The realtor's familiar slogan applies to the technique of dream re-entry as well as the property game. The easiest way for you to 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 dream world is not that of the Times atlas or the Mobil guides. In dreams you may find yourself in familiar locales, including places from your past – Grandpa’s place, or your childhood home – that may or may not have changed. You may also visit unfamiliar but realistic locations, often clues that your dream contains precognitive or other “psychic” material. You may find yourself in scenes from a different historical epoch (past or future), in a different galaxy, in otherworldly locales, or in free-flowing situations where nothing conforms to the supposed laws of the physical world. One of the purposes of dream reentry is to 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 to try 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 slide back into the dream in a gentle and natural way. But your work schedule may not allow you leisure to do this. And if your dream contains deeply disturbing material, you may need to wait until you are ready to deal with it. You may also feel you need the support of a partner or a drumming session.
But here is a simple technique for dream reentry you can use in the privacy of your bedroom or easy chair:
1. Find your question. What is your main question about the dream you wish to explore? Try to formulate that question as clearly and successfully as possible. Write it down. This will help to establish your focus. During your exploration, you will use this question like a flashlight or a miner’s lamp. It might be quite specific, or as general as, “What is this dream telling me?”
2. Focus on your target. Summon back as many details of your dream location as you can. This is the scene you are going to reenter. Maybe you have multisensory impressions of it. How does the air feel? What can you hear? Are there any distinctive smells?
3. Ask yourself who or what inside the dream can best answer your question. When you reenter the dream, you may be able to communicate directly with one of your dream figures.
4. Relax. Get into a comfortable position, sitting or lying down. Take some deep breaths. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. As you exhale, try to release any pain or tension you are holding in your body and wish it outside your space. You may find it helps to count yourself down – from twenty to one – as you let your consciousness slide toward your selected locale. Or you may wish to put on meditation music or a drumming tape.
5. Move into your dream locale. Look around carefully to identify exactly where you are. You may notice many details you forgot or overlooked before. Do you know this place? Do you feel you are inside a scene from another time, or another order of reality?
6. Let the action unfold. Don’t interfere with the spontaneous flow of images. You have full power to choose how you will interact with your dream characters and respond to any challenges that are presented to you. Your dream reentry may take you beyond the point at which the original dream ended; if the first dream was unresolved or aborted, this is part of your design. Your new dream may also introduce characters and events that were not in the original dream. This is fine; your underlying purpose is not to reproduce the earlier version, but to move closer to the source from which dream images flow.
7. Dialogue with dream characters. You may find a dream character who can answer all your questions. Your selection is not confined to humans. Dreams are full of “persons other than human” (to borrow an Ojibwa phrase). There is no such thing as an inanimate object in dreams.
8. Expect the unexpected. Because the dream source is wiser than the ego, it may be telling you something more important than the question you decided to ask.
9. Map your journey. Pay attention to how you return from the dreamscape, as well as the paths you took through it.
Text adapted from Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press.
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