Whose Dream is this Anyway?

There is a word being bandied about in some spiritual circles that is hard to find in today’s dictionaries. It’s called a “cledon” and refers to a message unknowingly spoken by one person that has meaning for another person. They are used as signs on the highway of life in much the same way as we might regard synchronicities. I was presented with a cledon in my dream group a few years ago that left me wondering if anyone else has had this experience. I have never experienced anything like this before.

The dreamer shared the following dream:

I am being laid off from my job. I knew I had done my best. I was doing an excellent job and I was happy. I demanded to know the reason. It turned out that someone had submitted changes to my contract and that I could be terminated on the spot without reason. I saw a piece of lined paper with the changes to the contract. I knew I was supposed to learn and realize something from this. The word BLEEDEN appeared on the paper. I knew it was him [the one who had changed the contract] and woke up feeling ok.

The dreamer didn’t recognize the name of this man, Bleeden, and had absolutely no associations that came to her from either the word [bleed] or the dream character who was changing the terms of her contract. It was not anyone she had ever met in waking life and trying to find a message from the dream produced no “aha” of connection or insight. But I knew.

That was my maiden name, a name that I never used, as I went by my step-father’s last name. The dreamer had no way of knowing the name I was born with, and I had never discussed my childhood with her. We were not social friends and she didn’t know anything about my relationship with my father.

“I knew I had done my best.” The back-story that she didn’t know was that my father had died suddenly leaving me with a lot of unfinished business with him and questions when I discovered that he had cut me out of his will. I believe that her dream was a message to me to help me finally lay him to rest. It told me that on a soul level, whatever “Sacred Contract” we originally had, he had changed the terms of the contract and it had nothing to do with me. I had done an “excellent job.”

When we have dreams that make absolutely no sense to us, a dream in which we have no associations at all, we have to ask the question, “Whose dream message is this?” We may not actually be the one for whom the dream message is intended. These dreams need to be shared!

We are social beings and we need to tell our dream narratives to others who are both respectful and empathetic. Each dream carries many layers of meaning, mostly for ourselves, but also for others in our lives, as well as for our communities and our world. In the same way that we might ask ourselves if our dream has any precognitive information for us before assuming that the dream is about our psychological issues, we need to ask, “Who is this dream message for?” Or “whose dream is this?”

Here is my cledon and maybe the message is for you? Find or start a dream group, find friends to share dreams over cups of coffee and don’t keep those messages, wisdom and insight to yourself! You never know who needs to hear its wisdom.

Patti Allen is a Dream Teacher and psychotherapist who believes that dreams are an “inner global positioning system” (iGPS) guiding dreamers on their own unique journey to wholeness, truth and spirit. Click here to learn more: www.pattiallen.com