Mutual lucid dreaming on the Moon of grass

Boulder, Colorado

I spent the weekend in Boulder, leading an Active Dreaming workshop. On the Thursday evening before the workshop, 111 people (nice number) braved rain and sleet to come to the Boulder Bookstore for my talk on The Secret History of Dreaming. The energy was crackling as we explored the need to reclaim ancient tools of healing and seership such as the construction of webs of dreaming by intentional families to scan the environment and scout out the possible future in order to help whole communities to thrive and survive.

Someone at the bookstore commented on all the Bear energy he felt I had brought into the space. So I was cheered - after driving through a snowstorm to Denver the following afternoon for another bookstore event, at the Tattered Cover - to be welcomed to the downtown area by a huge blue bear saluting his double in the glass facade of the conference center.

The weekend workshop was held on the Naropa campus. I was reminded how, the night before I first traveled to Boulder, twelve years ago, I dreamed I had a delightful dinner conversation with an Asian man I regarded as "a shaman in a business suit". He had a great sense of humor, enjoyed a drink or three, and had the aura of a true magician. We talked about life and death and the larger reality. When I got to Boulder and reported my dream to people at Naropa University, they were convinced that my "shaman in a business suit" was Chögyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher who founded Naropa, enjoyed alcohol, and once greeted the Governor of Colorado by saying, "Welcome to my kingdom." Chögyam Trungpa had died long before my visit, but it would have been very like him - so one of his former students said - to appear in nonordinary reality to welcome a visiting teacher.

In the Active Dreaming workshop, I was struck by the depth of our shared experiences in dream tracking and group dream travel. A Swiss woman in the group shared a dream in which she is on the deck of a cruise ship at night. The moon grows bigger and bigger until it fills half the sky, to the right of the boat. As she nears the moon, she is amazed and thrilled to see that it is covered with lush green vegetation that reminds her of scenes from her childhood in the French part of Switzerland. She is eager to reenter this dream and so, of course, are we.

We set the intention to travel together and explore this moon of grass. People arrange themselves comfortably in the space, and I drum to fuel the journey. I find it unusually difficult to enter the dreamscape as it was described to us. I can get on the cruise ship easily enough, and feel the rhythms of the waves. But however hard I try, I cannot visualize the moon on the right side of the boat; it continues to hang in the sky on the left. So I try a path I have used before, the path of moonlight on water. Now the moon of my vision is straight ahead, across the ocean, laying a path of light along which I travel into the realm of Luna. There is no sign of the lush green vegetation the dreamer described. Instead, I see locales familiar to me from previous journeys. Something inspires me to go through this lunar scenery. I travel rapidly through a series of doors and passages and come out in a lush green garden on the other side of the moon. The high grass and the flowering trees are full of eyes, the eyes of boys and girls who are living here. I understand that this is a place of Lost Children, who came here when the world was too much (or too little). I think about how to bring them home to the grown-ups in the world who are missing their beautiful moon children. As I turn around, I see that the moon - the moon of grass - is now on my right.

The Swiss dreamer's report of her own journey was extraordinary. In the realm of the moon, she found a tool of vision: an abalone shell filled with water. As she looked in this mirror of water, she saw a second self, looking in an abalone shell - at another, smaller self, looking at a yet smaller version...and so on, all the way down. Then she sensed a larger self, viewing her in a mirror or water...and so on, all the way up. From this lovely and simple vision of nested realities her consciousness expanded and she began to perceive something of the possible shape of the multiverse.

Dream Reentry and Tracking with a Navajo Elder

Later in the workshop, I was privileged to work with a Navajo elder named Abraham who had driven up from Flagstaff because he had heard that I dream in the way of the ancestors, and can teach others how to do that. He wanted to reenter a dream from many years ago. In 1984, he told the smaller group of dream trackers we formed for this exploration, he dreamed he was riding a paint across the desert with his deceased gradfather and a famly friend who had also passed on. They were riding hard towards a great rounded sandstone boulder rising above the dunes. He knew there were important teachings to be received at this place. But the dream was interrupted and he was unable to get back to that place.

When I drummed for the journey, I enjoyed galloping across the desert on a cream horse with a white mane. Rattlesnakes sounded a warning as I neared the great sandstone boulder. I could see no obvious way either to enter the sandstone - using it as a portal - or to move beyond it. I began to feel that perhaps this was sacred territory reserved for the Navajo and that I was not welcome within it. Then I sensed something above me and looked up to find a giant eagle - an eagle as big as a mountain - hovering overhead. Its wings were striped in horizontal bands of bright rainbow colors. I looked down at the ground and saw the same rainbow eagle depicted in a sand painting at my feet. In that moment, I realized I had stepped through the sandstone portal and been received into a Navajo imaginal world. I walked by water, and saw Abraham walking there too, with an animal ally at his heel. I heard the long blessing way chants of his grandfather, and witnessed some indigenous ways of healing.

When we shared journey reports, the deep grooves on Abraham's face opened into a smile of delight as I described the rainbow eagle. He proceeded to tell us how he had found a place of sacred teaching and healing by water, inside the world of the sandstone boulder, and had been followed everywhere by a gila monster - regarded by his people as a great diagnostician - that he would now work with, consciously, as an ally in healing work. He pronounced "gila" the Spanish way, so it sounded like he was speaking of a "healer monster".

Later I was privileged to have Abraham as one of my trackers when I shared a dream from the Saturday night in which, on my way to giving a lecture on Sir William Johnson and the Iroquois in a huge auditorium, I found myself on top of a soaring mountain, inside a security fence, and had to jump down in order to give my presentation. Abraham saw the mountain becoming an eagle, with the area at the crest within the security fence as the head of a bald eagle, and then saw the mountain-sized eagle wrapping itself around me to guide and protect. Thea, another of my trackers, had a very down-to-earth vision of my dream. She advised me to remember "not to make mountains out of molehills" and to remember to "come down to earth" in order to reach all my audiences where they live. I loved both messages, which were nicely balanced and again demonstrated how we always benefit from multiple perspectives on our dream material.

- My journal entry for April 21, 2009

What's the use of dreaming?

Most human societies until relatively recently have understood that dreaming is important for three reasons above all. First, dreams give us access to sources of wisdom beyond the ordinary mind - to the God or Goddess you can talk to, to the ancestors, to the animate powers of nature, to the greater Self. "It is an age-old fact," declared the great psychologist C.G.Jung in his last major essay, "that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions." 

Second, dreams show us the future, in ways that can contribute to the well-being and survival of whole communities. They not only rehearse us for events that will happen; they show us possible futures,. If we are able to harvest and clarify the information, and then take appropriate action, we can improve the odds on manifesting a desirable future event, or avoiding an unwanted one.

Third, dreaming is medicine, in several senses. In somatic or prodromic dreams, we are shown what is happening inside the body and symptoms it could develop in the future. So dreams can be a source of vital, even life-saving, diagnosis.

When we do get sick, dreams are a factory of imagery that can help us to get well. Medical science is increasingly receptive to the fact that the body receives images as events, and responds accordingly. Where do we get the images that will persuade the body to adjust in the direction of health? The best images we can use for healing are those delivered by our own dreams. We know they are timely and they are authentic, or own material. The dream image may initially be scary, but I would insist that any image that belongs to us can be developed in the direction of wholeness and healing, if we are prepared to work with it.

Still on the theme of dreams in relation to healing, dreams put us in touch with multiple aspects of ourselves - with the shadow side we may have repressed or denied, with the magical child who may have parted company with us when the world seemed too cold and too cruel, with our animal spirits. Working these connections consciously can help us be stronger, and more. It can lead to soul recovery, which is what happens when we bring home vital parts of our energy and identity that went missing to live in our bodies and our lives. 

Dreaming is an essential human activity, as essential as sex or sleep. If we have lost contact with our dreams, the Iroquois say, we have lost a vital part of our souls. Dreams are important and useful for everyone.

Through our dream radar, we are able to see challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. This is part of our survival kit. Dreams hold up a magic mirror to our everyday attitudes and actions - sometimes in a quite shocking or humorous way - helping us to see ourselves from a higher perspective. In this way (as Dostoyevsky reminded us in Crime and Punishment) the dreams of the night can be a corrective to the delusions of the day.

And then there is the entertainment and refreshment value of dreams, whose gift may simply be a good story or a good laugh. You have access in dreams to a night cinema where the movies are screened  especially for you. You can sometimes step through the screen and become scriptwiter, director and star of your own productions. If you don't remember your dreams, you are missing out on the movies.

Dreaming you can travel without leaving home, not a small thing in the time of pandemic. You can come back with the memories of a delicious vacation. You can rendezvous with friends and loved ones far away, since dreaming is social as well as personal. 

Illustration: "Three Bands of Dreaming" by RM

Place of the Lion

The Dream

I am driving in a large open car along a once-grand avenue near the water in a city on the Black Sea. To our left are splendid buildings from the Belle Epoque that once housed department stores, hotels, restaurants. Everything has fallen into disrepair; signs are missing letters or hanging loose; some buildings look abandoned. Business is still being done though it doesn't correspond to the old signage.
     The person giving me this private tour explains that old magic is still alive in this fallen city. In particular, the ancient art of bonding with an animal familiar is practiced even in the best families, though proscribed by the church and frowned on by the state. Behind the columns of that now-shabby emporium, for example, is an establishment known to its clientele as Lion Inspiriting. Here the most awkward and tongue-tied can be learn to speak in a commanding voice, and the timid and cowardly can be infused with courage.
     I want to see how this works. Quick as thought, I am guided through a marble hall, up stairs to a half-lit parlor where I am invited to recline on a divan. I am aware that there is a stuffed lion in the room, so shabby and dusty I am sure it is an old taxidermy specimen rather than merely a prop or a toy. A black and white film starts to play. Grainy, silent. Nothing much happening for a long time except close ups of waving patterns in high glass. I am amazed at the detail. I can see every blade of glass. I realize the scene is not only on a screen. It is all around me. And it is not only black and white; There is some green and blue, and a glow of colors I can't normally see.
     Am I inside the night vision of a lion?
     The stuffed lion is no longer where I saw him before.

Feelings when I leave the dream: Excitement and delight.

Reality check: The city reminds me of Constanța, the Romanian city on the Black Sea where I led a fourt-day workshop years ago. The signs on the buildings are in the Roman alphabet, but I'm not certain they are in Romanian.

There is a villa in Constanța called the House of Lions. I don't recall seeing it when I was in the city and don't know whether it is the marbled building in my dream.

I love lions and have made a shamanic practice of connecting people with Lion spirit to claim their voice and find their courage. My original title for my book Active Dreaming was The Place of the Lion and there is a lion door knocker on the cover.

The werewolf is well-known in Romania (and is far more common than the vampire) but I have not heard of werelions here. However, I did once meet a werelynx in the Carpathian mountains. 

I find shifts between color and black and white (going either way) very significant in dreams.

I enjoy the slightly creepy Gypsy-Steampunk quality of the room where things go black-and-white. Of course Romania is famous for Romany. And in the middle of the night I was reading some hilarious chapters in Robertson Davies' novel The Rebel Angels about Gypsy magic in the heart of bourgeois Toronto.

What do I want to know?

Where does this story want to go next?

Bumper sticker

When the lion speaks everyone listens.

 Revisting the dream

When I look again to see how the story could develop, I imagine the narrator - now distinct from myself - discovering he is in the body of the taxidermy lion, which is now animated but shedding hair and bits of hide as it moves around awkwardly. To his horror, he finds that something else has taken the human body he left on the divan. It raises up and leave the premises. He is trying to track it but in this form people will flee from him or try to capture or kill him.

Dialogue with a dream character 

The Alteri

I ask the proprietess of the shapeshifting salon called Lion Inspiriting, Who are you?

She tells me, “We are Alteri”.

Does this mean alters, as in other personalities? 

Surely the lion isn’t native to these parts. She laughs at me for forgetting my history. The lions of the Hatti and of Ishtar, of Egypt and Africa. The cave lions of long ago. Her people are not captives of time or borders.

[Unedited entry form my joirnal for May 10, 2021]

Photo: House of Lions in Constanța.

On Dream Reentry: A Brief Introduction

Think of it this way: In your night dream, you went to a place, which may resemble a site in ordinary reality or may be somewhere quite extraordinary where the physics are utterly different. Either way, because you were in a certain place, you may be able to find your way back there, just as you could return to that café or bookshop or house party you once visited in your regular life. 

     Why would you want to do such a thing? There are plenty of excellent reasons. Maybe you’ve been running away from your dreams and leaving them broken and unfinished because there’s something in your dream world that scares you. If you can find the courage to go back inside one of those nightmares, wide awake and conscious, and face what frightened you, it’s more than likely you’ll find power and healing waiting for you on the other side of the terror. The fiercest dragons guard the richest treasures, said Rilke, with a poet’s clarity.
     You may want to go back inside a dream because you were having a great time that was interrupted by the alarm clock or the kids tickling your toes. You may want to go back in to have more of a conversation with someone who appeared to you in a dream - your departed grandmother, maybe, or a wise old man you suspect is a guide - or to read a letter you left unread. You may want to see what’s on the top floor of that mysterious house, or down in the root cellar. You may have a mystery to solve. You may want to clarify whether that plane crash could take place in the future, as either a literal and symbolic event, and what you need to do with that information (once you have it clear) in order to avoid or contain an unwanted development.
     You may simply want to know more about a dream. The best way to understand a dream is to recover more of the experience of the dream. Dreams are experiences, not texts, and a dream experience, fully remembered, is its own interpretation.          
      Through dream reentry, one of the core techniques of Active Dreaming, my original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism, you can pursue any of these agendas, or simply enjoy the fun and adventure of using a personal dream image as a portal to the multiverse. The best time to attempt dream reentry may be when the dream is fresh and you are still closely connected to it - lazing in bed after waking, or slipping back into bed after a bathroom stop. But if the dream has energy for you, you may be able to go back inside it long afterwards.
      For ancient and indigenous shamans, the chief cause of many of our complaints - fatigue, low energy, excessive vulnerability to illness and allergies - is soul loss. The understanding is that in any human life, we may lose part of our vital energy and identity through pain or grief, shame or abuse or wrenching life choices. The cure is to try to find that missing piece and bring it back and put it where it belongs. 
       Our dreams offer us roads to soul recovery. You dream of being back in the old place. This may be your childhood home, or the place you shared with your ex. Such dreams may be telling you that you left a part of yourself at that place, at a certain time in your life. They may be issuing an invitation for you to reach back into that time and place and reclaim something that belongs to you — that beautiful younger person whose dreams were interrupted but can now be lived by you, if you are together.

You prepare to reenter a dream as follows:

1. Pick a dream that has some real energy for you. It doesn’t matter whether it is a dream from last night or from 20 years ago, as long as it has juice. It doesn’t matter whether it is a tiny fragment or a complex narrative. It makes no difference whether you choose to work with a night dream, a vision or waking image. What’s important is that the dream you choose to revisit should have some juice — whether it is exciting, seductive, or challenging.

2. Begin to relax. Follow the flow of your breathing. If you are holding tension in any part of your body, tense and relax the muscle groups associated with that part of your body until you feel yourself becoming loose and comfy in your body.

3. Focus on a specific scene from your dream. Let it become vivid on your mental screen. See if you can let all your senses become engaged, so you can touch it, smell it, hear it, taste it.

4. Clarify your intention. Come up with clear and simple answers to these two questions:

What do you want to know?

What do you intend to do, once you are back inside the dream? 

You may need one thing more: something to energize your adventure in conscious dreaming and to help you shut out distracting thoughts. Shamanic drumming — a steady beat on a simple frame drum, typically in the range of three to four beats per second (but sometimes faster) - is a marvelous tool for helping to shift consciousness and travel into the dreamspace. The steady beats serve to override mental clutter and focus energy and intention on the journey. The rhythms of the drum correspond to brain wave frequencies in the theta band, associated with the hypnagogic zone and its dreamlike imagery. If you want a physiological explanation of why shamanic drumming is such a powerful tool for shifting awareness, you could say that the “sonic driving” of the drum herds our brain waves into the theta band, opening us to its characteristic flow of imagery. I have made my own recording of shamanic drumming specifically for the dream reentry adventure. 

When you reenter a dream, you can invite one or more friends to go with you, to support you as you face your dream challenges on their own ground, and to gather information for your benefit. When two or more people are able to enter the same space in nonordinary reality and bring back mutually confirming information from that space, they have produced hard evidence of the objective reality of other realms. Through this process, we can bring through immensely valuable guidance and healing for each other. 

 

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

Illustration: "Stepping through the Magic Clock" by RM with Night Cafe

If you can't remember your dreams

 "I can't remember my dreams."

1. Ask your cat to share a dream.

2. Be kind to wisps. You may have a tiny something from a dream if you don't close the door right away.

3. Write in your journal every day, whether or not you have a dream to report.

4. Wake up to the fact that you don't need to go to sleep in order to dream. The world around you will speak to you in the manner of dreams- through signs, symbols and synchronicity - if you pay attention.

5. Try to assure the beautiful bright dreamer in you that you are safe and you are fun. She may have been in hiding for a long time.

6. Find friends with whom you can share dreams and personal stories in a fast, fun way that leads to action to embody creative and healing energy from another world in ordinary life. Make dreamwork socially rewarding, and you have a strong incentive to bring a new story to the table every day.

7. .Learn the Lightning Dreamwork process. Accept no substitutes!

When you don't know you're dreaming until the dream spills into the street

Dreams offer many clues that we are not in ordinary reality. We can fly, or breathe underwater, or find ourselves inside different bodies. We have the powers of superheroes. We can talk to animals and ride dragons. We meet people who died in the regular world but are very much alive here.

    Even humdrum dreams offer many lucidity triggers: prompts to wake up to the fact that we are dreaming. We are naked in public or engage in other anomalous behavior. The scene shifts inexplicably from one location to another, as if we have teleported. There is odd repetition; the same scene plays out several times, like the black cat walking across the room in the movie The Matrix. People we know are notably older or younger than in regular life.
    When a lucidity trigger awakens us to the fact that we are dreaming, we are sometimes so startled that we are jolted out of the whole experience, back into the dormant body on the bed. When we can stay in the dream, conscious that we are not in ordinary reality, we may be on our way to grand adventures, to romance or healing, to solving a mystery or vanquishing a fear.
     To recognize that you are dreaming is not the same as telling yourself This isn't real. Dreams are real experiences. The realities in which they unfold may be as real, less real, or more real than the physical world. In a certain kind of dream experience, the reason you may not pause to say to yourself I'm dreaming is that you are conscious, in an even deeper sense, that you are in another reality, for example a world where the dead are alive, where you will join them on a full-time basis when you leave your own body behind at physical death.
     You can fail to notice you are dreaming during sleep and then wake up to the dreamlike character of everyday life. I missed several lucidity triggers in a dream, and then found elements from my dream spilling into the street, quite literally, as I took my dog on the first walk of the day.
    In my dream:

I'm at a retreat center in California, wearing a wild tropical shirt I think looks great on me. Next I am giving directions to a group of my students on how to take a train from a London station - I specify Victoria or Euston - on certain assignments. There's an air of adventure, as if I am asking them to play detectives.
    As soon as I name the stations, I am transported to a train station. I go back and forth between a pleasant waiting room and a platform. I notice a shower head near the door, outside the waiting room, and decide to take a quick shower. The flow isn't strong, and I catch water in my cupped hands and sprinkle it over myself. I find this quite enjoyable.
    I'm still naked when I hear a station announcement that the train is coming. I look along the platform and see a bus. Can this be right? Behind it, a train or tram is coming.
    A attractive lady in a dark blue uniform - a station official - smiles at me. I tell her I probably shouldn't get on the train naked. Will she hold it for me until I get dressed?
   There's a small problem. I can't find my clothes. Eventually I discover a crisp white short-sleeved shirt on a hook and a pair of boxers. This wasn't the shirt I was wearing earlier (one with a wild tropical design) but it will serve.
    I'm barefoot and pantless and missing not only my carry-on bag but my wallet and ID. Who can I call? I think of a dear friend but I am not sure he can help. 

I felt some concern towards the end of the dream, but relaxed - and fairly soon amused - on waking.
    My little dream report contains several classic examples of lucidity triggers that I missed. 

* Instant change of scene. I am whisked from California to London, quick as thought.
* Naked in public. One of the most common dream themes, and a lucidity prompt for that reason alone.
* Anomalous behavior. I take a shower in an unlikely place, fully exposed to public view. The lady station official acts in a very non-official way.
*  Repetition and recurring dream situations. Trains and train stations often feature in my dreams and I was talking about their symbology in a recent class. Naked in public, losing ID or valuables, and quick change scenes are also recurring situations here, as in many people's dreams.
* The dead are alive. I don't call my friend but it does not occur to me that, in ordinary reality, he died several years ago.

Maybe you'll want to make a list of your own lucidity triggers, including any of the ones I missed that are relevant to you.
    The entertainment value of this little episode was enhanced by what happened when I walked the dream, along with the dog, before coffee in the morning. A couple of blocks from my house, a woman was packing her car. She called to her boyfriend, at the door of an apartment, "Hey, is my wallet in there?" He responded, "I don't know."
    There was the theme of misplaced or lost ID, spilling from the dream into the street.
    It got better (or worse) when we returned to my house. On the sidewalk, I noticed a discarded pair of men's briefs. Not the kind of underwear I had in the dream (or would choose in regular life) but there was the theme of naked in public, dropped right where I live.

1916 photo of female train conductor in London. Photographer unidentfied.

    

Dreaming for Epiphany

 

Whatever you do as the year turns, write in your journal! Write your dreams from the night, and your dreams of life for the coming year. Write, in particular, whatever you receive from dreams, synchronicity and spontaneous revelation over the last night of the Old Year and the first day of the New Year.

    If you were up all night partying - or the effect of your New Year's Eve reveling knocked your dreams out of memory - then record and work with the first dream that comes the following night, and whatever dreamlike symbols the world around you may give you.  
    In Japan they make a special effort to catch and work with the very first dream of the new year. Many Japanese people pay close attention to Hatsuyume, the first dream of the New Year. It may come in the night of December 31-January 1 but - since many may be up late partying or suffering the after-effects - it may come in the following day or on the night of January 1-2.     
     I would counsel you to stay alert for dreams for the New Year for a slightly longer period. In my mind the turning of the year rolls from December 30 until January 6, which is Epiphany in the Christian calendar, the day of “showing forth" when the Magi come to Bethlehem following their star, to honor the Christ child. Beyond the religious context, an epiphany may be a sudden revelation or perception of the reality or essential meaning of something important. It may be the gift of a dream.
    In hopes of a lucky dream to kick off the New Year, some Japanese invoke the Shichifukujin or "Seven Lucky Gods" and may place a picture of them under the pillow. These may not be part of our belief system, but we have other sources of guidance and blessing available, and it is always appropriate to ask for help and blessing if we do it nicely!

 If you are ready to dream in the New Year, you could set the simple intention: 

Show me what the New Year will bring. 

Or give this a positive spin by couching your request to your dream makers the following way: 

Show me the best that life holds for me and those I love in the year ahead. 

Be as specific or as general as you like, but ask in a way that excites you and reflects your willingness to receive guidance and enter on new adventures.
     Don't forget that dreams require action! Your first action is to record anything you remember from your dreams and the drifty state of hypnagogia. Share it with a friend, if you can, using our Lightning Dreamwork process. Walk with your dream and see how what is going on around you may illuminate the dream and how your dream may illuminate your world.
    If you saw things in your dream you don't want to manifest in the year ahead, comb through the material with the eye of a detective, asking Who, What, When, Where, How? If you can clarify the details of the dream and identify where it may play out in coming events, you may be able to take appropriate action to avoid an event you don't want to live through in your physical life. You can also try to accomplish this by going back inside your dream, in a conscious reentry journey, to see whether you can change the script where it was playing. You may want to try writing the story of your dream so it comes to a happy ending. If those approaches feel artificial, however, that may be telling you that physical action is required to reshape the probable future for the better.
    If your first dream for the New Year is full of promise, then celebrate - but make it part of your celebration, once again, to take action to embody the energy and promise of the dream and to help it to take root in the world. Don't leave the old year without your journal, and don't enter the new year without your dreams. 
    May your New Year be filled with abounding joy, and may you grow big dreams and see them take root in the world!

Art: Byzantine image of the  Three Kings in the Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, 6th century.

Active Imagination and Dream Reentry

 

By my observation, any image that belongs to us can be worked in the cause of healing and resolution and soul growing. I have seen wonders accomplished when a dreamer has resolved to confront an initially dark and terrible image and find the gift in the nightmare. The fiercest dragons guard the richest treasures, and to earn the support of greater powers we are required to brave up. I have also seen lives saved and visits to the ER avoided by getting back inside a dream, clarifying what is going on - and applying that information to avoid manifesting an unwanted future event that may be playing in the dream. This may require courage, and significant work.
     Jung said towards the end of his life that he did not want to spend time with patients who were unwilling to do the work of active imagination. His method of active imagination and my technique of dream reentry have much in common, including the recognition that “dreams are the facts from which we must proceed” and that the raw power of images coming directly and spontaneously to the perceiver must not be shackled to theory or rules of interpretation. Stay with the image, amplify it by tracking its parallels in mythology and folklore and other dreams, go back to the image and develop it through active imagination – these are three signature features of Jung’s approach to dreams, and I encourage active dreamers to practice all of them.  Amplification requires, as Jung insisted, a “wide culture”. Active Imagination, like dream reentry, may demand courage. I think of Robert A. Johnson, the author of Inner Work, a very readable introduction to Jung’s approach. He was terrified by a lion that appeared to him in his study. He knew the lion was a vision, but it was so real he could not bear to enter his normal place of work. After many efforts to reach an understanding with the lion through active imagination, he managed a deal in which the lion would appear as a statue like the ones in front of the New York Public Library, a statue holding a book.
     Our Active Dreaming approach goes to places that Active Imagination may fail to reach. By making a dream or another personal image the portal for a shamanic journey, often powered by drumming, we enter directly into the other worlds and other times where the dream action took place (and may have continuing to unfold after our attention moved elsewhere and we returned to our bodies wherever we parked them.).
     Active dreamers are more likely than most Jungians to seek clues to the future in dreams, to look at the possibility that a dream shows a future event literally or symbolically. He knew that we intuit the future – his own visions shortly before the Great War of a bloody floodtide drowning Europe left him no doubt about that -but he seems to have rarely asked whether a dream could play out in the future in everyday life despite his interest in “primitive” cultures and his familiarity with mountain peasants, for all of whom clues to the future, from a weather forecast to a death in the family,  were one of the main things to look for in dreams.
     Jung was a doctor who guided his patients through amplification and active imagination. I am a teacher who gives dreamers a process they can do by themselves or – if sociable – do with others, using a dream as a portal for an adventure in solo or mutual lucid dreaming.

Illustration: "Drumming for Dream Reentry" by Robert Moss

Play First, Work Later (& delight your inner child)

 

Like puppies or lion cubs or dolphins spinning silver lariats of bubbles, children play for the joy of playing. Young children are masters of imagination, since they know the magic of making things up. Our first and best teacher of conscious living is our inner child.
     But that inner child may have gone into hiding, under a glass dome or in a room in Grandma’s house, because of shame or abuse, ridicule or loneliness, because the world wasn’t safe or it wasn’t fun. If we have lost our dreams, if our imagination is stuck in a groove, it’s because we have lost our inner child. To live as active dreamers in everyday life, we have to bring that child home. This requires a quest, a negotiation, and fulfillment of a promise. 
     The quest will lead us down halls of memory to a place and time where our wonder child went missing. We can embark on the quest as a guided journey to a real place in the imaginal realm, or through the portal of a dream or memory from childhood.
     The negotiation requires us to convince our child selves that we are safe and we are fun to be around. Fulfilling the promises we make will require us to remember to play without scheduling it.
     Play first, work later, our child selves will insist. The cautious dutiful adult self will protest. But if we are to keep our inner children at home in our bodies and our lives, we’ll need to fulfill our promises to be fun as well as safe. If we play well enough, then before we quite know it, we’ll fall in love with our work because it will be our play. 

Text adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

 

"I can't remember my dreams"

You may hear this a lot. We are living in an era in which many people are suffering from a protracted dream drought.This is a serious malaise because if you have lost touch with your dreams, you have lost access to many gifts, including your power to tap into a wiser source than the everyday mind, to rehearse the possible future, to hear the voice of conscience and to find energy and direction to carry you through the day.
     "I can't remember my dreams." This statement is still a big step up from saying,"I don't dream", which really just means "I don't (or won't) remember", but is often freighted with a hardhead denial of the reality and importance of dreaming
     What do you say to someone who says they can't remember their dreams? I sometimes start like this:

1. I would drop that statement altogether, because every time I repeat "I can't remember my dreams" I am programming myself to make that the case.

2. I would wake myself up to the fact that I don't need to go to sleep in order to dream.The world around me will speak to me in the manner of dreams, through signs and symbols and synchronicity, if I pay attention.

3. I would try to call up a dream or memory from early childhood and put myself back into that scene. My inner child is a world-class dreamer and if I can only get more in touch with her my dreams will come back.

If I am called to offer more extensive guidance, I might offer any or all of the following

WAYS TO BRING BACK DREAMS

1.Set an intention for the night

Before sleep, write down an intention for the hours of dream and twilight that lie ahead. This can be a travel plan (“I would like to go to Hawaii” or “I would like to visit my girlfriend/boyfriend”). It might be a specific request for guidance (“I want to know what will happen if I change my job”).

     It could be a more general setting of direction (“I ask for healing” or “I open myself to my creative
source”).

    You might simply say, “I want to have fun in my dreams and remember.”

     Make sure your intention has some juice. Don’t make dream recall one more chore to fit in with all the others.

     If you like, you can make a little ritual of dream incubation, a simple version of what ancient seekers did when they traveled to temples of dream healing like those of Asklepios in hopes of a night encounter with a sacred guide. You can take a special bath or shower, play a recording of the sounds of nature or running water, and meditate for a while on an object or picture that relates to your intention. You might want to avoid eating heavily or drinking alcohol within a couple of hours of sleep. You could get yourself a little mugwort pillow – in folk tradition, mugwort is an excellent dreambringer – and place it under or near your regular pillow.

2. Be ready to receive

Having set your intention, make sure you have the means to honor it. Keep pen and paper (or a voice recorder) next to your bed so you are ready to record when you wake up. Record something whenever you wake up, even if it’s at 3 a.m. If you have to go to the bathroom, take your notebook with you and practice doing two things at once. Sometimes the dreams we most need to hear come visiting at rather anti-social hours, from the viewpoint of the little everyday mind.

3. Be kind to fragments.

Don’t give up on fragments from your night dreams. The wispiest trace of a dream can be exciting to play with, and as you play with it you may find you are pulling back more of the previously forgotten dream.The odd word or phrase left over from a dream may be an intriguing clue, if you are willing to do a little detective work.

    Suppose you wake with nothing more than the sense of a certain color. It could be quite interesting to notice that today is a Red Day, or  a Green Day, to dress accordingly, to allow the energy of that color to travel with you, and to meditate on the qualities of red or green and see what life memories that evokes..

4. Still no dream recall? No worries.

If you don’t remember a dream when you first wake up, laze in bed for a few minutes and see if something comes back. Wiggle around in the bed. Sometimes returning to the body posture we were in earlier in the night helps to bring back what we were dreaming when our bodies were arranged that way.

     If you still don’t have a dream, write something down anyway: whatever is in your awareness,
including feelings and physical sensations. You are catching the residue of a dream even if the dream itself is gone. As you do this, you are saying to the source of your dreams, “I’m listening. Talk to me.”
     You may find that, though your dreams have flown, you have a sense of clarity and direction that is the legacy of the night. We solve problems in our sleep even when we don’t remember the problem-solving process that went on in our dreaming minds.     

5.Remember you don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream.

The incidents of everyday life will speak to us like dream symbols if we will are willing to pay attention. Keep a lookout for the first unusual or striking thing that enters your field of perception in the course of the day and ask whether there could be a message there. Sometimes it’s in your face, as happened to a woman I know who was mourning the end of a romance but had to laugh when she noticed that the bumper sticker of the red convertible in front of her said, “I use ex-lovers as speed bumps.”

     When we make it our game to pay attention to coincidence and symbolic pop-ups in everyday life, we oil the dream gates so they let more through from the night.

Part of this article is adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawing: "Dream that Got Away" by Robert Moss

The Doorstopper Method for Keeping Your Dream Gate Open

 

Here's one of the games I invented for retrieving lost dreams.
   Picture a door to your dream world.
   As you left, you stepped through this door, back into your body in the bed.
   Some of your dreams are fluttering around you. Perhaps you have some of them in your pocket or what you think of as a safe container. I picture a glass jar like the ones I used to catch fireflies on summer nights. Or you think you have alreday recirded them in your journal, or captured them with your cell pnone camera.
    But a strange thing happens. As soon as you step through the door, back into an ordinary space, your dreams take flight. They won’t stay in your pockets. The container won’t hold them. They wing away, like butterflies through that door, which closes so fast you can’t prevent them leaving. Your journal for the night is blank and there is nothijng new in your cameral roll. Now the door is sealed tighter than a bank vault and you can’t find a way to open it.
    Try this: as you return from your dreams, imagine that the door to the dream world stays open for a while, because there is a doorstopper. I picture this stopper as a black dog. He’s alive, of course, though he may remain very still while his role is to keep the door from closing. Gradually he will let the door close. This is what must happen, so your waking life is not so full of dream creatures that you can’t tell where you are any more and end up on the couch of the mad-doctors.
     But you have enough time now to catch some of those escaping dreams. You are permitted to go back through that ever-so-slowly closing door, go in a little ways, and grab what you can.
     When I first played this game, I was surprised to see that a flight of steps began at the threshold. When I climbed the steps, I found myself in a pleasant wooded setting, with dreams gathered on the branches or flitting about.
     I invited them to play with me, and some consented to accompany back to the ordinary side of everything, which gets less ordinary in their company.
     As I stepped back through the door, heading for my body where I had parked it on the bed, I patted the head of the black dog who had managed the portal. He had become bigger and even more noble, shifting from the role of doorstopper to that of Gatekeeper. 

Drawing by Robert Moss with digital colorization

Reclaiming the Art of Dying

In most human societies, preparation for death and the afterlife is a central part of life. The practice of the ars moriendi  -the art of dying - does not reflect some morbid preoccupation. It is actually life-affirming rather than life-denying. By coming to know Death as a friend, you release the energy you have invested in trying to bottle up your darkest fears. When you establish for yourself — through personal experience — that there is life after life, you will find you take a more relaxed and generous view of the vicissitudes of everyday life. When you examine your life from the standpoint of your death, you will surely find that there is no reason to perpetuate old quarrels and jealousies. You will wish to put things right between yourself and others, to give up petty agendas and live fully and creatively for the years allotted to you.

In postindustrial Western societies, the neglect of the art of dying has led to a vogue for spiritual practices drawn from other traditions, such as Tibetan Buddhism, which offers a detailed geography of the afterlife that may or may not be relevant to you if you are not a Tibetan Buddhist. Our general neglect is fed by both fear and denial. The denial thrives on our hurry sickness, our tendency to fill up our time with compulsive, external activities — interspersed with infusions of passive consumer entertainment, IV-fed through the TV tubes — leaving no space for the inner search. Filling our lives with a bustle of responsibilities that leaves us with “no time” to commune with soul is mockingly described by a Tibetan master as “housekeeping in a dream.” Sögyal Rinpoche asks, “Would anyone in their right mind think of laboriously redecorating their hotel room every time they booked into one?

Our fear of death is bound up with our confusion about who we are. We fear losing all the props, connections, and résumés that we confuse with identity. We are terrified of being stripped of rank and title and credit cards and cell phones and being sent naked into the next world, as Inanna must descend naked into the underworld.

Your death is a rather important subject, not just the when and how, but the question of what follows, and what it all means. On a subject this vital and this intimate, you would be ill-advised to take answers on trust from other people. But how can we know before dying what lies on the other side, and know this as personal truth? In two ways: through a visitation by a resident of the Otherworld whose information can be verified; or by soul travel, by making a personal journey to the Other Side. My book Conscious Dreaming explores dream visitations by the departed. Here I want to suggest a variety of techniques by which you can embark on conscious dream journeys to explore the conditions of the afterlife for yourself.

An art of dying adequate to our needs and yearnings today must address at least these five key areas: 

        Practice in dream travel and journeying beyond the body. By practicing the projection of consciousness beyond the physical plane, we settle any personal doubts about the soul’s survival of physical death.

       Developing a personal geography of the afterlife. Through conscious dream journeys, we can visit “ex-physicals” — and their teachers — in their own environments. We can explore a variety of transit areas and reception centers, adapted to the expectations and comfort levels of different types of people, where the recently departed are helped to adapt to their new circumstances. We can tour the “collective belief territories,” some established centuries or millennia ago, where ex-physicals participate ins hared activities and religious practices. We can examine processes of life review, reeducation, and judgment and follow the transition of spirits between different after-death states. We can also study the different fates of different vehicles of consciousness after physical death.

      Helping the dying. The application of insights and techniques gained in these explorations to helping the dying through what some hospice nurses describe as the “nearing death experience.” In many of our hospitals (where most Westerners die) death is treated as a failure, or merely the loss of vital signs, followed by a pulled-out plug, a disconnected respirator, and the disposal of the remains. As we recover the art of dying, many of us in all walks of life — not only ministers and health care professionals and hospice volunteers — will be able to play the role of companion on the deathwalk, helping the dying to approach the next life with grace and courage and to make the last seasons of this life a period of personal growth. The skills required in this area include the ability to communicate on a soul level with patients who are in coma, are unable to speak or reason clearly, or have suffered severe memory loss. A vital aspect of this work is facilitating or mediating contact between the dying and helpers on the other side — especially departed loved ones — who can give assistance through the transition. Dreamwork and meditation are invaluable tools in helping the dying to prepare for the conditions of life beyond the body.

               Helping the departed. We pray for our dead in our churches and temples, and no good intention is ever wasted. However, you may have a hard time finding a priest who is willing to take on the role of psychopomp, or guide of souls, and provide personal escort service to spirits of the departed who have lost their way and gotten stuck between the worlds, causing pain and confusion to themselves and sometimes to their survivors. Yet the living have a crucial role to play in helping to release earthbound or troubled spirits. For one thing, some of these “ex-physicals” seem to trust people who have physical bodies more than entities that do not, because there is comfort in the familiar, because they did not believe in an afterlife before passing on — or quite simply because they do not know they are dead. An art of dying for our times must include the ability to dialogue with these spirits and help them to find their right path.

              Making death your ally. Finally, we are challenged to reach into the place of our deepest fears and master them: to face our own death on its own ground and re-value our lives and our purpose from this perspective. When we “brave up” enough to confront our personal Death and receive its teaching, we forge an alliance that is a source of power and healing in every aspect of life. We may now be able to carry a sense of divine comedy that can help us weather whatever life throws at us on a given day.

Art: "Storm Bird Brings Me Back" by Robert Moss

 

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death. by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. Here you will find detailed practices and travel repots.