Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

Today our topic is called Decoding the Helpful Universe. And here is how it goes. So this week,

I had a chance to do two different dream analyses. Did I already talk to you about this?

One was somebody's nightmare and one was a beautiful dream about a woman reaching into a stream

and pulling out golden threads of being. Now, if you have been coached by me or had one of the coaches I've

trained has walked you through a dream analysis the way I do it, you may know that I ask,

in order to interpret a dream, I don't believe that one symbol is the same thing for all people.

Like for you, lilacs may symbolize death because you smelled them at a funeral once.

And for me, they might symbolize my house growing up because we had a lilac bush there.

So it's going to have a different symbology depending on which one of us it is.

So when you go into a dream, and this pertains

to your daily life too, this is not just about dream analysis, so hang in there. To go into a dream,

say you dream about a monster. You have to become that monster and start to speak as the monster.

And it's hard to get people to become the monsters in their dreams

because they're very strongly separated from them, right? It's all obviously inside their own heads,

and yet they're separated from the monster psychologically because it scares them and it's alien and everything.

But if you can get people to drop into the character of the monster,

the way they would drop into the character of a part they were playing in a movie, if they were

an actor, they can start to speak as the monster and tell you things about why the monster

is shown up in your dream and what it's there to tell you and a whole

bunch of very valuable information. Always, in my experience, when someone has a nightmare and

there's a monster and they drop into it, the monster turns out to be something that is trying

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