INTERPRETING A DREAM

Renato Costa


When I was a child I used to have a dream that would occur from time to time and would never get its meaning. Some years ago I had it again only once and I finally understood it. After having learnt the lesson, I never had that dream again. It was like this:


I was an adult coming home on feet with my family and we had to take either a very long path, which seemed safe, or a shortcut by which we would go straight home but which would make us go through a dark and scaring graveyard. After thinking for a moment at the road crossing, I would always decide to take the shortcut. We would hardly have walked a hundred meters when an enormous beast would appear coming from the graveyard. It would have the size of a cow but the body, the head and the grin of a hungry wolf. The beast would start running at us and I would take some steps foreword, urging my family to stay behind. When I was a child, the dream would stop at that point and I would wake up very scared.

When I had the same dream a few years ago, I was already a Spiritist, a medium, a meditative man and a yoga practitioner. I think the few meters forward I had already walked on my evolution path allowed me to have a different end for that dream. The different end was as follows:

While the beast ran in my direction, I walked calmly towards it, sending continuous waves of love in its direction and viewing it as a small kitten that would jump into my open arms. As I walked towards the beast, its grin slowly changed until it lost its aggressive mood and the beast began to move slower and slower until it hardly halted. When we finally reached one another very gently, I opened my arms wide as if I would hold a kitten in my arms and the beast let its enormous body fall to the ground close to my feet, curling its entire body like a little cub asking for its mother’s caresses. We stood there in a beautiful transcendental love scene and the dream ended.

When I woke up, the meaning of the dream was clear to me. The crossroad meant the choice I had to make. The long path home is the one that shows no danger but is no more than an illusion, that is, the quest for material possessions. The shortcut is the path that seems dangerous but is in fact the only real one, to say, the spiritual quest. The graveyard represents our previous lives. The dangers it presents are our own inner beasts that live in our past and in our present: pride, vanity, anger, jealousy, revenge, cruelty and so on. The powerful weapon that tames all the beasts is unconditional love. And the family behind me surely means the Spirits I have to lead on the perfection quest.

(Article originally publshed in issue 54 of The Spiritist Messenger)