Dreams require action

 

Dreams require action. If we do not take action to honor and embody our biggest dreams in our lives, they may fly away. To lose a big dream is a sad thing. It can even amount to losing a vital piece of our soul.

Unless we do something with our dreams, we will not dream well. This is indigenous wisdom, and I believe it was understood by all of our ancestors when they lived in cultures that valued dreams, and the dreamer. As my friends of the Six Nations tell it, soul speaks to us in dreams, showing us what it desires in our lives. If we do not take action to honor such dreams, soul becomes unhappy with us and withdraws its energy and vitality from our lives.

In my Active Dreaming approach, which now guides dream groups and individual dreamers all over the world, we insist that every dreamwork practice must result in an action plan, and we are not content with some nebulous wishy-washy statement of general intention or spiritual correctness. We want specific, practical action of the kind that both entertains the soul and sustains the body.

Of course, dreams can be mysterious and hard to relate to the issues of everyday life. In one of his seminars on dreams from childhood, Jung remarked that dreams "fall like nuts from the tree of life, and yet they are so hard to crack." So the first action we may need to take is to find the right kind of nutcracker.

We don't have to seek this alone. Once we learn to share our dreams through the LightningDreamwork method with a partner or a group, we have an excellent recourse both for understanding our dreams and for determining the right action to honor them.

Here are some of the things a dream may inspire us to do:

RESEARCH 

Dreams can prompt us to do detailed research on content, ranging from an obscure word to the natural habits of an animal that appeared or a way of fixing a fuse box. This can go far beyond simply clarifying the initial information. Dream clues can put us on the trail of very important discoveries, ranging from our connection to a spiritual tradition that is calling us, to a new book idea, to what's going on behind closed doors in Washington. I delight in pursuing odd phrases and names from dreams, often in languages I don't know or know very imperfectly, and this has led me to treasures and opened cultures and traditions far beyond my previous ken. 

 DREAM REENTRY 

 The best way to understand a dream is to recover more of the dream experience. If we can stick our heads back inside our dreams, we can immediately settle many things, including whether the dream is literal or symbolic or an experience of a separate reality. 

 WALKING WITH THE DREAM 

 We may need to walk with a dream over time, and see how its message unfolds. For all our best efforts, dreams don't yield all their meaning and mystery all at once. We need to let some of them ripen like fruit on the tree, and be ready to catch when the fruit is ready to fall.

 CREATIVE EXPRESSION 

 Many dreams invite us to create from them and with them, through our favorite media and also through media with which we may be less familiar or less confident. Write, sculpt, draw, dance, paint, move with the dream, and if you have friends or family who'll play, turn it into performance or theater. I like to start my days by drawing a picture form my dreams and hypnagogic experiences overnight.

 MAKE A DREAM TALISMAN 

 Make or select a physical object that can embody the energy of a powerful dream so you can carry it with you or have it in front of your eyes. If you wore the color yellow in your dream, or the dream was suffused with that color, wear yellow during the day - whether or not you think it is "your" color.

NAVIGATE LIFE WITH YOUR DREAM RADAR 

 In dreams, we scout the future and bring back advisories that can keep us safe and put us on better roads than we might otherwise be on. We want to be alert to what is coming up on our dream radar screen and apply the information. 

 USE DREAM INFORMATION TO HELP OTHERS 

 We get dream information for others as well as ourselves. Working with such dreams requires care and practice, especially if a dream contains a glimpse of possible problems for another person. 

 I can think of another half-dozen suggestions, and you'll come up with your own. Let's be super-aware of this: Taking right action from dreams goes to the heart of real magic, which is the art of bringing gifts from a deeper world into this one.

Journal drawings by Robert Moss 

Top: "Lady of Many Colors"
Bottom: "Alternate Lives"

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