Astrological prediction
and interpretation of dreams have so much in common with one another that they
might be seen as twin sciences. Both will yield their secrets through logic and
an understanding of metaphors. The logic needed in astrology is couched in
terms of mathematics; the logic of dream interpretation is rooted in
associations. But astrology too, must work associatively, otherwise
interpretation of the positions of the planets, their aspects, conjunctions,
oppositions, squares, trines and sextiles remain meaningless. These geometric
relationships are comparable to the relationships of characters and objects in
a dream. The various progressions and transits in astrology, the movement of
the planets against the personal birth chart might be seen as the equivalent of
the plot in a dream story. A dream will never yield its true meaning without
strict adherence to the plot. A knife in the hand of a surgeon will mean
something quite different to a knife in a cook’s hand or a knife in the hand of
an assassin. Well, up to a certain point in the action; in the end they might
all mean the same: murder! For a cook can kill his assistant with a kitchen
knife just as well as a surgeon can kill his patient with a scalpel or an
assassin his chosen victim with a pocketknife. This actually highlights the
importance of the dream’s plot in the process of interpretation. The most basic
congruence between dream metaphor and astrological symbol can be found in the
various sun signs. Since the middle of last century the twelve signs of the
zodiac have become common knowledge. Most young people, at any rate, know their
birth sign. A number of them wear those symbols either as a necklace or ring or
in some other form. It means the wearers of them identify with the respective symbols.
They will know the basic characteristics attributed to them and think of
themselves as being endowed with them to a greater or lesser degree. Thus, a
person born in the sign of Leo will readily resonate with the regal stance and
strength of a lion. Astrology’s keywords for a Leo-born are usually something
like being self-assured, progressive, protective, artistic, and affectionate in
love. But such a one will also have to admit to traits of vanity, of
self-seeking, of hedonism, of being dictatorial, extravagant or purely
egotistical. But to admit this is, of course, far more difficult than endorsing
the positive traits. It is exactly here where astrology can break through the
defences of our weaknesses without offence. If we told a Leo man for instance
into his face that he was vain, hedonistic and self-seeking, we would most
likely lose him as a friend or worse still, walk away with a black eye. But
when we can show him what the stars are saying by means of their positions, he
will not see it as a personal affront, but as something to be faced and watched
over. Dreams share with astrology this same ability to spell out the truth
about us without offence. It is because they too speak in symbols that are
susceptible to the same sort of interpretation as the astrological symbols.
Thus, if a man dreamt that he had a lion as a pet that wreaked havoc in his
household, we would be able to say to him with impunity that since the animal
in his dream was owned by him, it was representative of his own character and
behaviour. Or, to give another example, if a man dreamt that a lioness walked
towards him on her hind feet, put her front paws on his shoulders, then licked
his face, and finally lifted him up to toss him through the bedroom window, we
could promise the dreamer that he would have a most exciting romp with his Leo
wife some time or other on the dream day. We might well wonder why such a
dramatic finale to this dream would not end in disaster. This is because the
window, originally called wind-eye, functions in a dream as an eye, which in a
sexual interpretation becomes a vagina. In theory, astrology should be able to
make similar predictions, perhaps not in such fine details. Since Venus is the
planet of love, it would be a matter of checking by means of an ephemeris just
where she spirals about in relation to our natal chart. This would allow us to
see whether her influences were in detriment or in dignity and how this might
affect the eighth house, which is called the House of Sex, Death and Transformation.
If after this our astrologer failed to produce an accurate prediction of our
impending sex life, it would not be because the data was not there, but because
the astrologer was unable to interpret the data available. This is exactly the
same in the case of a dream to be interpreted. If the analyst failed to come up
with the prediction I put forward above, it would not be because the dream
lacked sufficient data, but because the interpreter failed to read it
correctly. A hint that astrology and oneirology are in essential accord with
one another can be seen from the fact that the eighth house of astrology
gathers together sex, death and transformation, items identical with those of
sexual intercourse through the dream imagery. Indeed, if Professor Burr’s investigations
of the L-field are not just self-deception, then it must be clear that the
influences of the stars are not mere theory, but energies that shape our body
and mind and direct their development. When making long term studies of a maple
tree in New Haven, for instance, and an elm in Old Lyme by means of connecting
them over a period of many years to voltmeters and keeping an unbroken record
of the various influences, it turned out that the L-fields of the trees varied
not only with sunlight and darkness, but also with the cycles of the moon, with
magnetic storms and with sunspots. Thus, Professor Burr writes: “If such
extra-terrestrial forces can influence the relatively simple L-fields of trees,
we would expect them to have an even greater influence on the more complex
L-fields of men and women, and there is evidence that they do” [1].
Such evidence is not
only furnished by Professor Burr, but also by other investigators. The most
startling kind of corroboration comes from Dr. Jonas and Dr. Miavec from former
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia respectively. They started out from the
observation made in 1940 by Dr. William Peterson of Chicago that the acidity or
alkalinity of blood could vary in relation to the lunar magnetism. Taking this
discovery further, the two doctors were able to develop on the basis of the
lunar cycles a method of determining the sex of children at the moment of
conception. They found that the angular relationship between the Sun and the
Moon at the time of a woman’s birth revealed her fertile phases throughout her
entire life. This in turn made it possible to develop an individualised method
of contraception using simple astrological calculations [2]. Thus, the ancient
wisdom that the moon controlled a woman’s menstruation has been vindicated. But
dreams too, will tell a woman what stage of the menstrual cycle she has
reached. The clearest dreams of this nature are menstrual dreams. They often
come two or three days before the actual onslaught of menstruation. It is a
time when the ovum breaks up. Thus, typical dreams that announce this phase are
dreams of frying eggs, of breaking eggs, of scrambling eggs, or of fish
attacking a shell-less egg. When we recall that Delphos in Greek means both
fish and womb, it transpires that fish in this context mean to indicate the
location of the egg. Another way the dream communicates menstruation is by
having the blood in the urine. Such a dream might cause some consternation, but
when examined carefully this scenario seems perfectly logical since the blood
might well mix with urine during menstruation. But plain water might also be
used by the dream to indicate the draining away of menstrual blood such as
happened in this dream: “My son took over the big bathtub so I was left with
the smaller one. When I sat in the bath near the plug-hole, I noticed that the
water was gradually draining away”. The son in this context was meant to refer
to the place where sons come from. More frightening dreams of the impending
period are the kind that show the murder of babies. Obviously such dreams
dramatize this particular time by means of a kind of abortion. Here is one
example: “I dreamt that someone murdered their baby girl. I could not quite
make out who that someone was. They had bashed her to death and even though she
was quite dead, the baby would not lie down. It was a thoroughly disturbing
situation”. The fact that the baby would not lie down foretold that the period
would be slow in coming and cause the dreamer to think that she might be
pregnant after all. We have seen that magnetic storms and sunspots affect the
L-field that in turn shapes the living matter it envelopes. Whilst the
Chaldeans have been aware of the sunspots and their regular occurrence with a
commensurate influence on the vegetation of the earth, western science has been
slow in catching on. It was as late as 1843, when R. Woolf finally established
that the appearance and disappearance of the sunspots was a cyclical event. He
found that the time span was approximately 11.1 years. This could be verified
in the plant world where it was observed that the snowdrops, for instance,
would rise from their cold blanket each season a little earlier. After the 11th
season they regressed again to their starting point. Magnetic storms and
sunspots are intimately connected. These storms are at their strongest during
abnormally big solar winds. They will distort the magnetosphere and so depress
the earth’s magnetic polarity. In 1989 a solar wind caused the terrestrial
magnetic field to deviate by 8 degrees, a massive event when compared with the
usual deviations of 0.2 degrees. In view of Burr’s observations and Jonas’ and
Miavec’s discoveries it must be abundantly clear that such solar flares will
have an enormous impact on life on earth. The Maya were perfectly aware of
this. They knew the anatomy of the Sun like the back of their hand. They kept
tabs on its pulsation by means of the correlated movements of Venus. They found
that this planet could be used as a calibrator of the sun’s behaviour. They could
predict solar flares from the gyrations of Venus. This, as all else so far
discussed in this chapter demonstrates that everything in the heavens is
intimately interlocked and that there is solid scientific ground for the
science of astrology. Indeed, Cotterell, author of the ‘Mayan Prophecies’
created a new kind of astrology based on Mayan wisdom and his own observations.
He called it Astrogenetics [3]. He believed that the solar winds affecting the
earth’s magnetic field also affected the conception of the foetus and its
future development. This corroborates Burr’s observations made when studying
the L-filed. Cotterell also confirms that our solar system is not floating in a
vacuum, but in a sea of energy composed not only of electromagnetism, but also
radio waves, infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-rays topped up with particles
from the solar winds. What is of particular interest here is that Cotterell,
like Jonas and Miavec, maintains that the moment of conception lays the
foundation to the character of the individual, thus validating the sun signs.
When the traditional astrologers heard this, they were not impressed since they
determine a child’s character according to the time of birth, and not the
moment of conception. It took Cotterell some time to demonstrate that it was
not only the character that was determined at the moment of conception, but
also the time of birth, a moment that correlated with the circumstances of
conception in such a way that the birth chart was also a chart of the
circumstances at conception. There is one more nail to be hammered into the
coffin of the scoffers, the sceptics, in other words, who say that it was DNA
that formed mind and body of an individual, and not the solar energy and other
radiation. This nail is the fact that Dr. A.R. Lieboff of the Naval Medical
Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, showed in 1984 that variations in the
environmental magnetic field affected the composition of the DNA in cells. The
result of this was that cells would undergo mutation when exposed to magnetic
fields at levels below that of the Earth’s own magnetic field. (Cotterell,
Appendix 1) As well as that, we need to consider the wisdom of the ancients
that said the seven planets corresponded to seven metallic vibrations: the Moon
corresponded with silver, Mercury with mercury, Venus with copper, the Sun with
gold, Mars with iron, Jupiter with tin, and Saturn with lead. When we then
learn that DNA molecules do contain the seven planetary metals, metals that are
capable of receiving and transmitting messages from the environment, which
includes the planetary sphere, thus influencing the genetic functions, it isn’t
difficult to envisage yet another astrological determinant for our physical and
mental makeup. Today, we take much of the mysteries of electromagnetic
transmission and recording for granted. Although the energies that carry the
images and sounds are invisible, we believe that they are real. Imagine to be
living around the time of Thomas Edison. If someone had told us then about the
marvels of our age, the miraculous things they can accomplish, we would have
said to them that they were ‘dreaming’. And if we could have said it to Edison
himself, he would have quite freely admitted that he was indeed a dreamer.
Whenever faced with a technical problem, this most prolific inventor would sit
in his ‘chair of inspiration’, place a silver dollar on his head and a metal
bucket between his feet. When he eventually went to sleep and his head lunged
forward as sleep overtook him, the dollar would drop clanging into the bucket
and wake him from his hypnagogic state. This is the state before we drop down
into stage 4 of sleep. While we are ‘sinking’ into the realm of blissful
oblivion, dream images will flash passed our inner eye.
Edison had long discovered
that these images, pictorial situations, and minimal plots bore the solution to
the problems he took with him into the state of such hypnagogic sleep. It was
in one of these modes that the idea for the gramophone came to him. A machine,
in other words, that could record the sound made by means of a needle that
engraved the vibrations into a wax cylinder. When the needle later retraced the
grooves in the wax, they reproduced the sound made during the recording stage.
Eventually the wax was replaced by plastics and later still also by a band of
celluloid or plastic that was coated with magnetic particles, (iron oxide or
chromium dioxide). When this tape then is drawn through a recording head it
converts the electrical currents it receives into particular magnetic fields
that are then ‘engraved’ on the tape. A microphone translates the sounds that
enter it into complex patterns of impulses, thus modifying these currents.
While in principle the same as Edison’s invention, this process is subtler than
his steel and wax mechanism. It is subtler because we can’t see it happening.
We can’t see it happening because the engraving is not purely mechanical, but
partly electromagnetic. Were it not for the fact that we can easily demonstrate
the workings of the electromagnetism involved by simply recording and replaying
our voice with a tape recorder, we would doubt it all like someone would have
done so back in Edison’s time. Of course, directing laser beams onto a disk
composed mostly of polycarbonate later on refined this process.
There is scarcely a better circumstance than
Edison’s method of problem solving in order to demonstrate the interconnection
between astrology and dreams. Since Jonas and Miavec have been able to
demonstrate so factually that the angular relations between the Moon and the
Sun in a woman’s natal chart determined both her receptivity and the sex of the
child to be conceived, it must follow that other planetary relations would
determine other human developments in her. But it also must follow that
equivalent developments in men would also be determined by various astronomical
angularities. Thus, when Edison was born, he was no doubt endowed with a natal
chart that evidenced great inventive potential; but also particularly strong
leanings towards dreams (Neptune) which in time would help him solve his
various technical problems and inspire him with new ideas. His situation then,
where a conscious use of dreams guaranteed the flow of his inventions, and with
them their material implementation, demonstrates in the clearest possible way
the interconnection of astronomical angularities with dreams, and ultimately
their manifestations. If electromagnetism can perform the little miracle of
tape recording, when the computer can operate on similar principles, when
television is able to transmit pictures and sounds for thousands of miles by
means of unseen energies, why should we doubt the power of the electromagnetic
field, the effects of the L-field of our planetary system? Should we doubt it
just because we can’t see it with our bare eyes? Should we doubt it because we
don’t feel it influencing our mind? For how long can we resist the scientific
evidence proving that such energy fields are capable of varying the DNA, which
in turn will shape our human frame and mental predisposition? Indeed, is not
our neurological system operating along electrochemical principles that must be
highly susceptible to the L-field, a vastly stronger cocktail of electric
energies than that of our own intelligence circuitry? Incidentally, the
experiment that demonstrated that our brain operates along electrochemical
processes again was revealed in a dream. It came to Otto Loewi who shared in
1936 the Nobel Prize with Sir Henry Hallett Dale for research in Physiology.
His demonstration that our nervous system is an electrochemical mechanism makes
the L-field and its determining influx on our existence that Professor Burr
discovered around the very time Loewi made his crucial experiment even more
plausible. Indeed, if Burr’s vacuum voltmeter can reveal the future nervous
system of a frog when measuring the electromagnetic potential of its egg, why
should our own nervous system not also come to light under the same sort of
examination? And if it did, would that not clearly demonstrate that the shape
of things to come is in the ‘electric sea’, or the ether, as it used to be
called, in which we, together with the whole planetary system are submerged?
When we read pre-menstrual dreams with extra care and reflect upon them, it
dawns on us that there is a striking similarity between what such dreams do and
what Burr’s vacuum voltmeter does. We have seen that the voltmeter, when
attached to a single frog’s egg, will reveal more than its own cellular
material. It will in fact show the entire nervous system of the future frog.
Put another way, it shows the life potential of that egg, outlining the
blueprint of the creature that is to develop from it.