By Jefferson Harman
When I was three or four, I had a horrific nightmare that was so vivid that I recall it to this day. What struck me most, even at that young age, was that I knew the images I was seeing were not my own.
Obviously, I was too young to articulate this, but I had a sense of it, and as I got older, I never forgot the dream. To make things even more interesting, the day after I had the dream, we were driving in my family’s car, and as we drove over the bridge near my house, I saw the house that had been in my dream the night before. It was the only image in the dream that could have been my own, yet I remember that I felt I had never seen it before the dream. Everything else was not possible for me to have even experienced, much less remembered.
I tried to tell my family and friends what I had seen. My mother said I just had a nightmare, and told me it was normal to have scary dreams once in a while. Others around me were not as understanding, and told me I was imagining things. This was a common reaction for the next several years. If I said I knew my dreams meant something, or that I was seeing someone else’s memories, people would ask me to explain. But at that age, I didn’t even know the word elaborate, much less how to do it. So I stopped talking about it for a long time.
As I grew, I had very vivid dreams – I mean they were in Technicolor with Surround-Sound. I was aware there was more going on than just the recycling of random images from my day. There were stories, movies, epic tales, heroes, monsters, all manner of flora and fauna. It was a world I loved to visit, even though at times it could be extremely disturbing. I knew I was doing more than simply processing my day’s memories or stresses. That is what everyone else told me dreams were for, to review and to vent.
I began to see the continuity from one dream to the next. Then I realized that if there was a story, there had to be an author. If there was a movie, there had to be a director. I began to recognize themes and recurrent symbols. Then it hit me, what I was reading was a language. And if that language could be read, it could be understood and spoken. As I began to see my dreams as communication, I started to sense the language, to read the messages, and to interpret them.
At first I interpreted only my own dreams. As the years passed, I grew more comfortable and started interpreting those of my friends. In time, I became faster and more accurate, and began interpreting for total strangers.
Soon I was invited to read at local New Age stores and psychic fairs. In 2010, I became a recurring guest on Life Unedited, a talk show on WCHE Radio 1520 AM in the Philadelphia area with host John Aberle. Listeners call in and I interpret their dreams live on the air. The show streams at www.wche1520.com/ and you can access show times at my website, http://everydaysymbology.com.
I never took a psychology course. I never read Freud or Jung or had formal training in this work. It is a knowing I have had since childhood, and I have refined it over many years. Woven into what I teach is my own recovery from years of undiagnosed, untreated depression. My own journey of healing is an integral part of my work, and I offer these teachings in the hopes of helping others heal, whatever their experience may be.
I believe the language is that of the Universe, the Higher Self communicating with the Earthbound Self. I believe that what we see as symbolic in our dreams is actually a language that runs 24/7, even in our waking state.
I have developed workshops to help people better understand this language. My intention is to teach what I have learned so that everyone may benefit from this understanding. My workshops include Lucid Dreaming, Overcoming Your Phobias and The Healing Power of the Mind. I also interpret dreams in my regular column, Night Sailing. If you would like to send your dreams to me for interpretation, please send me an email at jefferson@everydaysymbology.com. Your dreams may be published in a future issue of MARCI Magazine. In the meantime, Pleasant Dreams!
Jefferson Harman, a symbolic intuitive, has been actively studying the relationships among metaphysics, psychology and anatomy for over 20 years.