Bird of Paradise: Taming the Unconscious to Bring Your Dreams to Fruition

By Jane Teresa Anderson

This inspirational guide to finding your calling and navigating your life using dreams, mysteries, and alchemy draws on Jane Teresa Anderson’s life and work as a dream analyst and author, scientist and mystic.

This is a story strewn with flowers that bloom, trees that shelter, and birds that sing — all of which

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jane Teresa Anderson
• Release date: May 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9780987189691

Jane Teresa Anderson

Jane Teresa Anderson, BSc Hons, is the author of seven books about dreams and dreaming, including The Dream Handbook. She consults worldwide as a dream analyst and dream therapist and can be reached at JaneTeresa.com. A frequent dream expert on television and radio and in the print media, she is also the host of The Dream Show with Jane Teresa Anderson-a podcast series now in its eleventh year. She also conducts training courses in dream interpretation and dream therapy through her online learning platform, The Dream Academy, at Dream-Academy-Online.com.

Book preview

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Other books by Jane Teresa Anderson

The Dream Handbook

(Hachette Australia and Little Brown UK, 2018)

Dream Alchemy

(Lothian Books, 2003, Hachette Australia, 2007)

101 Dream Interpretation Tips

(Jane Teresa Anderson, 2007)

The Shape of Things to Come

(Random House Australia, 1998)

Dream It: Do It!

(Harper Collins Australia, 1995)

Sleep On It

(Harper Collins Australia, 1994)

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Published by Jane Teresa Anderson 

JaneTeresa.com

First published 2020

© 2020 Jane Teresa Anderson

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright restricted above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and publisher of this book.

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ISBN 978 0 9871896 8 4 (pbk)

            978 0 9871896 9 1 (ebk)

Designed and typeset by Helen Christie, Blue Wren Books 

Cover illustration by LanaN, shutterstock.com 

Author photo by Laura Tilley 

Light/eggs photo by Karyn MacDonald

One morning the flowers laid themselves at my feet. Write about us, they seemed to say. I leaned in with sweet surrender, and entered into the flow.

Contents

Garden of Dreams

The Seed

Subtropical Blossoms

Bird of Paradise

Honeysuckle

Primrose

Rose

Golden Trumpet

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Pear Blossom

Heartsease

Buttercups and Daisies

Eyebright

Clover

Snapdragon

Forgetmenot

Moonflower

Baby’s Breath

Lotus

Cosmos

Mountain Thyme

The Unexpected Harvest

Savasana

The Stars that Guide You Home

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INTRODUCTION

Garden of Dreams

This book that you have before you is part whimsical memoir, part healing balm, and part alchemical guide to navigating your human journey by observing some of the deeper mysteries of the human experience. It aims, in a larger sense, to be an inspiration to you, to be used in ways that will enrich your life. Bird of Paradise is made up of stories I’ve wanted to share for a long time—stories whose time to be given a wider audience has now come.

But they’re not individual stories and this is not one of those dip in and read books, although I know you’ll be tempted to do just that! Accompany me from the beginning—where appropriately enough we begin with a story called The Seed—and progress all the way through to Savasana.

I am a dream analyst and dream therapist whose work is largely based on my own research and practice of more than twenty-seven years. As such, I have been privileged to spend much of my professional life engaged in exploring my clients’ dreams and witnessing their breakthroughs as they quite magically bloom and grow in their amazing lives. When I haven’t been working with clients, I’ve been writing about dreams and dreaming, speaking about dreams and dreaming in the media, training students to work with dreams, and at night, dreaming my own dreams.

When I look back over my life so far, I see a path of dreams. I think of my early childhood, and there it is: My dream of snakes nesting at the foot of my bed. I think of being six or seven, and there it is, in full color and vivid heart-pounding emotion: My dream of being a shepherd boy encountering a pack of wolves gazing down at me from a mountain ridge with ominous intensity. I think of being nine or ten, and there it is: The plane flying at such a sharp incline that it flips over backward and explodes in the sky. I think of being thirteen, and there it is once more: A dream of my grandfather, a couple of days after his death, riding a motorbike into my dream and casually asking me if there’s anything I’d like to know before he rides off again.

As a child I was curious. Were these dreams a parallel reality? Did they offer glimpses into a more distant past, perhaps a past life? Or were they predictions of future accidents, or glimpses into the spirit world? As a child I was entranced by the magic of dreams, and always welcomed the promise of the nightly adventures that sleep would bring, even the scary ones.

As my dreams became increasingly surreal, I began to understand that they were rather more like energy pictures depicting my emotions and interactions with the world. Yet they were also larger than life—as if they offered a glimpse of a bigger and deeper part of myself and the nature of life than I could grasp while awake.

I can mark out my life in dreams, as if turning the pages of a photo album. Most key events and turning points of my life were preceded or accompanied by vivid dreams, and I know the same will hold true in the years to come.

It’s not that my dreams predicted my future. Like all dreams, they connected or reconnected me with the deepest parts of my being. When I learned how to understand my dreams I learned how to understand myself and my life, and how to use those insights to make powerful changes when that’s what was called for.

These are the blessings that dreams bestow, and since every one of us dreams about five dreams a night, whether or not we remember them, on a regular basis they are universal gifts available to each and every one of us. To accept these gifts we need to learn and practice the art and science of reading dreams, and allow the insights they bring to bestow the blessings that they hold.

There’s a certain magic that comes from spending so much of a life in dreams. Your eyes acclimate to seeing beyond the everyday and you experience quite astounding synchronicities and mysterious goings-on. You witness a greater tapestry that’s woven from the threads of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Among the vignettes contained herein, you’ll find tips and techniques to help you understand your dreams. That said, however, dreams are not the main subject of this book! They are markers on the path, inspiring you to look and discover the big picture of your life’s purpose.

The entire book is a story strewn with flowers, trees, and birds that bloom, shelter, and sing a direction for the reader to follow. (You may have noticed that most of the chapter titles refer to flowers.) The book also contains a subtle through line, one I have gently nurtured to build your understanding of the mysteries of the psyche as you turn its pages. Read slowly, read quickly, read and pause, read and ponder—but stay with the flow, page by page, and begin at the very beginning.

As this book wrote itself into being, I realized I had a cache of stories that had accumulated in various blogs I’d written over the years, so I gathered these together and wove them in. Most are slightly updated with the wisdom of hindsight or reworked to fit the style of this book, so if you’re reading and thinking I know this story from somewhere, well, now you know.

As regards the book’s title, there is such a creature as a bird of paradise, but that is not the bird of my story. My bird of paradise appears in several guises throughout these pages. You’ll first meet him as Joey the budgie in The Seed, and you’ll last meet her—yes, her!—in this book as a constellation of light in the epilogue. In the pages in between, you’ll also encounter the bird-of-paradise flower, and the bird-of-paradise yoga pose. Once you’ve finished reading, I imagine that the bird of paradise will cross your path in many forms, shedding a feather here and there or a petal or two, or challeng­ing you to yoga-extend your limbs to fully embody her true nature. Or you will simply hear her calling to you in what may be some other mysterious, enigmatic way.

So let’s begin! Don’t think too hard and certainly don’t analyze as you go—just immerse yourself and read.

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The Seed

Miracles happen

Who Would Have Thought?

One Easter, when I was about six, my dad was shaving at the kitchen sink. He put down his razor and peered through the window. Is that a budgie perched on our washing line? he asked.

We tiptoed into the garden to investigate, hoping the bird wouldn’t fly away. In England, where I was born and lived as a young child, budgies don’t live in the wild. Essentially a parakeet, they frequently live in cages, one or two per tiny cage parked in the living room. Here they nod, peck at their reflections in teensy play mirrors, and talk—broken records of their masters’ voices—cocking their heads from side to side as they study you. I knew this because my granny had a budgie.

He must have escaped, Dad pronounced. Look, he’s got a big bump on his head! Maybe he flew into a wall, got knocked out, and forgot his way home.

Hello, Joey, said the budgie, opening and then resettling his wings.

Dad offered a finger as a perch, and Joey climbed on it. We made him a temporary cage—a cardboard box with a cellophane front for a window—and we poked pinholes in the cellophane so he could breathe.

We can’t keep him, said Dad as he wrote some big words spelled out in capital letters on a plain postcard: FOUND. BUDGIE. SAYS HIS NAME IS JOEY.

The local newsagent put the card in his window. But no one claimed Joey.

In school a little while later, I waited in the spelling line at my teacher’s desk, piece of paper in hand, to ask how to spell budgie so I could write the story in the daily journal we each had to keep. The teacher told me that budgie was short for budgerigar, and that budgerigars lived in the wild in Australia.

Now that really excited me, because as a much younger child I had dug a hole in our back garden with an old dessert­spoon, hoping to dig through the middle of the earth and come out on the other side in Australia. I had a globe in my bedroom and I had seen Australia hanging upside down on the bottom of it. As a result, I was curious about it.

In any event, eventually Dad bought Joey a cage with a perch, a mirror, a piece of cuttlefish to sharpen his beak, and all the other accessories an English pet budgie requires. The bump on his head fell off one day, and we laughed ourselves to tears for it was nothing but seed shuck that had somehow gotten trapped under his crown feathers!

Joey lived in his cage in the corner of the room for many years, speaking his lines every day, instructed and rehearsed by Dad. Hello Joey, Jane’s a good girl, Seventy-five thousand. This last was the amount of money Dad hoped to win on the British Football Pools. His verbal repertoire was recorded on a long piece of paper tucked into the space between his sand tray and the bottom of the cage. After a few years he was saying so many different things that we had to turn the paper over so we could write more on the other side.

A budgie was about as exotic as birds got in our neighbor­hood. I had seen pictures of kingfishers with bright blue chests and I had heard that budgies were small-fry, so to speak, compared to parrots. But I didn’t personally know anyone who had a caged parrot—and I’d certainly never met anyone who had found a wild budgie in their own back garden.

Australia dropped off my agenda shortly thereafter because I got tired of digging with my spoon. Or was it because I was reprimanded for making a big hole in the middle of the lawn? I had no wish to live in Australia, and when my first husband, Douglas, and I did come here for a three-year stint in 1984, I looked forward to returning home at the end of our stay. Yet here I am now, all these years later, living in this magical place.

We never did return to England. After nearly seven years living in a country town, and our divorce, I moved to Sydney before remarrying and then settling in Brisbane for some twenty-four years. This was a place where even in the heart of the city, parrots, lorikeets, rosellas, and other colorful parrot-like birds are a common sight. They’re background music to the business of daily living, especially and magnificently when rain blesses the subtropical trees with blossoms, pollen, fruits, and seeds. I think I’ve only seen a budgerigar once in the wild here, but whenever I bask in the sight of parrots flitting among the trees or waking me from dreams with their dawn chorus, I remember Joey and digging my hole to Australia with that old dessertspoon.

Who would have thought it? Nothing is impossible. When you dream big and take your first steps (even with an old dessertspoon!), magic can happen. And here’s a greater thought to keep your heart in the right place throughout: Your everyday reality may be someone else’s dream.

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My story gets better, and here’s its punch line. After I had committed to opening this book with this story, a handwritten note was delivered to the letter box in our front garden here in Australia. You could have knocked me down with the clichéd feather, for posting notes about lost budgies around the neighborhood is not something that happens anymore. I hadn’t even realized that people still kept budgies!

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Life had come full circle, at least in the budgie department. This sign from the universe was encouragement that I was squarely on my path and that magical creative work (which you now hold in your hands) was about to unfold.

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Subtropical Blossoms

Grevillea banksii

I heard the call, and I’m here to tell the tale.

The Tale of Two Feathers

The message that I should write this book was reinforced by the tale of two feathers.

In early 2015, when I’d begun the process of merging my websites into a more streamlined and contemporary site, I engaged a branding stylist and a web designer to use their exquisite arts to communicate mine. My art is comprised of the work that I do with my clients and their dreams. The arts of the branding stylist and web designer include the design of symbols, images, graphics, and web architectural technology to communicate my work in visuals. I received the gift of seeing my art interpreted and portrayed through their eyes, which in turn helped me recognize the subtleties of my offerings.

At the same time, I was doing some yoga breath work with a pranayama yoga specialist to liberate a persistent cough that was eager to be heard. (I engage in the practice of yoga several times a week.) In just one session he did his magic, restoring my ability to breathe deeply without spluttering, and, in parallel, freeing my ability to flow more fully with my work. I was open and ready for the next stage, whatever that would be.

The next day, I walked the few hundred meters to the yoga studio, swung my yoga mat from my back, and unrolled it onto the floor. Out popped a beautiful, iridescent, green feather. It was a lorikeet feather, and it must have fallen from the sky into my tightly rolled mat during that very short walk. If so, this was quite a feat, and it sent a little shock up my spine.

Two days later, I took a T-shirt off the hook on the back of our bedroom door, and as I slipped it on I saw something silvery glinting on one of the shoulders. It was an earring: a silver feather hanging on a silver dream catcher. Whose earring was this? And how had it ended up hooked into my T-shirt, a shirt I’d worn briefly a couple of times before hanging it on the hook a few days before?

As it turned out, the earring belonged to my daughter-in-law Nataly who was staying with us at the time.

Where did you find that? she asked. I haven’t seen it for four months!

Right away I noticed the connection between the feather and writing (quill), and the fact that I myself am a dream catcher (being the dream analyst that I am). Connecting the dots, did this indicate that I was meant to start writing a new book in my capacity as a dream analyst?

I was beginning to think it did.

On my office wall is a framed photo of a baby bird stretching and feeling its wings, with a quote from my book Dream Alchemy (later updated and published as The Dream Handbook), beneath. It reads: The world cannot benefit from your talents unless you unfold your wings. I’ve noticed that people shed a tear or two when they look at that, so I know it’s a powerful statement.

Acknowledging the nudge that the photo provided, I unfolded my own wings. I slipped the green feather and the silver feathery dream catcher earring into the photo’s frame to seal my intention and dipped my quill into ink to write the book that you’re now reading.

Obviously Joey’s English seed had found home, sprouted, taken root, transformed, and blossomed. In the process, I had learned the language that feathers speak, so when that feather fell onto my yoga mat, it certainly got my attention, and I was able to understand what it meant.

Who would have thought? Magic can happen. I heard the call, and I’m here to tell the tale.

Dreamtime Teatime

To further demonstrate how the dreaming life may inform and catalyze the creative life, I want to share with you a dream I had when I was contemplating writing my fifth book.

Dream, Mid-2000s

It all started with a cup of tea. Well, that was the idea, anyway. I was trying to wake myself up to make a cup of tea to bring back to bed but my dreaming mind was brewing something a little more exotic than mundane black breakfast tea.

In the dreamtime I padded down the hall in my dressing gown, boiled the kettle, opened the blinds, and pondered the dewy garden. Everything was exactly as it should have been on a normal Wednesday morning. I opened the fridge to get the milk and my heart missed a beat. A rainbow-colored bird was flittering around inside, full of life and warmth despite the icy interior of the over-frosted fridge.

Oh, poor little thing! Did you get trapped in the fridge? I twittered, standing back to open the door wide so that he could fly out. But he didn’t fly out and so I looked more closely. There were now three rainbow-colored birds in the fridge—a trio of a dawn chorus heralding sunshine