"The home is always the psyche," says Joseph Dispenza, author, spiritual guide, teacher and intuitive dream reader. "Everybody milling around is you--all pieces of you." He speaks gently, almost soothingly, and earnestly, like a confidante or a psychologist. "Your dream ego is wandering around in your psyche in this dream," he continues, "and it's about to try on various possible identities in the closet. You may feel disturbed because you feel there is too much identity-switching in your life. You resent all the people you currently have to be. You are trying to work out how you can just be you all the time."
Listening to his analysis, I have a shiver of recognition of the truth of it--although Dispenza's interpretation has never occurred to me or, at least, to my conscious mind. I have had theories about this recurring dream--all plausible--but this is a different take, and it's eerily dead-on. I don't know Joseph Dispenza; he knows nothing about me. He hasn't asked any trick questions, as some smarmy psychics do, so that he can project probabilities from my comments into his dream revelations. He couldn't possibly get this close to what's in my head in less than five minutes. He's scary.
Dispenza will be in Dallas on October 12 to facilitate a six-hour class in dream interpretation. He has interpreted dreams in the context of spiritual counseling for more than 20 years. He taught dream analysis for six years on the faculty of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. He has won awards for his books, the latest of which, The Way of the Traveler, explores avenues of self-discovery. He spends most of the year lecturing around the world and holding spiritual retreats in San Miguel de Allende in Central Mexico. Dispenza is the founder of LifePath Retreats and director of Parcells Center for Personal Transformation in Santa Fe.
Dispenza's informed opinion is that our conscious life is merely "the tip of the iceberg," with our unconscious life making up the bulk of who we are, just below the surface. "Dreams give us a very strong sense of direction," he says. "Our unconscious is really directing us. Dreams are coming from our higher self." During his LifePath retreats and also for the Dallas presentation, Dispenza says he concentrates on teaching participants to retain dreams and to self-interpret the issues that dreams reveal. "Everybody has his or her own dream vocabulary and dream landscapes they go back to," he says. "What I am here for is to help you uncover what a dream seems to be saying in terms of the next part of your life.
"In the dream world, what's happening is the body is speaking to the soul in picture language," Dispenza says. He believes as Jung believed that there are universal archetypes in the language of dreams. When children dream of the "boogie man" or a monster in the closet, Dispenza says, this is an archetype of fear. Free-floating anxiety often appears in dreams as being late to class, being undressed in public, being lost. "It's an archetype for being unprepared," he says. Be sure to make a reservation, get dressed and show up on time if you want to attend Dispenza's session on Saturday. He plans a one-on-one with each participant, so also bring your dreams.
