“Don’t shoot the messenger,” is a precept familiar since Shakespeare used the line in two of his plays. If you are going to be a good dream messenger, it’s rather important to bear in mind that you not only want to avoid getting yourself shot by the recipient; you want to avoid shooting him or her by delivering unwelcome information in the wrong way.
We dream for other people as well as ourselves. Sometimes, in dreams, we see bad things happening to people we know. We may feel a desire to pass on this information in the hope that it can help them. But we need to be very careful about how we do that. We are unlikely to help someone we have dreamed about by telling them, “Guess what? I dreamed your husband was cheating on you” or “I dreamed you had a car accident” or “I dreamed you had a heart attack.” In some cases, we could actually help to precipitate an unhappy event through the power of suggestion. If we suggest to another person that something bad is going to happen to them, we can actually push them into making that manifest, perhaps through ill-considered efforts at avoidance.
We also want to remember that, while dreaming may be a social and transpersonal activity, what goes on in a dream may be, first and last, about the dreamer. This means that what we think is happening to another person may primarily be about what is going on with the part of ourselves that resembles that other person.
So, if you think you have picked up a dream warning for another person, here are a few things to consider carefully before you share or act on that information:
1. Is it possible the dream is actually about you, and the part of you that resembles that other person?
2. What, where, when, how, who? Can you clarify the dream information so it can be presented – if it needs to be presented – with enough specific information to enable the recipient to work with it in practical ways?
3. Can you create a safe space in which you can share the dream information with that other person, and od you have a process that can help that person to decide on appropriate action to take if the warning is relevant?
4. How is the other person likely to respond to your story? Could this damage your relationship, because she may be inclined to “shoot the messenger”? Could sharing actually make it more likely that a”bad” event foreseen in a dream will take place, for example, through that power of suggestion?
When we feel quite sure that we have received a warning for someone else (in dreams or in other ways) and have determined that we have a space in which we can talk safely, we want to give the facts as clearly and specifically as possible, and open a discussion that will help the recipient to evaluate this information and decide on an appropriate course of action.
In some case, however, the best thing to do with a dream warning for another person is not to tell the dream to them dircetly but to work with the information to do some good on their behalf. I give an example of how to do this in Conscious Dreaming. I dreamed that a toddler in a family I knew was in danger because a window that went down to the floor had been left open on the landing of a staircase. In the dream, I was yelling at the adults in the family to put bars on the window or nail it shut. I had never visited that house. Instead of calling the family directly, I phoned a mutual friend and asked her to go round and check on the situation and if necessary, give the family some safety advice. On the day she went over, the toddler was on the stairs and the window below her was open, exactly as in my dream. The mutual friend prevailed on the family to nail that window shut. You can do any amount of good if you don’t mind who gets the credit.
image: “Don’t Shoot the Messenger” artshole.uk
posted February 19, 2012 at 5:13 pm
Robert, I’m curious to hear more about your question #1 and distinguishing what is about ourselves and what is about others….
also, shooting the messenger is exactly how I felt recently in my work presenting a project that I did not design and the community hated