11 - Cayce’s Home Remedies

One Sunday I was having dinner with friends in New Jersey, about an hour’s ride from New York City.

There were several people at the table, and somebody had been talking of making a trip to Europe.

“Be sure to take a bottle of Cayce’s seasick drops,” a middle-aged man said. His wife nodded her emphasis. “We never travel without them,” she said. “They are even more useful than Cayce suggested. In New Orleans recently, Al”—here she turned to her husband—“Al felt some distress after overeating, and the thought of getting on the plane made him want to cancel out. He took the drops, and the nausea disappeared.”

I looked up politely.

“Where do you get these drops?”
“We make them ourselves, from the Cayce formula,” Barbara Anton said.

“We’ve given them to twenty of our friends.” She laughed.

“The kind of people who turn green just looking at a boat have found an end to all their dread about ocean travel, and the same with air or car sickness.”

The drops were a first-aid must. But there was still another substance they wouldn’t travel without. This was a mild antiseptic known as Glyco-Thymoline. Cayce had recommended this for all sorts of packs, douches, and gargles. The husband, Al Anton, a jeweler, rubbed his hands over his eyes.

“Sometimes, I’ve felt as if my eyes were coming out of their sockets. Three parts of distilled water with one part of Glyco-Thymoline, in cotton pads applied to the eyes for five to ten minutes, and all the ache, sting, and smart goes out. It’s amazing.”

The rest of the company had looked up with interest. A man sitting down the table from me put in,

“And don’t forget the witch hazel for athlete’s foot. There’s nothing better; Cayce certainly knew what he was talking about.”

How could so many home remedies be put to practical application so long after Cayce’s death?

“That’s the easiest part of it,” our host spoke up. “Haven’t you heard of the famous black book? It’s all there, clarified, collated, and indexed, for anybody that wants it.”

The black book consisted of extracts from diverse readings. Everything from baldness to stuttering was represented, with tips on how these conditions could be helped. The book was brought out, and I dutifully leafed through it, turning to Gly-co-Thymoline, and its various uses.

“What should be done to relieve my eyes?” somebody had asked thirty years before. And Cayce had replied, “Bathe them with a weak Glyco-Thymoline solution. Use an eye-cup, two parts of distilled water preferably, to one part of Glyco-Thymoline. This irritation is a part of the kidney disturbance that has come from the upsetting in the digestive forces.”

The conversation had become general, and another woman looked up with a sheepish grin.

“I don’t know if I should mention this in mixed company,” she said, “but a little Coca-Cola after the menstrual period does a lot toward getting me feeling better.”

I suddenly remembered. “But I thought Cayce disapproved of carbonated beverages.”

She smiled. “The Coca-Cola syrup is mixed with water.”

I thumbed through the big black book, to good old Coke. Cayce had recommended the drink for both men and women, for purifying the body. Apparently, it helped clear the system of toxics.

“Do take Coca-Cola occasionally as a drink, for the activity of the kidneys,” he told a twenty-nine-year-old woman, “but not with carbonated water. Buy or have the syrup prepared and add plain water to this. Take about one half-ounce or one ounce of the syrup and add plain water. This to be taken about every other day, with or without ice. This will aid in purifying the kidney activity and bladder and will be better for the body.”

Cayce hadn’t exactly recommended Coke as a steady diet.

By now, of course, nearly everybody was recalling some miraculous way that someone had been helped.

“This man I knew,” a woman said, “threw away his glasses after doing the head and neck exercise.”

There were exclamations of interest, and she continued. “He was suffering from eye-strain, and somebody mentioned doing this simple neck-rolling exercise a few times a day. His vision unproved to a point where the headaches left him and he threw his glasses away in a week.” It had all happened two years before, twenty years after Cayce’s death. I remembered now Gladys Davis telling me how a few simple neck rolls, advised in a reading, had helped her as a young woman to get rid of her reading glasses, not to return to glasses until she was fifty, though constantly doing close work.

Again I skimmed through the black book.

“How can I improve my vision?” a fifty-four-year-old woman had asked Cayce. “The head and neck exercise will be most helpful,” he said. “Take this regularly, each morning and each evening for six months, and we will see a great deal of difference.” He then described what seemed a simple Yoga exercise to an old Yogi like myself. “Sitting erect, bend the head forward three times, to the back three times, to the right side three times, to the left side three times, and then circle the head each way three times. Don’t hurry through with it, but take the time to do it. We will get results.”

For some, I noticed Cayce suggested a variation of this exercise, along with a brisk walk.

“Do the head and neck exercise in the open, as you walk for twenty to thirty minutes each morning. Now do not undertake it one morning and then say, ‘It rained and I couldn’t get out,’ or ‘I’ve got to go somewhere else.’”

I put the book aside. Between the conversation and the food, the table was heavily freighted. My hosts were health faddists and I had half-surmised they were vegetarians, organic vegetables at that. But, pleasantly, a thick, sizzling steak was brought on, set off with a variety of vegetables. As the meal ended, I mentioned my surprise that they were meat-eaters.

My host laughed.

“Actually,” he said, “we follow what might be called the Cayce normal diet. Pork was about the only meat he was dead set against. He was for a little of everything in moderation, favoring a well-balanced diet full of natural vitamins. He didn’t believe much in the synthetics. He was full of surprises. For instance, he felt that coffee, without milk or cream, was a food and not necessarily harmful. With milk, it formed a leathery substance inside the stomach, he said, and it was better taken alone than with a meal.”

He reached for the black book, and turned to coffee.

“Coffee,” Cayce said, “is a stimulant to the nerve system. The dross from coffee is caffeine which is not digestible in the system. When caffeine is allowed to remain in the colon, poisons are thrown off from it. If it is eliminated, as it is in this individual, coffee is a food and is preferable to many stimulants.”

My host had made a study of Cayce’s dietary advice.

“It wasn’t only what he prescribed, but the way he felt foods should be consumed. The person should always be relaxed at the table, or the meal would become almost immediately toxic. As a digestive aid, he recommended a glass of warm water on rising. Not so hot that it is objectionable, not so tepid that it makes for sickening, but this will clarify the system of poisons. Occasionally, a pinch of salt should be added to this draught of water.”

It seemed to me that we were getting a little afield. What was the perfect diet? My host shrugged.

“Even Cayce varied it for the individual. and his individual needs. He was great for the shellfish with their natural iodines, as he felt they toned up the thyroid, and he recommended the lighter meats, fish, fowl, lamb, fresh vegetables, and fruits.”

This was not at all unusual in the current nutrition-conscious period, but Cayce had been advocating this fifty years ago, when hogs, hominy, and grits made pellagra epidemic in the South.

At times, Cayce outlined an ideal diet, as he did for a six-year-old girl.

“Mornings: whole grain cereals, or citrus fruits, but these never taken at the same meal; rather alternate these, using one on one day and the other the next. Any form of rice cakes or the like, the yolk of eggs.

Noons: some fresh raw vegetable salad. Soups with brown bread, broths or such.

Evenings: a well-coordinated vegetable diet, with three vegetables above the ground to one below the ground. Seafood, fowl, or lamb; not other types of meat Gelatin may be prepared with any of the vegetables, as in the salads for the noon meal, or with milk and cream dishes.”

Cayce ruled out fried foods, preferring the roasted, broiled, or boiled. He didn’t vary the normal diet much for adults, but stressed the seafoods twice a week, particularly clams, oysters, shrimp, or lobster.

“The oyster or clam should be taken raw if possible, while having the others prepared through roasting or boiling with the use of butter.”

He advocated “foods of the blood-building type once or twice a week—pig’s knuckles, tripe, and calves liver, or those meats of brains and the like.”

He was definitely no vegetarian, for specifying certain vegetables and fruits, he stressed,

“These foods with the occasional eating of sufficient meat for strength, would bring a well-balanced diet” I found the diet business rather tedious, but my host observed, “Cayce never believed that you are only what you eat, but rather what your body does with what you eat, and what you do with your body and mind.”

My host, on the portly side, had tried one of Cayce’s special diets, raw apples, for reducing. After three days of all the apples he wanted, he had dropped twelve pounds, and was well on his way to pruning off a desired twenty pounds.

“There’s something about the apples that pulls the water out of the system,” he said.

His diet had been topped off each night with a couple of tablespoonfuls of olive oil, for cleansing.

I wondered what kind of apples he had eaten.

“Golden, red, purple, Mclntosh, Delicious, Baldwin, Northern Spy. I kept mixing them up, but they were still apples.”
Hadn’t he gotten weak or hungry?
“All I had to do was eat another apple.”

Cayce was the answer to the cigarette manufacturer’s current nightmare over cancer. He said that moderate cigarette-smoking—five or six cigarettes a day—never hurt anybody, and he was an inveterate smoker himself. They relaxed him.

He saw no harm in an occasional drink, but said wine was the only alcoholic drink actually helpful.

“Wine is good for all, if taken alone, or with black or brown bread. Not with meat so much as with just bread. This may be taken between meals, or as a meal, but not too much, and just once a day. Red wine only.”

Eventually, the dinner party broke up, all agreeing that Cayce was affecting more people’s well-being today than he had even while alive.

As the others drifted off, I retired to my room with the precious black book. I thumbed through the index, stopping at asthma. A dear friend had a child suffering from this affliction. What could Cayce do for it?

Here was a girl, thirteen, whose mother had written, “The asthma has bothered her two and a half years.”

Cayce was as specific as gravity.

“For the asthmatic condition,” he said, “have those properties made into an inhalant. To four ounces of pure grain alcohol (not 85%, but pure grain, 190 proof) add: oil of eucalyptus, twenty drops; benzol, ten drops; oil of turpentine, five drops; tolu in solution, forty drops; tincture of benzoin, five drops. Keep in a container at least twice the size, or an eight ounce bottle with a glass cork. Shake solution together and inhale deep into the lungs and bronchi, two or three times a day.”

Under attitudes and emotions, to which I next turned, Cayce translated a whole course in psychosomatic medicine into a few simple paragraphs. My host, a well-known healer himself, had marked the margin,

“Here is the root of nearly all illness—Cayce was a generation ahead of his time.”

I read where Cayce told a man whose simmering resentments had affected his health:

“Attitudes oft influence the physical conditions of the body. No one can hate his neighbor and not have stomach or liver trouble. No one can be jealous and allow the anger of same and not have upset digestion or heart disorder. Neither of these disorders is present here, and yet those attitudes have much to do with the accumulations which have come gradually, tendencies towards neuritic-arthritic reactions.”

It was all part of an emotional backwash, hindering the healthy flow of glands, blood, lymph, and nerves.

“Stiffness at times is indicated in the locomotories; a nausea, or upsetting of the digestive system; headaches seem to arise from a disturbance between liver and the kidneys themselves, though usually the setting up of better eliminations causes these to be eased.”

All these were symptoms, not cause. Then came the crux of all Cayce healing,

“There is within self all healing that may be accomplished for the body. For all healing must come from the Divine. For who healeth thy diseases? The source of the universal supply.”

He put it all on the individual and his outlook.

“How well do you wish to be? Are you willing to coordinate with the Divine influences which may work in and through you by stimulating the centers latent with nature’s activities? For all of these forces must come from the one source, and the applications are merely to stimulate the atoms of the body. For each cell is as a representative of a universe in itself.”

From my own Yoga, I knew pretty well what Cayce was saying. With Yoga had come a new positive state of mind, a freedom from illness, a reliance on strength. Pains, aches, colds disappeared. The head and neck rolls, similar to those advocated by Cayce, had dissolved an arthritic stiffness in my neck resulting from a whiplash injury. In my new tranquillity, I was more tolerant, less critical, more productive and energetic. Nearing fifty, I was keenly aware of a well-being I had never known before. Each cell of my being seemed proudly confident of its ability to maintain its integrity. A Virginia Beach physician, viewing a brief Yoga demonstration, had observed, “You can stave off the inevitable but eventually you will need a doctor.”

And the Yogi had replied with equal conviction, “Only for the death certificate.” He was sure of his health, for he drew on the universal supply. Still skimming through the black book, I came upon the heading baldness. It appeared to me that if Cayce could have cured baldness, he could have named his own price and never gone without Yet, there were some who insisted the readings had halted premature loss of hair. Cayce’s advice on hairgrooming had chiefly helped those whose hair loss was sudden, indicating some striking deficiency in body chemistry.

A twenty-six-year-old youth had turned desperately to Cayce.

“Is there any chance of restoring my hair? I am the only one of six brothers who is going bald.”

“Yes,” Cayce replied. “There is a lack of activity of the glands in the thyroid areas. This causes a weakness in the activities to nails and hair over the body.”

The treatment was sweeping.

“We would take small dose of Atomidine to purify the thyroid activity. Take one drop each morning for five days in succession. Then leave off for five days. During that period give the scalp a thorough massage with crude oil, using the electrically driven vibrator with suction applicator. This should be done very thoroughly, not hurriedly and should require at least thirty to forty minutes for the massage with the crude oil and then the application of white Vaseline and the vibrator again.

 

Then begin the first of the next week with the Atomidine, one drop each morning for five days. During the next five days (now the middle of the week) give another crude oil shampoo following with the white Vaseline and the vibrator treatment. Leave these off then for two weeks. Then have another complete series, but between each two series allow two weeks to elapse. Doing these, we will find that in six or eight months, it will begin to stimulate the activities for the growth of hair over the scalp and the body.

“Use the diets that carry iodine in their natural forms. Use only kelp salt or deep sea salt, plenty of seafoods. Not too much sweets. The egg yolk but not the white of egg should be taken. These will bring better conditions to the body.”

For another person with a dry scalp, losing his hair prematurely, he advised massaging the scalp once every twelve days with hog lard, allowing it to soak twenty minutes before washing it out with tepid water and a dandruff remover. He had several diet recommendations:

“Eat the soup from the peelings of Irish potatoes, take raw vegetables such as lettuce, celery, watercress, radishes, onions, mustard greens and all of those that may be prepared as salad and the like. Carrots will make better conditions in combination with these for the sparkle of the eye and the general vision.”

 

“What will thicken the hair?” somebody else asked.
 

“Massage the scalp with crude oil,” he replied, “cleansing it with a twenty percent solution of grain alcohol. This will thicken the hair and bring better conditions to the scalp.”

Cayce never completely lost his sense of humor.

“What should the individual now do,” he was asked, “to cause the hair to grow in the front of the forehead?”
“You won’t have much brains there, and hair, too,” he replied drily, but added seriously, “This may be assisted, though, by using any vapor rub, or the use of Listerine will keep the hair in a healthy normal condition.”
The same person asked again, “What causes the scalp to itch?”
“Irritation, produced by the accumulations in the system. The digestion is bad, and the nerves on edge. Use the Listerine twice a week on the hair.”

I had gone through much of the black book when my host dropped in for a good-night chat,

“I don’t want to run this into the ground,” he said, “but if there had been more Cayces around, a lot of doctors would be out of business. Take the common cold; nothing causes more misery and disruption than colds and flu, yet I haven’t had a cold in thirty years.”

I surveyed his robust figure appraisingly.

“Maybe your resistance is better than most.” He laughed. “Naturally, but I avoid the situations Cayce told me to avoid, and I keep alkaline. Cayce once suggested that people give themselves a litmus paper test. If they turned blue, they were all right. Pink, and they had an acid condition, usual forerunner of a cold.”

He picked up the black book, turning to Common Cold.

His finger stopped at “susceptibility.”

“A body,” he read, “is more susceptible to a cold with an excess of acidity. An alkalizing effect is destructive to the cold germ. An extra depletion of the vital energies produces a tendency for excess acidity. At such periods, if an individual comes in contact with one sneezing or suffering with cold, it is more easily contracted.”

The whole mechanics of cold causation were explored. Cayce went into drafts, sharp changes in temperature, unusual changes in clothing, wet feet

“All of these affect the circulation by the depletion of the body-balance, body-temperature, or body-equilibrium. Then if the body is tired, worn, overacid—or more rarely, overalkaline—it is more susceptible to a cold, as, too, from being in a warm room, overheated. When overheated there is less oxygen, which weakens the circulation of the lifegiving forces that are destructive to any germ or contagion.”

My host looked up pertly.

“I always keep my rooms cool, stay away from drafts, dress lightly during the winter, and don’t do any heavy eating or drinking that would turn my stomach acid. And no sweets—they’re the worst.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “You don’t have time to think of much else.”
He growled. “I don’t have tune to be sick.”

His mood changed. “You know, I knew Cayce quite well. He read for me a number of times. Generally, he would give me a life reading or advise me on business problems. I was seldom under the weather because I did maintain the hygiene he recommended.”

As we chatted, I recalled a learned doctor friend expounding on a recent theory that equalization of body temperature was important in forestalling colds. And yet here was Cayce saying a generation or so before:

“Much may also depend upon the body’s becoming immune to sudden temperature changes, by the use of clothing to equalize the pressure over the body. One that is often in the open and dresses according to general conditions, or the temperatures, will be less susceptible than one who bundles up too much.”

Vitamins, he said, could be used judiciously during the cold season, as a preventive, not after the infection had taken hold. “For that which may be helpful may also be harmful, if misapplied, whether by the conscious activity in a body or by an unconscious activity in the assimilating forces of the system.”
Analyzing body resistance, Cayce stressed that the system functioned as a unit, drawing on one area to shore up another; therefore it helped to have a natural reservoir of vitamins and minerals to tap in emergency.

My host explained,

“So often people get over their colds only to come down with a secondary infection, because they depleted themselves. That’s why Cayce stressed rest in the first days of a cold.”

To show how body repair works, Cayce used this analogy:

“If there is a bone fracture, the body of itself creates that element needed to knit this fracture or broken area. Yet it does not supply or build as much of such an element during the periods when the fracture does not exist. Hence when it exists, unless there is an abundant supply of that which is needed by or from that which is assimilated, other portions of the body will suffer.”

In treating a cold, there should be an over-all approach.

“One may get one’s feet wet and yet have a cold in the head, One may also get the head wet and still have a cold in the head.”

Cayce’s cold therapy would be generally accepted today.

“Do not attempt to go on, but rest. For there is the indication of an exhaustion somewhere, else the body would not have been susceptible.”

The victim’s vulnerability to secondary infection was explored.

“Then, too, the inflammation of the mucous membranes tends to weaken the body, so that there is the greater susceptibility in the weakened portions of the body throughout the special areas of influences of the lymph and the head, throat, lungs, intestinal system. If there has been an injury in any of the structural portions of the body, causing a weakness in those directions, there is a susceptibility for harmful effects from such a cold.”

Different colds were treated differently.

“In correcting a cold, determine where the weakness lies. Is it from lack of eliminations, which causes many ailments? Hence quantities of water, as well as an alkalizer, as well as a booster to assimilating forces, are beneficial toward producing a balance, so that the cold and its consequences may be the more readily eradicated.”

Cayce really hadn’t contributed much on colds that a sensible doctor wouldn’t. My host smiled.

“Cayce only knew the cures, when there was a cure. The system with a cold was a system run down; the cold, sniffles, sore throat, or what have you, was only the symptom, generally a warning signal.”

“You mean Cayce was like the doctor who let a cold develop into pneumonia so he could cure it?”

“Oh, Cayce could knock out a cold quickly, when the basic resistance was strong.”

He turned to a reading Cayce gave for a man with a heavy cold thirty years before. The subject was a New York industrialist, who didn’t give in easily to anything. His secretary had requested the reading, saying her boss was so choked up he couldn’t speak above a whisper.
 

Cayce got right to the remedy.

“Take first an eliminant, or about eighteen hundred drops [two bottles of Castoria] but not at once. Take it in very small doses, a half teaspoonful every half hour. After the first bottle has been taken in these proportions, then take the Turkish bath; first the sweats, then the salt rubs, then the alcohol rub after the oil rubs. Keep more of an alkaline diet. No white bread. Principally use fruit juices, and citrus fruit juices at that. A little coffee without cream may be taken as a stimulant or a little whiskey and soda later in the evening. The body should feel physically fit by morning.”

Apparently it worked. For here was the subject’s report tacked on to the reading.

“I felt miserable, but after taking the day’s rest and the bottle of Castoria, and the rubs, I could talk the next morning and was at work all day.”

The rubs had concentrated on the lower dorsal and lumbar area, though the cold manifested itself in the nose and throat. It was all the same body.
My host skimmed through the black book.

“Cayce told them how to look pretty, grow hair, clear up their kidneys, get rid of their migraines. But people hate to do anything about themselves. Women, for instance, just want to sit down in a chair and let somebody coat them with cosmetics, when essentially, real beauty stems out of good health.”

One brief passage illustrated Cayce’s attitude toward vanity.

“How can people avoid aging in appearance?” he was asked.
“The mind,” he replied drily.
The questioner, a thirty-two-year-old woman, persisted, “How can sagging facial muscles be avoided? How corrected?”
Cayce relented. “By massage and the use of those creams as indicated [Black and White Genuine] over the chin and throat, around the eyes and such conditions of sagging. Occasionally, the use of the Boncilla or mud packs would be very! good.”

He elaborated for a thirty-year-old woman,

“About twice a month the mud packs, face and neck, across the shoulders and upper portions about the neck; especially extending over the area of the thyroids, as an astringent and as a stimulation for better circulation throughout the system.”

Cayce had a special preparation for the girlish complexion and told a thirty-two-year-old woman, whose skin was beginning to dry, how to use it. The treatment amused my host.

“I know a dozen women who look ten years younger because of the preparation, and the exercise they get rubbing it into their skin,” he said with a chuckle.
“For a good complexion for the skin, the hands and arms and body as well,” Cayce said, “prepare a compound to use as a massage by self, at least once or twice a week. To six! ounces of peanut oil, add olive oil, two ounces; rose water, two ounces; dissolved lanolin, one tablespoonful. This would be used after a tepid bath in which the body has remained for at least fifteen to twenty minutes, giving the body then, during the bath, a thorough rub with any good soap, to stimulate the body forces. Sweetheart, or any good Castile soap, or Ivory, may be used.
“Afterwards, after shaking it well, massage with this solution, which will be sufficient for many times. Pour some in an open saucer, dipping fingers in same. Begin with the face, neck, shoulders, arms, and then the whole body would be I massaged thoroughly with the solution, especially in the area of the limbs, in the areas that are across the hips, across the diaphragm. This will not only keep a stimulating effect with other treatments (hydrotherapy, and osteopathy) taken occasionally, and give the body a good base for the stimulating of the superficial circulation, but the solution will aid in keeping the body beautiful, as to being free from any blemish of any nature.”

Topping this off, the tissues of the face could be patted, an act more beneficial, Cayce said, than any facial exercises.

My host handed back the black book. “Have you any friends with halitosis?” he said lightly. “I got rid of mine with Cayce.”
As I turned to Halitosis, he finally bade me good-night. “Don’t sleep too late,” he said cheerily.
“Cayce said mind and body develop from conscious stimulation of same.”

I wondered what Cayce had to say about what-best-friends-won’t-tell-you.

“The condition of halitosis,” he said, “is produced from the stomach and from the throat and larynx. In the blood supply, in the lungs proper, the body does not receive sufficient carbon. Hence the whole body is under strain at times and this interferes with the blood supply having sufficient properties to supply the organs in their functioning and in keeping coagulation effective in the system, where organs use the force and energy in their functioning. Hence, non-elimination often shows and through this same condition brings much of the condition exhibited in the intestines and stomach of the catarrhal condition.”

I had always thought of halitosis as something pertaining simply to the mouth, and here was Cayce again insisting that the body functioned as a unit, malfunctioning where outer circumstances and inner conditions combined to provoke a weakness.

The cure conformed with Cayce’s belief of over-all toughening.

“First take that which will give an incentive for correction in the body through the digestive organs, as well as through the mental reaction in the system.”

But there had to be other incentives. “Unless the body desires to improve itself, it will continue to enjoy poor health.”

The subject was a longtime hypochondriac. Elsewhere, he was more specific. “Get rid of bad breath by making better conditions in the eliminations. Take Glyco-Thymoline as an intestinal antiseptic, two, three times a day put six drops of Glyco-Thymoline in the drinking water.

“This is a condition of poisons being thrown off into the lungs [into the body forces] from the changing in cellular activity of lymph forces that become fecal.”

Hypochondria was something Cayce dealt with constantly, but he didn’t give, out placebos or coddle anyone. And though some doctors, without knowing his work, insisted that many of his cures came through the power of suggestion, they themselves acknowledged they had rarely, if ever, cured anybody with similar suggestion.

To Cayce, there was no incurable ailment; the patient had to be ready, and the therapist knowledgeable. He was familiar with incurable migraine headaches, and where many; thought these the result of a nervous, tense disposition, Cayce noted this was again only the symptom, not the cause. But even a Cayce could do little with long-sufferers who clung desperately to their illnesses, fancied or otherwise. Earlier that very day I had a long talk with a friend of forty-five or so who had complained proudly, I suspected, of migraine headaches for years. Ever since I had known her, she had used them as an excuse for long periods of bedrest, with her telephone off the receiver, and a cluster of pillboxes on her night table.

Recovered periodically from an attack, she would close her eyes and sigh,

 “I don’t see how I can ever go through another one.” Then she would look up and say brightly, “They’re incurable, don’t you know, and nobody knows what causes them—nobody.”

According to the black book, my migraine friend was wrong. Cayce seemed to know all about migraines, even to the sage advice,

“In the activities mentally, keep optimistic, even when everything goes wrong.”

There were several migraine cases, and all, I noted, stemmed not from pressures within the head, but the abdominal area.

“Most migraine headaches, as in this case,” Cayce said, “begin from congestions in the colon. These poison cause toxic conditions which make pressures on the sympathetic nerve centers and on the cerebrospinal system. And these pressures cause the violent headaches, and almost irrational activities at times. These should respond to colonic irrigations. But first, we would X-ray the colon and find area in the. ascending and transverse colon where there are fecal forces that are as cakes.”

I wondered if this was what was bothering my lady friend, and whether Cayce’s remedy would help.

“There will be required several full colonic irrigations, using salt and soda as purifiers for the colon; and we will find that these conditions will be released. The first cleansing solution should have two level teaspoonful of salt and one level teaspoonful of soda to the gallon of water, body-temperature. Also in the rinse-water, body-temperature, have at least two tablespoonfuls of Glyco-Thymoline to the quart and a half of water.”

Additionally, in his mass attack on disease, Cayce recommended the use of a radioactive appliance, along with an hour of meditation for self-analysis.

“Keep the attachment plates very clean, polishing them with the emery paper each time before attaching to the ankle and the wrist, and polishing them each time when taking them off.”

He also recommended osteopathic adjustments to relax the neck area, and in the sixth dorsal, the midback; and in the lower back, the lumbar axis.

“Do these,” Cayce said, “and we should bring help for this body.”

This particular migraine sufferer reminded me of my friend. She just wouldn’t recognize the possibility of a cure.
“Is any of this trouble due to allergy?” she asked.

I could almost see Cayce shrug in his sleep. “Some of it is due to allergy, but what is allergy? These are the effects of the imagination upon any influences that may react upon the olfactory or the sympathetic nerves. If we will cleanse the system as we find, we should bring better conditions.”

The subject apparently couldn’t believe that those terrible racking pains in his head came from another part of the anatomy.

“What mental factor,” he persisted, “is responsible for the disturbance to the subject’s head?”

Cayce was adamant

“Those pressures, as indicated, between sympathetic and cerebrospinal system, and these arise from condition in the colon. X-ray the colon, and you’ll find I made a mental note to Xerox the Migraine pages and present them to my friend the next time she proudly invoked her own incurable migraine. It might at least quiet her. I was about to close the black book when a flipping page stopped me. Menstruation. As one twicemarried, I had experienced the reflected agonies of woman’s periodic cramps and headaches until I felt somehow guilty that I was not similarly oppressed. Therefore, I read with more than normal curiosity what Cayce had to say.

“Please explain fully the reason for cramps at menstruation?” a sufferer asked. “Contraction of the uterus,” the admirably concise Cayce replied. “And this is caused by the muscular forces that supply nourishment to the ovarian channels and the Fallopian tubes. Hence, have those osteopathic relaxations and the general body-building conditions indicated, that would be necessary for correction.”

This didn’t seem at all difficult, once the woman concerned took the vitamin and iron supplements needed to balance out a diet deficiency.
Now came the second of the monsters—menstrual headaches. How many hapless males had suffered through these!

“Why are there headaches at the time of my monthly period?” a forty-year-old female queried. Cayce likened the cause to that of the migraines.

 “These are part of the clogging that is a part of the general eliminating system. There are channels or outlets for the eliminating of poisons, that is, used energies, where there is the effect the activity of the circulation upon foreign forces taken breath, taken in dust, taken in particles of food or those activities which come from such as these—from odors or the like. These all, by segregating of same in system, produce forces necessary to be eliminated.

We eliminate principally through the activity of the lungs, of course, and the perspiratory system, the alimentary canal, and the kidneys. Then, in the case of women, as here, we find that such periods the menstrual flow cause congestion in certain areas until flow is begun, or until there is the beginning of the let-up of same. This then, clogs some portions of the system. The headaches are the signs or warnings that eliminations are not being properly cared for.

Most of this, in this body, con from the alimentary canal and conditions that exist in portions of the colon itself, as to produce a pressure upon those centers affected from such periods. Hence the suggestion for the osteopathic corrections, which aid but which do not eliminate all of those conditions which are as accumulations through portions of the colon. Consequently, the colonic irrigations are necessary occasionally, as well as the general hydrotherapy and massage.”

Cayce apparently felt his subject needed more than physical advice, for he counseled, “Keep the mental attitude of a useful, purposeful life, using the abilities to be helpful to others.” In other words, stop complaining!

With some regret I put the black book away. But I did not forget it, not completely. A month later, my lady friend with the migraines phoned to complain about her inexplicable, incurable headaches. I suggested she would perhaps be interested in reading what Cayce had to say about migraine cure. She had read about Cayce and had been duly impressed by the reports of his wizardry. But now she seemed strangely reserved and skeptical.

“Cayce,” I pushed on, “said migraine could be cured if the sufferer cleaned himself out, got osteopathic adjustments of the spine, and improved general mental attitude. Would you care to see his report?”

The long-sufferer drew in her breath sharply.

“How ridiculous,” she cried. “Nobody can cure migraine, nobody.” As she rang oft, I recalled a line from the black book. What was it Cayce had said? Oh, yes, here it was: “For that builded, that held in the mental image of one, becomes the condition.”

And so it was.

In Cayce-land, another way of saying Virginia Beach, Cayce home remedies were as common as saying hello. Even the Geologist, in the midst of his earth changes, was familiar with some. “Every time the kids get pinworms, my wife grates some raw cabbage and feeds it to them, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. By bedtime, or the next morning, the pin-worms are gone.” The cabbage was all they took that day except for tea, also recommended.

“Cayce,” the Geologist observed, “said that one cabbage leaf killed a hundred thousand pinworms.”

Pokeweed was another great favorite of Cayce’s, and it was used regularly by the faithful as a purifier.

“Boil it up,” a Cayce follower said, “and it tastes better than spinach and Kale, while doing the work of sulphur and molasses.” He laughed. “It’s a funny thing, but at a meeting of the Virginia agricultural association recently, they told everybody how to grow more corn by killing the surrounding pokeweed, and the pokeweed will do you more good than the corn ever could.”

Wherever I turned in Cayce-land somebody seemed to be following Cayce. In one household, I noticed that steamed leaf lettuce and sliced raw tomatoes were practically dinner staples. The tomatoes, a hostess advised, were the richest of vegetables in vitamins.

Edgar Cayce had said so. As for the lettuce, it was served only in the evening for a very good reason.

“The effect is so immediately sedative that my husband falls asleep at the table.”

I was inclined to treat this lightly, until I read elsewhere that doctors abroad had just discovered that lettuce had narcotic effect, taken in quantity.
Many householders in the Tidewater belt around Virginia Beach were familiar with Cayce table tips.

“To lose weight the easy way,” a slimmed-down housewife reported, “merely take a half-glass of Welch’s natural grape juice a half-hour before each meal. It satisfies the body’s craving for sugar, and will break the habit of fattening desserts.”

This housewife also fancied gelatin salads, with such raw vegetables as watercress, celery, lettuce, tomatoes, carrots

“The gelatin,” she pointed out, “acts as a catalyst to increase natural absorption of vitamins in vegetables. Cayce said with the Knox gelatin the vitamin intake from the vegetables was seven times what it would be ordinarily.”

Like my friends in New Jersey, the housewife thumbed through the Cayce black book for an explanation.

“It isn’t the vitamin content in the gelatin,” Cayce explained, “but its ability to work with the activities of the glands, causing the glands to( take from that which is absorbed or digested the vitamin that would not be active, if there were not sufficient gelatin in the body.”

Oddly, even among oldsters who didn’t look favorably to exercise, I found that the head and neck exercise had its converts. And the younger element had profited equally. Tom Hungerford, a middle-aged Chicago business executive, tried the simple exercise because of his dissatisfaction with bifocal glasses just prescribed.

His experience was so transforming that he still marvels at it.

“Though it seemed a bit odd that such an exercise could have any effect on the eyes,” he said, “I decided I’d rather do anything than wear bifocals. So I took them off and started the exercise.”

There followed a six month period of hardly being able to see anything very well without his glasses, but Hungerford, believing in Cayce, persisted.

“Then, gradually,” as he continued the exercises twice daily, “came a clearing, and better sight than I’d had since my teens.”

His testimonial was glowing indeed.

“This was all five years ago, and I have not worn any glasses since. I don’t even have a restriction on my driver’s license anymore.”

In his enthusiasm, he has given the exercise to nearly a hundred people.

“Some said it would not work [and it did not]; but it did work for an airline employee in Hawaii, and her mother. And it did work for a seventy-nine-year-old man in Las Vegas who was about to lose his driver’s license, and who, on last report, could read the morning paper without his glasses.”

It not only helped vision, the enthusiastic Hunger-ford said, but cleared up the chronic sinus of one friend, and stopped the migraine headaches of another.

Like Cayce, latter-day disciple Hungerford has found that “that held in the mental image of one, becomes the condition.”

For ultimately, he concluded:

“It seems to boil down to the fact that for those who believe in it and do it regularly, it works—for the eyes and for other things as well.”

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12 - The Dream World

For many, the dream world is more revealing than the world of apparent reality.

“In every man,” Hugh Lynn Cayce once observed, “there exists a vast expanse, unfamiliar and unexplored, which sometimes appears in the guise of an angel other times a monster. This is man’s unconscious mind, and the language we call dreams.”

Although little of Edgar Cayce’s psychic power apparently has rubbed off on the son, Hugh Lynn, as directed by in sleeping father, has carried on diligently with the A.R.E research effort, establishing a dream seminar at Virginia Beach, where psychiatrists and psychologists analyze dreams that the elder Cayce had casually interpreted in his sleep.

During his lifetime, Cayce gave six hundred psychic readings on dreams, some of the most notable his own. The Cayce dream readings dealt chiefly with the interpretations of individual dreams, but the symbols and suggestions he advanced for using one’s own dreams to advantage still apply. Studying his father’s dream readings, Hugh Lynn concluded that dreams are not only a doorway to the unconscious, but can be readily opened by anyone who can recall his own dreams and wants to know what they mean.

From experience, the younger Cayce has discovered this doorway is as available to the average person as a pencil and pad at his bedside table. At first, on waking, he may not remember a single fragmentary dream, but in time his unconscious will get a prod from the waiting pencil and pad, and will go to work for him, opening wide the possibilities of a whole new area of self-exploration.

“Through his own dreams,” Edgar Cayce stressed, “a person may gain more understanding of those forces that go to make the real existence—what it’s all about and what it’s good for—if the individual would but comprehend the conditions being manifested.”

Dreams, of course, are a concomitant of sleep, and Cayce’s description of sleep gives ample indication that this hiatus in the waking life of the individual is designed for more than mere rest of mind and muscle.

In sleep, the subconscious mind, more powerful than the conscious, as hypnotism has shown, reviews whatever has passed through the conscious mind, and distills in dreams whatever warnings or messages it finds necessary.

“Sleep,” observed the sleeping Cayce, “is that period when the soul takes stock of what it has acted upon, from one rest period to another; drawing comparisons, as it were, that make for harmony, peace, joy, love, long-suffering, patience, brotherly love, and kindness—fruits of the spirit; or hate, harsh words, unkind thoughts and oppressions which are fruits of Satan. The soul dreaming either abhors what it has passed through, or it enters into the joy of its Lord.”

Edgar Cayce may very well have been the only living man who ever used his own subconscious consciously to interpret the dreams channeled through that subconscious. Through a desire to understand dreams of his own that remained vividly in Ms consciousness, he began to take interest in the dreams of others.
In some dreams he saw an immediate symbology, which antedated by years the symbology generally accepted by the psychiatric profession.

Back in January 1925, in perhaps the earliest dream for which he sought an interpretation, Cayce visioned a close associate and himself standing together in a rocky area. There were many knots of people standing around, but they were separated from him and other groups by streams of running water. Incongruously, as dreams so often seem, Edgar Cayce at this point saw a fish jump out of the water. He tried to catch it, but in the attempt the fish was broken into fragments and he set about to put the pieces together.

All through that day and the next, the dream stayed with Cayce. It vaguely troubled him, made him uneasy. But think of it as he would, it didn’t seem to suggest anything that made sense. Finally, he went into trance, and the suggestion was put to him by his wife that he analyze and interpret the dream. The ever-present Gladys Davis was there to record the interpretation for posterity. Out of this dream came interpretations of symbols useful today to anyone with similar dream images.

As Cayce said:

“In the dream of water, with the separating of the acquaintances and the body, we find the manifestation again of the subconscious forces, the water representing the life, the living way, that separates those of every walk of life and exists about each entity or group, building that which radiates in a spiritual sphere, the deeds done in the body.”

His explanation, with symbology now generally accepted, continued:

“In the fish is the representation of Him who became the Living Way, the Water of Life, given for the healing of the nations; in the breaking, in the separation there will yet be brought the force that will again make this the Living Way, the perfect representation of the force necessary to give life to all.”

As Cayce saw it, this dream came under the heading of spiritual guidance. The fish, of course, symbolized Christ, almost universal symbol, and water, life. Peace would ye come out of war—yet war would come.

The dreams fell into four general headings. Some dealt with the problems of the physical body, others with self observation, psychic perception and spiritual guidance. The most common dreams appear to stem from the body itself, the dream being the reaction to improper diet, lack of exercise, faulty regimen—the body registering its protest with the unconscious mind through the dream medium. One of these rather ordinary types of dreams was recorded on waking by one of two brothers who had been counseled by Cayce to study their dreams.

He had the pencil and pad handy, and after writing the dream down, took it to Cayce.

“I dreamed my brother and I with our wives were out on a party with B. B. I fell asleep at the table. We got home very late. My brother left the car, and walked home. He and I stopped to look at a bottle of milk that was marked ‘undistilled milk.’”

To Cayce the message was plain. He interpreted it almost literally. It was a warning to the dreamer, Cayce said, that his body was suffering from late hours (asleep at the table) and irregular diet—undistilled milk obviously referring to impure milk.

The brother was seen as more carefully disciplined— leaving the car and going on ahead, rather than taking the chance, apparently, of riding with somebody who had overly imbibed. Seeing the milk also was a warning to change the milk supply. For in reply to a specific question about the part dealing with the milk, Cayce had stated,

“Change from the present supply, for this shows adulterations in same.”

Many dreams, as Cayce pointed out, dealt with self-study. They included wish fulfilment dreams, suppressions, symbolic conflicts between good and evil in our natures, and work or family problems. Often these dreams had a prophetic quality, and were couched in horrible imagery to underline the gravity of the warning. Time after time, Cayce unraveled the tangled threads of dreams, psychically interpreting situations subsequently confirmed in ensuing developments. One of the most provocative dreams was that of a businessman in Florida, disturbed by the vivid reality of the dream, and a guilty conscience.

He had heard of Cayce through a neighbor, whose health had been aided by one of Cayce’s distant readings, and was delighted that he wouldn’t have to lift an arm to get help— just send the dream in with a request for an interpretation.

With meticulous detail, the dreamer, a married man with two children, described a nightmarish dream:

“I was standing in the backyard of my home—had my coat on. I felt something inside the cloth on the cuff of my left-hand sleeve. I worked it out, but it was fastened in the cloth and broke off as it came out, leaving part in. It proved to be a cocoon, and where broken a small black spider came out. The cocoon was black and left a great number of eggs—small ones—on my coat sleeve, which I began to pull off. The spider grew fast and ran away, speaking plain English as it ran, but what I do not remember, except that it was saying something about its mother. The next time I saw it, it was a large black spider which I seemed to know was the same one grown up, almost as large as my fist—had a red spot on it, otherwise was a deep black.

“At this time it had gotten into my house and had built a web all the way across the back inside the house and was comfortably watching me. I took a broom, knocked it down and out of the house, thinking I’d killed it, but it did more talking at that time. The next time I saw it, it had built a long web from the ground, on the outside of the house in the backyard, near where I first got it out of my sleeve—and it was running up toward the eave fast when it saw me. I couldn’t reach it but threw my straw hat in front of it and cut the web and the spider fell to the ground, talking again, and that time I hacked it to pieces with my knife.”

Perhaps because of a boyish loathing of spiders, I was fascinated with this dream. I had stumbled across it, shortly after my own introduction to the Cayce readings, and wondered what the psychoanalysts would make of it, and how it would tally with Cayce’s interpretation. I copied the dream, and took it to a distinguished psychoanalyst, who had studied with the first of the great dream merchants—Sigmund Freud. I told him none of the particulars of the dream. It might have been dreamed yesterday or the day before, for all he knew. I did not tell him that Cayce had already made an interpretation—in fact, made it some thirty-five years before.

The learned psychoanalyst studied the dream text care fully, and then gave his analysis. The dreamer, he said, was destructively obsessed with the thought of breaking up his home. His views of women, including his wife, had beer formed from a childhood resentment of his mother, and this transference was behind the breakup—the web or cocoon being the nest or home, the spider the obvious homebreaker himself.

After he finished, I showed him the Cayce reading. He had heard vaguely of Cayce, and he read the Cayce interpretation with interest, inasmuch as he accepted the psychic as having been scientifically established.

“In my work with Dr. Freud,’ he said, “there were many examples of clairvoyant and precognitive dreams. It even made a believer of Freud.”

Cayce’s report, intriguingly, tallied with that of the psychoanalyst’s, only Cayce’s delved far more extensively—and prophetically—into the home situation. He clearly saw the dreamer straying from his marital vows and warned that continuation of a clandestine relationship would ruin both home and business.
Cayce’s explanation of the dream was as explicit as the dream was cryptic: “In this dream, there is seen the symbolic conditions of those forces as are being enacted in the life of this body.

And, as is seen, both the spider and the character of same are as warnings to the body as respecting the relations of others who would in this underhanded manner take away from the body those surroundings of the home—that are in the manner of being taken—unless such a stand is taken. For, as is seen, the conditions are of the nature emblematically shown by the relations of this body with this other body [the woman]; that its relations at first meant only the casual conditions that might be turned to an account of good, in a social and financial manner; yet, as has been seen, there has come the constant drain on the entity, not only in the pocket, but in the affections of the heart, and now such threaten the very foundations of the home; and, as seen, threaten to separate the body from the home and its surroundings; and unless the entity attacks this condition, cutting same out of the mind, the body, the relations, the conditions, there will come that condition as seen.”

Cayce had no way of consciously knowing that the businessman had entangled himself in a financial way with his secretary, who had brought some shady backing into the business enterprise. Originally, as it developed, their relationship had been confined to business, but then had developed until he was, in fact, considering leaving his wife and family. At this point, as Cayce saw, there was still time to withdraw.

And so Cayce viewed the dream as being of a warning nature, and so gave warning:

“Prepare self. Meet the conditions as a man, not as a weakling—and remember those duties that the body owes first to those to whom the sacred vows were given, and to whom the entity and body owes its position in every sense; as well as the duty that is obligatory to the body or those to whom the entity, the body, should act in the sense of the defender, rather than bringing through such relations those dark underhanded sayings, as are seen, as said by that one who would undermine, as well as are being said by those whom the body may feel such relations are hidden from; yet these have grown to such an extent as may present a menace to the very heart and soul of the body of this entity.”

In other words, the wife, too, was aware of the situation. The reading closed with an injunction rare for Cayce:

“Beware! Beware!”

As might almost be expected of one who had gotten himself into this scrape, the businessman did not heed the warning. He kept on with his secretary, and lost wife, home, family, and business. However, following a divorce, he did marry the other woman. He was now so impressed by Cayce’s insight, that with his newfound wife he took himself to Virginia Beach to place himself at the disposal of the mystic.

Cayce could give him no advice, except to profit by the mistakes of the first marriage. He started a new business in the North, consulted Cayce regularly, and managed maritally and business-wise, until his death recently.

Long before the psychoanalysts, Cayce had discovered a psychic content to dreams, similar in prophetic insight to the seven-fat-years-and-seven-lean interpretation given the Pharaoh’s dream by Joseph and of the handwriting-on-the-wall clarification by the prophet Daniel. The prophetic or precognitive dream might revolve around mundane things. As a matter of fact, Cayce, interpreting one such dream, warned the dreamer to get out of the stock market, and predicted an unprecedented stock market crash in a few months.

The forecast was made in April 1929; six months later— Black Friday, October 29, 1929, the market collapsed.

The dreamer, a Wall Street broker, had kept a daily record of his dreams, in accordance with an advisory from Cayce. Each morning, Cayce interpreted the dreams that the man had the night before. The dreamer listened closely, as a rule, because he had made a fortune buying and selling stocks with Cayce.
On March 5, 1929, the Wall Streeter had his first dream reflecting misgivings about the bull market.

He jotted his dream down on a night-table pad and phoned it into Cayce.

“Dreamed we should sell all our stocks including box stock [one considered very good]. I saw a bull following my wife, who was dressed in red.”

Cayce took this bull right by the horns.

“This is an impression of a condition which is to come about, a downward movement of long duration, not allowing latitude for those stocks considered very safe. Dispose of all, even box, great change to come.”

The dreamer was apparently sensitizing his own subconscious channels for precognitive dreams by a conscious effort to remember them each morning. On April 6, a month after the first market dream, the broker had another provocative dream.

The dream was shorter, but considerably more complex than the first.

“Dreamed a young man was blaming me for murder of a man. A gang asked, ‘Is there anyone else in the world who knows this?’ I answered, ‘K. Cornell.’ Saw dead man. Gang started to administer poisonous hypodermic which had been used on dead man. I felt needle and expected death.”

The dreamer awoke, startled. And then fell back into a troubled sleep. By this time his dream apparatus was so linked up to his conscious that he dreamed his own interpretation of the dream.

“This,” he wrote, “represented fight going on in Reserve Board—stock stimulation.”

That same day, Cayce prophetically clarified the dream:

“There must surely come a break where there will be panic in the money centers, not only of Wall Street’s activity, but a closing of the boards in many other centers and a readjustment of the actual specie—higher and lower quotations to continue for several moons while adjustments are being made—then break.”

What followed is history. After the October crash, exchanges were closed in Wall Street and elsewhere. There was a major adjustment in the specie—the United States and a number of other countries going off the gold standard.

Cayce’s interpretation of the symbolism involved in the first dream would now be generally accepted. The red dress was obviously a danger warning, the bull a bull market, on its way out. Ironically, the wife was on the way out, too, divorcing the dreamer shortly thereafter. In the second dream, Cayce went along with the “gang” identified as the Federal Reserve. The hypodermic needle was construed as a “hypo” for a sinking market. The attack was on the dreamer’s financial stability, and spelled his death financially. The apparent reference to the well-known actress, Katharine Cornell, went unexplained. But certainly, Cayce had scored a bull’s-eye. Dreams of death are particularly disturbing to many. But for Cayce this was often a hopeful symbol.

On June 23,1925, a subject was so shaken by a dream that he could only write:

“Dreamed I died.” Cayce was reassuring. “This is the manifestation of the birth of thought and mental development awakening in the individual. This, then, is the awakening of the subconscious, as manifested in death of physical forces.”

I must admit I was not always satisfied with Cayce’s interpretations. A Virginia woman, of Anglo-Saxon heritage, was having a physical reading for a condition of obesity, hemorrhoids, and a kidney disorder, when she threw in a request for a dream interpretation. It had come to her in 1932, before Hitler’s rise, and when things were relatively quiet on the international scene. Looking back, it seemed rather evidential of the hard times Britain was soon to have.

The dream follows:

“My husband and I seemed to be in a large dwelling, and looking out toward the sky we saw large black circles floating through the air. We thought this very strange, and soon discovered that the circles looked like black auto tires or large truck tires. Suddenly, out of the sky a big black machine, resembling the large caterpillar machines used during the World War, came down to earth.

We said we had better get out of the place, for we realized it was the intention of this machine to crush people to death. Too, we realized that it meant troublous tunes, so we tried to get out of its way as quickly as possible. We walked down to the river front, and there saw a British ship tied up at the wharf. Someone said it had fired on the lone watchman while in his office on the wharf, but found out later that the watchman had fired on the British ship—which seemed to please us very much. We realized there were troublous times in the making, and I was very much afraid. We walked further down the long wharf, and saw many more British ships.”

It seemed to me, looking back on what had happened up to and through World War II, that this was a plain warning of the division in England before the war, with Winston Churchill the lone watchman, giving and taking cross fire from his embattled British colleagues. Or could it be Britain standing alone, resisting the destruction from the sky, including clusters of rockets and massive bombers, until that lone ship, Britain, had become many British ships—many allies?

Cayce caught the difficulties Britain would be in, but Ms explanation was rather general.

“This is a prophetic vision relating to those peoples that were mostly shown [the British], as to the straits to which those peoples would pass, are passing. The fear that was felt would be the natural tendency, knowing and feeling the relationships of that land [Britain] to the whole world, as related to the self’s own associations.

“The conditions seen, as from whence the aid or power came, as if from on high, in the form of circles that increased as they ballooned in their action through the heavens, indicate the way, character or manner this people would aid themselves, in the appeal to the spiritual than to the power of force that was implied by the act of the lone watchman.”

Certainly, on reflection, it could be said that Churchill and Britain put their faith in God, but it seemed to me a prophecy about a war, dealing with a dream as detailed as this one, should have been more specific as to what the upshot of it all was going to be on earth.

I mentioned my dissatisfaction, or disappointment, to one of the A.RE.’s dream experts, Everett Irion.

He looked at me with obvious surprise.

“Don’t you see? Cayce was looking at the broad side of it. For in the last analysis, it was the spirit of the English that made them hold out, when practically everybody else had collapsed before the Germans.”
“But why,” I asked, “were these people of obvious English background pleased in their dream to see a British ship fired upon?”

Irion shrugged.

“I would have to know more about their own frame of reference, and what these symbols meant to them. It could very well have been that the firing on the ship, say by Churchill, the lone watchman, conveyed the feeling that the British Navy, then downgraded by the appeasers, was to be jolted by this ‘attack’ into some recognition of the realities of the situation. This would certainly have pleased any Anglophile.” He laughed. “I’m trying to reason this; Cayce of course saw it intuitively, and certainly the intuitive should have a better grasp of the subconscious.”

If a dream was prophetic, was the foreseen event then fixed? After a dream which was clearly precognitive, materializing a year later when she walked into a room and saw the same people and furnishings she had envisioned in sleep, Gladys Davis asked Cayce to explain how it was that dreams came to fulfillment.

“Are such conditions set at the time dreamed of,” she asked, “and why would one dream of any given condition?”

Cayce replied that the law of cause and effect was immutable, that as “thought and purpose and aim and desire are set in motion by minds,” the result is certain and fixed, and therefore foreseeable.

“For its end, then, has been set in that He, the Giver of the heavens and the earth and those things therein, has set the end thereof.”

The dreamer had tuned into a particular cycle of activity, Cayce suggested, because of her interest in the people involved.

“Dream is but attuning an individual mind to those individual storehouses of experience that has been set in motion. At times, there may be a perfect connection, at others there may be the static of interference by inability of coordinating the own thought to the experience or actuality or fact set in motion.”

There were different reasons for different dreams.

“Those experiences that are visioned are not only as has been given to some, to be interpreters of the unseen, but to others as prophecy, to others healing, to others exhortation, yet all are of the same spirit.”

Considerable emphasis has been placed in the Cayce readings on the psychic content of our dreams. In fact, as Hugh Lynn Cayce observed from his own study, the dream state may be the safest, quickest way for most of us to become aware of extrasensory perception, an agency of our own subconscious. Telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, all seem commonplace in the dream world; all they require is the proper interpretation. And Edgar Cayce was that interpreter.
In December 1926 a woman came to Cayce with a disturbing dream about a friend she had not seen in years. In her dream, her friend, Emmie, had committed suicide.

Cayce went into trance and explained that the dream was telepathic rather than prophetic or literal.

“Such conditions had passed through this mind—or it had contemplated such conditions. They have passed.”

A check was made of Emmie, and it developed that she had seriously contemplated suicide at one tune. But the crisis had passed.

It was an odd dream, since the dreamer had apparently tuned into a thought that had been dismissed and buried away, and which was no longer in the conscious circuit of the other’s mind. How then had the dreamer reached out and drawn in this information? It was real enigma, even granting that ESP was a reality.

Cayce was asked to indicate how this telepathic message had originated. His explanation may well apply to all psychic dreams:

“Other dreams there are, a correlation between mentalities or subconscious entities, wherein there has been attained, physically or mentally, a correlation of individual ideas or mental expressions, that bring from one subconscious to another actual existent conditions, either direct or indirect, to be acted upon or that are ever present.”

As Cayce pointed out, tune was only an illusion at best

“Hence we find visions of the past, visions of the present, visions of the future. For the subconscious there is no past or future—all is present. This would be well to remember in much of the information as may be given through such forces as these.”

In the normal frame of reference, it was difficult to gauge the source of some telepathic dreams. However, if Cayce was infallible, as some suggest, then certainly evidence can be adduced for the survival of not only life, but of life interested in what it has left behind of friends and family on this terrestrial plane.
One dreamer, back in September 1926, reported to the sleeping Cayce: “My mother appeared to me.

She said, ‘I am alive.’”
Cayce, still somnolent, cut in, “She is alive.”

The dreamer appeared a little more shaken by the interruption than by the dream, but bravely continued on. His mother had then enjoined in the dream,

“Something is wrong with your sister’s leg or shoulder. She ought to see a doctor about it.”

Psychic researchers, crediting the psychic quality of the dream, might accept it as a dramatization of the dreamer’s subconscious, rejecting it as evidence of a surviving spirit. But not Cayce. In advising the dreamer to heed the dream warning, he stressed:

“The mother, through the entity’s own mind, is as the mother to all in the household. Warning, then, of conditions that may arise, and of conditions existent. Then, warn the sister as regarding same.”

The brother knew nothing of any physical difficulties his sister was having. He checked, without telling her about the Cayce reading, and she mentioned, rather surprised, that her leg and shoulder were bothering her.

Mother—or perhaps the subconscious self, tuned to the sister’s subconscious—had known what it was talking about. And so had Cayce.

The dream state, when body and mind are relatively quiescent, is apparently the best channel for psychic messages.

Some people, who have no apparent psychic ability, waking, become surprisingly attuned in the sleeping phase. At one point, the Cayce home in Virginia Beach was virtually a dream laboratory, establishing precognition for even the most dubious who followed the dream readings. One young woman alone, in four years, had eight readings, analyzing more than three hundred dreams, a large number of these foreshadowing precognitive experiences with remarkable precision.

On June 6, 1925, this married twenty-one-year-old woman’s dream record visualized a nameless girl friend (obviously self) at a dinner table making violent love to an old friend. Cayce warned of a return to an old admirer, and several years later, a checkup disclosed, the dreamer broke up her marriage to marry her admirer. The admirer then walked out on her, making the warning most apropos. According to Cayce, virtually everything is dreamed before it happens, and so it was hardly a surprise to him that he was able to anticipate through her dreams practically everything of major account that was to happen to this woman in the next thirty years.

On June 7, 1925, she had a perfectly wretched dream. She dreamed of a weak-minded child, though she had no children at this time.

Cayce was never more prophetic, and tactful. “Any condition,” he stated, “is first dreamed before becoming reality.”

It took a while for this dream to materialize, and the woman may very well have forgotten it. Then one day, some twenty-five years later, one of her children, now an adult, became a mental case. There was a method to her dreaming. She kept a pencil and pad at her bedside, and her dreams increasingly remained with her as she awakened. On July 18, 1925, she had a dream that her husband wasn’t coming home any more. It hardly required a Cayce to sense trouble ahead on this one, though he did convey the warning. Five years later her husband stopped coming home—to her home, anyway. They were divorced.

More and more, as she kept a dream record, the woman’s dreams seemed clearly to be prophetic. On December 27, 1925, for instance, she dreamed that she and her sister were at her mother’s bedside. The mother was unconscious, and both the dreamer and her sister were sobbing, “Don’t leave us.” It was again an almost literal warning, this time of her mother’s death. Although her marriage appeared tranquil on the surface, there was obviously considerable suppressed material for the subconscious to brood over. For on July 17, 1926, she dreamed explosively of her relationship with her husband. She saw herself traveling on a boat with him. It was raining, and a flash of lightning struck the boat. The boiler blew up.

To Cayce, this was again a clear warning of an impending marital blowup. By this time, this young woman was becoming so clearly psychic in the dream state that admirers of Cayce wondered whether they had not found a potential disciple in the young matron. On November 17, 1926, for instance, she saw her cousin being married. It was literal as all that. Cayce read the dream as precognitive. The cousin was married several months later. Cayce was for everybody dreaming. As a clue to people interested in evaluating their own dreams, he suggested that the dream could be typed by its very nature.

He was asked once, by a subject,

“Are my dreams ever significant of spiritual awakening?” and he replied in rhetoric a bit more diffuse than usual:

 

“As experienced by the entity, there are dreams and visions and experiences. When only dreams [without any spiritual message] these too are significant, but rather of the physical health. In visions where there are spiritual awakenings, these are seen most often in symbols or signs. In training yourself to interpret your visions, the expressions of eye, hand, mouth, posture, or the like must be understood in your own language. When these are then symbolic, know the awakening [of the spirit] is at hand.”

The trouble with dream symbols, of course, was that they varied with the individual outlook. So as Hugh Lynn Cayce has so aptly pointed out, each individual to interpret his own dreams—in the absence of a Cayce—must realize that the symbol for one intellect is not always the symbol for another.

Out of the Cayce dreamology, though, certain common symbols appear to have almost standard reference:

Water—source of life, spirit, unconscious; boat—voyage of life; fire—wrath, cleansing, destroying; dead leaves—body excrement or drosses; mud, mire, tangled weeds—needed purification or cleansing; naked image—exposed, open to criticism; and fish—an almost universal symbol of Christ, Christian, or spiritual food.

A person, identified or otherwise, often represents what the dreamer feels toward that person; clothing, the manner or way in which one person appears to another, usually the dreamer. Different animals reflect some phase of self, as the individual dreamer feels about that animal. If he thinks about the fox as being tricky, and then dreams of a fox, he may regard himself deep down inside as being a rather shady person, and this may indicate great inner conflicts of which his conscious mind knows nothing.

Different races, groups, associations influence or color the animal connotation. For the Hindu, or those steeped in Yoga or Oriental culture, the dreamed snake is both a symbol of wisdom and sex. The bull, for some, may symbolize the sex glands, and hence sexual activity.

The Cayce “dream book” flows on. Self-revealing dreams, stemming as they do from wish fulfillment, suppressed desires, and other worries and conflicts, are replete with symbolism. A gorilla may represent man’s lower animal nature; a madman, unrestrained anger; a ship’s captain, the steady helmsman—the higher self, sound principles; a house where one once lived, may relate to a traumatic experience there; a rough road, the experiencing of harsh travails.

Often we are not up to directly facing the ugly side of our natures, hence the protective symbolism that makes it possible for dreams to be unpleasant without startling us into blood-curdling nightmares. The following dream, self-revealing in nature, was significantly obscure.

The dreamer wrote it down carefully, not missing a single detail in the transfer from pillow to pad:

“A policeman was leading a man who had his two hands tied up across his chest. The policeman led him up to the gallows, about which a great crowd of people were gathered. Just as they were about to slip the noose over his head he slipped down a long slide, the policeman clinging to him. The man crawled desperately and speedily on his stomach, through the milling crowd, thus escaping the policeman.”

The dreamer elaborated on the prisoner:

 “I could see his black nude form as he crawled very quickly along the ground. Finally, he came into a yard of a brick house, still crawling on his stomach very fast. He continued in this manner until he bumped his head on the brick wall of the house. This threw him backwards and stunned him. As he lay there on his back, an old woman came out of the house and regarded him. She started toward him and as she did so, the man stood up and the back of him suddenly appeared to me as a nude Negro, with an animal tail attached. He resembled both a Negro and an animal.”

The dreamer was a forty-eight-year-old woman, whose son was about to marry a Southern girl. She felt she had no strong prejudices against Negroes, but had dwelt consciously, in view of the impending marriage, on the lynching problem in the South, some thirty years ago. The Cayce dream reading made the dark figure, the Negro who at the same time seemed an animal, a symbol which was turned inward for an examination of the self—actually, the center of nearly every remembered dream. What the Negro represented to the woman was symbolic only in reflecting her own hidden attitudes, dramatically revealing the prejudices she was concealing from herself as well as others.

“In taking on the animal form,” Cayce explained, “the entity sees in itself a still more dreaded condition. In the opening part of the dream the entity sees the dark figure as someone bringing trouble to itself by its own doing. This truth escapes as it were from the mass criticism, and then is halted by the wall. As it stands up, the entity recognized the self—or the lower nature of self. The woman is admonished [in the dream] to study ‘all the elements of truth’: even those about self which become ‘troublesome’ and ‘obnoxious.’”

As it developed, the woman admitted she was strongly disturbed within herself by the thought of sexual relations between blacks and whites and yet this feeling made her darkly ashamed of herself, so that she herself, dream-wise, became the Negro she secretly deplored. Once acknowledging the truth, she seemed more at ease about the problem, to the point, anyway, where she no longer dreamed about it.

The Cayce readings revealed a certain consistency in the inherent symbolism of dreams since, in the dominant white Anglo-Saxon culture, the average person in the mainstream of society—at work, school, or play—is exposed to pretty much the same attitudes and outlooks, whether or not he accepts them.

The symbolism of the dark animal figure, conveying an impression of sinister, unbridled power, cropped up with striking frequency in dreams analyzed by Cayce, and as Cayce saw them—correctly, the psychoanalysts now tell us—the figures revealed an unfavorable side of the individual, which the conscious blocked, and the unconscious obscured.

This might be an apparent prejudice, as with the woman who dreamed of the Negro, or suppressed animalistic sex urges, or greed, bad temper, envy, anything obviously negative impairing the individual’s own regard for himself. A middle-aged woman brought a typically nightmarish dream to Cayce.

She was considerably agitated, for the dream had been violent, and perhaps prophetic:

“My husband, his mother, and I were living together in a house in New Jersey. I heard much shooting and excitement. All of the windows of our house were open and it was raining and storming outside. We rushed to close and lock them. Some terrible wild man seemed to be running through the town shooting and causing great trouble, and the police were chasing him.”

Cayce was able to reassure the woman. She had no storm to worry about, no fireworks, no explosive shooting. All the excitement, all the pent-up storm was in her. She had a rotten disposition, and unless she learned to curb it, was headed for trouble.

Or as Cayce put it:

“The large man, the bugaboo, that comes to the entity in these emblematical [symbolic] conditions here presented, and as seen in others, is in self and self’s temper. See?”

She saw.

Because the symbols must be seen in the dreamer’s own perspective, he may interpret them better than anybody else if he understands the symbology. Some symbology, of course, is general. As the house was the body in a Cayce dream reading, a burning house could be anger, or it could be the end of a marriage, if the house burned down, as it would then be all-consuming.

One dream can express many different things. A Norfolk housewife, interested in the work of the A.R.E., dreamed that her home was burning. All she saw left was the number, 912. She had had other precognitive dreams before that had materialized—a girl friend’s divorce, a relative’s getting in trouble with the police. The day after her dream, she walked into a shop to pick up a dress and puzzled by the significance of the numerals, she related what she had dreamed.

The number caught the proprietor’s ear.

“What did you say those numerals were?”
“Nine-twelve,” she repeated.
He checked through some papers, and then his eyes widened. “Why didn’t you tell me about this yesterday?” he said in an angry voice.
The girl shrugged, “What difference would it make?”
“What difference? I would have won two thousand dollars, it’s the winning number.”
She explained that she didn’t know about such things.
“You were supposed to come in for that dress yesterday,” he said accusingly. He threw the suit across the counter at her. “Next time you dream of three numerals, tell somebody about it.”

Weeks later, studying up on dreams, the girl wondered whether the rest of it was prophetic, too. Her own marriage had just gone up with the flaming house.
As interpreted by Cayce, many symbols were of an obvious nature, easy to adapt to dreams, generally. Missing a train or bus—hurry up to get life in order; barbed wire entanglement or rough highway—difficulties along the way; one shoe, a poor foundation; right turn, the correct course; left turn, the wrong; beaver, an industrious person or job; mud, scandal or dirty linen; rabbit, timidity or sex; a wall a barrier to new ideas, lack of open-mindedness. In the same vein, repairing an old house indicated changing concepts, crossing a stream or river the beginning of a new venture.

A baby or child, generally, meant a new start, or if associated in the dreamer’s conscious mind with problems, it could signify small problems. In Norfolk, in a tavern known as Gigi’s, the proprietress, Mrs. Sally Coty, had been dreaming precognitively ever since she could remember.

But when she saw children in her dreams, it didn’t mean anything creative, it meant problems, small problems, because her children had always represented small problems to her.

“I dream of a child, and the next day, I know I’m going to have trouble, a little trouble—like the health authorities or the liquor authorities coming in to complain about something.”

She tried to close off her dreams, but it wouldn’t work.

She, too, had had a dream about a number once, but it was in New York City, when she had a store on Mulberry Street, and she knew what to do about it. She was in a state of emotional strain when the dream came. She was going into a hospital for major surgery, and had been told that her hospitalization insurance did not apply. She needed more than a thousand dollars, and had nowhere to turn for the money.

On this particular night she had dreamed of a number-4-11-66—and was musing about it, when she looked out through the window of her store onto the street. There standing idly, where she had never seen him before, was a man named Charlie, a runner for the Italian lottery, which was big in the neighborhood.
 

She went to the door.

“What are you doing out there Charlie?”
“I have the day off,” he said.
She took out three one-dollar bills. “Here,” she said, “are three numbers, will you play them in the lottery for me?” She considered his appearance a “sign.”
The lottery was decided at the end of the week, and this was a Monday.
“I’ll be back Thursday,” Charlie said.
She didn’t care to explain she was going into the hospital. “Take it now,” she insisted.
He finally agreed.
“That weekend,” the dreamer recalled, “my brother phoned me at the hospital, and said, ‘Charlie’s looking for you—he’s got $1,500 for you.’”

The numbers had come through. While Cayce is gone, dreams live on at the A.R.E. After attending a dream seminar at Virginia Beach, a young man kept a record of his dreams, interpreting them according to his own frame of reference and standard symbols mentioned by Cayce. What he did with one dream, apparently anyone can do with his own dreams, perhaps opening up a new realm of insight into one’s life. The following dream was analyzed months after the study project.

The young man, in his early twenties, saw himself standing at the ocean, fishing. The water was clear but turbulent. Standing next to him on the sand was a small figure, a replica of himself, weeping. His larger self caught a fish, an orange-hued flounder, and gave it to the smaller self, who promptly stopped crying. But the flounder flopped out of the smaller figure’s hands, landing in a clump of bushes, and the small self began to cry again.

The dream’s larger self poked through the bushes for the fish, but as he parted the foliage, discovered the fish being eaten by two animals, a white rabbit and a beaver. The beaver ran off, vanishing; the rabbit leaped into the ocean, swam about for a while, then returned tired and bedraggled. After writing down the dream, the young man studied each symbol separately, passing over some whose meaning was not readily clear, then coming back to them in a day or two. After two days of intermittent study, he had compiled a list of symbols, relating each symbol to his own feeling about it, hoping in this way to find out what was stirring in his unconscious mind.

He began with ocean.

“I have read that water means spirit or source of life, or the unconscious.”

Then:
• Fishing — act of seeking in the spiritual realm.
• A fish — something out of the spiritual realm.
• The self (larger) — myself as I am now in the physical.
• Smaller self — could this be my childhood? was I starved or hungry in childhood? (sobbing over not getting the fish).
• Crying — wanting something, stopped crying with fish.
• Fish got away — lost something which started smaller self crying again.
• Beaver — work like a beaver.
• Rabbit — timid.

This was the first listing. Reworking his dream, the young man began to form a discernible pattern:

• Ocean — whatever the ocean stood for—spiritual source of life or the unconscious—it was beautifully clear, but turbulent.
• A fish — a fish was the symbol used by early Christians; could this mean Christ, or spiritual food?
• The self (larger) — I seem to be seeking, or fishing, as I am now doing in real life, for direction for my life and solutions to my problems.
• The self (smaller) — this isn’t a child. It is an exact duplicate of me. Can this be the part of me which needs spiritual food, small, undeveloped, a part of me that is crying out and is satisfied when given the fish? Maybe this is not my childhood (as first thought), but rather part of me as I am now, which needs help.
• Fish got away — somehow my spiritual food is getting away.
• Beaver — when I think of a beaver, I think of work. Maybe this is my job.

The dream could not be properly analyzed without knowing more of the young man’s situation. He was working in a factory at the time, making parts for missiles, was troubled about making munitions that might be destructive one day, and had taken to hanging out with bad company, using profanity carelessly and drinking at bars after work. Consequently, a bickering relationship had developed at home with a young wife.

In a very real sense, it then became apparent to the non-psychic dream interpreters, that the beaver (his work) was actually eating up his spiritual food.
Like many essentially idealistic, puritanically schooled young Americans, he blocked out sex symbolism—and the symbolism was rather obvious in the white rabbit. He had written subsequently that he had raised them as a boy. “Sometimes I liked them. A lot of times it was hard work taking care of them.”
What he apparently meant, it developed from questioning, was that he was intrigued by the rabbit’s sex habits, and he had apparently learned something from watching them. His sex attitude—the rabbit—could be consuming his spiritual food—the fish.

Reviewing the dream, and the thought process connected with its interpretation, it would seem, offhand, a great deal of bother for one dream. However, the dream, with its interpretation, did have something to do with reshaping the young man’s life. It got him thinking about himself, about the warning he had apparently received, and he acted on it. He quit his job (the beaver ran away), and got another he considered more constructive.

He took stock of his marriage, the sex habits that endangered that marriage (the rabbit swam around for a while) and attempted to reform. Dreaming had awakened him, and perhaps saved his marriage. Only recently—1965—the A.R.E. held its first seminar on dreams. It was supervised by Dr. W.
Lindsay Jacob, a Pittsburgh psychiatrist, who has helped patients by analyzing their dreams; and Dr. Herbert B. Puryear, a clinical psychologist at Trinity University in San Antonio.

Both had studied the Cayce dream readings, both found dreams an invaluable channel for resolving the inner conflicts of the emotionally torn. Just as Cayce had pointed out the relevance of all dreams, Dr. Puryear, too, observed, “No dream comes from nowhere.” The emotionally disturbed dreamed recurringly of being engulfed by water, or of violent accidents, or even atomic attack; the last often characteristic of a brooding depression bordering on the suicidal.

What Cayce had said about dreams forty or fifty years before, science—and advanced science, at that—was now postulating.

“The physical, psychical, and spiritual are reflected in different kinds of dreams,” Dr. Jacob pointed out.

Flying saucers, for instance, could mean something beyond our comprehension, a wheel an expression of spirituality, a camel the subconscious, an automobile the dreamer’s own body; his higher-self, a clergyman, judge, law officer, or an old man with a white beard. They all had significance for the students of dreams.

About thirty persons of various ages joined in the dream seminar. The young and eager seemed particularly with it Some college students, who had hitchhiked across the country to participate, lyrically reported a series of dreams within dreams. This was a device, expert Everett Irion passed on, to apprise the subconscious of a psychic message, usually precognitive. Other dreams revealed the students involved in ego-releasing conflicts to better understand themselves. This was the new generation that accepted the psychic as readily as travel to the moon, and their enthusiastic openness apparently induced significant dreaming.

Much was learned in the seminar about dreaming. When the dream was unpleasant, the subconscious would often block off all dreaming. A youthful-appearing grandmother, who ordinarily dreamed regularly, suddenly could not remember her dreams, no matter how many conscious suggestions she gave herself, or how diligently she put pad and pencil at her side. While others in the dream class cheerfully sat around and recalled their dreams, she had nothing to report Nevertheless, during the night, when each sleeping member of the seminar was under personal observation, her eyeballs were seen moving under closed lids, a telltale sign of dreaming.

Just as the eyelids stopped quivering, she was awakened, so that her dreams would be fresh in her memory, but she could only shake her head. She could remember nothing. The class good-naturedly accused her of blocking. Everett Irion, conducting the class, tried to get her to recall the last dreams she had, thinking they might provide a clue. Searching her mind, she finally recalled a fragmentary dream she had shortly before the seminar began, a week previously. And then she remembered still another dream. Obviously, she had begun blocking, as soon as the seminar opened, not wanting to discuss her dreams with anybody, nor touch on a situation that might have been stirring her subconscious.

Only recently, she disclosed under group questioning, she had been going through a bit of an emotional crisis. Her granddaughter, who had been living with her for some time, had just been taken back by the mother, and the grandmother was heartsick and lonely. She was yearning for the child, so much so that she broke into sobs just talking about it

The dreamer was a Mrs. Belva Hardy, a youngish middle-aged type, and a well-known teacher of music. She was interested in dreams, generally, and quite willing to explore her own with me. She remembered both dreams well now. The most significant vision came the night she checked into A.R.E. headquarters for the dream seminar. She called it the Porpoise Dream. Two porpoises were playing in the water, in a setting similar to the Marine Land of the Pacific. They were leaping and gamboling about and talking together; they were extremely happy. Meanwhile, Belva was standing on the bank, watching. Suddenly somebody came by with a straw hat turned upside down—passed the hat in front of her and asked her to give some food to the porpoise.

She dropped three kernels of corn into the hat and said,

“Be sure to bring it back because I don’t have much.”

Even to a neophyte, the meaning seemed apparent Evidently, Belva’s dream subconscious had been triggered by the approaching dream conference, and her subconscious had dredged up the problem. It was obvious who the porpoises were, and she, Belva, was on the sidelines. Next, Belva dredged up her fragmentary dream:

“A young couple is silhouetted some distance from me. The young lady is dressed in blue. The dream said, ‘Don’t bother to write this one down—there is more coming.’”

She was already blocking.

After this fragment, Belva went dreamless four straight nights. Everett Irion pointed out that if dream material is ignored or suppressed, the individual does not dream for a while. In some detail, Irion had clarified the symbology of the Porpoise Dream. The Pacific signified peace; corn was the highest spiritual food, the three kernels representing Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and when Belva said, “Be sure to bring it back,” this very clearly meant that she wanted the child back.

The obvious interpretation had also struck her. The two porpoises were her daughter and granddaughter. Their reunion was an extremely happy one, and they were enjoying each other. She should cut her own ties, and bless the situation. This would free her mind, including the distracted subconscious, and prepare her for whatever was best for her.

Belva got the message. She sat down and prayed, and her prayers were for what was best for the child. Permeating good will, she subsequently visited her daughter and the child in California. The daughter reacted with similar warmth and understanding. When the conversation got around to the child’s schooling, the daughter suggested, surprisingly, that the girl might do better in an Eastern school.

“I had broken my hold on the child,” Belva observed, “and now I found her coming back to me—this time for her own good and not to fill my own little needs.”

At last report, the child was with the grandmother again, and Belva was dreaming good solid dreams every night

She had nothing to keep from herself.

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