Published: Monday 28th of April 2025
Secrets of the Subconscious
As a teenager I was an avid reader of books on the supernatural. I took from them the idea that our subconscious mind is a vast storehouse of untapped wisdom, and we only have to know how to dip into it to transform our lives for the better. That notion was quickly dispelled after having the following vivid dream-like experience.
I was standing in a room by myself, when a lady came up and asked if I remembered her. She seemed familiar but I couldn’t quite place her. I asked if perhaps she’d changed her glasses. “Yes, I have,” she said. “You last saw me wearing glasses with frames that curved up at the sides.” Suddenly I recognised her as Mrs Primavesi, a teacher from my infant school. Even allowing for different glasses, her facial features and whole demeanour looked altogether softer. She told me she was no longer teaching but had taken up playing music. “Violin?” I asked. 'Yes, that’s right,' she replied. Our conversation over she started to walk away, vanishing into thin air even before reaching the far end of the room.
I should tell you that Mrs Primavesi was my teacher when I was six or seven, more than a dozen years before getting this experience. I‘d not given her a single thought in all that time, but the dream reminded me I hadn’t liked her. I was also slightly afraid of her, after she gave my friend and me a good telling off for laughing too much in class. I’m not saying we didn’t deserve it, but we nicknamed her ‘the lion’ because her glasses made her look especially fierce.
Before then I had no real idea of what happens each time we take a dislike to someone or something. The dream showed me that negative feelings don’t just fade away when we move on to something else, but drop instead into our subconscious mind. There they accumulate like silt, year on year, a barrier to the natural self and to the soul. Fortunately for me the dream also showed a way of clearing the past, in this case by meeting the very person I’d come up against all that time before.
Under normal circumstances it would be an impossible task to rush around finding everyone we’ve ever wronged or harboured bad feelings against, in order to apologise or make amends. In any case some of those people might by then be dead. In the state of sleep, however, our inner body can do just that, if we earnestly desire to do so. In fact many things are best sorted out in the state of sleep, and people can be found even when they have died to the earth.
I feel that meeting this woman was not by chance. Whether she was passed over or not I have no idea, but she evidently came to make peace between us. I could see she’d lost her harshness of character, or perhaps it was never there in the first place. I needed to understand that people can be quite different beneath their exterior shell. In taking up the violin it showed she was developing an inner harmony, which would – if she wished – allow her to return to teaching at a later date and do well at it.
The manner in which she vanished at the end of the dream suggests she came from, and returned to, a different plane of life to where I was myself in the dream. I suppose that like me she needed to erase things from her subconscious, made possible by our talking together. Even today I still thank her and bless her for visiting. I hope she knows how much I learned from it. And that Gladys (the founder of Studies on Life) even gave my dream as an example of the subconscious mind hanging on to unhelpful feelings – feelings we are best to challenge and throw out before consciously forgetting them.
This then is the secret, that what we dislike or grumble about or become irritated by, however petty, can easily become a sticking point in our progress. I don’t mean that if things aren’t right we should just ignore them. But saying something calmly and kindly will give better results than dwelling upon a situation and building up resentment.
Author: Colin