and figures of speech to get things done.” Here, at the level of the subconscious, the dreamer can easily draw on whatever ESP is possessed as a natural talent or a developed art to get one's bearings on practical matters, and to recover problem-solving items from the distant, the past, or the private.
In Cayce's view, an even deeper source of help is also available. He called it the superconscious, which he described as a higher realm of the subconscious. According to Cayce, there are dreams that can bring into play certain structures of great importance to the dreamer. In these dreams, the dreamer contacts the best, or higher, self—or may even reach to something beyond the self, which Cayce called “the Creative Forces, or God.” In Cayce's view, the superconscious is the portion of mind that has retained the memory of God's presence and is man's link with his original spiritual consciousness. These forces can provide the dreamer with boundless information and guidance. As Bro states, “They are…the creative currents of the divine itself, moving through human affairs like some great unseen Gulf Stream. In dreams one may reach far beyond his own faculties to tune into these Universal Forces, through his own superconsciousness.” Cayce treated the contents of these kinds of dreams with great respect.
Cayce saw the superconscious as the portion of the mind that has retained the memory of God's presence and is man's link with his original spiritual consciousness.
Creating trained dreamers
Before his death in 1945, seventy-seven people received dream interpretations from Edgar Cayce. Altogether, he interpreted 1650 dreams during almost seven hundred readings. The bulk of these readings were for four individuals with whom he worked closely over many years.
The purpose in focusing on these individuals was to create what Cayce called “trained dreamers.” His desire was to help them develop the skills needed to guide and interpret their dreams—and thus to use their dreams to help guide their everyday lives and to grow spiritually.
Cayce's greatest challenge in training these dreamers was to get them to rely on themselves, asleep or awake. Bro, who worked directly with Cayce for almost a year, remarks, “He did not seek little Cayce-ites. He wanted capable, self-reliant people, using the talents with which they were endowed, and learning new laws to apply.”
Cayce encouraged his dreamers to do more than study dreams and dreaming and to do more than rely on psychics and spiritualists for interpretations or answers. He coached them to interpret and use their own dreams on the problems of everyday life. Through regularly working with their dreams, he pressed them to broaden and deepen their natural psychic, intellectual, financial, leadership, artistic, and healing gifts. He urged them to go into their dreams to access the wisdom and guidance of the Universal Forces.
“After the first few,” says Bro, “Cayce never again trained dreamers as such. Instead, he trained people in an explicitly spiritual pilgrimage— one which included dreams but placed still greater weight on meditation, prayer, and daily service to others. Further, he trained people only in groups, where they could daily help one another in study, in love, in mutual intercession, in ways that his major dream subjects rarely knew.”
It is thanks to his intensive work with these few individuals that we are able to discern the pattern of laws and principles that govern dreams and our work with them. Through the experiences of these four people, we are able to see how the ability to work with dreams grows, we can witness the kinds of challenges that can be experienced, and we are shown the most effective methods for addressing them.
The purpose of dreams and dreaming
Cayce believed that all phases of humankind's nature are revealed in dreams for the express purpose of directing us to higher and more balanced accomplishments in our physical, mental, and spiritual lives.
According to Cayce, each night we have contact with spiritual and psychic forces through our dreams. Because of this, dreams work to accomplish two things: they work to solve the problems of the dreamer's conscious, waking life, and they work to awaken the dreamer to full stature as a person, to quicken in the dreamer new potentials which are his or hers to claim.
In describing a large part of dreaming as problem solving, Cayce underscored the kind of dreaming that can be called the “incubation” dream. This is the dream that either presents a surprising solution to a problem on which the dreamer has been working or awakens in him a state of consciousness in which the solution he needs springs easily to mind.
Cayce described the rest of meaningful dreaming as quickening the dreamer to his or her own human potentials. Over and over he pointed out how dreams signal to the dreamer that it is time to carry new responsibilities or to develop more mature values or to stretch one's thinking. Such dreams, he said, are not simply solving practical problems—they are helping the dreamer grow.
According to Bro, “[Cayce] described whole cycles of dreams as devoted to developing a new quality in a dreamer: patience, balance, manliness, altruism, humor, reflectiveness, piety. Some of these self-remaking dreams he saw as coming from the efforts of the dreamer's personality to right itself…. Other such dreams Cayce saw as spontaneous, healthy presentations, occurring when it was time for a new episode of growth in the dreamer's life.”
Everyone dreams—and everyone can remember them
The Cayce readings are clear that anyone who will record dreams in an attitude of prayerful persistence can, in time, bring about a complete restoration of the dream faculty.
As Bro describes, “Those whom Cayce coached had no great difficulty learning to recall dreams, once they set their minds to it. They had to be certain they were ready to confront whatever came forth in dreams, and to do something with it…. He was firm with several dreamers that to recall their dreams they should record them—and go back over the records often…. Finally, he saw it as important to the process of recalling dreams that dreamers act upon the dreams they recall. The very act of adding consciousness to the subconscious activity which produces the dream will set currents in motion…helpful currents to facilitate the recall of the next dreams, and eventually to aid in the interpretation of all dreams…. Each of these steps builds recall of dreams. They also build the depth and clarity of the dreams, for they serve to build the dreamer himself.”
The four broad kinds of dreams
As an aid to interpreting dreams, Cayce described four broad kinds, or types, of dreams. Sometimes identifying the kind of dream just experienced helps the dreamer begin to interpret its purpose and meaning. While Cayce was clear that some dreams are just nonsense or night-mares, resulting from the body trying to handle troublesome foods or other biological upsets, he said our meaningful dreams fall into these categories or types:
Physical: dreams that provide helpful information about our physical bodies and our health through symbols that may suggest improper diet, a kind of exercise needed, previews of illnesses, and so on. These dreams can even provide specific suggestions for treatment.
Self-revealing: dreams that provide self-knowledge and insight into problems, goals, desires, plans, decisions, relationships, character traits, and so on.
Psychic: dreams that reach out through the windows of telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition to provide insight and information not accessible by our ordinary three-dimensional consciousness.
Spiritual: dreams originating from the dreamer's higher self, dreams flowing from the superconscious mind and the Universal Forces. Cayce often called such dreams “visions.”
These four kinds of dreams serve two functions: to solve problems and to aid in spiritual growth.
Interpreting the dreamer, not the dream
The best interpreter of a person's dream is the individual dreamer, since the symbols are one's own. Interpreting dreams, as Cayce described the process, is not just looking up a symbol in a handy dream book and applying it to a dream. Rather, one interprets a dreamer, not a dream.
“Study self; study self” was Cayce's first counsel on training to interpret dreams. As Bro says, “If one grasps the dreamer