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Perhaps the most striking claim made in the Cayce readings is Cayce's repeated assertion that anyone can do what he did—and we can best begin with our own dreams.

Drawing upon his intimate work with Edgar Cayce, Harman Bro, in his book Edgar Cayce on Dreams, states, “The claim that anyone could do, in some measure, what Edgar Cayce did, may well have been the boldest claim he ever made. But he did not let the claim hang in the air. [Cayce] gave people a laboratory where they could investigate the claim for themselves. He urged them to recall and study their dreams. In dreams, he said, people could experience for themselves every important kind of psychic phenomenon, and every level of helpful psycho-logical and religious counsel. What is more, they could, through dreams, learn the laws of these things and undergo a spontaneous and tailored dream-training program in the use of these laws—provided that in their waking life they put to constructive use everything they learned in the dreams.”

It was Cayce's avowal that all of the insights and information that arose in his dream, topic, medical, and life readings, including information drawn from past lives and extra-sensory sources, were capable of investigation in the individual's dreams—if the dreamer needed it and could understand it. At the very least, the dreamer who sought it would find direction where to get help, when, and why, both personally and for loved ones.

Cayce viewed consciousness as multi-layered. First is the level of consciousness experienced in everyday awareness. Then comes the level of the subconscious, or what Cayce called the “subconscious forces.” According to Elsie Sechrist, in her book Dreams: Your Magic Mirror, “[Cayce's] psychic gift enabled him to induce in himself a state of trance or deep sleep that stilled his conscious mind and gave him access to what Jung calls the “collective unconscious”—the universal wisdom of man at its subconscious source…. [Cayce] saw the collective or universal subconscious as a vast river of thought flowing through eternity, fed by the sum total of man's mental activity since his beginning. He maintained that this river is accessible to any individual who is prepared to develop his psychic or spiritual faculties with sufficient patience and effort.”

As Bro describes, “The dreamer's subconscious—his hidden structures, habits, controls, mechanisms, complexes, formulas—uses the dreamer's own peculiar memory-images and figures of speech to get things done.” Here, at the level of the subconscious, the dreamer can easily draw on whatever ESP is possessed as a natural talent or a developed art to get one's bearings on practical matters, and to recover problem-solving items from the distant, the past, or the private.

In Cayce's view, an even deeper source of help is also available. He called it the superconscious, which he described as a higher realm of the subconscious. According to Cayce, there are dreams that can bring into play certain structures of great importance to the dreamer. In these dreams, the dreamer contacts the best, or higher, self—or may even reach to something beyond the self, which Cayce called “the Creative Forces, or God.” In Cayce's view, the superconscious is the portion of mind that has retained the memory of God's presence and is man's link with his original spiritual consciousness. These forces can provide the dreamer with boundless information and guidance. As Bro states, “They are…the creative currents of the divine itself, moving through human affairs like some great unseen Gulf Stream. In dreams one may reach far beyond his own faculties to tune into these Universal Forces, through his own superconsciousness.” Cayce treated the contents of these kinds of dreams with great respect.

Cayce saw the superconscious as the portion of the mind that has retained the memory of God's presence and is man's link with his original spiritual consciousness.

Creating trained dreamers

Before his death in 1945, seventy-seven people received dream interpretations from Edgar Cayce. Altogether, he interpreted 1650 dreams during almost seven hundred readings. The bulk of these readings were for four individuals with whom he worked closely over many years.

The purpose in focusing on these individuals was to create what Cayce called “trained dreamers.” His desire was to help them develop the skills needed to guide and interpret their dreams—and thus to use their dreams to help guide their everyday lives and to grow spiritually.

Cayce's greatest challenge in training these dreamers was to get them to rely on themselves, asleep or awake. Bro, who worked directly with Cayce for almost a year, remarks, “He did not seek little Cayce-ites. He wanted capable, self-reliant people, using the talents with which they were endowed, and learning new laws to apply.”

Cayce encouraged his dreamers to do more than study dreams and dreaming and to do more than rely on psychics and spiritualists for interpretations or answers. He coached them to interpret and use their own dreams on the problems of everyday life. Through regularly working with their dreams, he pressed them to broaden and deepen their natural psychic, intellectual, financial, leadership, artistic, and healing gifts. He urged them to go into their dreams to access the wisdom and guidance of the Universal Forces.

“After the first few,” says Bro, “Cayce never again trained dreamers as such. Instead, he trained people in an explicitly spiritual pilgrimage— one which included dreams but placed still greater weight on meditation, prayer, and daily service to others. Further, he trained people only in groups, where they could daily help one another in study, in love, in mutual intercession, in ways that his major dream subjects rarely knew.”

It is thanks to his intensive work with these few individuals that we are able to discern the pattern of laws and principles that govern dreams and our work with them. Through the experiences of these four people, we are able to see how the ability to work with dreams grows, we can witness the kinds of challenges that can be experienced, and we are shown the most effective methods for addressing them.

The purpose of dreams and dreaming

Cayce believed that all phases of humankind's nature are revealed in dreams for the express purpose of directing us to higher and more balanced accomplishments in our physical, mental, and spiritual lives.

According to Cayce, each night we have contact with spiritual and psychic forces through our dreams. Because of this, dreams work to accomplish two things: they work to solve the problems of the dreamer's conscious, waking life, and they work to awaken the dreamer to full stature as a person, to quicken in the dreamer new potentials which are his or hers to claim.

In describing a large part of dreaming as problem solving, Cayce underscored the kind of dreaming that can be called the “incubation” dream. This is the dream that either presents a surprising solution to a problem on which the dreamer has been working or awakens in him a state of consciousness in which the solution he needs springs easily to mind.

Cayce described the rest of meaningful dreaming as quickening the dreamer to his or her own human potentials. Over and over he pointed out how dreams signal to the dreamer that it is time to carry new responsibilities or to develop more mature values or to stretch one's thinking. Such dreams, he said, are not simply solving practical problems—they are helping the dreamer grow.

According to Bro, “[Cayce] described whole cycles of dreams as devoted to developing a new quality in a dreamer: patience, balance, manliness, altruism, humor, reflectiveness, piety. Some of these self-remaking dreams he saw as coming from the efforts of the dreamer's personality to right itself…. Other such dreams Cayce saw as spontaneous, healthy presentations, occurring when it was time for a new episode of growth in the dreamer's life.”

Everyone dreams—and everyone can remember them

The Cayce readings are clear that anyone who will record dreams in an attitude of prayerful persistence can, in time, bring about a complete restoration of the dream faculty.

As Bro describes, “Those whom Cayce coached had no great difficulty learning to recall dreams, once they set their minds to it. They had to be certain they were ready to confront whatever came forth in dreams, and to do something with it…. He was firm with several dreamers that to recall their dreams they should record them—and go back over the records often…. Finally, he saw it as important to the process of recalling dreams that dreamers act upon the dreams they recall. The very act of adding consciousness to the subconscious activity which produces the dream will set currents in motion…helpful currents to facilitate the recall of the next dreams, and eventually to aid in the interpretation of all dreams…. Each of these steps builds recall of dreams. They also build the depth and clarity of the dreams, for they serve to build the dreamer himself.”

The four broad kinds of dreams

As an aid to interpreting dreams, Cayce described four broad kinds, or types, of dreams. Sometimes identifying the kind of dream just experienced helps the dreamer begin to interpret its purpose and meaning. While Cayce was clear that some dreams are just nonsense or night-mares, resulting from the body trying to handle troublesome foods or other biological upsets, he said our meaningful dreams fall into these categories or types:

Physical: dreams that provide helpful information about our physical bodies and our health through symbols that may suggest improper diet, a kind of exercise needed, previews of illnesses, and so on. These dreams can even provide specific suggestions for treatment.

Self-revealing: dreams that provide self-knowledge and insight into problems, goals, desires, plans, decisions, relationships, character traits, and so on.

Psychic: dreams that reach out through the windows of telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition to provide insight and information not accessible by our ordinary three-dimensional consciousness.

Spiritual: dreams originating from the dreamer's higher self, dreams flowing from the superconscious mind and the Universal Forces. Cayce often called such dreams “visions.”

These four kinds of dreams serve two functions: to solve problems and to aid in spiritual growth.

Interpreting the dreamer, not the dream

The best interpreter of a person's dream is the individual dreamer, since the symbols are one's own. Interpreting dreams, as Cayce described the process, is not just looking up a symbol in a handy dream book and applying it to a dream. Rather, one interprets a dreamer, not a dream.

“Study self; study self” was Cayce's first counsel on training to interpret dreams. As Bro says, “If one grasps the dreamer in the dream, one can take the first important step in interpretation: determining which of the two major functions of dreams is to the fore in a particular dream— (a) problem solving and adaptation to external affairs, or (b) awakening and alerting the dreamer to some new potential within him.”

Studying dreams and interpreting them is not enough. Bringing dreams into action in everyday life is critical. Cayce called for “application” and included a section on application in every dream reading. While study is a form of application, Cayce had something more concrete in mind. The dreamer must put the insights, tips, and ideas received in dreams into motion in life, trying out the guidance given by experiment. Over and over Cayce counseled his dreamers, Do, do, do.

The lawful patterns of dreaming

Bro points out that the same natural laws or principles that governed Cayce's readings also appear to govern the dreamer's dreams. While these laws were rarely explicitly spelled out in the readings, they can be glimpsed as patterns that are evident in the body of the readings as a whole.

Bro provides a fascinating outline of what he called the “lawful patterns in dreaming.” Of particular help are the following:

• “[Cayce] had to be directed to his targets by hypnotic suggestions. For medical counsel he needed the address of the individual who sought aid. For psychological readings he needed the birth date of the individual. And for topical readings, or those on bidden resources, he had to be told both what was sought, and the names and location of those seeking.

“Often those who wanted one type of counsel would request, in the question period following the reading, counsel of another kind. When Cayce was especially keyed up or relating deeply to the person seeking aid, they might get the desired medical information in a business reading, or counsel for a loved one in a dream reading. But more often they would be told, “We do not have this,” and instructed to seek a different type of reading.

“Cayce explained to his dreamers that their dream-focus had similar limits. He coached them to set before their minds, by hard study, concentration, and activity, whatever they sought aid upon through dreams…. Dreams are limited by the conscious focus of the dreamer.”

• “Cayce's readings were limited to the information and guidance which an individual could constructively use; it is the same with dreams, said Cayce…. [While unlimited] information [is] available through the subconscious and the other resources,…the psyche [protects] its balance by feeding the dreamer limited material. It [operates] by laws of self-regulation.”

• “Cayce's health affected his readings. When he was ill he could not give them…. Cayce's state of mind [also] affected his readings. When he was distraught and defensive with those about him, he experienced some of the few clear errors in a lifetime of giving readings: once in giving readings on oil wells, and once in giving readings on patients in his hospital. Neither time was a complete miss, but the distortions, as later readings pointed out, were dangerous…. His best readings came when he was buoyant, relaxed, humorous, secure. However, he also gave exceptional readings when in keen distress—as when he was twice jailed for giving readings, or when his university collapsed.

“Dreams, too, he said, are conditioned subjectively. He urged his dreamers to get out and play, to take vacations, to balance up their wit and reason, to tease and to laugh and to enjoy children. But he also urged them to note the depth of dreams for the person confronted by death-loss, or by business failure, or by divorce, or by difficult vocational choices—all of which might call forth dreams of such depth and power as to make them ‘visions.”

• “Cayce's readings were affected by what his own trance products described as his relative 'spirituality.’ When he was carried away by the ambitions of a treasure hunt, or temptations to seek notoriety with his gift and his considerable lecturing ability, he was reminded to notice how the quality of his readings suffered. On the other hand, when he was regular in his times of prayer and Bible study, as well as in his quiet fishing times, he was reminded to notice that his readings gained in quality, and that he even developed new types of gifts or capacities, both within his readings (for example, producing an entire series on a new subject), or awake (aiding the sick, through prayer).

“Similar factors, his readings said, affect the quality of dreams. When his dreamers drove themselves for money or fame or power, they could see that their dreams brought up these very issues, and then began to deteriorate in clarity and helpfulness. When they were secure in their faith, their prayer times, and in their desire to serve others, they could find new vistas in their dreams—giving them glimpses into the world of the future or the past or the transcendent.”

• Frequently, the Cayce source noted that the attitudes of those who sought information and guidance from Cayce affected what they got. Those who sought novelty, exploitation of others, a godlike guarantor for their lives, justification for their past mistakes, or anything but genuine aid and growth, received curt responses, or vague ones, or unexpected lectures on their motives. Those who failed to act on the counsel given them might find future counsel brief or even withheld.

“Gullibility was as readily rejected as cynicism; adulation of Cayce accomplished as little as belittling or envy of him. ‘The real miracle,’ one reading said, ‘occurs in the seeker.’

“Similar factors, he said, govern the extent to which dreamers produce dream information helpful to those about them. Often a dreamer secures facts unavailable to a loved one because of his greater detachment toward the need or problem. Often, too, unconscious telepathy from a brother or sister or child shows dreamers how to reach the other's bad temper, or alcoholic habit, or despairing heart, or overbearing pride.”

Improving the usefulness of dreams

To strengthen dream recall and enhance the usefulness of dreams, Cayce emphasized the value of daily contemplation on an affirmation and regularly entering into the deep silence of meditation. Cayce stressed that the spiritually oriented person, whose own intuition is disciplined to a high level, can interpret dreams more exactly than an individual depending solely on his or her own capacity to reason.

But the note which recurred like a silver thread in Cayce's dream readings, whenever he explained to others how to improve their dreaming and their interpretation of dreams, was a familiar one that appeared regularly in his life and medical readings. That note was service.

“For some dreamers, service through dreaming meant literally dreaming for others and giving them aid and counsel,” shares Bro. “But such dreamers were few among those who consulted Cayce. Others were encouraged to draw or to write stories based on their dreams. Or to share stock tips secured from their dreams. Or to learn from their dreams the laws of human development, and teach these laws to classes of interested adults. Or to teach others to dream. Or to pray for those presented to them in their dreams. Each one's gifts were different….

“First the dreamer must change and grow. Then he must find a way to share his growth in unassuming service to those closest to him in everyday life. Only then may he find dreams that can occasionally help the leaders in his profession, or his social class, or his school of art, or his reform movement—by helping him to help them.

“It is a law underscored by the failure of the early dreamers that Cayce trained to sustain the high potential which he saw for them, and which they realized at times in both their dreams and their lives. They fell away from one another in their families. This was a blow the straining psyche could not survive, said Cayce, while it was reaching for the heights of dreaming. With his next dreamers he put his first emphasis not on dreaming skill at all, but on loving and producing. There was loving and producing in the family, there was loving and producing in the daily work, there was loving and producing in the gathered fellow-ship of those who met to study and pray. Only this course—only the course of giving, giving, giving—would keep the flow of dreams clean and ever stronger.”

Lawful patterns in dream interpretation

Bro points out that just as there were what he called “lawful processes” that governed every reading Cayce gave and every dream of every dreamer, so there are lawful processes of interpreting dreams. Of particular usefulness are the following:

• “As Cayce took up each dream in a typical dream reading, he first distinguished which levels of the psyche had produced that particular dream. The dreamer can also be taught by his own dreams, he said, to recognize the various levels working within him to produce each dream.

“When a voice speaks in a dream, an aura of feelings and thoughts will show whether the voice is his best self or just his imagination. When a scene from the day flashes across his mind in sleep, he will be shown by nuances whether the scene represents merely worries from the day, or a prologue to helpful comments from the subconscious. When strange and outrageous material appears, his own subconscious will teach him to distinguish which is merely a dream caricature of his outrageous behavior, and which is instead a radical challenge to his being.

“Dreamers should often ask in a dream, or immediately after it, he said, to be shown what part of their mentality has been at work in the dream, and why. Some of Cayce's dreamers were amazed at the colloquy which they were able to follow within them. Others were delighted to be able, they felt, to distinguish their own inner voice from the contribution of discarnates in dreams.”

• “In Cayce's view, dreams often carry significant meaning on several levels at once, and should be interpreted accordingly.”

• “Part of the art of interpreting dreams, according to Cayce, lies…in recognizing symbols with relatively universal meaning. He emphasized the purely personal meaning of much dream contents, from articles of clothing to scenes of war. But he also challenged dreamers to see, in certain poetic and evocative dreams, the presence of symbols which have wide currency in myth and art. Fire often means anger. Light often means insight and help from the divine, as does movement upward. A child often means helpful beginnings, needing further aid from the dreamer. A horse and rider often mean a message from higher realms of consciousness. Pointed objects inserted in openings may be sex symbols—although a key in a lock is more typically unlocking something in the dreamer.”

• “One aspect of Cayce's dream interpretation was harder for dreamers to duplicate: the times he predicted their dreams, even the night and time of night. In the strange, wandering world of dreams, this bit of his skill seemed incredible—even allowing for the power of his suggestion upon the dreamer's unconscious. But he said he could do it because he could see factors in the dreamer's psyche which made the dreams inevitable, much as one on a high building could predict the collision of careening cars on separate streets below him. He added that dreamers would also learn to recognize when given dreams were signals of a new theme or series, and to predict for themselves how more would follow—as his dreamers did in lesser degree.”

• “In Cayce's view, determining the purpose of a dream is a major step in interpreting it. He explained that the psyche or total being tries to supply whatever the dreamer needs most. If the dreamer needs in-sight and understanding, it gives him lessons and even discourses. If he needs shaking up, it gives him experiences—beautiful or horrendous. If he needs information, it retrieves the facts for him. Dreams are part of a self-regulating, self-enhancing, self-training program, over which the dreamer's own soul ever presides.

“An important step in interpreting a dream, then, is specifying what it came to accomplish—which the dreamer, according to Cayce, can learn to recognize for himself. A stock discussed by an acquaintance in a dream was a nudge to note and study the stock. But a stock seen in action, in actual figures, or described with instructions by a special kind of voice in his dream, was a signal for the dreamer to act, no longer to study.

“Part of Cayce's training led dreamers to wake up after a vivid dream, review it in their minds so as to recall it later, and then return to sleep with the intention of having the dream interpreted for them—as it not infrequently was, whether by more episodes, or by essay-like passages, or by the voice of an interpreter or ‘interviewer,’ as one dreamer called it.”

Simple Steps to dream interpretation

Kevin Todeschi, in his book Dream Images and Symbols, offers this advice on developing the skill of dream interpretation:

“Step One: Write down your dream immediately upon awakening…. Even if you only have the feeling of a good night's sleep, write it down. Let the subconscious mind know that you are serious.

“Step Two: Realize that the feeling you had about the dream is every bit as important as any one possible interpretation. What is the emotional response you have to the dream, to other characters in the dream, or to the action taking place in the dream? Note the actions, feelings, emotions, and conversations of each of the characters in your dream as well.

“Step Three: Remember that every character in a dream usually represents a part of yourself. Other people may reflect aspects of your own personality, desires, and fears. Even if the character in the dream is a real person who you know, generally the dream character represents an aspect of yourself in relationship to that person.

“Step Four: Watch for recurring symbols, characters, and emotions in your dreams, and begin a personal dream dictionary. Write down these symbols and what their importance is to you. As you observe what is going on in your life and then look at a particular dream, you'll begin to have an idea of what individual symbols may mean to you, especially if the symbol appears in later dreams. If the symbol had a voice, what would it be telling you? The symbol won't necessarily mean the same thing to other people, because personal symbols are as individual as the dreamer. For example, dreaming of your teeth falling out may be symbolic of gossip to some people, but an individual who has just been fitted with new dentures may have an entirely different interpretation.

“Step Five: Practice, practice, practice!… After your dreams have been recorded, make a habit of exploring them a few weeks later. Look for themes, situations, emotions, and symbols that are repetitive. One individual found that her cat, which she dearly loved, frequently appeared in dreams that dealt with personal relationships; another discovered that a watch or a clock was a recurring symbol in precognitive dreams about his personal future. These types of personal insights are only possible with ongoing practice.”

Above all—hold to your ideal

“In Cayce's understanding of dreams,” says Bro, “a comparison of the dreamer's life with his ideal was occurring in dreams almost every night, however symbolically portrayed, or however small the action examined…. In [Cayce's] view, the individual's actions of the previous day, and of the current period of his life, are compared for him each night in sleep with his own deepest ideals. Accordingly, one who awakens grumpy and unrested ought to look into his life, as well as his dreams. And one who awakens in a clear and peaceful frame of mind may be sure that when he recalls his dreams they will not show him in serious inner conflict….

“Further, the remembered dream needs to be used, if possible…. The subconscious is like a woodland spring to be dipped out and kept flowing, if it is best used. The dreamer may focus on some portion of the dream that strongly appeals to him, provided it is in keeping with his inmost ideal. For dreams, said Cayce, ‘are visions that can be crystallized.’ In dreams the real hopes and desires of the person, not idle wishes alone, are given body and force in the individual….

“'Study self, study self,’ was Cayce's first counsel on training to interpret dreams. He told people to search out memories, to list their working ideals in columns (physical, mental, spiritual), to decide what they honored in others and to compare this with themselves, to check their self-perception against what others perceived in them…. [For] every person who seeks to grow, whether in dreams or awake, must find and assess his own working ideals…. Once one clarifies his own deepest ideal, however hard to word and to picture, he must begin lining up his psyche in harmony with it, or his dreams will show him in constant conflict with himself….

“Part of lining up the psyche with its ideal, and ultimately with its Maker, is laying aside fear of past mistakes. Cayce was firm about this, resisting self-condemnation whenever he saw it, and insisting that guilt be replaced with present action. In one of his more startling sayings, he told a dreamer with unpleasant memories of sexual indulgence at the expense of the women in his life that ‘no condition is ever lost.’ What-ever the failing, even the cruelty, if the dreamer puts his life squarely in the hands of the best he knows, he will find his bitter fruits being turned, over the years, to the wine of understanding for others. What has been one's 'stumbling-block,’ he often said, can be made his very 'stepping-stone’ towards love and aid to others, because of deep sensitizing action—provided that the psyche is oriented to allow this transmutation to occur.”

Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you

Bro leaves us with this final thought:

“One does not need to invent his existence. He has only to ‘use what is in hand’ and ‘the next will be supplied.’ For there are two helping forces always at work to guide the unfolding and spending of a human life.

“One force is a person's own original spark of creative energy, a force placed in him at creation, and bearing a potential for love and creativity as great as that of the Creator Itself. The other is a spirit “abroad in the universe” of helpfulness, of unending creativity, kindness, and wisdom…. This other force will 'seek its own’ within the individual when allowed to do so, and magnify whatever is good within the person.

“In Cayce's view, dreams are of prime importance for the meeting of the ultimate creative force of a person with that other force which ever seeks to help him.”

Kristie E. Knutson, Editor

Editor's Note: In this book, the Editor's comments are indicated by the phrase Editor's Note.

In addition, you will find the text of some readings repeated in more than one chapter, examples of the richness and depth of the Cayce readings, and how they can be explored and understood in many different contexts.

Cayce's entire collection of readings is available on CD-ROM from the A.R.E., so even though a referenced reading may not be found in this book, they have been included for any future research.