Active Dreaming? The phrase is a provocation, designed to shake us free from the assumption that dreaming is a passive activity. I am grateful for the gift of spontaneous sleep dreams, the ones we don’t ask for and often don’t want. They hold up a magic mirror in which we can see ourselves as we truly are. They serve as a voice of conscience. They preview challenges and opportunities that lie in our future. Sleep dreams show us what is going on inside the body, diagnose developing complaints before medical symptoms present themselves, and show us what the body needs to stay well. We solve problems in our sleep. And, as the First Peoples of my native Australia teach, our personal dreams may be a passport to the Dreamtime, the larger reality in which we can meet the ancestors and our authentic spiritual teachers.
I work with sleep
dreams in all these varieties, and many more, and welcome them to work on me.
But Active Dreaming is far more than a method for decoding sleep dreams. While
the techniques involved are fresh and original, they are also very ancient.
They involve ways of seeing and knowing and healing that were known to our
early ancestors, kept them alive on a dangerous planet, and enabled them to
communicate with each other and with other forms of life in the speaking land
around them.
Active Dreaming is a
way of being fully of this world while maintaining constant contact with
another world, the world-behind-the-world, where the deeper logic and purpose
of our lives are to be found.
Active Dreaming is a
discipline, as is yoga or archeology or particle physics. This is to say that
there are ascending levels of practice. In any field, the key to mastery is
always the same: practice, practice, practice.
CORE PRACTICES OF
ACTIVE DREAMING
First, Active Dreaming is a way
of talking and walking our dreams, of bringing energy and guidance from the
dreamworld into everyday life. We learn how to create a safe space where we can share dreams of
the night and dreams of life with others, receive helpful feedback, and
encourage each other to move towards creative and healing action. We discover
that each of us can play guide for others, and that by sharing in the right way
we claim our voice, grow our power as storytellers and communicators, build
stronger friendships and lay foundations for a new kind of community. Above
all, we learn to take action to embody the energy and guidance of our dreams in
everyday life.
Second, Active Dreaming is a
method of shamanic lucid dreaming. It starts with simple everyday practice and extends to
profound group experiences of time travel, soul recovery and the exploration of
multidimensional reality. It is founded on the understanding that we don’t need
to go to sleep in order to dream. The easiest way to become a conscious or lucid
dreamer is to start out lucid and stay that way. As a method of conscious dream
navigation, Active Dreaming is not to be confused with approaches that purport
to “control” or manipulate dreams; it is utterly misguided to seek to put the
control freak in the ego in charge of something immeasurably wiser and deeper
than itself.
Third, Active Dreaming is a way
of conscious living. This requires us
to reclaim our inner child, and the child’s gift of spontaneity, play and
imagination. It requires us to claim the power of naming and define our life
project. It invites us to discover and follow the natural path of our energies.
It calls us to remember and tell and live our bigger story in such a way that
it can be heard and received by others. It is about navigating by synchronicity
and receiving the chance events and symbolic pop-ups on our daily roads as
clues to a deeper order. Beyond this, it is about grasping that the energy we
carry and the attitudes we choose have magnetic effect on the world around us,
drawing or repelling encounters and circumstances.
To live consciously is
to accept the challenge to create, which is to move beyond scripts and bring
something new into the world.
This approach is not
only for individuals and friends and families, but for communities and for our
deeper attunement to the cause of the Earth. Active dreamers become
Speakers for the Earth, and rise to full awareness of the truth of the
indigenous wisdom that we must be mindful of the consequences of our actions
down to the seventh generation beyond ourselves. Active dream groups can offer
a model of intentional community, and can foster a new mode of leadership that
empowers each member to claim her voice and play guide to others as they learn
to speak and embody their own truth.
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