When the world is your body

In one of my workshops, a woman I'll call Lara shared a dream titled “War”. She was very agitated and upset as she retold it.

I am on patrol with six women dressed in green uniforms. We are all riding motorcycles. The stars seem very close. I don’t want to look at them. I don’t know where we are to begin with, then I realize we are near my home town. Enemy missiles are coming in. Our people are firing missiles to stop them, but their aim is all wrong. I keep yelling to warn them they are missing their targets, but they don’t hear or don’t act. An enemy missile hits the place where I was born and I know it has been obliterated.

Lara connected this dream with a series of “end of the world” dreams, but found this one the scariest. In our early discussion of her dream, she did not tell us that she had been undergoing medical treatment and has been worried about her doctors. This came out only at the end of the process, and we did not ask for details.

After some hesitation, Lara agreed to my suggestion that she should try to go back inside her dream through our Dream Reentry technique. She also agreed to allow all the other dreams in the workshop - a circle of 35 - to make a group journey into her dreamspace, where we would support her and gather further information for her as dream trackers.

I asked her to set a clear intention for Dream Reentry. She stated that her intention was to “heal the dream” by preventing the enemy missiles from getting through. I then started drumming to give the group fuel and focus for the group expedition.

In her Dream Reentry, Lara made interesting discoveries. She found the dream cities full of “pink houses” that she had not seen or remembered before. The stars, once again, were ominously close and she did not want to look at them. She was unable to fulfill her intention to "heal the dream". Something more remained to be done.

In tracking for Lara, my first aim was to establish whether her dream related to a literal threat of war or terrorism. It soon became clear to me that it did not. I looked for the women in green that Lara had described and found they were wearing nurses’ hospital scrubs. These nurses are aware of alternative approaches and can help to temper the allopathic approach.

I called on my dream allies to support Lara and I saw the Bear come through and wrapped her in healing energy. It seemed to me that the world of Lara's dream was the world of her body, and that all the war was raging within her body. I saw the menacing stars as cancer cells, threatening to metastasize. The “pink houses” were Lara's cellular system. The missiles being fired off were her doctors’ efforts to come up with the right mix of chemicals to treat her condition. The threat of missing or misfiring reflected the danger that the doctors would get the treatment wrong.

I tried to assist Lara in her intention to “heal the dream”, experimenting with setting up shields. I saw the missile fired at her birthplace deflected so that it landed in the river and was washed out to the sea.

I had the strong feeling that Lara could work with her dream imagery in the direction of healing, that it might even be possible to re-weave the pattern of the stars.

When we shared travel reports at the end of the group journey, I was cautious in telling Lara what I had seen, not wanting to project any negative images or scenarios. "In my dream of your dream," I began, She accepted what I brought quickly and gratefully, telling us immediately that there was a very real danger that what her doctors were doing – or might try to do – would misfire. She resolved to carry the dream warning as an advisory and to look for help from the “warrior nurses”.

Other members of the group reported that in their own journeys, they had seen the Bear embrace Lara and surround her with its healing and protective energy.

This adventure in group dreaming brought into sharp focus the need to determine whether the world of our dreams is the world out there, or our personal world, or the world inside the body, in which dramas and battles are also playing out. Because dreams work and speak on many levels, an individual dream may relate to all three of these worlds, and to a world beyond the ones we know.

For a full explanation of Dream Reentry and tracking, core techniques of Active Dreaming, please read my books Conscious Dreaming and The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination.

Night battle via Future Invention Gallery