Senior News October, 2002 Vol. 21. No.  10

 

Published by the Humboldt Senior Resource Center in Eureka, California. HSRC is a non-profit community-based organization offering services for senior citizens, multi-generational families and caregivers.

Mayoral Hopefuls: Largest pool of candidates say why they want to lead Eureka

Remembering Spirit: Dreams come for my health and wholeness

Eureka Veterans Clinic: Dr Phillip Wagner receives well-deserved honors

Good health: How sweet it is

The Center for Integrated Health and Welness comes to Eureka

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Remembering Spirit
Dreams come for my health and wholeness
by Barbara Clark

This summer I spent a week at the Graduate Theological Union in a Summer Institute on dream work with Jeremy Taylor. He is coming back up to Humboldt for his eighth workshop in mid October, but I wanted a bigger dose of dream work-five mornings in which I could explore dreams with the teacher and 30 other students from many religious and spiritual backgrounds across the country.

What an amazing week. Dreams seem to be a psycho-spiritual dimension that has no limits. The week led me to deeper study-and to setting up a dream workshop at the Senior Resource Center. A small group met for six weeks in August and September and explored the colorful material of our dreams.

It led me to some different books at the library and to learning that dreamwork had been a part of Judiasm and early Christianity. Many stories existed of people being given information in their dreams. Then in the third century St. Jerome, a biblical scholar and contemporary of St. Augustine, translated a word in the Old Testament to equate witchcraft and augury with observing dreams. As one author said, "In one deliberate stroke of the translator's pen, Jerome had tipped the scales and changed the delicate balance of history. Almost all translations of the Bible in use until the mid-20th century were made from Jerome's Vulgate."

Armed with books written during the past 20 years offering ways to bring dream work into a spiritual practice, I started looking through old journals and dream books to find the diamonds in the rough of my past. What treasures! With my current dream work experience in groups, I see that many of my dreams would have given me a boost had I looked at them more closely during those struggling periods of my life. Ancient stone staircases descending in old churches, sacred circles where people are gathered, airplanes flying and crashing, being unprepared in a multitude of ways-all of these events, people and things came then in the service of my health and wholeness. Similar themes come still today for the same purpose, only now I know to catch them as they come and explore them for information to help me in my personal growth.

What I'm enjoying as much as the dream material are the reminders of the people, places and activities that showed up in my dreams, things long forgotten and deeply treasured then. It is a new gift from dream work-to "re-member" the past, to bring it current. It's given me many additional hours of journaling as well and time to reconnect old dots and new ones.

Barbara Clark is editor of Senior News. If you are interested in the Jeremy Taylor dream workshop, please e-mail right away at srnews@northcoast.com.