The Smoley–Silva dream technique

Reading multiple books at once has a way of combining active ingredients– like Charles Goodyear dropping rubber and sulfur on a hot stove. For example, I recently split time between Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition by Richard Smoley and The Silva Mind Control Method by Jose Silva. A basic idea explored in both books is that consciousness is passive unless trained.

In his chapter “Spiritual Practices,” Smoley explores shifting your awareness between head-and-heart consciousness, a technique employed by a group of early Christian monastics in the Egyptian wilderness known as the Desert Fathers. Some believe these holy men preserved the secret oral teachings of Christ regarding the inner meaning of Scripture (known as kabbalah), referenced in Matthew 13:11. The process of transmitting oral wisdom tradition (logia) from the mouth of a rabbi to his inner circle may have continued through select members of The Way or its alleged descendants–the Ebionites–before the rise and supremacy of Pauline Christianity. According to Rev. Jeffrey Bütz, these Desert Fathers significantly influenced the mystical branch of Islam known as Sufism.

Smoley explores various esoteric practices in a section called Working With The Psyche. One of the techniques he describes involves taking mental inventory through “remembering the day” or “backward remembering.”

The basic practice simply involves remembering the events of the day backward, as if you are watching a film being played in reverse, while you are lying in bed and waiting to go to sleep. You may fall asleep before the day is finished, or you may not; it does not matter. If you practice this regularly, you may find that your dream life has greater depth and vividness: the mind in sleep is not so preoccupied with making sense of sorting through the events of the day and can penetrate to deeper levels.

At first glance, there seems to be prima facie evidence as to the practice’s merit–like the advice we received as children to “chew 32 times before swallowing.” Backward remembering is chewing our daily thoughts to aid mental digestion in dreamland.

So I gave it a try, and, sure enough, it led to a peaceful sleep and more vivid dreams. At that time, I was also reading the seventh chapter of The Silva Mind Control Method entitled Creative Sleep, where Jose Silva discusses how to train your subconscious to deliver answers to life’s more challenging questions.

While meditating just before going to sleep, say, “I want to remember a dream. I will remember a dream.” Now, go to sleep with paper and pencil by your bedside. When you awaken, whether during the night or in the morning, write down what you remember of a dream. Keep practicing this night after night and your recall will be clearer, more complete. When you are satisfied with your improved skill, you are ready for step two:

During meditation before going to sleep, review a problem that can be solved with information or advice. Be sure that you really care about solving it; silly questions evoke silly answers. Now, program yourself with these words: “I want to have a dream that will contain information to solve the problem I have in mind. I will have such a dream, remember it, and understand it.”

When you awaken during the night or in the morning, review the dream you recall most vividly and search it for meaning.

By combining Smoley’s “remembering the day” with Silva’s focused intention on a problem, I discovered a powerful dream tool to tap hidden levels of understanding beyond my conscious threshold.

Receiving and remembering dream answers from my subconscious was only the beginning because the answers arrived encrypted in symbolism and metaphor.

Analogies are the language of consciousness, which is one of the reasons as sentient beings that we love stories so much. Our dreams possess a unique set of symbols that convey our underlying emotional states. Author Jeffrey Burton Russell’s quote on metaphor is equally true of our psyche’s attempts to comprehend life’s deeper meaning through dream imagery.

“As the sign of a deeper truth, metaphor was close to sacrament. Because the vastness and richness of reality cannot be expressed by the overt sense of a statement alone.”

When I used to wait tables during and after college, one of the most stressful shifts I can remember was New Years’ Day. First, four-to-five people called in sick with hangovers, which left me running a station of twenty tables. Then, we began running out of everything on the menu to top it off.

My dreams now use restaurant scenes to convey stress. However, to decipher how my subconscious registers the origin of the stress requires knowing myself and paying attention to small details within the restaurant’s setting.

For example, when I am a patron in a restaurant, it tells me that my subconscious is aware of stress around me, but it doesn’t feel its impact directly. Sometimes, while waiting tables in the dream, I may struggle to froth a cappuccino perfectly, an indicator my subconscious is concerned with the details of a project rather than the general stressors of life.

It takes time to connect the dots and learn the language of your psyche. There is no manual as certain classic archetypes may mean one thing to you and something entirely different to someone else. You must discover your own dream language through trial and error. As psychologist William James might say were he alive today, “Dream interpretation is true if it is useful.”

Give it a shot, let me know how it goes, and comment with any other tricks you’ve found helpful while dreaming!