The Killer in Plain Sight

In my post about dreams related to our physical health, I gave some of the ways in which dreams give us messages about the state of our physical health. Sometimes the messages are warnings about our future if we continue on our current path, and other times they include suggestions for improving our health. Once in the early days of my dream work, I was shown that the right place for burgers from a fast-food restaurant I occasionally visited was down the garbage disposal. Another time I was shown that I should drink more orange juice and less milk to correct a problem I was having. I heeded the advice both times and benefited physically.

 

In working with your dreams, you will soon realize that good health, both physical and emotional, begins with the conscious mind. It begins with our beliefs and our daily thoughts. The best diet and exercise programs may not save you if you are suffering from extreme stress over a prolonged time. I recall a brief conversation with a salesman who was a business colleague who had recently been informed by a cardiologist that he needed a triple bypass. He was a trim man in his early fifties who exercised regularly and maintained a good diet. But that wasn’t enough. His cardiologist told him there were three main causes of heart disease: bad diet, lack of exercise, and stress. The stress did him in. He was under great stress that he did not handle well for an extended period, and his physical health suffered as a result.

 

I once had a conversation with another colleague, who was also a salesman, but for a different part of the company. He was a star performer in a very high-pressure job and bragged about his ability to live a life of extremes. He dealt with his stress with alcohol, sex, and food. I asked him how he was able to maintain late night visits to the bar at the hotel where he stayed while in town for meetings and still show up at 8:00 am the next day. He laughed and said that people often told him he would not live to see thirty, but he proved them wrong because he had turned thirty a few months earlier. A few months later we were told he was found dead of an apparent heart attack. He saw thirty, but not thirty-one.

 

These two examples may seem extreme, but nowadays I believe many are feeling high stress levels because the pace of everything has accelerated. Even back before the digital age, many in professions you may not consider high stress jobs were suffering the effects of prolonged stress. I once worked on a project to provide automation for a newspaper company. I was part of a team that included several people from my company and some individuals from the newspaper side. One of the newspaper representatives was a man who had a severe drinking problem. His coworker told me it was common in their business because each day they had a new deadline to meet. Think about how your stress level may have increased when facing a deadline on an assignment in school or at work. With them the deadline was every day.

 

Stress can be beneficial if you are faced with a situation in which your entire body needs to be quickly galvanized to action. Or you are feeling stressed because you have failed to do something you should do. The stress is a reminder that action is needed. But prolonged stress with no solution can leave you depressed and feeling hopeless. You feel like there is no way out of your situation and that you have no control over your life. The mental stress causes real physiological changes to your body. On a temporary basis, they may be proper for the situation. But a prolonged basis, your organs may be negatively affected because your body was not intended to receive the chemical changes for the long term. Instead of a brief elevation in your blood pressure, for example, you are left with a permanently elevated blood pressure.

 

Some people begin to turn to chemical remedies to reduce the feeling of being stressed out. They turn to the latest drugs to get a high and before long they have substituted an even worse problem for their stress. And the cause of the stress is still there. Decades ago, the preferred chemical solution was alcohol, and it is still a problem today for many. But with the availability of more potent solutions that are faster acting than drinking alcohol, many have turned to opioids including some very powerful synthetic varieties.

 

The problem of drug addiction often begins from opioid treatment for physical pain, which may have resulted from surgery. Here I am addressing the use of drugs for relief from mental pain because life seems unbearable. For some the result of prolonged stress was physical disease; others turned to drugs before physical disease occurred, but they now had an addition with negative physical side effects from the drugs.

 

Dreams are messages from your subconscious that are trying to keep you on a path that will optimize the value of your life—to maximize your full potential. They deal with all aspects of your life: physical, mental, and spiritual. In the view of Carl Jung, they are important for uniting the conscious and subconscious into a whole that represents the complete person, a process he called individuation. We must begin to examine the mind because everything begins there. A high-quality life and a life of disease both have their origin there. We must become self-aware of the contents of our conscious mind through observation and reflection, and the contents of our subconscious mind through our dreams.

 

If you have a physical disease that developed over time, the starting point was the mind. Your beliefs, thoughts, and feelings put into action daily were either beneficial or harmful for your physical body. Often the very thoughts themselves with their corresponding action on the body chemistry is the primary cause of the disease. Edgar Cayce said, “Mind is the builder. The physical is the result.” If you are filled with hate, you are negatively affecting your physical body and disease will most likely be the result. If you constantly worry, an ulcer or other stomach problem may well be in your future.

 

Medical studies have shown relationships between people’s personalities and certain types of disease. It was found that cancer patients often hold feelings within rather than expressing them (see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-the-mind-heals-the-body/201411/is-there-cancer-prone-personality). I am not suggesting that this is the only cause of cancer. But it is a factor. The stress they felt was internalized. The immune system is affected by stress, and its ability to fight off disease can be compromised by factors that negatively affect the immune system. In many cases, stress is the killer in plain sight.

 

Since the mental world we inhabit is so large and varied, you should not be surprised that your dream world will also be large and varied. Nevertheless, there are some common symbols relating to our broader life that are not specific to our physical health. These include a house with its many rooms and fixtures. Others include the landscape surrounding us and the activities we find ourselves involved in. A few simple symbols that often relate to our daily speech and our thoughts are our teeth and hair. In my next post, I will begin to examine these symbols and what they may mean in a dream.