nderf

Several years ago I had a series of nightmares, involving the subject of the unknown. In one I was pursued by a Greyhound bus and scrambled down an embankment, to have the vehicle charge down the slope, with its headlights beaming (I am into flying saucers in a big way and saw this as a UFO abduction scenario); I woke up screaming. Another involved me being in a 'U' shaped building, with my wife in one wing and me in another and a corridor between. Suddenly but very slowly the door behind me started to creep open, revealing nothing but a dark, empty space (yes, you guessed it, I woke screaming). A third dream involved me being in my old family home, in the kitchen, when the back door slowly crept open, revealing nothing again (woke burbling as I was in sleep paralysis stage and couldn't utter any other sound - in my childhood I had another instance of this and eventually got out of bed and dozed outside my parents bedroom, before going back to bed). A fourth dream involved the same scene but I had my old dog with me from present time and it warned me that someone was at the front door. Again it crept slowly open to reveal nothing but darkness. I think the symbolism here is simply fear of the unknown. When I attended the Leeds UFO conference, I mentioned these dreams to John Mack, the well known psychologist

Are you familiar with Carl Jung? I think you’d find his book “Man and his symbols” pretty interesting. he talks about symbols and dreams, and i believe he had an nde too

I'd heard that about him too. I haven't read the book but I do know of him and use a lot of his terminology on another site I belong to as it helps understand the mind in relation to the spirit (see Accumulation / Discharge Cycle material, when I get round to posting it and also the work of Lindsay Gibson, the psychologist who talks about immature and mature adults, using her own clinical work and that of other psychologists in the field, to disclose the obvious differences, which like Eric Berne's Games People Play displays mind games used to control others)