Understanding Your Dreams with Pearl Gregor, Phd. | EP005

Jo-Anne Kobylka: Good day everyone. This podcast is about what dreams what our dreams can tell us. I have Pearl Gregor with me today, Earl. If you like it, we can give me a casual introduction to who you are and how you got into dream work.

Pearl Gregor Phd.: Oh my God into dreams. Wow, who am I, I'm a I'm a dream coach for beginning. I'm a mother, a grandmother, a farmer I worked in was involved education, I ended up teaching at the university when I did my doctorate that's quite recent, an allready person, I'm 78 years old. So I still work at my my passion in life, which is to work with dreams. That's basically who I am and what I'm doing.

Jo-Anne Kobylka: So what have you learned through your own experiences, and the experiences of others about dreams?

Pearl Gregor Phd.: While I've learned a whole lot about dreams, that would take me hours to tell you. But I can start with why learn begin with and that very few people understand their dreams. And it takes a long time to work with your dreams. And it takes a long time to actually understand what a dream means. It took me years to understand the depth of my first dream. That depth took me way back to childhood, and carries on today, it still informs the life I live today. What I find is people don't know a lot about symbolism. They take their dreams often, quite literally. And that's real hard to do. But that's what we do. And we don't understand that dreams don't come to tell us what we already know. They come to unfixed our fixed positions. They unhinge where we're where we believe what we believe today, we're supposed to often change what we believe in. But we don't often make that change until we're weird. Maybe it's too late. And we learn to better experience that we should have changed our belief a long time ago. What else have I learned about dreams? While I've learned that? Dreams are often misunderstood that we don't understand symbolism. that dreams are not a prophetic. It's going to happen in the future. Very often people think their dreams are telling them what's going to happen in the future. But they're really not. They're more often telling us what's happening today. People think that their dreams come from all well I watched a television show last night the dream was set in a television show. But doesn't mean that was ever came the television show just prompted your dream. Your dream is not about the television show, or whatever you were doing yesterday, the dreams used our the setting for our dream to get our attention. It was obviously something you thought important when you're listening to the TV. And so the dream uses that to get your attention. Otherwise, you might ignore the dream completely. Another thing that probably teaches you is that dreams do not come to you on behalf of anyone else. Very seldom you do you dream for someone else, you're dreaming, maybe someone else comes up in your dreams, but it really is referring to you. And that's a part of who you really are. So when you think about a person who's in your dreams, and you think about what you like or dislike about that person, you're thinking about yourself, it's what you project on to others. That's really coming through in that dream. How do you think about that other person, that's yourself. So when you really like a person, that's probably an important part of yourself, that you not recognizing that other people really like about you. It could be a very special characteristic about yourself that you're not paying attention to. Maybe it's a gift that you have that you're not learning much from and you're not actually fulfilling that gift. So that's what we're why we dream about other people is to talk to us about who we are really, and some something else that we learned that nightmares are an open letter to ourselves. Nightmares are very important. I lived with nightmares from the age of nine to 43. Those nightmares were trying to tell me that I was ignoring the what the nightmare was trying to tell me. It kept recurring and recurring. Anything that recurs in your dream is telling you what, what you're supposed to be paying attention to. Not just something random. It's a nightmare. It's not just a random nightmare. You never say to a child, it's just a nightmare. You ask that child to draw a picture of the nightmare, or to tell you a story about the nightmare. They may not recognize it's about themselves. My nightmare was about the healing that I needed to do. He was telling me that I had a huge scar on my being. It was a scarred face that I ran from Iran from around from around from because I needed to stop, turn around and say what do you want? I've used that technique with my grandchildren more than once. When you have a nightmare you you sit down with grandma and you think about that nightmare. You imagine that it's returning and they don't want to do that. You say no the Grandma's here. Don't worry about it. You'll be fine. One of my grandsons was dreaming of a car Nobody that was chasing him. And he just had surgery for tonsillitis or for his tonsils having them removed. When he when I finally convinced him that he could just stop and ask that nightmare to come back. And he could turn around and say to the coyote, what do you want. And he did that and his eyes popped open. He said, Grandma, you told me, he came to bring me via my voice back. That's what the dream was telling him was, the nightmare was telling them. And it wasn't about a cave that had been chasing him around in in the past who before that, or he thought the coyote was chasing him, it wasn't really chasing him, it was just a coyote that was running across the field. So the child became afraid of that coyote, and it showed up in his dreams, and was chasing him in his dreams. But it was really about bringing him his voice. Carl Jung tells a story about a man who, who was having he didn't want to get up in front of people and give talks, he was a famous nuclear physicist, and was often called upon to give talks, but he would just hate the whole scene. And he had a terrible time with it. So So you only said you want to go back into your nightmare. So he finally agreed he would do that. Then when he got back to that nightmare, he turned around and said, he wants to he says he's a lion, he's come to give me my voice. So that's a pretty important thing for a nuclear physicist to dream about, are gonna have a nightmare have already had to go back into the nightmare to find out what it really was trying to tell them. So those are just some of the things I've learned about dreams.

Jo-Anne Kobylka: That's very, that's very interesting, because I would think the tendency for most of us would not want to go back to that dream. And to just close that door.

Pearl Gregor Phd.: Yeah.

Jo-Anne Kobylka: So can you give me a couple more examples, that how may dream work as assisted you in your own personal energy.

Pearl Gregor Phd.: In my own energy, while I'm making some a really important dream, my energy is through the roof, I can tell you about my first dream, and I woke from that dream. I was beside myself, my energy was so high, I had to immediately look for the meaning of that dream. I hadn't a clue for months what that dream really meant, till I went to a meditation and learned what it meant. But that was months after the dream. Another dream I had was called the Eleusinian mysteries. I don't know how many of you've ever heard of the LSAT and mysteries. But I dreamed of this. And it was a dream that I had a night after I did a dream workshop, where we did a hand washing ritual, a group of women, and we stood in a circle. And we watched each other's hands and told him, the other person what we were most grateful for about that person. And I had that dream that night, because a circle of women is a very important event in our lives, women create a circle as a symbol of their wholeness. So I had created this circle, and we were washing each other's hands. And we went through this process of a ritual with this. And I dreamt that night of the LLC and mysteries. I had never heard of Palestinian mysteries before. And when I woke up from that dream, the thing that woke me up, I was saying to myself, I am for the very first time glad that I'm a woman. That was a big step. For me, I had avoided being a woman my whole life, because of what happened to me in early childhood. I had to go looking in dozens of books. Everywhere I went, I was looking for the LSAT and mysteries. Finally I came to them. It was an ancient women's ritual. They're where they got together to heal each other. And that's what we were doing in that dream workshop was to heal each other. And so that mystery that mysteries came through to me, they were written about in Greek times, they didn't come to an end until the church ended them in the fourth century, the church declared this kind of women's ritual, because it was a belief in reincarnation as well. The women believed in death, rebirth and birth, death, rebirth. And that was considered reincarnation and the church outlawed that so they stopped these women for meeting in their groups. And so this was a mystery to me. I'd never heard of it before I read it in Mary Daly's book called when God was a woman. And I've, that's when I found it the first time, the Eleusinian mysteries, I woke up from that dream so damn full of energy, I could fly. So that's just a couple of dreams that they will change your whole energy. They'll change how your body, how your body is working, they will change many things in you, especially those important are archetypal dreams. That was an archetypal dream. That dream doesn't just come for no reason. It comes to you remember the rest of your life. You have a dream that you remember your whole life. You use an archetypal dream. It's a universal dream.

Jo-Anne Kobylka: That is so interesting. And I have read Mary Daly is some of very dailies work at her books that I could, you know, I can really understand but for other women to understand that it was something that we wouldn't have known that in the fourth century of after credit after the death of Christ, the Christian church said, Oh, we can't have that. Oh, Um, you know, and banned it because often women feel that it's hard to be within the church because there are certain things that they're not supposed to do. And so this for me, it's really uplifting, that you had such a dream and believe you could do it, and it would be very freeing, and I can just even feel the tingling in my body now of energy of saying, Yes, this, you know, it is time that we have done, do this kind of ritual for group of women in a circle, and whatever you know, they get from that is a higher being of themselves that vibration, that energy. Yeah,

Pearl Gregor Phd.: I was filled with that vibration for many, many years, when I was especially at the height of my intense dream work, I spent seven years doing intense dream work. And that was it took seven years to actually fully heal. From where I started and into December 8 1988, it took a good seven years before I was actually I could consider that I had actually completed the inner healing that cycle of inner healing. I've done cycles since then, where we kind of live our lives in seven year cycles, you can tell when a cycle begins and ends. If you look carefully, like I didn't rule her about it, you soon realize that was an end of a cycle. And you finish right there, and you stop and you start a new cycle is that birth, death rebirth cycle again, an idea that lives and dies. Yes, death in a in a dream doesn't mean you're going to die. either. That's taking it literally, what it means is a death of an idea, a pregnancy means or an idea is being just aged. And that's a very important dream to have elderly women in their mid 80s might have a dream of being pregnant, and they will follow me and say, I dream I'm pregnant, how's that possible? It's not possible, you're not pregnant, you're not going to be pregnant, even 50 year old women are not wanting to be pregnant, it's about getting an idea, you're starting a new project, perhaps, and you have to live this project through, it's going to take nine months to live it through, then it's going to be a born project. And then you have to grow that project up. All kinds of dreams tell us a big amount of symbolism.

Jo-Anne Kobylka: Yes, and that's, you know, and that's often what I wouldn't mind business is called ConnectED transitions is understanding that we go through transitions in life, many of them, and, and, and some come to the end of that transition, and you move on to the next one. And it's like being it's like being pregnant yet. I think while now where I'm going. And then all of a sudden, you figure out a couple of months later, oh, this is now what I'm supposed to be doing. So very interesting. This, that dream work, just so much connects in with our own transitions and our own personal energy that we we have now can you tell your listeners about that aging into the shadow culture?

Pearl Gregor Phd.: Well, that's an interesting concept. That whole notion of aging is very interesting. And I'm reading a book about it right now, that talks about going from role to soul. And that book talks about our own personal shadow we take into aging. And it also talks about the cultural shadow that we're faced with, we don't recognize our own shadow side as as normal people, we don't recognize we even have a shadow side. But a cultural shadowside is even more difficult to recognize, you'll find it in a group of people that are talking on Alberdi. And I know that it's very easy to become totally invisible to a group of young people. They don't even see that you're there. Unless you're an elder who's grown into your own wisdom. But elders often tried to stay young. They use anti wrinkle cream from the time they're 14 years old. You can go to a store and you'll find out all kinds of ads for anti wrinkle cream. And you'll notice that the clerk is she'll tell you how good it is. And she's no more than a day over 25 You know very well, she's not going to have a wrinkle. And if she does have one, it's going to be a natural wrinkle. You're not going to prevent it. But that's we spend millions of dollars in the makeup industry trying to stay young. That's called the cultural shadow. We don't even realize we're doing it and it's not a necessary thing to do. I avoided anti wrinkle cream most of my life. I have wrinkles, but they're part of what I've earned. I've earned every minute of my old age, and I intend to live it out quite happily. The other thing that we have against old ages getting gray hair, how many women are dyeing their hair from the year I was invited to start dyeing my hair when I was 16. I had a streak of white. I told the hairdresser nevermind it's not important. My brother hit me with a hammer, which wasn't necessarily true. But I had six brothers and so that was passed off as truth quite easily. So that's a culprit of cultural aging is we're expected to keep our hair dyed. We're expected not to have wrinkles, we're expected to do things like walk a marathon or 90. That's, that's not being elderly, that's attempting to remain young. There's nothing wrong with being physically fit. There's nothing wrong with having no wrinkles is the idea that it's an expectation. Once it becomes an accepted thing about being an elder, it becomes an expectation. That's the part of the cultural shadow of elderly being an aging person. And you become invisible, just automatically, the doctors will try to tell you when the day you turn 40 That you're in middle middle life. And our I was 30, when they first said, your, well, you have to expect this, you're getting into your middle years, you don't have to expect anything. When you're 30, you can expect to be just a normal living person who's living out your daily, whatever you need to do. That's part of the cultural shattering. There's this expectation that when you're elderly, you can't do anything. We put people in nursing homes, for crying out loud in our culture, they don't belong in a nursing home, they belong at home being looked after by the younger people. That's what I would say that's how many cultures deal with aging. They deal with aging as though they're they're all elderly were important people, they don't put them away where they can't even be seen by many people. And it's an expectation it's a cultural shadow. People expect now that I believe my farm because I'm 78 years old. What is age got to do with my leaving my farm. It has nothing to do with it. It's whether I can handle my farm or not. It's a cultural expectation that the minute you're widowed, you need to move somewhere. How many women sell their houses within the first year. And they should never do that. Because that first year widowhood, you don't know what you're supposed to be doing, you're still living upside down because you're on your own and you're living a different life. So that's just a part of that cultural shadow. Connie's week writes quite, I've just joined up to she, her book is the one I mentioned, from, from aging from Soul roll to soul. That's where you, you shed your identity. And being a teacher when you retire. Retirement is is entering that elder an elder in yours, but you don't have to suddenly become wheelchair bound or being unable to do things. Because you're getting Alberty, you can do as many things as you're capable of doing. You just don't have to do it, because it's an expectation. That's the difference.

Jo-Anne Kobylka: That is so true with our culture. And, you know, I often think some of my friends that are of Chinese background, that they have three generations living in a household. Right, and it's, you know, it's most acceptable that way, or we have our indigenous people, they have generations, and they say they've only got about 15 people living in that same house. Well, if you look at how many it doesn't really many matter how many people it is the generations that they have when they take care of each other. And it is so important.

Pearl Gregor Phd.: And that's an expectation that they have of their elderly that they're not going to be put out on a nice fall like some some small cultures will do the ancient myths put the elderly out on a on an ice floe. And that's what was expected. We use the same thing only we don't use the nice rule, we use a nursing home. Yes, we tuck them away, they're in there. And even dementia, people are locked away St. Dymphna had had or had an a culture in Belgium where she grew up. And they there they have small town developed. That's just for people who are handicapped, severely mentally handicapped. They live there, and they go about their daily business as though they were normal. And they are normal in that culture is not something that you disappear, the minute it gets too much white hair or gets to decrepid. You don't weigh in, put them away in a nursing home.

Jo-Anne Kobylka: They have, we have so much to learn from the wisdom of people that may be mentally physically elderly, you know, and then go back to the indigenous people. They're trying to reclaim their roots and the stories. Yeah, and I think and I think that is so important that we do that. And I often find my nieces and nephews will ask me something about my mom, which was their grandmother. And I would because I know the stories I can tell retell the stories to them, because it's

Pearl Gregor Phd.: that you just identified a very important role of the elderly that's to keep the younger people in touch with the with the older generation. I mean, we are all stories. That's all we are as a group of stories. And that's what we're made up of and we tell our own stories and we tell our other stories. Particularly when we become older and wiser and we have time to sit in our chair. I never knew. I had very, very excellent elderly models in my lifetime. My grandmother when she was in her 80s, was visiting my family and some of the aunts and uncles were there visiting too. And Grandma was knitting in her in her rocking chair where she often comes out and she knit, she knit 50 pairs of mittens every year because she had 50 grandkids. Imagine having 50 grandkids today, if you have four, you're lucky. She had 50 of them. I don't know how often she considers herself lucky. But she did. She mittens for every kid. Anyway, that day she was listening to her brother or her kids talk about their kids. And it was the height of a nasty years in Alberta in the 80s. When many people went through some pretty tough times, the interest rates were sky high, higher than they are could be conceivably today. And she was listening to the stories of people talking about the young people didn't want to work and there was all these problems. And she said, as she rocked back and forth, you have to change with the times. And they all sat and they looked at her and listen to that so carefully. You have to change with the times. That person was already in her early age. And she knew that change was necessary. I had another elderly couple they were in their 40s When I lived with them, of course I was 22. And I thought they were getting old. They weren't getting old. They were getting into the early 80s. They big they were in their 90s I would my girlfriend and I took them golfing. And is Harold was the man's name. Bernice was his wife. And she was blind already. Anyway, Harold would line her up and say, remember the spruce trees 250 yards straight in front of you just hit that that no, the the green is right beside the Spruce Street, she would hit that ball within a few yards of that green every single time. And you knew that she was an excellent golfer. And when she was dying, she was 94 years old. And she was telling us that story. Do you remember when we went golfing? And I remember that story. So because the golfing was such an important part of who they were. And they were very elderly, they were still going golfing. So it's not unusual to be an active senior when it's expected. And that's when it becomes a problem. That's

Jo-Anne Kobylka: right. And that's so true. That's so true. And my grandmother was like that she was very active. And you know, I look at it as as people get older, they wisdom to share because have gone through more experiences. And I know that in Saskatoon, they had a grade six class and one of the public school, they would have school every day at this seniors extended camp place. And at the end of grade six, they had done all their work with the seniors and everything else. And they said, Can we come back next year. And they were going into junior high, which was grade seven here in Canada. So you know, there, they got conditioned to it? And they said no, we have another grade six class coming in. But they said we want to come back. And whether or not the children did come back? I don't know because they never passed on it. But I think it opened their eyes. It really opened their eyes to the Wisdom

Pearl Gregor Phd.: does it opens her eyes to the wisdom of the elderly. That's the most important thing we can do is to not no longer identify as the career we had, but as the person we are today.

Jo-Anne Kobylka: That is That is right. So it's our last my questions. Here we go. I just want to you know, thank you, Pearl. for coming today. I think we need we'll probably have to do another podcast sometime. So we can go a little deeper. And I think our our people listening would probably like that to happen. So if you could just give us your email, a website, a phone number where people can look you up. And if they want to know more about you, then they can get in contact with

Pearl Gregor Phd.: you. They can find me on my social media on Facebook. I'm on Facebook at PC Gregor. I have dreams along the way site on Facebook as well. I don't often post much there. But I'm posting a little more these days. I have a website where I have a lot of stories of dreams and dream work. I have every podcast that I've ever done. I've done several from the first book that I published in 2018. I was invited to a podcast right after I published the book now is on there. I've got a number of accounts that are on there and some that are your videos as well. And my Facebook or pardon me My website is www dot dreams along the way.com Dreams along the way. Everything I do comes under that label of dreams along the way. Even my Facebook pages called dreams along the way. So you can find me you can like me there and now then that'll mean you get every email that I send out. You can go to LinkedIn which is that easy. Just type In my name, Pearl Gregor author PhD that will do it. And or you can go to Instagram Pearl Gregor as well. You can go on Amazon and find the books I've written about dreams. There's three books there that told my depression, my early depression and how I healed that through dreams and journaling and prayer and meditation. Those are important aspects of who I am today. My books are called a journey to the either women plant the tree, a journey to do the feminine through dreams. Another one is called authoring self, which is about how you come into your own self when you're shedding your shredded soul of how because I was molested as a pre verbal child. That was the first thing I learned when I started my dream work. My dream work is about the descent to Anana. I made that descent through my dreams. And the third book is called The cauldron on the feminine. They're all available on Amazon, I have a dream journal there as well. The last thing that I'll tell you about is the dream of circles I operate, I operate, you can join the next one, which is in September, it'll be published on my website and to my Facebook page. And you can follow me at 780-941-2106. If you didn't catch that, that's 941 2106 780 the preface and that that way you can talk to me on dreams, I'll give a half hour free consultation to anyone who wants to join a dream session with me. And you can have a consultation so you can decide if you really want to join the Dream circles or not. There are a group of women are on man, one man, every time we meet on Friday at noon or on Friday, Tuesday at 730 in the evening. And we meet for an hour and a half each time. And we each time we meet we're in circle on Zoom. And everybody can bring a dream and discuss it with the group. There's wisdom in the group a lot of wisdom because you share ideas around what that dream could mean for you. You never give any advice in that circle. So you will come getting free therapy are free advice because we're not therapists and we're not advice givers. We're dreamers and we work with our own dreams and goals in yourself. I often do an introduction to the day or two the evening the circle by doing a meditation with people. But that set you set you up for dream work and the discussion that follows with that. So Thank you Jo-Anne for inviting me to come and do this podcast with you.

Jo-Anne Kobylka: Well, thank you Pearl. I have thoroughly enjoyed this and we will get in touch with each other once again remember this is on the podcast. You've got the power. See you next time. Take care