Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships, we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Ann O'Hare, and this is The Spiritual American. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Spiritual American. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare and I'm your host. Today we are going to be talking about sleep and dreams and I'm going to give a little bit of a experiential different way of thinking about it and also a spiritual perspective on it as well. But before we get started, please consider like sharing and subscribing. You know that when you do that, you actually assist us in getting this content out to others. And also please consider sharing with your friends and family as well so that they may benefit. So sleep and dreaming. So where to begin? There's been a lot of science around sleep and dreaming. There's a lot of, can I say superstition about sleep and dreaming? And I'm going to come at it from a consciousness perspective. So we're going to talk about what sleep is in terms of consciousness, and maybe an ordinary definition. And then also think about what dreams are and how to use our dreams, or at least our understanding of what dreams are to help us to progress with our spiritual effort or working on our mind and so forth. And then there's a little secret towards the end regarding how dreams can actually help us. So we're going to start with what is sleep. So we all sleep, animals sleep, people sleep, everybody sleeps. And what is it? So the body is being still and the mind is doing whatever it's doing. But let's say the body is being still. And at that time when I'm sleeping, I am disconnected from my senses. I'm not seeing anything. I'm not hearing anything through the body, right? So the body is asleep. So it's an interesting situation that we do every day, right? All of us do it every day. And in our waking life. I'm looking at you right now through the eyes. I'm moving the hands. I'm experiencing life through my physical senses, through the body. But when I go to sleep, I'm actually disconnecting myself. I, the spirit, the spiritual being, the living being, is separating from the body. I mean, not physically, but physically. in terms of connection, separating that connection so the body can rest and recharge and heal and everything else, what it does when we're sleeping. So then what happens in the mind when we're dreaming? Now again, I'm not going against any science. There's been a lot of science about dreams, psychology about dreams, and all kinds of you can say superstitions or ideas about what dreams may mean or the significance of dreams. And actually, different religions have also used dreams as a way of predicting things or communicating with their, you know, community. The elders have used dreams to, to inspire or guide the community. So dreams and you could say visions and things like that have been used in different cultures for different things. What I'm going to talk about today is your everyday general dreaming and what it means or does it mean anything. So and how, what can we use it to help us in our journey with the mind. So when we're sleeping, we're disconnected from our senses, but generally the mind is still going. And if we know anything about dreams, we say there's like this REM, like rapid eye movement, and then you go into like a deeper, deeper levels of sleep. And there's been a lot of science about that, but I'm talking about our experience. What's my experience? When I wake up, sometimes I say, Oh, I had a dream about and I remember the dream, right? Sometimes we have a dream state when we're like half awake and half asleep. You know that one where you're just about to wake up and then this very vivid dream is there. And then all of a sudden, I'm awake. Oh, it was a dream. So there's a real aspect to it, a sense like it feels real. And I'm going to say today, this is where my experience and opinions are going to start right from here. I feel that. The fact is that it feels real because of the emotional charge of the dream. So I'm going to say that what dreams are is our residual unprocessed emotions. So I'll say that again. Dreams are our unprocessed emotions playing out. through scenarios, through different scenes that are being generated in the mind. Now we've talked about the mind before and what is the mind? So we say that the mind is the interface between the being, the soul, I, the spiritual being, the living being, and the world. The mind is where I actually experience everything. We know this to be true because every one of us has our own mind and you could have the same scene and five people give five different interpretations of the same scene. So our mind is a very individual, unique, you want to call it a place, but a field of experience. So with dreams, the mind is creating and generating scenes and scenarios and ideas to help process emotions. Now, I'm going to give a couple of examples that are kind of common. Like, let's say there's a dream where you're going to be late and you feel like you can't get there on time and there's this anxiety or this this feeling of tension, like I have to do what I have to do and I can't, like maybe a helpless feeling or something like that. That's a common dream, but you could have three people that will have that same feeling with three different dream scenarios. So what I'm going to suggest here, one of the first ways that we can use dreams to our advantage is just like in waking life, rather than think about the scene, think about the feeling that you're having in the dream. So if I'm having a dream where I'm feeling afraid, the fear, that is what needs to be looked at or addressed. Fear needs to be addressed. Or if I'm having a dream where. Let's say it's a desirous dream. I'm just using that as an example of something that I may be. generating in my dream to feel and experience something. Could be fear, could be, usually fear actually. It's usually fear. Some kind of scenario where I'm out of control or I've lost control. So why is it that the dreams create those scenarios so that I can feel them? And what, how does spiritual practice help us with these dreams? Now, what I mean by help is that, let's say, I'm going to say that when we have a meditation practice, it doesn't only impact our waking life, but it also impacts our dreams. Our dreams become less, less emotionally charged, and actually, which is what the secret is, but Maybe I won't get it to there yet, but there's a little secret about, uh, dreams that we can use it as a gauge. This is the secret. You can use your dreams to gauge how well you're doing with your spiritual progress. And what I mean by spiritual progress in this sense is how calm the mind is, how happy I am. How relaxed I am, how comfortable I am with myself. So if I'm generating these fearful dreams, then there's some fear that's being processed while I'm sleeping. And I'm going to say as a general principle, that as you practice meditation, and as we start looking at ourselves and start, paying attention to our mind, some of those emotions that we have throughout the day will be processed while we're awake. It's not only dreaming that's the issue, it's also how your sleep is. Do you notice that sometimes your sleep could be disturbed, right? Maybe I'm not comfortable in my sleep. Maybe I don't feel rested. That is also part of that on unprocessed emotional energy. And now when you lay down to rest, the body has to try to work it out. So what is the most important thing to think about with our dreams? Now, I know that sometimes people say, Ooh, what does it mean? And does it mean this is going to happen or that's going to happen? And I'm not really. We're going to talk about that. Everybody has their own ideas about what, what a sign like, Oh, it's a sign. And you know, it can be meaningful to you. Like, if you have a dream about something, maybe that's meaningful to you. Actually, I have an example of that. So let's have an example of that. I was going to name my son a name, and then I had a dream while I was pregnant with him that his name was something else. And what, whatever the name was in the dream, that's what I named him because I felt like it was a sign and I felt like the baby was telling me his name. So is that really the truth? No, but for me it was meaningful. So that's not kind of what I'm talking about. I'm saying that if you have a dream and you're going to take meaning from it, that isn't causing you sorrow, right? That there's a meaning and you're going to use that to, you know, make a decision or something, that's fine. I'm talking about these kind of. dreams that are not in our control, that feel bad in some way, or maybe my sleep is disturbed. So how can meditation help with this? So when I meditate in the morning, what I'm doing is I am practicing observing my mind and disconnecting from my senses, meaning that the body is there, but I'm not paying attention to the body. And actually that, that takes a little practice. Cause at first, maybe we were talking about meditation, maybe the body is fidgeting and so forth. So maybe that takes a little bit of time, but once we have started having experiences where the body is there, but I'm not really paying attention to the body, then in effect, I am detaching from my senses. When I do that, I'm focusing inward and I'm watching the mind. At that time. I'm processing, I'm processing my emotions. I'm processing my thoughts because I'm watching them. So if I spend some time every day doing that, I'm reducing the emotional intensity in my mind and body. And then when I go to rest, there'll be less to process. One thing I can share is that the dreams will also change over time. So maybe. I was dreaming about things that I really wanted or things or people or situations or memories or things like that. And I find that over time as I meditate and practice, those dreams basically went away. I mean, once in a while, maybe I would, I'm having maybe a fearful dream or one of those I'm late, I'm late kind of dreams. And actually it happens so rare now that Well, I've been practicing for 13 years, so let's get some perspective. I've been practicing for 13 years. So after 13 years, I can tell you that I no longer have these dreams about people and worries and things like that. And I rarely, rarely have those fearful dreams. So what kind of dreams am I having? I don't, I, I kind of, this is my experience. I kind of say it's good if I don't remember them at all, because it means that maybe I'm relaxed enough, or the body is calm enough, or the mind is calm enough that it's not kind of imprinting in my memory or making me remember it, or, you know, that it, that it's so intense. So how does this information help us moving forward? So the purpose of me sharing this is so. Maybe some of us are disturbed by our dreams. Maybe some of us have sleep disturbance. Like it's very difficult for us to get rest or be calm. Actually, one of the first episodes of the podcast is about resting. And so what I would like to do is say, I'm saying regular meditation practice. thinking about the idea that whatever is going on in my dreams is giving me a clue as to what types of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that I need to process, that they're not good or bad, that maybe, I mean, you could have some significance, like I gave the example before, if you like, but generally speaking, they're unprocessed emotions. That's basically what I wanted to share today. I hope that if you are thinking about dreams and you're wondering about it, there's all kinds of information about dreams out there. And of course, I've, I myself have thought, Oh, maybe what does this mean? What does this mean? If you remember a dream, it's kind of fun to analyze, but I'm going to say in terms of spirituality and in terms of your mind, what's most helpful is to think of it in terms of the feelings that you're having and use it as a gauge to see, okay, look, I'm still having fearful dreams. I'm still having out of control dreams. I'm still desiring this and desiring that and wanting this and wanting that and feeling disappointed in my dreams and making up all these scenarios. There's a lot that I need to work on. So I'm going to meditate in the morning and when things come up, I'm going to try my best to process them so that when I actually go to sleep, some that I can rest. Some of these things are not in our control, but I'm going to say in my experience that just the meditation practice itself has an impact on our dreams, a positive impact. Okay, so I'll leave it there. I hope this was a little bit interesting. It was a little bit of a light episode. Maybe gave you a little something else to think about and also not to judge yourself by your dreams. They are your feelings and your ideas and your feelings and your mind is just coming up with an interesting scenario to process them, to play them out. So I'll leave it there today. Remember our slogan is heal, empower and serve. And again, when we heal our emotional wounds and we empower ourselves and we begin to get better, then everyone around us gets better and eventually the whole world gets better also. So, so thank you for being here, everyone. Until next time, take care. You
