How dreaming gets us through

In our current closed-down society, people who did not previously make much room in their lives for dreams are dreaming up a storm. Unused to sharing or working with dreams, they often shout out, “Why am I having this weird dream?” As a lifelong dreamer who devotes much of his time to teaching others how to dream, let me offer a few general observations: 

1.Dreams always tell us more than we already know. Don’t dismiss any dream, or tag it as “weird” or trivial, until you have recorded it and looked carefully at what is going on here.

2. "Weirdness" in dreams may be special effects your dream producers bring in to dramatize something you need to understand or act upon, such as the need for social distancing and self monitoring.

3Dreaming may be traveling; you make visits and you receive visitations. Your social life may be very restricted in ordinary life, but you can be as social as you like in your dreams. You can go to that farmer's market or that travel destination you've been missing. I dreamed I wass in Aruba the other night, lying back under a palupa on the white sand beach with the taste of sea salt and lime daiquiri on my lips. I did not feel downcast when I reurned to my body's housebound condition. I enjoyed the full after effects of a mini vacation and did not have to pay for a plane ticket or wait for bags.

4.You have intuitive radar that comes fully alive in dreams. You see things happening at a distance in time and space. You check out the possible future. You see unwanted events in the possible future you may be able to avoid if you clarify your dream information and take appropriate action. You see desirable future scenarios -your dream home, your dream partner, your dream job – that you may be able to manifest if you follow the road map your dream has given you.

5. In dreams, you can go to a night cinema where the feature films are made especially for you. You are not confined to sitting in the audience. You can step through the screen and become scriptwriter, director an star of your own life movies.

6. You can talk to the dead in your dreams. There is nothing “weird” or unnatural about contact with the deceased, especially in dreams. We meet them because they are still around, or because they come visiting, or because in our dream travels we go to places where they are alive. Sometimes they have guidance for us. Sometimes they need our help because they are stuck or confused, and may have been hurled into the afterlife without preparation or rituals of leave-taking. With so much death around us, this is a very good time to learn, with the deceased, that consciousness survives the death of the body and that life goes on in whatever world.

7. Dreaming, you have access to wiser sources than those available to the daily trivial mind: to the god/goddess you can talk to, to the ancestors, to a Greater Self. Your dreams are a voice of conscience and course correction, showing you how your current actions and attitudes appear to an objective, witness self. Dreams are a way for your true spiritual guides to get past the cynical, reductionist skeptic in your left brain and recall you to your bigger story.

8. Your dreams are a factory of images that can help you stay well or get well.  Your body believes in images. Find the right ones and you program the amazing pharmaceuticals factory inside you to pump out the right drugs, boosting your immune system.

9. You don't need to go to sleep in order to dream. Your most powerful dreaming may unfold in the twilight zone between sleep and awake. You may journey like the ancient shamans, hyper-awake. The scales may drop from your eyes so you see that the world around you is a forest of living symbols looking at you.

10.Active dreaming is a path of real magic. In my lexicon, true magic is what happens when we bring gifts from another world into this one. We do this when we remember our dreams and act to embody their energy and guidance in everyday life. And when we wake up to the fact that dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. Dreaming is about waking up to a deeper reality and deeper sources of meaning in our lives

To get good at dreaming, as with anything else, requires practice, practice, practice. Three things to do now:

* Keep a journal. Date each entry and give it a title. This is going to become the most important book on dreams you will ever read: your personal encyclopedia of symbols, our data log for “supernormal” phenomena like clairvoyance and precognition, a place where you dialog with your Self and your inner teachers, a workout for the writer and creator in you.

*Learn some of the core techniques of Active Dreaming, my original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. These include using the Nine Keys to Your Dreams explained in my book Conscious Dreaming, practicing the Dream Reentry technique, and learning to navigate by synchronicity, which is the dreamer’s way of operating 24/7/ You’ll find a short guide to my relevant books here. You may also want to check out my online video courses for The Shift Network

*Learn my Lightning Dreamwork technique, a fast, fun process by which we can share a dream or a personal story with a friend, give each other helpful feedback (without presuming to tell each other what our dreams or our lives mean) and help each other determine what action we should take to embody guidance and energy from the story.

Get to know your dreams better and you may find that if you still want to call them "weird" you will use the word in older sense. Though few of us remember its origin, weird is derived from Wyrd, which is a way of understanding how things in all the worlds are connected, and turn together. In the Scotland of my paternal ancestors, to be “weirdless” was to be unlucky or unfortunate in life. 

Photo: Under a palupa on Manchebo beach, Aruba, by RM