Introduction to Linda Yael Schiller and Dreamwork

My guest today is Linda Yael Schiller She is a therapist and she describes herself as a spiritual psychotherapist. I love those two words in combination.

A consultant, author and teacher, she facilitates group dream circles. She provides individual, group and corporate consultation and trains professionals on working with dreams.

And dreams are a powerful window to our unconscious and subconscious processes, and we learn a lot about them in the next little while with Linda. She also has designed several innovative methods for Dreamwork, and she integrates various psychotherapy techniques like the Enneagram, like energy psychology, like eMDR, like EFT tapping, and as well as a professional work with dreams.

She's been involved in her own dream sharing group for more than 30 years. Welcome, Linda. Thank you very much. Nice to be here. good to have you here.

And so your book is called as PTSD dreams. All one word PTSDreams And, it's a powerful guide to to looking at those dreams that might otherwise really, terrify us, baffle us, and using them as a hobby avenue to personal growth.

I'm so glad you've done this work. I'm so glad that you have, have written this book. And before we dive into the book, I wanted to ask you that group you've been part of for 30 years.

That's a really long, long term commitment. How did you get into that? So at this point in time, I guess when I wrote that it was 30 years, now it's it's actually pushing 40.

the way I got into it was a friend invited me and my dear friend Eve, moved up from New York City to the Boston area, which is where I live. And she said, I'm really done with living in New York.

It's too much city for me. I don't really miss anything except my dream circle. And she said, I'm going to start one in Boston. Will you be in my dream circle?

And I said, yes. And then I said, and what's a dream circle? So so somehow I knew right to say yes, even though I wasn't exactly sure what it was. And that was the stepping stone for what's become my life's work.

Part of my life's work. And so when you did that, did you have any immediate epiphany or immediate realizations as you began to really consciously work with your dreams?

Joining a Dream Circle and Learning Dream Association

Well, in the beginning we were all neophytes and I was already a psychotherapist and, trying to think of anyone else in the group was and I think I was the only psychotherapist in the group, but nope, there was one other, but we were all sort of in the helping professions, you know, one way shape or form, but we hadn't really done much with framework.

So we all set out to learn and we read a lot of books and we went to workshops and we went to trainings, and we kind of learned as we went. And the beautiful thing about doing Dreamwork is you don't have to be a professional to do it.

You have to have a gift of of association. Right. Because doing dreamwork is about association. And what we quickly learned from one of our teachers, Jeremy Taylor, is that the only person who's in charge of telling me what your dream means is you know yourself.

So I might have ideas, I might have thoughts, I might have associations. But I'm not here to interpret your dream. I don't even use that word interpret.

We talk about dream work, but I help guide you. And then you can do this with yourself and with friends and colleagues and peers. And we'll talk later about if if you have a trauma history when it's time to, to look at for a professional as well.

but to ask questions about a dream and as you work with a dream material, you peel it like you peel an onion and you find the multiple layers of meaning.

So over the many years I've worked both with my own dreams and with my friends and with my clients, there have been a lot of epiphanies, both personally and, for other people.

Just go and share one notable one. And then I want to ask you another. Got a different tack, but just share one of those stories. Start with. okay, so probably the the biggest dream Jung Carl Jung uses the phrase big dreams I ever had was when my husband and I were in the process of adopting our daughter from China and bringing her home, and we got in the adoption world, that's called a referral.

So we got a referral. And in the referral it said that she was about a year old. and, you know, we had been waiting for. So it was practically a double pregnancy was it takes about 18 months, or at least it did them to, to adopt from China.

And we had been hoping to have a baby who was younger, who would have spent less time in the orphanage. So she would have had, you know, less of a life neglected first year of her life.

So we were a little nervous, a little anxious. Is is this our daughter? Is this the right match for us? So we exchanged glances and he knew what I was, where I was going.

And he nodded his head and I said to the agency worker, can I go home and dream at it tonight? oh. That's the first question they hear people ask, I'm sure.

Yeah, right. I might have been the first person who ever said that, but, I said I will. I will know, you know, I will dream hard on it. So she said, yes, but you have to tell me by tomorrow because, you know, there's a time crunch here and we have to really get the ball rolling.

So I said, okay. So I went home and I did a process called dream incubation. And dream incubation basically means you think about a question, a dilemma.

Some information you need, and you spend some time writing it down in your journal. And I was I was so glad. By the way, in your introduction, you talked about taking notes and writing things down because writing things down A in general, and B, especially in Dreamwork is the only way to really remember the specifics as well as the generalities of what you're hoping to understand.

And so in incubating a dream, I wrote down, basically I think I wrote something like, is this baby is this girl our daughter? And we they gave us this little, little tiny picture about size of a postage stamp.

So I, I woke up a few times in the night and I, and I didn't have a dream. And then it was like 3 or 4 in the morning. So I wrote again in my journal and I said, I need to know tonight and I need to know clearly and without ambiguity.

So I got a little bossy with my dream. You know, it's a lot at stake. So I woke up in the morning and I had a dream. And I know exactly what it meant.

Dream Incubation and the Adoption Dream

Now, before I tell you the dream, all dreams are contextual. In other words, they're related to something in our life. And if we, you know, connect the dots, we know what the context is.

So here's what you need to know to know what my dream meant, the same way I did it immediately, to the back story, because my mother in law had given us a tool shed for our gardening tools about a year before, and when the guy came to put it in, it was a little too large to fit.

Under our deck, we have a above ground deck because we're on a hill. But he said, no problem, I'll just dig down and put in a foundation and it'll fit just fine.

And it did. So we have a tool shed. So that's the backstory. That's the context. Here's the dream I had. The dream was we got a new tool shed. It was a little bit bigger than we expected, but it fit just fine.

too rich. Wonderful. How profound. Yeah. And no mistaking the difference. The message behind the the dream, either. I remember once what of, one of Napoleon's generals had a terrible, defeat.

And it was due to a key brigade not following his orders at a certain time, it went back and said to Napoleon, you know, why didn't they follow my orders?

I wrote an order that anybody can understand. Napoleon said, that's your mistake. You need to write an order that nobody can possibly misunderstand. Oh, really? And.

Oh, I like that. yeah. Yeah. See you. You asked for something that would be absolutely crystal clear to you without ambiguity. And, Yeah. Most of the times, you know, when we have dreams, they come, you know, dripping with metaphor and symbol and and we have to really sort of work with it and massage it and tease it to find out, you know, what it's telling us about.

But I didn't have time for that this time. Yeah, you had to know and had to know right away. And that idea of dream incubation is is powerful. And then like, where do you suppose this knowledge comes from?

Like tell to Shah Dan talked about the psychic sphere of the earth and no sphere, the sum of all consciousness in the universe, and and is that people who feels a lot of research shows that our brains aren't the originators of consciousness, that they're transducers of consciousness, and they're all these experiments now with, measuring human brain function against solar, solar flares and huge cosmic events and finding out that they match. So, how how do you suppose this is all happening?

So that's the million dollar question isn't it. So Jung as well, Carl Jung, you know, talked about our collective unconscious. So because we don't know for sure where it all comes from, we can all hypothesize and and we don't know what is the right or wrong answer.

Or maybe it's right. All of the above. So it could be that our dreams and our visions come from this collective unconscious of the mind meld, if you will, of all of our collective, collective brains and psyches on the planet.

It could be that we're downloading, that we're we're channeling something from the universe that is larger than ourselves. For people who are spiritual, that could be, a higher power.

It could be God. If you're comfortable using that word, it could be, the force of the universe. and it also could be from deep inside ourselves, our own unconscious self that actually lives in every cell in our body.

So we don't know things just with our brain and with our mind. We actually know things with our whole bodies. And when we're asleep and we relax, that waking, conscious aspect of ourself, of our consciousness, that we're able to tune in and tap into the other parts of our consciousness that we call unconscious or subconscious much more easily when the the daily sensor is asleep, if you will.

Yeah. You know, I, I don't, I don't think like we in our workshops could ask these questions very often. People say, well, I've had this dream of guardian angel.

I've had this vision in my, my meditations is the higher power. Is that being real? And what I say is that's the wrong question. The right question is, is it therapeutic?

do you feel comforter? Do you feel illuminated by that? And who cares whether it's real or not? It's just your your way of tuning in to that level of awareness and then that your body is such a good guide that like, does this am I feeling resolved off?

Right. Make a connection with this being so? Yeah, powerful to do to have the body awareness right. And I agree with you that is this being real is is not the right question.

And I would add, in addition to your very good response, that it's not a matter of objective scientific testing reality because that's just one form of realm.

There are lots of forms of real that we can't run through a computer yet. Yeah, I say yeah, and we can't run through a microscope yet. But nonetheless, our subjective and what Eugene Gendron calls felt sense, our felt sense of it is real.

And that's the main reality, right? What you feel, what you are resonating with is your reality in that moment. Absolutely. Yeah. That felt senses a wonderful, again, body based guide.

So, I've done a lot of research over the years with veterans and, usually we use something called the Insomnia Severity Index. We measure them when they start work with us.

They are they're a clinical level on that scale after they've had 6 or 10 sessions, usually a vft, they're back to normal.

Where Dreams Come From and the Nature of Reality

And so we we measure the reduction in their symptoms and measure the reduction in their insomnia also. That usually means a reduction in things like PTSD dreams.

But what is so loved about your book was that you are we're sort of focused on making them go away. What you're saying is learn from them. Let's use these as a chance not to try and avoid them.

Don't be terrified of those PTSD dreams. Go and and, engage with them and all these ways you give us and and what are they trying to tell you? What's what's the gift within that maybe very difficult experience.

Yeah. So it's certainly a normal and natural inclination to want to run away from something that's terrifying or to want to push it away or suppress it or not deal with it.

And if we can find some relief from the nightmares, EFT is a wonderful method. I'm a big fan of it. I use it with my clients as well. However, if we're having it for your veterans, for example, or anyone else has been through any kind of traumatic experience, if were if they're getting nightmares and there are two kinds, there are the nightmares that are the actual replay of the traumatic events that happened.

And many, many veterans. There's been a lot of studies done with the types of dreams that veterans have. They frequently will have replay of the war theater.

And when they're just sort of reliving what happened to them. Then there are the metaphor dreams where people are dreaming about being chased and there are monsters and there are floods and they're being attacked.

It's didn't really happen, but those dreams are the metaphor for the trauma that they went through. Either way, if our system is able to metabolize the experiences that have happened to us, if we have enough safety and in our life now, if we have enough resources in our life now, if we have someone like yourself or anyone else to accompany us.

So we're not alone now with the traumatic experience, then our systems can do what they're built to do and metabolize the traumas. And after a few weeks or months, the nightmares will kind of diminish, fade off, get less intense, and eventually go away.

However, if we don't have those resources, we get stuck on a replay like Groundhog Day. The movie goes over and over and over again, and that's when we need some extra help and support, because our system isn't able to metabolize it.

It's like stuck there. So we need to find out what is it that we need to know and then do in order to resolve, come to terms with and recognize that whatever happened to us is in the past and no longer happening.

As long as that's true, of course. because there can be people who still are in unsafe situations in their life, have nightmares. So that's a different way, a different protocol.

But to recognize the difference between then and now and then with a variety of different tools to create the safety needed, the accompaniment needed to be able to go in and face the nightmares and the monsters and the trauma with other resources that weren't there either in the original traumatic scenes or in the nightmares.

And then when we add these resources in and work with the resources, with our dreams, we can create a new story of our dream and the end of our life. Linda.

So we're able in this way now to approach our dreams, to, contextualize our dreams, to learn from our dreams and whether they're where which of those two types they are repeating the same thing over and over again.

And that or some, just symbolically and some of the way, you're, you're reenacting the kinds of scenarios that that brought you stress. so what is the first thing you do with somebody comes to you with what's clearly PTSD appearing in their dreams.

So when I'm working with someone who has, we know has a history of trauma, my approach is going to be a very slow, careful approach. And I'll describe that in one minute with a guy.

And method one, I'm working with someone who's having nice dreams, pleasant dreams, interesting dreams, or even dreams that are just sort of mildly upsetting.

Not not true too much. We don't necessarily have to go sort of incrementally slow and and carefully, because the risk of retraumatizing someone is not there if they're having a nice dream or just a mildly upsetting dream.

So then we can kind of poke around a little more, kind of dive in more quickly, have dialog with the different characters, recreate scenes in the dream without doing too much preparatory work.

PTSD Dreams, Nightmares, and Trauma Responses

But if I either know or suspect that someone has a history of trauma, either public trauma or private trauma, public trauma is things that happen in the public eye, like your war vets, like disaster victims, like, violence in the streets.

They happen in the public sphere. Private trauma or things that happen behind closed doors in the privacy of people's homes, in institutions, in schools, in religious settings, where there's in addition to the traumatic events that occur, whether it's abuse or neglect or battering or shaming or bullying, there's an extra layer there of secrecy that goes with it.

And with the secrecy and the question of will anyone believe me? If I even talk about this, then we get sort of multiple layers of that trauma, trauma response.

in addition to responding to what actually happened. So with either of those types of trauma, I'm going to start with a guy in method. And Guy A stands for guided Active Imagination approach.

And it's a method that I designed that has two pillars. And one pillar is based on unique and active imagination. Work with streams. And I'll describe in a minute what that is.

And then the other pillar is best practice trauma treatment. And some of the protocol is based on my experience in working with eMDR for other types of body mind modalities, so that we go slowly and carefully and we build in the resources that someone needs before diving head first into the belly of the beast.

Because the last thing we want to do is retraumatize someone by working with a dream more quickly than they're ready. So there are two, Phases and there's just a lot of different elements.

So just quickly define re traumatization for those who aren't familiar with it. Oh, sure. So a lot of people in the vernacular now, you've heard the word being triggered, right?

Something has happened in your life. It's not happening anymore. But there's a reminder something in your life happens now that either consciously or very often unconsciously, reminds you in some way of the original traumatic events, and then you react as if you were still there.

That's the re traumatization the Vietnam vet or the vet of any war who ducks and covers when a car backfires. That's an example for Traumatization, the survivor of childhood sexual abuse, who loves her boyfriend and enjoys making out with him.

But one day they're kissing and he has beer on his breath and she has a panic attack. And she's never had a panic attack before. And later she realizes, oh, this is the beer that my father drank when he assaulted me when I was a little girl, and she didn't even know it at first.

Later, through working on it, you realize this is why she hit the panic attack. It wasn't kissing her boyfriend, it was the smell of the beer. It brought her right back to being. Being. Yeah.

So that's obviously what you want. Make sure you avoid that. That's why you approach this cautiously. Exactly, exactly. So, and with a guy method and I personally love the, the acronym, the title because the word guy is the Earth mother, right?

She's the, the queen of of of consciousness of our our earth mother. So it's a very sort of holding, acronym. for comfort, I think. so in part one, we're first doing the ingathering of resources before we start to work with a dream.

If someone says, I had a nightmare, it's really scary. I'm very upset. The first thing I'm going to do is ask them if they even want to tell me the dream, because they might not just want to say, I had a dream, but I don't want to talk about it.

So once I've determined they do want to talk about it, I said. Then I said, go ahead and tell me the dream. And I listen. And then the next question I might ask would be, and would you like to work on this story?

Because I might just want to tell me the dream. And that's as much as they could handle today, right? We have a there's a saying in another in effect, which is internal family systems, which is another, psychotherapeutic, modality that says we can only go as fast as the slowest part of us can keep up.

So we want to really respect those slow parts and those little kid parts that are not ready to go to too fast yet. So once we get a yes from these things, the next thing I do is, I say staying outside the dream.

Don't go in the dream yet. Going inside of the dream is part of the act of imagination approach. But from the outside, let's first gather the resources you need to feel really safe, really protected and able to go in the dream and confront, talk, to, deal with dialog with whoever and whatever is there that you need to find out more information from.

Get some understanding and bring some healing into that scenario. So I tell people they can gather anything at all. They can gather people in their lives, people who are alive, departed relatives who have passed over.

They can have friends. They can have pets. They can have pets who are alive, pets or dead. They can have spiritual beings. They can have fairy tale, or storybook people.

a little girl that I worked with, she brought Mary Poppins in as a resource, which I. That was very clever. a gentleman that I worked with said, I'm going to.

I'm bringing Gandalf with me, the Lord of the rings. So. And we get a posse, as many people as possible until they say, okay, I got enough. I feel I feel safe and protected.

So that's one step. And then we add objects. So any object I'd like to bring in with you to talk to your dream world. So when you hold or touch aware of that object, you feel safe.

Whether it's a special talisman or a piece of jewelry that you inherited from a beloved parent or, invisibility cloak, whatever it is, bring that with you to.

The Gaia Method for Safe Trauma Dreamwork

And then I want to ask, is there any spiritual protection, if they haven't already named that that you need before we go into the dream? So, Linda, this is really powerful that you're giving people not just, sense of protection, but layers of protection.

And as many layer is piling them on as, as as, as much as possible until they feel really safe going into that dark territory of trauma. Right? Right.

So I keep asking anything else, anything else until they say, no, I'm good. I'm ready. So that's one of the sort of the guidelines between the work. And then what's next.

So next is the bridge. And so between my first book and my second book with this method I added the bridge. The first book is called Modern Dreamwork, and that came out a couple of years ago.

And then in the last few years that I added this bridge to the to the Gaia method. And here we get we take all of the resources we've gathered, and now we peek inside the dream itself.

We're still outside. We haven't gone in, but we look inside. The dream review the dream story and the landscape. And I ask the dreamer, is there anything in the dream that's already there that you may have forgotten to mention?

Or you may not have noticed the first time? That's already a resource for you. So this allows them to go inside into their own soul and their own unconscious and say, oh, here are some resources they already have in may not have realized.

And that's very empowering for people. So we add those resources to the passage, whatever they see or find. Maybe in the dream they see, oh, there's this woman with long gray braids sitting under the tree.

I didn't notice her before. Oh, but she reminds me of a Native American wise woman. She's a resource for me. I think great. Means. She's been part of the passage to.

So then we go in the dream with all the resources, all the protection needed, and work with whatever's there. Sometimes we start with the scariest part of the dream.

Sometimes we start with the least scary part of the dream. But I'll often just ask the dreamer, where would you like to start? What feels like the right place to start?

And let's say in the dream, for example, there was a a large three headed monster. approaching the dreamer in the dream and the dreamers in the dream.

What he or she first did was turned and ran from that monster as fast as possible. And when they wake up, the monster is fast on their heels and they wake up with heart pounding, you know, catching their breath.

And that's it. So this time, I said, now that you have all these protections, would you be willing, instead of running to stop, gather your protections and turn and face the monster and see who are what this is?

Why are they there? Why are they chasing you? Because before they couldn't do it was too terrifying. Now, with your protection, they can go into dialog with the monster.

They can have a conversation with the monster. They can find out why is the monster chasing us. And generally speaking, once we've had a conversation with whatever it is that's pursuing them, it's terrifying.

When we find out that the scary figure in the dream has been trying to give them some information that's going to tell them what they need to do next in their life, has been trying to actually give them some kind of a gift, whether it's something tangible or information that will allow them to deal in a deeper, more balanced way with the traumatic circumstances.

And like. Wow. So again, you're actually asking what was the feared subject to give you information. Exactly. Exactly. Because once you write this a phrase like we tend and befriend.

Right. So when we can tend and befriend the things that we fear, we find that there are no longer as fearful as we thought that they were. Wow. When we are othering people, we're afraid of them and they're dangerous, but we're not othering them either in our real life.

excuse me, I shouldn't. That's a slip of the tongue there in our waking life, dreams are very, very real in our waking life or our sleeping life. Then we can relax enough to have a conversation, find out who and why they're there and what we can learn from them.

Powerful. And then where do you go to wrap it up? Let's keep that information nugget from that. That being so just I'll use an example. someone was being chased in their dream.

And in the dream they at some point get confronted by a wall. And the the scary I think it was a vampire in this dream was chasing them and they literally using the metaphor.

But in the dream they hit a wall and they can't go any farther, and the vampire is just about to catch them. And in their waking, in their actual dream, that's where they would wake up, on the verge of being devoured by the vampire.

So in the dream this time, we surrounded the person, surrounded himself with protection. He had, a blue gold lights surrounding him, and he decided in this dream that he was going to grow wings on his heels like the winged mercury.

So I'm like, so this time, when the vampire was chasing him, he surrounded himself with light. He grew wings on his heels and he flew to the top of the wall.

So now he's on the top of the wall. And for some reason, with dream logic, the vampire cannot climb the wall. But from this vantage point, he's safe. And he says to the vampire, who are you?

What do you want? Why are you chasing me? And the vampire responds, I am your darkest fear. I am your biggest nightmare. The dreamer says, well, that I already know.

Can you be a little more specific? You've been chasing me for a long time. You know. You chasing me, he said. Because throughout your history you have been running from things that you need to face.

I'm trying to tell you that you have more courage than you think you do. And here I want to give this to you. So the vampire gave him a a ball of some sort.

And so this is your courage. But. And he tossed it up to the dreamer on top of the wall. And the dreamer catches the ball, and it's this golden, glowing orb.

That's his ball of courage. And as we're working with this dream, it's reminding me my associations are to the visit of us right now. The Cowardly Lion was really not afraid, but he just needed proof, right?

That he had courage. And the Tin Woodsman was the most sensitive and heartfelt one of the bunch.

Facing the Monster and Finding Courage

You know, he'd cry at the drop of a hat, but he thought he didn't have a heart, because when he was turned into a ten minute, he he wasn't given a heart.

So in the dream, the dreamer took this glowing or above of courage. And I asked him, now what do you want to do with it? And he replied, I think I'm going to keep it safe in my heart.

So he took the courage ball and he put it in his heart, and at that moment he just felt completely relaxed, filled with this golden light. And when he looked at the vampire now, he saw that it was just a little tiny woodland creature.

It's not there to harm him at all, and it just kind of scampered away. So, Linda, I loved that your very first credential you present in your bio is a spiritual psychotherapist, and you talk and Peter streams about how the end result can be not just being okay and not just having the trauma result, but that the end result of trauma can actually be spiritual growth.

Just share that whole idea with us here now. Sure. So in our vernacular, when when words are used to describe traumatic experiences and events, people often talk about soul shattering experiences and that it seems to be a very common way of describing, particularly ongoing trauma or life threatening trauma that either is or feels life threatening.

And this has been true, throughout history, where in indigenous and native cultures we talk about the soul leaving the body during traumatic events and the job then of the the wise woman or man or the shaman in the tribe is soul retrieval is to bring the soul back into the body again.

And we know that one of the, results that the result, one of the reactions to traumatic events, is also what's called dissociation. And dissociation, basically, is when we're in a traumatic experience where it's too much for our body and mind to hold our mind fragments, it splits into parts.

So that a part of us can be safe, protected, and a little bit unconscious while the rest of us is trapped in whatever the experience of being trapped in.

So in dissociation, the body mind becomes fragmented into pieces, and part of the healing, then, is to reunite and re whole, reintegrate those fragmented self parts.

So when we are working with trauma, one of the goals is to return to a state of wholeness. We just turn to a state of well-being and that is our birthright.

That is our legacy. Our spiritual legacy is to be whole beings. And if something has disrupted that, we want to re, we remember that we can return to this state of wholeness.

And I separate that. How to re member is to literally to put the members, the pieces of our body back together again. So that's part of the work in the spiritual side of healing from trauma.

And it's funny that you you bring that up and said, that was part of my bio because I was talking with another, podcaster last week, and she said that back in the day when she first started doing the work, she was afraid she'd get her license revoked if she used the word spiritual before psychotherapist.

So she was so happy that we could use that language that we have accepted in the world. I thought it was a great a great point. so maybe I'll just I'll give you an example of a dream that in a, in the dream itself, moves us from a state of, of abandonment, despair, trauma, and out the other side, all in one dream.

You know, it doesn't always happen this way, but in the interest of time, I'll give you one example. So I'm. I'm very fortunate that I tend not to have very many nightmares in my life, but, the last couple of years, there's been a lot of trauma in the world, and we talked a little bit.

Not too much today, but about the world shadow. Well, there's been a lot of shadows in our life, ranging from being locked down in a pandemic for the past several years to climate change to violence to governmental upheavals.

There's been a lot of tough stuff, and even people who generally are pretty well balanced have pretty good childhoods and don't have a lot of trauma in their life, have experienced trauma in the last few years just from living in the state of the world as it is.

So that's the background sort of context, if you will, for this dream. So I had this dream, the winter solstice of 2021. We had been in lockdown, I guess for a little bit over a year at that point.

I'm doing the math right. So here's what happened.

Spiritual Healing, Wholeness, and Returning to the Light

And at that point in time, December 2021, we were just starting to hear about the possibility of vaccines. They haven't come out yet. So we're still in that very first phase of the trauma of, excuse me, of the pandemic, when we didn't really know what we were doing.

There's a lot of guesswork. So here's the dream I had. that night. So in the dream, I dreamt that I was a young person about ten years old or so, and I.

I'm in a cell like a like a jail cell, and it's very dank and kind of cold. And I'm crouched down against the wall, kind of huddled. And this is a very unusual dream for me.

It's not a common theme that I've ever had. And all of a sudden I realize out of the corner of my eye, I see a ray of light, and I turn in this cell, and I see through the bars of the window, beams of light shining through the bars of the cell.

And at that point in the dream, I turn around and I stand up, and I hold up my arms to the light. And in doing so, and in reaching my arms and reaching out to the light, the light picks me up, transports me out through the bars and out of the cell and into the world.

And that was the train. wow. So powerful. And then to be able to turn away from that gloom that had been there when you were huddled against the wall, and then to turn toward the light, and then also when we had those experiences to the very profoundly shifting.

And I know many people, when they've gone through that kind of experience that, they, they feel empowered in a whole new way because they have been huddled against the wall and then seeing the possibility of redemption and change.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the core, I think of of faith in anything, whatever your spiritual or religious background is or your, your atheistic background, whatever it is, anything that gives you hope and allows you to feel that there's something larger than yourself holding you up in some way, is going to allow you then to have forward movement and spiritual growth.

And whether for you it's the light or whether it's the universe, whether whether it's Gandalf, like the gentleman in who I described earlier or whatever it is, then you have that with you forever.

Once you've had that experience in your dream work, you get to keep that and you get to move forward toward the light, whatever that means for you in the rest of your life.

And at this time of year, we just finished, yesterday was the was Yom Kippur was the Day of Atonement. So the last few days or the High Holidays in Jewish tradition, and there are three, pillars that we stand on.

It's called tycoon Tuva and Baraka. And this is from Rabbi Rami Shapiro. I recently read his book. He actually writes for health and spirituality for the magazine.

fat is repair. We we repair ourselves first. And Tuva, we return, we go back to do the healing. We go back to make amends. We go back to, reconnect with with people, with ourselves, with nature.

And then the last thing is Baraka, which means blessing. So when we can do the repair of ourselves and when we can return, then we can take the blessings that we got and bring them out to be a blessing to heal the world as well.

Will certainly bless us all today, and I just wish everyone listening a blessed life. Thank you for the huge contribution you're making and everyone listening to us.

Thank you so much. Till next time, be healthy, be happy and lift yourself. Be that ray of light in the world. Thanks again.

Linda Yael Schiller, MSW, LICSW

PTSD Dreams