Wisdom: noun. 1: the quality of being wise; power of judging rightly and following the soundest course of action, based on knowledge, experience, understanding, etc., good judgment; sagacity

In other words, wisdom comes from successfully learning from your experiences. It requires two steps: 1. Looking at your experiences and 2. Actually changing so that you do something different and better in the future.

As you will see, dreams are great experiences from which to develop wisdom. In the work with this particular dream, we take advantage of the fact that we already know the outcome of the dream and consider alternative ways to face that situation using the dreamer's best waking judgment.

Jerry's dream:

I am driving my car along an ordinary road. Everything is fine then I suddenly discover that the car is off the road and on a narrow footbridge. The bridge is swaying from side to side. It is very precarious and I'm afraid the bridge will collapse. Shaking and sweating, I continue to drive and finally I get to the other side. I look back and see that I have crossed a magnificent mountain gorge.

By one standard, that's a terrific dream: Jerry managed to get to the other side and it's a great view even though he had a very unpleasant journey. The dream work, as we will see, helped to create a different approach.

It is odd but, even though you know it was "only a dream" and you "know" you cannot be harmed, going back into a dream situation still reproduces the original fears. I took Jerry back to the beginning of the dream and asked him if, knowing what he knew now, he would still want to cross the footbridge. Jerry thought about it, seeing himself at the place where the road turned into a bridge and weighed his options. He decided that not only did he want to cross the bridge but he would still take the car. I asked him, in his imagination, to drive over that precarious bridge knowing that he could make it to the other side.

In this replay Jerry was still tense but he suffered far less than in the original dream. He managed a peek out of the driver side window and noticed that the footbridge seemed wider and somewhat stronger this time. It gave him more confidence that he would make it across and a bit more space to breathe. Once he even noticed the beautiful view.

In waking life, Jerry was a manager in a large department store. He perpetually worried about his sales figures despite the fact he had been doing this work for 20 years. In fact, he knew exactly what to do when sales were low, however each time he reacted to the situation as though it was completely unexpected. By replaying his dream he got to live through a far worse problem knowing that he would get through it. Jerry remarked that the stress wasted an enormous amount of energy.

I think you can see that the dream experience on its own is a tough one, a nightmare. Naturally the replay was much easier because Jerry already knew the first outcome, but that's precisely why Dream RePlay is so powerful. Jerry was better off when he faced a dangerous situation holding in mind the fact that he could handle it. It was then possible, although not easy, for Jerry to apply this wisdom to the waking life bad-sales-month and know that he would cope with it well because he always had done.

Replaying Your Dream:

The technique is to go back to the beginning of the dream and ''replay'' it in your imagination taking full advantage of what you already know from both your dream life and your waking life. You will naturally make wiser choices because of this.

It is easy to underestimate this technique because it is so simple and the remedies themselves are so elementary in the context of a dream. But wisdom is like that: Once you have noticed and mastered a difficulty, it is hard to understand why it was ever a problem. The power of this dream technique is that you will experience radical changes in your attitude and your decision making. That wisdom can be carried over into your waking life.

Dream of the Week is an experimental email from David Jenkins. It has the goal of explaining the benefits of this unique way of working with dreams to as wide an audience as possible. Each email shows one of the many techniques I use and is intended to show the reader how I worked with a particular dream. Please forward this email to anyone who might be interested. (And unsubscribing information is at the bottom of the email.) If you have any feedback for me about Dream of the Week, please send me an email.

Best wishes