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    Sylvia Browne's Book of Dreams
    Sylvia Browne's Book of Dreams
    Sylvia Browne's Book of Dreams
    Ebook311 pages5 hours

    Sylvia Browne's Book of Dreams

    By Sylvia Browne and Lindsay Harrison

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    #1 New York Times bestselling author and world-renowned psychic Sylvia Browne offers a startling and revealing look into the world of dreams, illuminates a path to the beauty and truth that resides within everyone, and gives readers the knowledge to use their dreams to contact the world beyond.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateAug 5, 2003
    ISBN9781101209738
    Sylvia Browne's Book of Dreams
    Author

    Sylvia Browne

    Sylvia Browne (October 19, 1936 – November 20, 2013) was a #1 New York Times bestselling author and world-famous psychic who appeared regularly on the Montel Williams Show and on Larry King Live, as well as making countless other media and public appearances. She also founded the Society of Novus Spiritus church, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2011.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      This was a helpful book. It answered alot of lingering questions about some dreams that I have had. I have always had vivid, if not strange, dreams. I now know what to think about those dreams and how to interpret others.

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    Sylvia Browne's Book of Dreams - Sylvia Browne

    Introduction

    Dreams, and all the other rich journeys our spirits take while we sleep, have been a passion of mine for more than thirty years. I’ve studied countless volumes of research about dreams. I’ve explored dreams with literally thousands of clients. I’ve read about the importance of dreams in the world’s many great spiritual works, with 121 references to dreams in the Bible alone. I’ve lectured on the subject of dreams. I’ve taught courses on dream interpretation. And I’ve promised myself for years that someday I’d write a book about dreams that would make them simpler, less confusing, more accessible, and above all, more comforting, to the point where we’d understand that even our nightmares are blessings.

    On September 11, 2001, our lives changed forever, in more ways than we’ve begun to realize yet. When our lives changed, our dreams changed, too, as we tried to process the tragedy, the fear, the loss, the sorrow, the courage, the pride, the unity, and the palpable, exquisite faith in God and in each other that was there when we needed it and always, always will be. Through it all, our dreams were and are there for us too, helping us escape, helping us hope again, helping us relive and release the worst of it to spare us some of the pain during the day, taking us to the past and the future and even The Other Side for much-needed comfort from loved ones, silently helping us heal and go on. More and more clients, more and more letters, more and more phone calls, and more and more audience members wanted and needed to talk about their newly intensified dreams, and I finally realized it was time to keep that promise to myself and write the book I’d been preparing for almost half of my life.

    Wanting this book to embrace some of these newly intensified dreams without its becoming a book about 9/11, I put out a call at lectures and on my Web site, asking you to send me your dreams, to add to the files of them I’ve kept through all these years. You responded with your usual openness and generosity, and I’ll always be grateful. You’ll find many but not all of them throughout this book, with precautions taken to protect your anonymity so that you won’t have to claim them as yours unless you want to. That so many of you were willing to confide in me, knowing up front that I intended to publish the dreams, is an honor I don’t take lightly and will never abuse. To those of you whose letters don’t appear, please be assured that I read every single one of them, with witnesses who’ll attest to that, and if my dear but strict editor Brian Tart would have let me get away with it, I would happily have included them all.

    This book, then, has been compiled from literally mounds of research, file cabinets full of material from dream classes I’ve taught and dreams sent in by the hundreds. It’s a tribute to this fascinating, uncharted territory of which we’re still just scratching the surface, this amazing phenomenon called dreaming that we all have in common. It will give you insights into why we dream, how we release negativity while we sleep, how we gather information, and even why monsters and demons sometimes intrude. It will guide you toward long-awaited reunions with loved ones you thought you’d lost, and with your own extraordinary history. It will help you understand that dreams are a world within themselves, a world we live in for about six years in an average lifetime—and all time converges into God’s eternal now—a world full of past life memories, current problems and solutions, and precognitive insight into what our tomorrows may bring, a world in which messages, warnings, hope, help, Spirit Guides, and even a cure for our universal Homesickness wait patiently for us to find them.

    Dreams, I’m convinced, are just one more dimension of our minds, a dimension that, when put into perspective, gives access to a whole new wealth of knowledge. The subconscious mind that takes charge while we sleep is where our passive memories are held and where the key lies to the records of all of our lives, every life we’ve ever lived on earth and on The Other Side. Dreams form our path to that key. That key unlocks the door to an eternity of wisdom. And the more wisdom we acquire, the more understandable, useful, and affirming our dreams become.

    Thanks again to your hundreds and hundreds of letters, this isn’t just my work—it’s a collaboration. So welcome to our Book of Dreams.

    One

    The Miraculous Journeys of Sleep

    There is nothing more fascinating, more intensely personal, and more uniquely ours than the voyages our minds and spirits take while we sleep. These dreams and other adventures confuse us, alarm us, preoccupy us, relieve us, amuse us, comfort us, inform us, enlighten us, and above all, keep us more sane and whole than we could ever hope to be without them. Our sleep journeys, even the nightmares, are gifts, our allies, to embrace rather than dread, and worth every effort it takes to unravel their mysteries and cherish every valuable lesson they have to offer.

    I’ve been studying the worlds of sleep and dreams for more than thirty years. In the course of those studies I’ve read a lot of the same dream interpretation material you have, and often come away feeling more confused when I finished than I was when I started. Some experts swear that there’s great cosmic significance in every dream, if we were only bright enough to figure it out. Others are convinced that dreams are nothing but meaningless little vaudeville shows to keep us entertained while we sleep. Still others strain to find sexual symbolism in each tiny detail of our dreams (I’d love to have met Sigmund Freud just once, just long enough to say, "What’s wrong with you?"), while a few geniuses even insist that the minute we doze off, we disintegrate into any number of vapor blobs and go darting around the universe for reasons I can’t figure out for the life of me.

    I might have thrown up my hands and dismissed the whole subject of dreams as being too confusing to conquer if it hadn’t been for some basic realities I wasn’t confused about at all:

    First and foremost, I grew up with my grandmother Ada, a brilliant psychic and teacher, who shared her passion for dreams, especially prophetic ones, with her adoring granddaughter and taught me that the subconscious mind understands their meaning whether the conscious mind can make sense of them or not.

    Then there was my own passion for world religions, which led me to read and reread every great sacred work and to appreciate how prominently dreams are woven into the exquisite fabric of every one of them. If the Bible included those 121 references, how could I ignore them?

    In addition, maybe because I was born psychic, I devoured the books of all the great psychics, from Edgar Cayce to Arthur Ford to Ruth Montgomery, in the hope of not feeling quite so out of place. At the same time, endlessly curious about exactly how the human mind operates (thinking I could learn to be normal, I guess), I read and studied every book and course I could find on the subjects of psychiatry, psychology, and hypnosis, even becoming a master hypnotist in the process and forming lifelong friendships with some of the finest psychiatrists and psychologists in the country. I’m sure there are some members of the psychiatric community who won’t appreciate hearing this, but the truth is, the psychic world and the psychiatric world have a lot in common, including a deep interest in uncovering and understanding the secrets hidden in dreams.

    Once my career as a psychic was under way, more and more clients were asking for my help with interpreting their dreams. In most situations, I don’t mind a bit saying the words I don’t know. But when a client wants and needs something from me, I owe them better than a shrug and a simple Beats me. So it was for my clients’ benefit as well as my own insatiable curiosity that I made it my business to unravel the mysteries of dreams as best I could, to the point where for many years I had the pleasure of teaching very successful dream interpretation classes to the growing number of clients who were as fascinated as I was.

    And then one day I found myself so shaken by a dream that I went to one of my professors for help, and the value of decoding a message received in dreams hit home like it never had before. It was during a period of huge personal upheaval in my life, which, by the way, is when our sleep adventures tend to be more vivid, intense, and meaningful than ever. I was juggling my two full-time careers, as both a psychic and a schoolteacher, taking an advanced hypnosis class, and most of all, in the midst of a nasty divorce from my first husband, Gary (technically my second, but that’s another story for another book). There was no dispute over money or property, since neither Gary nor I had any money or property to fight over. But there was a huge, ugly dispute over the custody of our two precious little sons, Paul and Chris, and our beautiful foster daughter, Mary, and I wasn’t about to let anyone on this earth separate me from my children, period. It was a painful, terrifying time that I can still feel in the pit of my stomach as I write about it now, thirty years later.

    In my dream, at the height of my fear, I was standing in a classroom, tightly holding my three children, Paul, Chris, and Mary, who were huddled beside me, the four of us in the center of a protective circle I’d drawn on the floor. Several androgynous, nonthreatening figures wearing faceless green masks were walking single file around the outside of the circle, chanting, Beware of the three, beware of the three, over and over again. The figures themselves didn’t frighten me, but their repeated warning did, and I woke feeling helpless and more afraid than I’d ever felt in my life.

    I was awake and almost frantic the rest of that night trying to make sense of what beware of the three could possibly mean. What three was I supposed to beware of? Surely it wasn’t the three innocent children I was trying so fiercely to protect. Was it an upcoming date for a custody hearing that wasn’t going to go well for us, maybe the third of the month, or three months later? Had my estranged husband somehow manufactured three charges against me to try to convince the judge that I was an unfit mother? Most unthinkable of all, was I getting a premonition to emotionally brace myself because I was going to lose these three children, which I’m not at all sure I could have survived? I must have come up with a thousand possibilities that night while I paced around the house like a lunatic, but none of them felt quite right, let alone offered the kind of help a warning like that should give. I’ve always said, I’ll vigilantly beware of an enemy, I’ll bravely square off with an enemy, but I can’t do a thing unless I know what or who the enemy is.

    Luckily, I was studying advanced hypnosis at the time, and my professor was a genius about the workings of the subconscious mind, including the messages it sends through dreams, and I still count him among my most trusted and insightful colleagues. I was waiting outside his office when he arrived that morning. I was so frantic by then that I hope I didn’t grab him by the lapels, but I can’t swear I didn’t. He patiently led me to the chair beside his desk and simply said, Tell me what’s wrong.

    I filled him in on the fierce custody battle that was consuming my life and then described my dream, in all its disturbing detail. I don’t cry often, especially in front of other people. I cried that morning.

    You wouldn’t think a psychic of all people would feel this helpless, I told him, but as you know, I’m not one bit psychic about myself. If that dream was trying to tell me something and I blow this custody case because I didn’t understand the message, I’ll never forgive myself. What am I missing, John? What could ‘beware of the three’ possibly mean?

    His smile was patient and compassionate. Tell me, he said, who’s fighting against you for custody? Who’s trying to take your children away from you?

    That was easy. "My husband, his mother, and believe it or not, my mother."

    Instead of pointing out the obvious, he let me catch on all by myself. It took me a few seconds, but finally I added, In other words, three people. Three people I need to beware of. I was hit with that wave of relief that comes when you know something right and true has just been uncovered. The dream wasn’t some dire prediction. It wasn’t teasing me with mysterious new information in a kind of infuriating guessing game. It was simply clarifying and reminding me to stay focused on the three people who were conspiring to use my children to hurt me.

    I felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulders as I left John’s office that morning. The fear that had kept me awake and pacing most of the night was replaced by a sense of resolved power, like when you turn on a bright light and discover that the terrifying, shadowy monster in the corner of your bedroom is nothing but a pile of clothes on a chair. My lawyer and I paid even closer attention to the three from that day on and, because we did, we won. I was awarded full custody of my children. Thank God.

    If any one event sealed my commitment to explore the world of sleep and make its magic more available and understandable to my clients and to myself, it was that dream, its aftermath and everything I learned from the experience.

    I learned that there’s valuable clarity to be found while we sleep if we can just master the vocabulary to translate it.

    I learned firsthand how lost, confused, and often frightened my clients felt when they came to me for help with their dreams, and I promised God and myself I would do everything in my power not to let them down.

    I learned how important objectivity is when trying to figure out the purpose of a dream, and how easy it is for the conscious mind to overcomplicate a dream’s meaning when very often the simplest answer is the right one.

    I learned, above all, that the sleep world is richer, more varied, and far more vast than I ever imagined and that, as we’ll explore in the course of this book, dreams are only the beginning of that world.

    The Basics of Sleep

    We all know how to sleep, and we all know that sleep is a biological and psychological necessity. But in the 1950s, researchers began doing formal, well-documented, and exhaustive studies of the whole process of sleeping, and more than fifty years later the studies continue, proving how infinitely complex the world of sleep really is.

    I’ve read the published results of most of these studies. Some of them are fascinating, and frankly, some are so boring, technical, and just plain badly written that I could barely get through them. Much of this research provides valuable information about sleep, though, and about when and how we dream, that can help us take maximum advantage of those luxurious hours when our conscious minds step back and let our subconscious minds and our spirits take center stage.

    It’s fairly common knowledge by now that there are two basic stages of sleep: REM, which stands for rapid eye movement and is the lightest stage of sleep, and Non-REM, which is the deeper sleep when eye movements and our other muscle responses become almost nonexistent. It’s during REM sleep that we dream, and it’s when we’re awakened during or immediately after REM sleep that we’re most likely to remember our dreams.

    The Non-REM stage accounts for about 75 percent of our sleep, leaving 25 percent for REM sleep. Thanks to a lot of brilliant minds, tirelessly curious researchers, and great advancements in the world of medical technology, we also know that our brain waves fluctuate in approximately ninety-minute cycles while we sleep. Brain waves, measured by the EEG, or electroencephalograph, have been charted into distinct levels for those ninety-minute cycles:

    Beta Level: We’re wide awake, active, and alert.

    Alpha Level: We’re awake but relaxed, and our eyes are closed.

    Theta Level: We’re very sleepy or in the process of falling asleep, and usually in the REM stage.

    Delta Level: We’re very deeply asleep and in the Non-REM stage.

    Once we reach the Delta level of the cycle, the order simply reverses, and our sleep becomes progressively lighter again. When we wake up feeling rested and refreshed, it’s very likely that these ninety-minute cycles have been allowed to progress on their own without interference or interruption.

    Scientists have become so specific in their studies of sleep cycles, and of REM sleep in particular, that they’ve discovered our eyes actually move horizontally while we’re dreaming about viewing something from side to side and move vertically while we’re looking up and down at something in a dream. Fortunately, this business of our bodies acting out the movements in our dreams pretty much stops with the eyes. The same parts of the brain that control our sleep cycles also inhibit our other motor activities. That explains why, in the relatively light sleep of REM, when we’re still asleep but vaguely aware of our surroundings, we’ll occasionally have dreams in which we desperately want to run but our legs refuse to move—it’s a blend of the situation in the dream and the normal, temporary, sleep-induced inhibition of body motions. As frustrating as those dreams can be, the alternative, in which biology doesn’t stop us and our bodies actually take off running while we’re asleep, would be worse, not to mention potentially embarrassing, don’t you think? In fact, there’s a rare brain malfunction called REM sleep behavior disorder that causes those who suffer from it to physically act out their dreams without being consciously aware of it and end up injuring themselves and anyone around who might happen to get in their way.

    Because successful sleep depends on the natural balance and flow of the REM and Non-REM cycles, and the various levels of brain wave activity, I can’t stress enough how I hope that, unless it’s prescribed by a qualified doctor, you’ll resist the temptation to medicate yourself with drugs or alcohol to help yourself sleep. Chances are, self-medicating will make you fall asleep more quickly. But it’s a guarantee, proven by countless experts and researchers, that it will also disrupt the balance of your sleep cycles. You’ll either spend too much time in the Theta level, hit by a barrage of dreams that will make you wake up feeling as if you’ve spent the night in some sort of bizarre, relentless house of mirrors, or you’ll stay too long in the Delta level, sleeping so deeply and dreamlessly that you’ll wake up feeling hungover and emotionally flat.

    And believe me, in spite of some ongoing debates among a handful of researchers who I think have buried their humanity under too many piles of data, there’s not a doubt in my mind that dreaming is as essential to us as breathing. Whether we remember our dreams or not, whether we can even begin to understand what they mean, they’re a release valve, an absolute survival mechanism, our minds’ way of protecting and preserving some sense of balance in a waking world that often seems to offer very little balance at all. Sleep researcher William C. Dement once said, Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives. I couldn’t agree more. Dreams are so necessary that in clinical studies it’s been found that after several nights of REM deprivation, the first thing the mind and body will do when allowed to sleep uninterrupted is indulge in a dramatic increase in the length and frequency of REM cycles to make up for lost time. They’re so necessary that without them, we can experience everything in the cold light of day from disorientation to an inability to concentrate or be logical to anxiety to depression to hallucinations—in other words, those often disquieting indulgences we can freely express in private while we sleep.

    So before we start this exploration together into the extraordinary, indispensable world of dreams, all I ask is that no matter what we uncover, no matter how dark or light or bizarre or joyful or scary or upsetting it might be, you remember to celebrate the fact that you do have dreams, and make a promise to yourself to dream bravely and without apology, starting tonight and for the rest of your happy, healthy, spiritual, inquisitive, God-given life.

    Two

    Inside the Dream World

    As I said earlier, I’ve read the same dream interpretation books you’ve read, and often come away just as mystified as you have. The books that get on my nerves the most are the ones that start by marveling over how easy it really is to interpret our dreams and then proceed to offer such complicated, convoluted explanations of dream symbols that we come away feeling either hopeless or just plain too stupid to bother trying. So let’s get a couple of things straight right up front.

    For one thing, interpreting our dreams isn’t always easy at all. Like so many other worthwhile skills, it takes practice, time, accurate information, and a willingness to keep an open, self-honest mind. It’s usually harder to interpret our own dreams than it is someone else’s, since we’re often so close to a situation that we can’t see the forest for the trees. So the more objectivity we can bring to the process, the more successful we’re likely to be.

    For another thing, there’s rarely only one right answer to what a dream means. A few different possibilities can make all the sense in the world. And frankly, as long as we come away understanding the overall message of the dream, I don’t think the literal meaning of the details matters all that much.

    A perfect example is a client who came to me several months ago, just as I was starting this book. (It’s amazing how often life brings me relevant situations at the exact time I need them.) We were in the middle of a reading that had nothing to do with dreams at all when suddenly she felt compelled to tell me about a recurring nightmare she’d been struggling with for months:

    I’m trapped in this small room with gray walls and no windows, she told me. I’m holding a baby, and I love babies, but this one isn’t bringing me any joy at all—it’s just making me anxious and frustrated because it has an insatiable appetite. No matter how many bottles I give it, it keeps wanting more and more and more, like it’s desperately needy but I’ll never be able to satisfy it. I feel hopeless and stuck, because I know I’m responsible for this baby, but all I really want to do is escape from it and let it be someone else’s problem.

    The baby? Her husband. The bottle? His severe alcoholism, which he refused to address, let alone deal with. Or, just as legitimately, the baby was her, feeling as helpless and defenseless as an infant in the face of her husband’s drinking problem. Whether the baby represented him or her isn’t nearly as important as the repeated snapshot she was being given while she slept of the truth she couldn’t face in her waking hours: she felt trapped in a deeply troubled marriage that had long since stopped giving her any joy. She wanted to run away, but her sense of responsibility wouldn’t allow it.

    I didn’t pick up that information about her husband’s alcoholism psychically. I didn’t need to. She’d told me about it earlier in the reading. She’d also told me how much she loved him and how it wasn’t really that bad, certainly not bad enough to threaten her marriage. It was as good an example as I’ve seen of being too close to a situation to see the obvious message of a dream, and of how much more honest the spirit mind in the subconscious can be while the conscious mind is busy making excuses and flexing its defense mechanisms.

    By the way, I got a letter from her eight months later, telling me that after repeated refusals by her husband to admit to, let alone deal with, his alcoholism, and after a lot of therapy on her part, she’d left him. It wasn’t easy, but she knew it was the right, healthy thing to do. I especially loved one comment in particular: "Frankly, if you’d been the one to tell me how lost I was, I’m sure I would have refused to believe you. But since I was the one who was telling me, I couldn’t exactly deny it."

    Which illustrates another wonderful point I want to make about dreams before we get started: our dreams and the spirit minds behind them are usually a whole lot smarter about us than we are, so what a waste not to master their language and then listen.

    The Eternal Pursuit of Dreams

    It should inspire, not discourage, us that people have probably been trying to solve the mysteries of dreams for as long as there have been people. Written interpretations of dreams date back to around 4000 B.C., but even before that, primitive societies (sometimes much wiser than we civilized societies, let’s face it) thought of the world of dreams as nothing less than a more powerful version of the real world in which they spent their waking hours, so that those two worlds were inseparable, interdependent, and of equal importance.

    Ancient Romans, who believed that dreams were messages from their gods, routinely relied on the Senate to interpret dreams that seemed significant, while the Greeks often assigned dream interpreters to be aides to their military leaders. In Africa, healers and shamans looked to their dreams for clues about diagnosing and curing illnesses. The Chinese and Mexicans thought of the dream world as a whole separate dimension that the soul travels to every night, a dimension where their ancestors waited to share comfort and wisdom. The Egyptians believed dreams to be sacred, and honored priests with the responsibility of interpreting them. Almost five hundred years before the birth of Christ, a northern Indian queen named Maya had a dream one night in which she was playing with a

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