Once you are able to remember your dreams, you are ready to start programming them to tell you about your past lives. Many people are surprised to discover that programming a dream or getting a dream to answer a particular question is a remarkably easy process. It is also a very ancient practice. In her book Creative Dreaming, psychologist and dream re-searcher Dr. Patricia Garfield notes that techniques for programming dreams to answer specific questions have been found in Egyptian records dating from 3000 B.C.The ancient Assyrians called the practice istiqara, and among the ancient Greeks it was known as "dream incubation."
Many modern researchers have also developed methods for
"incubating" dreams. Although devoid of the mythological jargon that accompanied ancient techniques, the essence of these techniques remain the same. Inducing a dream about one of your past lives (or about any matter on which you desire dream guidance) involves three basic steps.
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Step 1 After you have performed your nightly dream relaxation technique, spend some time thinking about what you want the dream to tell you and consider carefully the various possible answers you may receive. For example, you may want the dream to show you a past-life scene that you would like to become reacquainted with. Or you may want a dream that will show you an undiscovered past-life talent.
Step 2 Once you know what you want the dream to tell you, formulate your request in one clear and simple statement. You should always be careful to tell your unconscious mind that you do not wish to unearth any past-life memories that will be too traumatic or painful for you to deal with. Once I made the error of asking a dream to tell me about a particular past-life injury without adding this qualifier and found myself tossing and turning for a week with vivid nightmares of how I had died
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Because of this possibility, you may also want to consult a pendulum (see p. 43) before asking a particular question, and then you can ask if your chosen subject is a safe one for you to dream about. Or you can simply couch your question in a way that will rule out a too-painful answer. For example, such a request might be phrased: "Tonight I would like to dream about an unpainful past life in which I knew my current husband." Or, "Tonight I would like to dream about an unpainful past life which explains my current religious concerns."
Step 3 On retiring, after you have placed yourself in a stateof relaxation, repeat the request several times aloud and focus on it as you drift off to sleep.
The next morning when you awake—or during the night if you wake following a dream—write down any dream experiences that you have had, no matter how cryptic. Remember that although many past-life dreams will be clear and straight-forward, a few, like van Waveren's dream about the judge with the nine diamonds suspended beneath his arm, will be ex-pressed in the sometimes daunting symbolic language of the unconscious. If, following the dream-inducing exercise you have a vivid or moving dream, but at first it does not seem to pertain to your question, meditate upon it and let it incubate in your conscious mind.
Look beneath its literal level and try to determine whether it has any allegorical meaning. If you still cannot figure out what it means, ask your dreaming self for further guidance.
After trying the above exercise, if you do not have immediate success, try it again, making sure that when you ask for a particular dream you are completely relaxed and are in-deed focusing your thoughts intently on the request. If you still do not have success, try modifying the exercise in some way. For example, before going to bed, spend some time thinking about why you are asking that particular question, and what you might gain by knowing the answer. Even write a paragraph or two in your dream journal about your expectations. By spending this time focusing consciously on your request, you will
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increase the likelihood of impressing your desire in your unconscious mind.
Before going to bed, you might even spend some time imagining that you are already in the midst of your re-quested dream and actually visualizing what you expect to see. If you do not know what to expect visually from a requested past-life dream, imagine instead the emotions you anticipate experiencing, and be sure to emphasize positive reactions, such as feelings of calm, increased understanding, and joy.
Do not expect all past-life dream experiences to be visual reenactments or even symbolic scenes. After programming myself to have a past-life dream, I have had dreams that contained no visual scenes at all, but consisted entirely of auditory experiences in the form of disembodied voices telling me the answers to my questions. I've also had dreams in which I was presented the information in written form. For example, a few years back I met a well-known Jamaican actress. The moment we were introduced, we were both swept with a powerful feeling of familiarity, a sense that we had known each other for a long, long time. We became instant good friends, and although we didn't discuss it at the time, we later learned that we both shared a conviction that we had known each other in a previous life.
About two years after our meeting a talented psychic was giving me a reading and suddenly started to describe my actress friend in detail—her life-style, emotional temperament, physical appearance—everything. He even described the nature of our friendship, the subjects we tended to talk about, and the things we shared in common; then he told me that the first time we were friends was in a life in the 1700s in a French fort somewhere in what is now the eastern United States. He also told me many other things that seemed to shed new light on the nature and intricacies of our current friendship.
My curiosity piqued, I decided to program a dream to see. if it could tell me more about this revelation, and that evening while I slept, I had a dream that I was flying through a universe that was filled with nothing but an ocean of words, all suspended motionless in space. The firmament of this cosmos of words was not dark, but white, so that all of the floating words stood out sharply, and as I zoomed through this three-dimensional dictionary, I suddenly approached one word that filled my
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entire screen of vision, Onondaga. I did not know what the word meant at the time, but I wrote it down in my dream journal. When I researched the matter the next day, I found that Onondaga is the name of a lake in Syracuse, New York, and it was the site of Fort St. Marie de Gannentaha, an old French post and one of the area's first settlements.