Have you been feeling out of sorts lately? Perhaps you’re under the weather or you’ve caught the latest bug that’s going around the office. Avid dream practitioners may know that dreams often reveal the state of your physical health. For example, the dream you have tonight can relate an illness up to two or three months in advance. Or it can tell you that you are in excellent health.

You may be asking yourself “How is this possible? How can a dream tell me I’m going to be sick? And then how do I know what the illness will be?”

Examine the following dream and its interpretation so you can begin to find answers to these questions.

I keep having a recurring dream; I dream I’m driving my car and everything’s fine until I get to my destination. When I try to shut off the car, it just keeps running.
PEC,Female,40, Tulsa, OK

A car, pickup truck or other personal conveyance in a dream symbolizes the dreamer’s physical body. In many modern cultures we use an automobile as a vehicle to get to where we want to go: school, the store, work or home. As a spiritual being, the vehicle we use in our daily lives is our physical body -- it moves the spirit or the thinker from experience to experience. As stated in The Dreamer’s Dictionary, the physical body provides “mobility for the thinker.”

In the dream above, the woman is experiencing a kind of malfunction, the car drives fine but it can’t be shut off. The dreamer can not “shut off” or relax. She probably holds a lot of tension in her muscles and may experience backaches or neckaches. This dream is relating stress problems. There is a need to learn to relax the conscious mind with an exercise such as directed concentration. Read the next dream and its interpretation to begin to understand how to identify specific health issues.

I was driving my car up the on-ramp to the interstate but my car started rolling backward. I put on the brakes, but the car continued to pick up speed. It crashed through a fence, finally stopping in someone’s backyard.
JS,Female,42, Wixom, Michigan.

The dreamer is approaching the interstate. Highways in a dream symbolize the dreamer’s direction in life, such as the path towards a goal. In this particular dream, the dreamer is unable to start her journey and begins backsliding until her car is out of control. This illustrates how, after setting a new direction or goal for herself, in this case, vowing to lose weight, the dreamer “backslides” and needs to strengthen and use her will power to achieve her goal.

To identify what the dream is saying about the health, the dreamer should examine her thoughts of the previous 24 to 48 hours. Those thoughts, concerns or actions of the mind are related in the dream symbols. In the instance above, the dreamer had made a resolution to lose weight and she “just couldn’t seem to get started.” Perhaps the day or two before this dream occurred, the dreamer had thoughts of guilt or condemnation because she didn’t start her diet. Thoughts such as these set up the conditions for the physical body to become ill. Repeated similar thoughts add more energy to the already manifesting illness. Thus, if one interprets a health dream early enough, it is possible to change the unproductive thoughts to positive, creative ones before one develops a full-blown disease. (For more information regarding the relationship between thought as cause and physical dis-ease, refer to Permanent Healing by Dr. Daniel Condron).

Health dreams relate more than malfunctions or illness in the physical body. The following dreamer was concerned about a dramatic change in his life, from working in an office to spending his days engaged in physical labor.

I dreamed I was looking over a car, a Volkswagen Beetle. But the engine wasn’t the Volkswagen engine, it was a big Chevrolet V-8 engine.
PB,Male,35, Norman,OK

Once again, the dreamer’s physical body is represented by the car. In this particular car the engine, the motive force, is something extra-ordinary, an engine that a hot-rod enthusiast might use to achieve the most power in a small car. The particular message answers the dreamer’s concern -- he has more power than necessary to accomplish this transition.•

Sandman is a regular feature of Thresholds Quarterly. Write to Sandman, c/o Thresholds, School of Metaphysics National Headquarters, Windyville, MO 65783. When relating a dream indicate your gender and age. For learning to interpret your own dreams, the best reference is The Dreamer's Dictionary [retail $15..00] by Dr. Barbara Condron. With over 1000 dream images, this book gives the interpretation in the language of mind plus suggestions on the insights being conveyed by your subconscious mind and how to use them.
©1995 Vol. 13 No. 2