speak back to a teacher, or wear pajamas to church. You dream because you need to express these unconscious forbidden thoughts and desires.

Freud suggested that by getting to know your dreams, you would get to know your suppressed unconscious. This healing would help you to function more effectively in your waking life.

Jung- Its all in the Dreams
Jung agreed with Freud that dreams are part of human latent consciousness, but had a more positive view of dreams. While Freud said the dreams represent suppressed thoughts that have to be overcome, Jung said that dreams represent aspects of yourself that need to be integrated. For Freud, dreams were the garbage can of the unconscious. For Jung, dreams were the mother of consciousness.

The objective of dream analysis for Freud was "to convert unpleasant representations into pleasant ones"- According to the Freudian perspective, the dream is essentially spurred by unconscious desires relating mainly to lurking sexual insecurities or dysfunction.

For Jung, "The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic balance" (Man and his Symbols, p. 34).


Modern Science- Its all in the Brain
Modern science suggests that dreams are a way for your brain to download information, memories, and responses to your waking life. Just as you need to sleep, your brain needs to restore itself by doing some filing and rebooting.

Your brain works with two different types of memories-

In dreams, you draw from both types of memory, which is like wearing a mismatching outfit- familiar scenes with unfamiliar- groups of people in your life who don’t know each other. You find yourself in places and you don’t know how you know the place, and in situations and don’t know how you know the situation.

Dreams are Miraculous
Dreams, like intuition and various forms of extraordinary knowing are miraculous, but not necessarily because they are acts of divine intervention outside of the laws of nature. Its all in the brain, and that is itself the miracle.

In the Christmas story, it’s a miracle that Joseph found within his consciousness the certain sense of danger and how to avoid it. It’s a miracle that wise ones felt the calm guidance of a star. It’s a miracle that you have within your brain all manner of latent wisdom and guidance.

The beautiful thing about a naturalistic view of miracles is that you can nurture the universe that lies between your shoulders. You can tap your own unconscious world for wisdom and guidance. It’s extraordinary. It comes as if from beyond; beyond your recognized wisdom. It guides your life and comes from within. It is so much more self-empowered than supernatural miracles, which you have no control over.

The Power of Dreams

You know so much more than you think you know. There is so much wisdom lying dormant in your unconscious. Dreams remind you to keep searching the more of life.
A Catholic mystic by the name of Brother David Steindl-Rast offers this broader perspective. He encourages an “open” world view where “the universe is an immense house ... with transparent walls. But outside it is night. Beyond the transparent walls lies the darkness of mystery, the invisible presence of the utterly Other, nameless, imageless. And as humans try to understand the mystery in which the world is embedded, they begin to project images onto the walls of glass behind which lies the night of the Great Question.”
Dreams direct you to the more of life, but not in literal ways. Haven’t you had the experience of telling someone a recent dream, and the conversation sparks some other really significant thoughts and conversation. It may have nothing to do with the dream, but the dream was the catalyst for thinking outside the box.
There’s always more. Extraordinary knowing is to some extent unrealized knowledge
What about dreams as premonitions? What about Abraham Lincoln dreaming his assassination days before it occurred? What about Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist, dreaming the Periodic table before it was common knowledge?
I don’t know! Three beautiful words, capturing part of the essence of spiritual insight- I don’t know. There’s always more, but the more isn’t necessarily supernatural, or even paranormal, maybe just extraordinary- a natural miracle.

There was once a poor, G-d fearing Jew who lived in the city of Prague. One night he dreamt that he should journey to Vienna. There, at the base of a bridge leading to the King's palace, he would find a buried treasure.

Night after night the dream recurred until, leaving his family behind, he traveled to Vienna to claim his fortune. The bridge, however, was heavily guarded. The watchful eyes of the King's soldiers afforded little opportunity to retrieve the treasure. Every day the poor man spent hours pacing back and forth across the bridge waiting for his chance.

After two weeks time one of the guards grabbed him by the lapels of his coat and demanded gruffly, " What are you plotting? Why do you keep returning to this place day after, day?" Frustrated and anxious, he blurted out the story of his dream. When he finished, the soldier, who had been containing his mirth, broke into uncontrollable laughter.

The poor man looked on in astonishment, not knowing what to make of the man's attitude. Finally, the King's guard caught his breath. He stopped laughing long enough to say, "What a foolish man you are believing in dreams. Why, if I let my life be guided by visions, I would be well on my way to the city of Prague. For just last night I dreamt that a poor Jew in that city has, buried in his cellar, a treasure which awaits discovery."

The Jewish man returned home. He dug in his cellar and found the fortune. Upon reflection the thought struck him,”the treasure was always in my.possession”. Yet, I had to travel to Vienna to know of its existence.

So it is so often for you. Your dreams are pointing to the treasures that reside within, between and beyond human consciousness. Sometimes you have to journey to a new and unfamiliar, even unfriendly place, to realize the treasures that were right where you started. Sometimes you will journey into extraordinary dreams to find the treasures within.

So its clear that dreams have latent power to guide and enhance our waking life. But the reverse is also true.

You interpret your dreams, and the maturity of your waking consciousness will determine the interpretation of your dreams. A child will interpret memories in a particular way. An adult will build so much more into the interpretation of the same events or memories; a broader, more inclusive meaning taking into account all sorts of knowledge and experience.

Work at expanding your waking consciousness, by study and meditation and reflection. This will enable you to interpret your dreams so much more fully.

Dreams Are Transformative

Ken Wilber uses this analogy. In your dream, you are surrounded by desperate, starving people. There are two ways to end their suffering. You can either feed them in your dream, or you can wake up. If you wake up from the dream, their suffering will end instantly.

Your dreams have an important message for you, but it may not be a literal message. It might be the reminder that knowledge and memories are connected, waking and sleeping. It might be that your dreams are bringing you a very specific message. Or else, your dreams might be telling you to wake up ay pay attention to more of life, and join some dots..

Life is so much more connected than your small, waking consciousness would have you believe. The world doesn’t need your help. The world needs you to wake up and be more fully yourself, both in your conscious and your not yet conscious self.

When you do that, you will transform yourself and the world.

Chuang-Tzu had a dream of a butterfly. He later said, “I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.”

Life is connected; waking/ sleeping, dreaming/ lucid dreaming/ day dreaming, ordinary and extraordinary, memories/ forgotten memories, future memories.
Australian Aboriginees believe in two forms of time, two parallel streams of activity. One is the daily objective activity ... The other is an infinite spiritual cycle called the "dreamtime," more real than reality itself. Whatever happens in the dreamtime establishes the values, symbols, and laws of Aboriginal society. Some people have special contact with the dreamtime. They can dream the next day’s events or know where to go hunting.
This is different to the primitive and magical belief in supernatural guidance. It is a way of staying in tune with the harmony of life. In the west, we could do with a dose of this type of harmony. We seek the certainty of divine intervention, without realizing that there’s always more. In an Indigenous mindset, everything is a footprint of everything else, everything leads to everything else, everything leads to an exploration of everything else. As above so below. As asleep, so awake.
Its all one. Dream and dream fully. Don’t be afraid of your dreams, even your nightmares. They are your unconscious opening you to treasures and wisdom beyond your wildest imagination. Dream up a storm, and then when you are ready- wake up, and live your dreams with passion for the transformation of the planet-  beginning with yourself.

Lord Byron captures all this questing and wondering perfectly-
“Our life is two-fold: Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence:

Sleep hath its own world,  and a wide realm of wild reality

And dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures,
and the touch of joy;

They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
they take a weight from off our waking toils,

They do divide our being;

They become a portion of ourselves as of our time,

and look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past,
--they speak like Sibyls of the future: they have power--

The tyranny of pleasure and pain;

They make us what we were not -- what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanish'd shadows -- Are they so?

Is not the past all shadow?
-- What are they? Creations of the mind?

The mind can make substance,
and people planets of its own with beings
brighter than we have been,

and give A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.”

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