Dreams are real experiences and a fully remembered dream is its own interpretation. The meaning of a dream is inside the dream itself. We claim it by learning to go back inside our dreams in a relaxed state. By learning how to reenter dreams, you will develop the ability to clarify messages about future events, resume contact with inner teachers, and resolve unfinished business. Through this method, you will place yourself in closer attunement with the creative source from which dream images flow.
As a natural side benefit, you will probably also find
that you are increasingly able to embark on conscious dream journeys from a
waking state, and retain awareness that you are dreaming as you move deeper
into the dreamscape. You may indeed discover that dream reentry is a royal road
to lucid dreaming: you start out lucid and stay that way.
To understand this process, we need to get one thing clear: the dream you remember is not the dream itself. By the time you are fully awake, you have forgotten 90 percent, if not more, of your nocturnal adventures. A partner's love bite, a ruckus in the street, a child tickling your toes, the need to get to the office, can shoo away most of your remaining memories. By the time the editor in your waking mind has finished processing and tagging the scraps that are left, your dream memories may be quite remote from the dreams themselves. At best, they are souvenirs from a journey.
Suppose you fly down to Rio and bring home a few snapshots of Sugarloaf Mountain and bathers in string bikinis on Copacabana beach. How much of your adventure is contained in the photos? Do they carry the smell of palm oil, the bittersweet tang of batida de limão, the slap of a tropical rainshower? Or the drama at Customs, the rippling laughter of the girls in the samba school, the dance of your nerve endings when you entered (or renewed) a romance that woke up all your senses? Of course not. However, as you study the pictures, you may find yourself sliding back into the fuller experience.
Dream memories are like this. Even as snapshots, they are often unsatisfactory: out of focus, with key characters missing their faces, subject to multiple exposures and mess-ups in the dark room. But with practice, you can learn to use these blurred images as windows through which you can reenter your dreams, continue the adventure and bring back valuable gifts.
Dream reentry requires two things: your ability to focus clearly on a remembered scene from your dream, and your ability to relax, screen out distractions, and allow your consciousness to flow back inside that scene. If there are scary things inside the dream you are nervous about confronting, or if you have difficulty relaxing into a flow of imagery, you may find dream reentry easier if you have a partner to talk you through the process, or the support of a whole circle.
Shamanic drumming is an especially powerful tool for dream
reentry, providing fuel and focus for the journey. Drumming enhances the
possibility that you can invite a partner to enter your dream space with you to
act as your ally and search for information you may have missed. I have made my
own recording of shamanic drumming for dream reentry, Wings for theJourney.
Why you want to learn dream reentry
- You want to have more fun
- You need to move beyond fear and
nightmare terrors
- You need to clarify the meaning of
the dream – for example, to determine whether it is literal, symbolic or the
experience of a separate reality
- You need specific information from
the dream – for example, the exact time and place of a possible future
event, or the full text of something you saw in a book or an inscription.
- You want to talk to someone inside
the dream.
- You want to claim a relationship
with a spiritual ally who appeared in the dream
- You want to try to change
something in the dream.
- You want to bring through healing
- You want to get in touch with a
part of yourself you encountered in the dream
- You want to enter creative flow
and create with dream energy
- You want to use your dreams as
portals to the larger reality.
Location, location, location
The Realtor's familiar slogan applies to the technique of dream reentry as well as to the property game. The easiest way for you to go back inside a dream is to hold your focus on the dream location. Your initial memories may be fuzzy but a single landmark - even a single shape or color - may be sufficient to enable you to shift your consciousness into a vivid and complex scene.
Be open to possibility! The geography of the dreamworld is not that of Google maps. In dreams, you may find yourself in familiar locales, including places from your past - Grandma's house, or your childhood home - that may or may not have changed. You may visit unfamiliar but realistic locations, often clues that your dream contains precognitive or other psychic material.
Your dream location may prove to be in a parallel world where one of your parallel selves is leading a continuous life. You may find yourself in scenes from a different historical epoch (past or future), in a mermaid cove or in lands where the dead are alive. You may fall into an astral slum or rise to cities or schools or palaces in the Imaginal Realm, where human imagination, in concert with higher intelligence, generates worlds.
One of the purposes of dream reentry is establish where
in the worlds you are. The typical dreamer, after waking, has no more idea
where he spent the night than an amnesiac drunk.
The best time for dream reentry
The best time to reenter a dream is often immediately after you have come out
of it. By snuggling down in bed and rehearsing the postures of sleep, you may
be able to slid back inside the dream space in a gentle and natural way. But
you work schedule may not allow you to do this. And if your dream contains
deeply disturbing material, you may need to wait until you have the resolution
and resources to face that challenge on its own ground - which you will
probably find is the sovereign remedy for nightmare terrors and frustrating
dreams.
There is no such thing as an "old" dream when it comes
to choosing the portal for dream reentry. What matters is that the image that
you choose should have real energy for you. I have seen people who had been
missing their dreams for thirty years take the last dream they remembered -
sometimes from childhood - and use it as the portal for a lucid shamanic
journey, powered by drumming, with stunning results. The gifts sometimes extend
to soul recovery, to bringing home the beautiful young dreamer who checked out
of a life when the world got too cold and cruel, leaving the adult bereft of
dreams.
Part of this text is adapted from Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press.
Illustration: "Door to Magic" digital art by RM
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