Читать книгу Active Dreaming - Robert Moss A. - Страница 36

Tracking how symbols feature and evolve in your dreams and your experience of the world around you will give you your own encyclopedia of symbols, far superior to all those dream dictionaries, because the snake or the train in your dream is yours, not theirs.

The images that arise in our dreams and in the play of coincidence in waking life often seem to link us to the realm of the archetypes, to universal symbols that seem to repeat again and again in the collective mind of humanity. At the same time, the images that arise spontaneously in dreaming are individual, our personal gifts, and we don’t want to assign an external authority the responsibility of determining the meaning of our dreams or our lives.

It’s fascinating to watch how a personal symbol can evolve over time. Thus the wild animal that scared you in one dream may become your ally when you brave up in a later dream. Or what seemed to be your childhood home turns out to have many more levels than you remember, opening a sense of expanding life possibilities. Again, we study this by journaling and linking our reports on a recurring theme.

I keep a thematic index of my dream reports that is very close to a personal encyclopedia of symbols. Animals figure prominently: Fox and Bear, Black Dog and White Wolf. So do recurring locales and modes of transportation: Houses and Theaters, Trains and Planes.

Living symbols take us beyond what we ordinarily know, and are never still but constantly evolving.