A Cartesian makes friends with his dreams

 

I dreamed that I was struggling to explain something important in my faulty French. I woke, checked online, and read a message (in French) from a friend in France. He was trying to help a man who was struggling to understand what he describes as "an absurd experience for a Cartesian spirit like mine."

The "absurd experience" was a dream in which the skeptic met his departed father. His father was eating breakfast, wearing a beautiful blue shirt. In ordinary life, the man did not believe such an encounter was possible. In the dream, he rushed to his father, gave him a big hug, and was deeply moved.

Trying to make sense of what happened, the dreamer exclaimed, "We need to be taught how to make friends with our dreams."

That is my loose translation. What he actually wrote, in French, was: "On devrait nous apprendre, quelque part, à apprivoiser nos rêves."

"Apprivoiser" is a very interesting word. It is often translated as "to tame" or "make gentle". Its most famous use is in the beloved story of The Little Prince, who learns from the fox that in order to find the secret of life he must "tame" the fox in the sense of making friends with something wild.

My friend in France thought that I might be able to help the man who had dreamed of his dead father. I could hardly refuse this appeal to help after seeing the word "apprivoiser", You see, I wrote a book called The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. It explains why contact with the deceased is neither weird nor even unusual, since they are alive somewhere else. They call on us and we visit them, especially in dreams. We discover that healing and forgiveness are always available, across the apparent barrier of death.

When foreign rights to The Dreamer's Book of the Dead were sold, my French publishers came up with this title for the translation: Apprivoiser la mort par le rêve.

I wrote to the Cartesian who had the "absurd" experience of a loving encounter with his father on the Other Side:

"I have seen it so many times: a man encounters his deceased father in a dream. He discovers that to die in this world is to live in another world. This transforms his understanding of what it means to dream, to live and to die."

I wrote this in my faulty French, My dream had rehearsed me for this minutes before.

How do you get to know that dreams are real experiences? Run a tingle test. Truth comes with goosebumps, Then let synchronicity give you a wink or a nod, as in "apprivoiser". Test, check, verify. Then: practice, practice, practice.