Past, present, and future.

“Why dig up the past? Isn’t that what you do when you explore your unconscious mind through your dreams?”

It’s a common perception that the unconscious mind is a minefield of explosive repressed emotions and bad memories buried in a vault of trash and long discarded mental clutter.

To some extent it is, but it’s also a treasure trove, a gold mine.

While you may think of your unconscious mind as a dark reservoir of things past and best forgotten, it constantly asserts its presence in your daily life, and is also a potent avenue that can connect you with a greater sense of meaningful being in your future.

Think of your unconscious mind as containing everything you don’t know – or have forgotten – about yourself and your life, past, present, and future. By definition it contains what you are not consciously aware of, even though it directs a great proportion of your automatic daily reactions and responses to life. Surely it’s worth getting to know and befriending this powerful energy?

I once dreamed that I saw a rat emerging from the ground. At first I was a little scared, but as I watched I saw that it wasn’t a rat; it was a small dog. As I watched the small dog grow bigger I saw that it wasn’t a dog; it was a small horse. As I watched the small horse grow bigger I saw that it was a two-headed animal, a horse-dog with a horse head and, at a slight angle, a dog head. I felt sad for the horse-dog because it didn’t know which way to turn, which head to follow.

When I worked with my dream, I realised that I saw dogs as unquestioningly loyal, and horses as vibrantly passionate. At the time of my dream, this made sense of some confusion I had been feeling about the direction to take a project. I was torn between my loyalty to systems that had worked for me in the past (but that then seemed to have lost momentum) and my passion to give vibrancy and life to the project by embracing new systems. I had been conscious of confusion over direction, but not conscious of the underlying dynamics. My dream revealed what my unconscious mind knew: that I was torn between two directions for fear of being a rat, disloyal to what had served me well in the past but which was no longer serving me.

Rather than dig up a scary rat from my unconscious mind, I had dug up a gift in the form of insight into my reasonable confusion, and a choice. I applied dream alchemy to align the two heads into one, so that I could look ahead with the best of both worlds, making decisions that were loyal to the life and vibrancy of the project and the good things that would grow from that. With the two heads combined and focussed in the same direction, I – and the project – found the required momentum.

Interpreting your dreams and working with them through dream alchemy may mean discovering the scary stuff – the rats or dark shadows – that lead you to light, or it may mean mining gold directly. Many dreams show you talents you’ve buried, latent gifts you’ve yet to discover, life lessons you’ve failed to recognise, lost puzzle pieces you’ve been searching for, new ways of seeing the world, depths of wisdom and intuition you’ve overlooked, a sense of meaningful purpose awaiting your connection, and a whole host of other treasures that might sleep on unless you’re ready to bring them into consciousness by awakening to your dreams.