Preview She Rises While it is Still Night

A dreamer is a person who enters other frames of consciousness, usually but not exclusively during sleep, and becomes a channel for energies of growth and transformation to enter the world. The Zohar, one of the great texts of medieval Jewish mysticism, says that nothing happens on earth that isn’t first ‘foretold’ by dreams, or by the birds. Readers of the movements of birds are scarce, but we all have the potential to be dreamers. Dreams help us to enter the realm of creativity – the realm of mystery from which everything emerges. Science tells us that new stars are continuously being born in an expanding universe – eon upon eon, matter is formed and becomes visible. Matter itself is really a dense form of energy: E=mc2 indicates that a gram of mass comes from an energy source vastly greater. Some scientists say that all the energy of this vast universe is a realm of information. In-formation. Energy coming into form. We may know with our senses only the densest realm of form where complex organisms are visible, but mathematical cosmology can tell us of realms that we cannot perceive directly. What is this universe? Do vast unknown forces simply spit out elements of reality in some random design, or even a planned sequence in which we are just happenstance? Or do we have some role in its emergence? Intuition tells us that we do have a part, though skeptical reason makes us doubt it. It was only when I was led to Dreaming that I was given direct confirmation of my – our – intuition. We do play an important role but, like most of the creative process, the precise ways we contribute are hidden from us except in rare glimpses. The Dream is the most universal road from which, in certain vistas, we can see energy moving from the Great Void – the information hidden in the mysterious darkness – into the world-as-we- know-it, the realm of action, the realm of “doingness.” Dreaming helps us clarify our deeper understandings of the mystery. Most people don’t think this way about dreaming, and understandably so. Scientists have done studies to “prove” that dreams are no more than debris of the passing days. As I was beginning to write this book, someone sent me a clip from a news article quoting experts saying that dreams are “mostly junk” and rarely refer to things think important to human beings, such as sex and religion. Probably they mentioned sex and religion because Freud had focused on sex, while others have focused on the “symbolic” and “spiritual” dimensions. They drew their conclusions from a databank that analyzed keywords in dreams, demonstrating that there is very little explicit sexual content, and few references to churches, temples, cathedrals and chapels. Of course, this ‘scientific’ conclusion totally ignores every theory that dreams are symbolic. If they are symbolic rather than literal, you wouldn’t expect direct references to sex and religion to show up in keyword lists. Freud already knew that, and a large part of his work was to suggest how apparently non-sexual “keywords” so to speak actually were sexual references. So if you suspect that dreams are symbolic, you can’t find out what they mean by quantitatively analyzing “keywords.”

Not all studies are so literalistic. Some scientists admit that dreaming seems to help problem-solving, and one theory has it that dreaming rehearses responses to threats, so that it provided a survival function by ‘practicing’ running away, fighting, and the like. But the majority of studies take the line that since most of the content is familiar and personal, involving things like parents, friends, driving, eating, and outdoor activities, dreams are really very ordinary – as one scientist put it, a “grade-B” movie. There is truth in the idea that we do a lot of mundane dreaming related to our personal lives. But it’s also the case that we put familiar faces on unusual experiences because, as we will see, the mind cannot directly translate the experience of a dreamer. Oh yes, and scientists do admit that there are a lot of people who dream of flying, which isn’t exactly mundane. They suggest it’s because there’s a lot more air travel these days. Frankly, the statistical studies are usually wrongheaded from the outset, and we can’t hope to understand dreams working from superficial propositions. We must trust the wisdom of the sages of previous centuries and cultures around the world who affirmed that dreams are guides. We must trust our own poetic sense, knowing that even in waking life we communicate our deepest thoughts in symbolic and indirect ways. And we must trust our profound intuition that there is meaning in dreams, if we only know how to look. It was by learning from the dream itself that Dr. Connie Kaplan brought forward the first really new understanding of dreams since Freud and Jung. My own acquaintance with Jewish mysticism has helped me to understand her theories. Let me try to clarify it here. First of all, we must not confuse the essence of the dream with the same as the dream-story we remember on awakening in the morning. They are at completely different levels. Our dream-story, in words that we say or write, belongs to the world of action. It is the final result of the laborious effort of the ordinary mind to receive and translate into physical form a journey into the higher realms. We sense how difficult this must be for the mind, from the frustration of trying to remember our dreams. You probably have the experience of waking with images or stories in your mind, only to find that by the time you sit up in bed, they are gone. Efforts to train yourself to remember – the pad of paper by your bed, bedtime rituals, careful slow waking in the morning – usually do help, but they’re not sure-fire. Why is this so hard? Don’t believe people who say it’s because dreams aren’t really important. The waking dreamer is like a mystic returning from the mountaintop or the oracle emerging from the cave – dazed to find that a remarkable experience is almost untranslatable to others, or even to him/herself.

Peek inside She Rises While it is Still Night

What Is a Dreamer?

She Rises While it is Still Night: The Journey of Dreaming

by Dr. Tamar Frankiel

Dr. Tamar Frankiel (author of Kabbalah: A Brief Introduction for Christians) offers a beautiful and inspiring companion for our dreaming work. She has looked back through her own dream journals of the past twenty years, and she shares with us her patterns, her understandings, her wisdom. She walks you through the connections she’s made by viewing dreams as letters from the soul.

In keeping with our commitment to “green” publishing, this is an e-book which you may print (please use both sides of the page and use recycled paper), or you may simply store on your computer.

November 2008 special offer: When you order She Rises While it is Still Night, you will also receive absolutely free a download of Connie Kaplan’s entire book Dreams are Letters from the Soul.

Order now: $7.00 and receive She Rises While it is Still Night: The Journey of Dreaming by Dr. Tamar Frankiel (168 pages.)

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