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, for
Sarvananda 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 dismiss
dreams 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't
dream 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 nightly
adventure is contagious. His book is a feast for the soul.
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