DREAM PILLOW

SLEEP ON IT!

Henry Reed

 

 

Do you have a problem or a difficult decision to make? As the saying goes, "Sleep on it!" Why do we say that? The saying does suggest, certainly, that during the night a dream, remembered or not, may resolve the problem or clarify the decision making. But why sleep on it? There does seem to be a literal aspect to the suggestion, as evidenced in some traditional practices. For example, there is the tradition that suggests that if a maiden sleeps with a piece of someone's wedding cake under her pillow she will dream of her own future husband. Another example comes from an article in Time magazine (September 20,1976, pp. 94-5), where it was noted that when the Dalai Lama performed the three-day ritual of the "Sermon of the Wheel of Time," he gave each of his disciples two reeds to sleep on, one for under the pillow and one for under the mattress. He requested that they remember their dreams so that he could interpret them as part of the ceremony. Adopting a similar custom, we have been encouraging participating subscribers to the Community Dream Journal to place a letter to their dreams under their pillows, asking their dreams to comment on Sundance. We have received many interesting dreams as a result. Of course, not everyone actually put something under his pillow to obtain the dream, but many people did. Believing in the practice isn't necessarily the most important ingredient in making it work. Several subscribers indicated that they thought the suggestion to sleep on a pillow-letter to be a silly idea, but, trying it anyway, they found that it worked! If it works, then how and why it works remains unclear.

A few years ago, a friend gave me a "dream pillow." It was stuffed with the herb, mugwort. I was told that mugwort would   produce   interesting   dreams.   Some  time  later,    I