Telling a dream inside a dream

In the Babylonian Talmud it is stated that “Three types of dreams are destined to be fulfilled. These are: a dream one sees in the morning, just before he wakes up; a dream that his friend dreamt about him; and a dream that is interpreted within a dream. And some say: a dream that was repeated is likewise destined to be fulfilled.” (Berakhot 55b)

I can't endorse all of this. I don't agree with the last statement. A dream that is repeated may be a warning that is being issued again and again. However we also confuse "repeated" dreams with serial dreams in which the action is evolving and changing from one installment to the next.

"A dream one sees in the morning" may indeed be psychic, showing things at a distance in place and time. I often catch glimpses of what is going to happen in the near future when I linger in the hypnopompic state after sleep. When we dream of others, our perceptions may have an objectivity that is harder to attain when we are entangled with our own hopes and fears; however we may not understand what we are seeing.

What I want to explore here is the phenomenon of telling a dream inside a dream. I do this quite often. It is rarely a case of old-fashioned dream interpretation; I find that far too limited. It is often a case of sharing the energy, as well as the content of a dream while inside another dream - and of taking some action to apply what is being shared. Here are some examples from my journals.

On the Beach in Brazil

August 11, 2013

I love the wild beach. Water, wind and light stream together. This calls for Turner's brush. I run in and out of the water with two lovely younger women who have trained with me.

I feel myself being gently pulled out of the dream, but I want to stay with it, enjoying its energy and trying to hold every detail: the island across the waves, the buildings on the rise above the sand dunes, the palms swaying in the wind. Is this the beach in Brazil where I'll be leading a workshop later this month? It is very like it.

I let the scene go and proceed to describe it to the women who were with me in the dream. One of them needs some counsel for a friend who is going through a painful life passage. The other wants to explore some marketing ideas we began to discuss in the beach dream.

I stretch, and open my eyes, and sit up in bed. I am now in a spacious, pleasant room where more than a dozen happy people are gathered around the walls. They seem to have been waiting for me to wake up. They are all students of mine, and all but two are women. I joke that it is my good fortune in life to go everywhere surrounded by beautiful women. We are in the midst of a retreat I am leading. Our laughter is interrupted by a matronly figure, the manager of the place, who comes through a door to my right I had not noticed before to remind us that checkout time is 12 noon.

Oh, very well. I go out through the door she used to get my stuff together. I go outside the house, and now seem to be in a different country. I overhear part of the conversation of friends in that country and get a picture of a certain situation that may be useful. I leave them to it and go back inside the house. Funny, I can't seem to return to my room the way that I left it. The layout of this house is rather unusual. When I stepped outside, I was in another country. When I go back in, I am not where I was before.

I rose from this dream this morning, in my regular bed, in excellent spirits. I amused myself by counting the number of dream scenes that opened from each other here. There was (1) the scene on the wild beach (2) the scene where I am discussing this with the two women who were with me on the beach; (3) the bedroom with the party crowd; and (4) the outside scene where I listen to the conversation of people from yet another country, apparently in that country.

I smiled at a very familiar motif. Remembering a dream inside a dream is a common experience for me. So is telling a dream inside another dream. This sometimes triggers dream lucidity in the narrow sense of becoming aware that you are dreaming inside a dream. Sometimes it brings the ability to navigate and draw knowledge from multiple realities in whatever state of reality and consciousness we happen to be in.

Called by Sea Eagle

Back in 1994, I dreamed that a sea eagle was wrestling with me on a beach for possession of the Australian hat I used to wear in those days. The struggle felt altogether physical. I reported the dream to a large audience in an auditorium at a conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams (ASD)*. Then I woke up in my bed, several months before that conference took place. The tussle with the sea eagle helped to prepare me for a very important life transition that was going to require my return to Australia. The scene where I told the dream, within a second dream, had more than entertainment value (though I never underrate that).

When I recorded the dream, I noted that I was speaking in an auditorium with chairs bolted to the floor in tilted rows under sterile lightning. This was quite the wrong environment for the workshop I had agreed to lead at the ASD conference, in which I planned to have people choose partners and journey together with the aid shamanic drumming. I called one of the ASD organizers and learned than the scheduled location for my workshop was identical to the auditorium in my dream. It was now time to tell the dream in which I was telling a dream to someone in the dream of waking life. By doing that, I was able to have my workshop venue changed to a dreamier space.

In a Sea Plane with the Professor

November 17, 1995

Here's another example of telling a dream inside a dream:

I am being piloted by an elderly professor in a small seaplane over a mountain range. As we dip low, over the reddish peaks, I remark that this reminds me of a dream in which I was flying in a similar plane over a cordillera, and how this kind of plane has always appealed to my sense of romance and adventure. We swoop low over a body of water. The sensations of flight and movement are wonderfully vivid.

 “This is like a dream!” I exclaim in delight.

It's like a dream because it is a dream. Like life.

 

Driving with My Father

I have dreamed of the departed for as long as I can remember. Our interaction usually feels perfectly normal, though information is shared that is beyond what is accessible to me in ordinary reality. I become aware that I am in another reality, where those who died on Earth are very much alive. I become lucid in that sense but rarely say to myself "I must be dreaming". One of the occasions when I did is noted in this journal report in which I proceeded to tell a dream within another dream. 

May 1, 1994 

My father takes me for a drive. The steering wheel is on the right. We are having a wonderful time. His moral support and counsel are immensely encouraging and steadying, at a time when my emotions and thoughts have been confused by various encounters with other people, including a couple of pushy tabloid reporters who want to write articles on my psychic abilities.

I realize I must be dreaming, because I remember that my father died in 1987.

I don’t want to lose the wonderful experience of the dream. I resolve to stay with it and explore its conditions more carefully. I start to open the car door, intending to make a small alteration in the dream scene, to confirm that I am dreaming and able to transform elements in the dream. When I open the door just a crack, I find the car is surrounded by pulsing white light, without form or dimension.

Now I wake up and describe my dream to others, possibly including the tabloid reporters.

When I wake up back in my body in bed, I realize that the dream lucidity I thought I had achieved was lucidity in a dream-within-a-dream. It strikes me that this is a metaphor for life.

[*] Now the International Association for the Study of Dreams

Photos: Praia Morro das Pedras Negras, Santa Catarina Island by Robert Moss

Seeking the innermost dream

I am intrigued by nights in which we slip from one dream into another, as if moving from an outer to an inner courtyard. Sometimes the shift is marked by the experience of falling asleep and waking up inside the dream state. Waking from an inner dream, not yet fully aware that we are still in outer dream (but not yet in the outermost dream of physical reality) we record or talk about what we just experienced in that deeper place. 

     In one of the big, life-changing dream adventures of my life, I woke from a dream in which a sea eagle, an aquatic raptor native to northern Australia, my native country, and to northern Scotland, the country of my paternal ancestors, flew me across an ocean to a profound experience of contact with Aboriginal elders and their Dreaming.
      In high excitement, I proceeded to recount the dream to a gathering of dream researchers at a conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. I noticed, as I spoke, that the lecture theater we were in was too formal and structured for my taste, with desks bolted to the floor in steep banks. I did not notice, until I woke again in my body in the bed, that I was still dreaming.

     There was a double follow-up to that dream sequence. First, I checked with the IASD on the venue for a presentation I was to make at a forthcoming conference and found that I had been assigned a lecture theater very similar to the one in the outer dream; thanks to my dream advisory, I was able to have the venue changed to a more informal space more suited to dream experiencers. Second, on a visit to Australia I had not planned at the time of the dream, I found myself in contact with Aboriginal elders who confirmed things I had seen in the inner dream, and opened sacred space to me because I came to them with the right dream.

     Experiences of this kind can awaken us to the important fact that there are many levels of dreaming. As we develop the practices of Active Dreaming, including the ability to embark on conscious dream travels and to attain and maintain lucidity during our nocturnal excursions, we will learn that we can go with intention to successive levels of dreaming. Our design then becomes to bring back more from the innermost dreams, where the greatest treasures are to be found, but may be lost to memory as our dream selves wend their way back to the surface.
    In a program I led for sixth-graders, we were all seized with admiration for a lovely young girl who narrated a night in which she passed through seven successive dreams, nested inside each other, until she found herself in an epic of love and danger in the time of the American Revolution - and then traveled back, level by level, through the outer courts of dreaming, with exact and vivid memories of the whole adventure.

     Part of our practice, as active dream travelers, is to learn to recognize personal markers that we are moving from one level of dreaming to another. Some dreamers have familiar places of transit; favorites include a locker room (a place of changing, when we think about it), a bathroom, an Eastern restaurant, grandma's house. Some of us have the frequent experience of going up or down successive levels in a building with many floors, or an elevator that works rather differently from a regular lift.
     Shifts from color to black and white and back again may denote transits between different levels of dreaming as well as different locales. Taking off or putting on clothes, or changing vehicles, may be another marker of switching levels. To get to higher levels, we may need to move beyond the astral body (in which we engage in many of our dream adventures) to a more subtle vehicle.

     The problem of the "false awakening", in which we wake from a dream only to find - when we wake again in the physical body - is an intriguing one. I explored it one evening in a class in which I suggested that although I could not prove whether or not I was dreaming at that moment, I might be able to establish whether I was in a physical body.
     To dramatize this point, I took the candle from the center of the circle and dribbled hot wax onto the web between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. As I felt the pain, I announced to the group, "I think I have established that whether or not I am dreaming, I am in a physical body right now." Then I woke up in my bed. I felt the residue of the heat and pain in my left hand, a dream hangover effect that is sometimes called astral repercussion.

     Growing consciousness and discernment about these things is a matter of practice, practice, practice. The reward is to become a more conscious citizen of the multiverse, awake to the fact that our ordinary lives are related to grander stories being played out, right now, in other orders of reality, able to draw from this the will to choose how we navigate life on all levels.

For more on the levels of dreaming and the subtle bodies, please see my book Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death (New World Library).

Art: René Magritte, "The Human Condition II" (1935)

Dreaming is social, and PJ is getting married

I'm at a conference of dream researchers, running a bit late for dinner. I hurry through a large restaurant lounge area, looking for the friends I said I would meet. Off to my left, outside on a sunny terrace, I see women I know and like and go over to greet them.
    I kiss a woman with long dark hair on the back of a head and she turns to smile up into my eyes. She calls herself PJ, and she is getting married. I had forgotten this, or the information had never registered. She introduces me to her fiance, a tall, stocky blond man who seems suspicious of me, maybe jealous. When I recognize that his last name is Lithuanian, I try to open him up by talking about my deep connection with Lithuania. I sprinkle a few Lithuanian words into my spiel, and mention that I am thinking of writing a whole book about my adventures in the country of Žemyna and Perkunas.

I have no strong feelings on waking from this dream into morning sunlight a few hours ago. This small and very social dream feels just-so: went there, did that, talked to those people.
    Yes, I could play the "What part of me?" game and ask whether PJ is a feminine aspect of myself and whether the big Lithuanian is a strong but sometimes surly part of me, and so on. But my feelings tell me this would be a wholly misdirected exercise.
    I could play word games with the name "PJ." For many of us "PJs" are pajamas. Were these initials a prompt to me to wake up to the fact that I was dreaming, and enter a state of dream lucidity? (I did not become lucid in this dream.) Well, maybe. But then I don't wear PJs, so an allusion to "pajamas" is not the prompt for me that it might be for someone with a different dress code for bed.
    I know a woman who calls herself PJ in regular life. I don't think I know the woman in my dream, though I can see her quite distinctly - slim, deeply tanned, possibly Asian-American.
    I do sometimes go to conferences with dream researchers, and some of the other people in the dream are friends who belong to the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) where I have spoken several times. So I'll file this dream in two categories. It may be a rehearsal for a possible future event. It could be an experience in a parallel reality. Either way, I feel sure it involved transpersonal interaction with other people on a plane of reality close to the physical.
    Dreams are not only personal and subjective; they are transpersonal and may be experiences of an objective reality, in many possible times and dimensions. When we dream, we get out there. Some of us are actually much more social in dreams than in ordinary life. This is certainly true for me, in those periods in my life when I am off the road and down in my creative cave, writing and researching.

Graphic: Yes, they are wearing pajamas! The old photos show handlers of the Sultan of Oudh's hunting cheetahs. The origin of the word "pajama" is Persian; its original meaning is "leg garment."