In the dream I am in a beautiful natural surrounding, on an ocean shore. Suddenly a bear appears and I know I am not supposed to run but I do. I start running away as fast as I can, which is very fast, but the bear runs faster. Someone starts calling out to me “stop running Rachel! Turn and face the bear! Be still! Stop running.” Apparently I am very stubborn and I keep running expecting to find safety. I come to a large cliff that extends high above me. My mom is standing at the top of the hill. There is no where to run to, nothing left to do. I summon all my courage and turn around to face the bear and stand still the way I have understood to do to show I am of no threat to the bear. I stand there and the bear runs to me. It stops before me, sniffs me, grunts and turns away.
Hi Rachel,
Thanks for those dreams and I am looking forward to receiving more. I am just writing about animal dreams in this book I have been writing on and off for about a year.
I have just been doing a lot of thinking about when a fear is based upon an actual experience or inherited and then when it is an illusion like in the category of what the [Baha’i] Writings say are vain imaginings.
Creativity seems to be one of those virtues that is so not present in the society and so puts you on the edge between the material and the spiritual domains that we can create imaginary fears and blow them up so that we do not have to express our creative minds. It is an ego protection. Shooting a bear and feeling positive is like shooting an imaginary fear.
The other type of fear is based upon real experiences such as yours, Rachel. The first step is courage. The next step in a dream like that is to become the bear in a positive sense. This gives you strength or confidence which allows you not only to begin new things, but to carry them through to their conclusion.
Richard
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Hi Rachel,Thank you for writing your process. You can feel free to publish any of my interpretations that you want. (In 2015, 7000 people viewed a post about dreams of being chased. Here is a link to that post.)
The thing that has always given me a great deal of insight into the dreaming process is to ask the questions of wonderment. So I would ask myself, “I wonder why a bear is in the dream chasing me as opposed to a lion or snake?” If you read the Valley of Wonderment where Baha’u’llah speaks about dreams, He invokes to wonder about things. He asks how is it possible to be asleep and dream of something and then 10 years later it comes true. He doesn’t give us the answer, but promises us that when we consider the difference between the dream world and the material world that we will attain to divine confirmations.
So where most people get stuck in the dream interpretation process and hence, in their own spiritual evolution, is that they do not consider the difference, for instance, of a dream bear and a material bear. The dream bear would be a like a spiritual bear.
Most of us stop in the process of our spiritual evolution by getting rid of the negative aspects of the material bear. The idea is to get rid of negative emotions rather than embracing the spiritual qualities.
So, for instance, in someone else’s bear dream there was the garden and then there are the three bears. I think that the idea in shooting the bear is to have protection. This is because the material world is governed by the principle of distinctions (either or). You can have a bear or you can have a garden, but you cannot have both. In the spiritual world you can have a spiritual bear and a spiritual garden and they both exist simultaneously in peace and harmony.
In your dream the bear running after you is the oppressive conditions of abuse which you experienced causing you to run away from things until you get to the very edge before you have courage. So on the one hand you have the material condition of oppression which was passed down to you from one generation to the next and then you have the spiritual bear which is positive strength and great confidence to do positive things in the world.
It would be good if you would be able to stop the oppression by having the courage to face it which you have done, but it is quite another thing to have the strength and confidence to make positive changes in the world. Embracing the spiritual world is much more difficult than facing off against the material world. It usually takes about a year to incorporate a new virtue because God seems to have a million things He wants to teach you about it. Turning around and facing the bear is step one. Having the strength and confidence to write and raise your daughter and a lot of other things takes some time to learn.
A garden is characterized by the quality of beauty normally or giving nourishment if it is a vegetable garden. This is what art does. A bear gives you strength and confidence. In the spiritual world they go together, but in the material world they do not.
These are just a few of my thoughts. I hope that they are helpful.
Richard
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The book which Richard refers to here has now been published and can be purchased from his Dreams for Peace site. The book is called “Dreamwork Module 1” and is $.2.99. Here is the link.
Dreams For Healing 
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