86. The Nocturnal Portal to Ourselves – Theresa Cheung

We all dream. Even the most hard-nosed materialist does. When a dream is powerful and seems to carry meaning it shakes you, whether you are spiritually oriented or not. – Dreams for me are the portal, the opening to the part of you that is invisible, unseen, unconscious, expansive and infinite, knows past, present and future and sees beyond the material, says Theresa Cheung, a returning podcast guest (our previous conversation is in episode #55) . Cheung is a successful and prolific writer of all things spiritual. She loves to write and speak about these things for people who are skeptical, and she always employs the power of doubt. Her latest book, How to Catch a Dream, is about lucid dreaming. – It is an entry point for an understanding of ourselves as spiritual beings having a human experience rather than human beings having a spiritual inside. The interest in the significance of dreams and dream interpretation is booming. Only twenty years ago, taking dreams seriously would have been considered woo woo in most camps. Theresa Cheung credits the younger generation for the change. If people looked inside for self-knowing, there would be less strife and violence in the world, Theresa thinks. Rulers who feel tortured inside inflict their pain onto the world outside them. – Your dreaming mind and your waking mind are one, they are interconnected. People separate waking and sleeping, like you're a different person when you dream, but you’re not, it's all your consciousness. But in dreams you interact on a symbolic level. In ancient times, people were better at thinking symbolically. We have sadly turned that ability off. But reading poetry, watching films or even playing computer games we can ignite that dreaming language. Your mind doesn't know the difference between sleeping and waking, so if you learn something in a dream, you can do it also in your waking life. The ultimate high in the dream state is lucid dreaming, when you ”wake up” in a dream and realize you are dreaming. – Then you can role play, you can be, do, experience anything. There are no limits. Think about that! The only limits are logic and reason, says Theresa. – I believe that what you meet in a lucid dream is the part of you that survives bodily death. Theresa Cheung says she finds the most clarity in the Jungian approach to dream interpretation. The characters we meet in a dream can be delightful or scary, but they are all aspects of ourselves. Most of the time they want our attention. They want to tell us something – There is night and day within all of us. Sometimes the monsters that we meet just want a hug. They want the dream God that created them, which is you, to love them, for all their sins. She strongly recommends journaling your dreams. Doing that will enhance the possibility that you will experience a lucid dream. According to Theresa Cheung, dream decoding may in fact be as useful a tool when we are awake as when we are asleep. – Increasingly, I am advising people to interpret their waking life as if it was a dream. What’s the hidden meaning behind this situation? What does this person trigger in me? – Life gets so interesting and fascinating. You become like a dream decoding detective. Theresa's website Theresa’s books