When Karen came for a tarot reading she asked about her lost passports. As a personal coach and trainer, she was more familiar with planning and advising others, than asking for help. She explained that during one of her biannual clean-ups she had carefully put the family’s passports away for safekeeping and couldn’t remember where they were. She seemed nervous that I might consider her obsessive about order in the home whereas in reality I was wondering if she could give me some tips on how to manage a serious clean-up.
“It’s a silly question really,” she said with a nervous laugh. “I should have paid more attention when I was securing them.”
“So you’ve effectively hidden them from yourself?” I enquired cheekily.
“Exactly,” she nodded. Realising that cancelling and replacing several European passports would be an onerous task, I asked her to select one card while thinking of each of the following questions.
- “Are our passports inside the house?” Yes was the answer.
- “Are the passports in my husband’s home office?” No.
- “Are the passports in the garage (attached to the house)?” No.
- “Are the passports in our bedroom?” No.
- “Are the passports in the spare room?” Yes.
As she left Karen vowed to search the spare room for the passports and report back to me when she had found them. A month later she phoned to tell me that she still hadn’t found them and was feeling rather desperate about her rapidly approaching trip. She was debating whether to cancel them immediately and apply for replacements before it was too late. She enquired if hypnosis might help to find them. Hypnosis can help an individual to access specific memories if used effectively.
I said that it could help, if she had placed them somewhere. If someone else had moved them then accessing her memory for last movements of the passports wouldn’t help. In passing she mentioned that she had been reading my book Intuition and she liked the idea of setting a dream task to answer a question.
This involves asking a simple questions or setting a simple task as you are falling asleep at night. In Karen’s situation I suggested that she state the following as she fell asleep that night.
“Tonight I’ll dream about where I last put the passports and tomorrow I’ll remember my dream.” She did this and she awoke the following morning dreaming about standing in front of a dresser in the spare room. She fell asleep again and awoke without an immediate recollection of her dream.
Instead of spending the day trying to recall her dream she climbed out of bed and told herself that she’d let her feet find the passports according to her dream last night. She walked out of the bedroom and into the spare room. She stopped directly in front of the dresser she had dreamed about. Having already searched through the dresser twice she was sceptical but decided to empty the contents once more and sift through them meticulously. She found her passports in less than ten minutes.
She emailed me excitedly to let me know that she had them again and I cheekily wrote back to say ‘You’ve just saved $95 on a hypnosis session. What do you plan to spend your money on instead?’
Although her discovery wasn’t immediately the result of remembering her dream, she recalled the full dream later that day. This is an effective technique for training your intuition but it does have limitations.
- To avoid confusion, limit yourself to one task per night.
- Personal instructions need to be short and clear. If the sentence is too long, you might not drift off to sleep easily.
- It is important to carefully consider the most effective way to set the goal so that it doesn’t take a week of tasks to eliminate alternatives. Instead of asking “Is my purse in my car?” It’s better to ask directly “Where is my purse?”
There are many different methods used to locate missing objects. Setting dream tasks has the benefit of not requiring lengthy meditations or specific tools. You simply ask your intuition to work while you sleep.
If you don’t want to sleep on each task or follow the feet to find a misplaced item, asking for guidance during meditation can help or simply cutting a tarot deck with a series of Yes / No questions sometimes offers a speedy resolution.
For the intuitively challenged, it’s probably best to avoid Roberto’s technique. When he lost his gold band wedding ring, Roberto bought an identical ring as soon as possible. Unfortunately the second ring went missing two years later so he furtively replaced this one too. A few months afterwards he was unable to find the third ring and his wife Natalie noticed him searching for it. In under an hour Natalie had located all three rings around the house. Having found his rings she demanded an explanation. It cost Roberto an expensive weekend away. “A ring would have been cheaper,” he sighed.
© Copyright 2017. Paul Fenton-Smith
For more information about setting dream tasks and keeping a dream diary, see Paul’s book Intuition. Paul also teaches psychic development courses.
