Dreams & Visions. Edgar Cayce
functions of dreams is to the fore in a particular dream— (a) problem solving and adaptation to external affairs, or (b) awakening and alerting the dreamer to some new potential within him.”
Studying dreams and interpreting them is not enough. Bringing dreams into action in everyday life is critical. Cayce called for “application” and included a section on application in every dream reading. While study is a form of application, Cayce had something more concrete in mind. The dreamer must put the insights, tips, and ideas received in dreams into motion in life, trying out the guidance given by experiment. Over and over Cayce counseled his dreamers, Do, do, do.
The lawful patterns of dreaming
Bro points out that the same natural laws or principles that governed Cayce's readings also appear to govern the dreamer's dreams. While these laws were rarely explicitly spelled out in the readings, they can be glimpsed as patterns that are evident in the body of the readings as a whole.
Bro provides a fascinating outline of what he called the “lawful patterns in dreaming.” Of particular help are the following:
• “[Cayce] had to be directed to his targets by hypnotic suggestions. For medical counsel he needed the address of the individual who sought aid. For psychological readings he needed the birth date of the individual. And for topical readings, or those on bidden resources, he had to be told both what was sought, and the names and location of those seeking.
“Often those who wanted one type of counsel would request, in the question period following the reading, counsel of another kind. When Cayce was especially keyed up or relating deeply to the person seeking aid, they might get the desired medical information in a business reading, or counsel for a loved one in a dream reading. But more often they would be told, “We do not have this,” and instructed to seek a different type of reading.
“Cayce explained to his dreamers that their dream-focus had similar limits. He coached them to set before their minds, by hard study, concentration, and activity, whatever they sought aid upon through dreams…. Dreams are limited by the conscious focus of the dreamer.”
• “Cayce's readings were limited to the information and guidance which an individual could constructively use; it is the same with dreams, said Cayce…. [While unlimited] information [is] available through the subconscious and the other resources,…the psyche [protects] its balance by feeding the dreamer limited material. It [operates] by laws of self-regulation.”
• “Cayce's health affected his readings. When he was ill he could not give them…. Cayce's state of mind [also] affected his readings. When he was distraught and defensive with those about him, he experienced some of the few clear errors in a lifetime of giving readings: once in giving readings on oil wells, and once in giving readings on patients in his hospital. Neither time was a complete miss, but the distortions, as later readings pointed out, were dangerous…. His best readings came when he was buoyant, relaxed, humorous, secure. However, he also gave exceptional readings when in keen distress—as when he was twice jailed for giving readings, or when his university collapsed.
“Dreams, too, he said, are conditioned subjectively. He urged his dreamers to get out and play, to take vacations, to balance up their wit and reason, to tease and to laugh and to enjoy children. But he also urged them to note the depth of dreams for the person confronted by death-loss, or by business failure, or by divorce, or by difficult vocational choices—all of which might call forth dreams of such depth and power as to make them ‘visions.”
• “Cayce's readings were affected by what his own trance products described as his relative 'spirituality.’ When he was carried away by the ambitions of a treasure hunt, or temptations to seek notoriety with his gift and his considerable lecturing ability, he was reminded to notice how the quality of his readings suffered. On the other hand, when he was regular in his times of prayer and Bible study, as well as in his quiet fishing times, he was reminded to notice that his readings gained in quality, and that he even developed new types of gifts or capacities, both within his readings (for example, producing an entire series on a new subject), or awake (aiding the sick, through prayer).
“Similar factors, his readings said, affect the quality of dreams. When his dreamers drove themselves for money or fame or power, they could see that their dreams brought up these very issues, and then began to deteriorate in clarity and helpfulness. When they were secure in their faith, their prayer times, and in their desire to serve others, they could find new vistas in their dreams—giving them glimpses into the world of the future or the past or the transcendent.”
• Frequently, the Cayce source noted that the attitudes of those who sought information and guidance from Cayce affected what they got. Those who sought novelty, exploitation of others, a godlike guarantor for their lives, justification for their past mistakes, or anything but genuine aid and growth, received curt responses, or vague ones, or unexpected lectures on their motives. Those who failed to act on the counsel given them might find future counsel brief or even withheld.
“Gullibility was as readily rejected as cynicism; adulation of Cayce accomplished as little as belittling or envy of him. ‘The real miracle,’ one reading said, ‘occurs in the seeker.’
“Similar factors, he said, govern the extent to which dreamers produce dream information helpful to those about them. Often a dreamer secures facts unavailable to a loved one because of his greater detachment toward the need or problem. Often, too, unconscious telepathy from a brother or sister or child shows dreamers how to reach the other's bad temper, or alcoholic habit, or despairing heart, or overbearing pride.”
Improving the usefulness of dreams
To strengthen dream recall and enhance the usefulness of dreams, Cayce emphasized the value of daily contemplation on an affirmation and regularly entering into the deep silence of meditation. Cayce stressed that the spiritually oriented person, whose own intuition is disciplined to a high level, can interpret dreams more exactly than an individual depending solely on his or her own capacity to reason.
But the note which recurred like a silver thread in Cayce's dream readings, whenever he explained to others how to improve their dreaming and their interpretation of dreams, was a familiar one that appeared regularly in his life and medical readings. That note was service.
“For some dreamers, service through dreaming meant literally dreaming for others and giving them aid and counsel,” shares Bro. “But such dreamers were few among those who consulted Cayce. Others were encouraged to draw or to write stories based on their dreams. Or to share stock tips secured from their dreams. Or to learn from their dreams the laws of human development, and teach these laws to classes of interested adults. Or to teach others to dream. Or to pray for those presented to them in their dreams. Each one's gifts were different….
“First the dreamer must change and grow. Then he must find a way to share his growth in unassuming service to those closest to him in everyday life. Only then may he find dreams that can occasionally help the leaders in his profession, or his social class, or his school of art, or his reform movement—by helping him to help them.
“It is a law underscored by the failure of the early dreamers that Cayce trained to sustain the high potential which he saw for them, and which they realized at times in both their dreams and their lives. They fell away from one another in their families. This was a blow the straining psyche could not survive, said Cayce, while it was reaching for the heights of dreaming. With his next dreamers he put his first emphasis not on dreaming skill at all, but on loving and producing. There was loving and producing in the family, there was loving and producing in the daily work, there was loving and producing in the gathered fellow-ship of those who met to study and pray. Only this course—only the course of giving, giving, giving—would keep the flow of dreams clean and ever stronger.”
Lawful patterns in dream interpretation
Bro points out that just as there were what he called “lawful processes” that governed every reading Cayce gave and every dream of every dreamer, so there are lawful processes of interpreting dreams. Of particular usefulness are the following:
•