The World Dream Book: Use the Wisdom of World Cultures to Uncover Your Dream Power

A PhD in history who quit the groves of academe for an ashram in India, Sarvananda Bluestone?s unique combination of talents first found expression in How to Read Signs and Omens in Everyday Life. In that book he offered a smorgasbord of divination techniques from around the world with which anyone can access the latent sixth sense he believes is our birthright as humans. Sarvananda wears his scholarship lightly, and The World Dream Book is written in the same lively, unpretentious style that informed the earlier book. But his message is a profound one, forSarvananda taps into the vast dream lore of traditional peoples around the world to challenge the assumption that our dream consciousness is world apart from our waking consciousness, a world that is somehow less valuable.Here in the industrialized west we tend to value doing rather than being and reason over intuition, and to question the very existence of anything we don?t understand. We tend to dismissdreams as crazy, unimportant, unreal. But the majority of the world?s people believe that dreams are real and deserve to be taken seriously. For indigenous cultures, our dream life offers a path to understanding ourselves, enhancing creativity, conquering fears, healing illness, evolving spiritually?even receiving visions.This book will not tell you what your dreams mean. Instead, it will give you the tools to discover their meaning?or meanings?for yourself. Unlike the many dream dictionaries out there, Dr.Bluestone does not believe in the existence of common universal symbols: ?The final authority on the meaning of a dream is the dreamer.?But what if we don?t remember our dreams? In our busy, action-oriented culture, many people are so cut off from their dreams that they are under the mistaken impression that they don?tdream at all. But in cultures where dreams are valued and hared, this dream amnesia is unknown; the inability to remember our dreams may be primarily a modern and western phenomenon.A few days after I started reading this book and trying out some of its Dream Explorations, I found that I started remembering my dreams again and integrating their insights into my waking life. Sarvananda?s enthusiasm for the nightlyadventure is contagious. His book is a feast for the soul..