The Romance of Dreaming

 

On Valentine Day, romance your dreams. The romance of dreaming is played out beyond your present life and your present world. Through dreaming, as the Irish poet-painter AE (George Russell) promised, "Your own will find you". Someone you loved and lost five thousand years ago may call you to remember that romance, and look for its fulfillment in new bodies that have ancient eyes.

    Yes, I am a romantic about these things. But I am also a practical romantic. I know that we can dream the way to manifest the kind of love that transcends time, and also that dreaming will show us how to do what we love and let the world support us. However, this requires us to develop the practice of active dreaming, which involves not only growing our dream recall and keeping our journals, but learning to clarify the content of dreams and above all taking action to bring energy and guidance from the dream worlds into the physical world.
    One of my favorite teaching stories about this comes from India. It is sometimes called "The Sketcher of Pictures". It goes like this:

 

The princess (and all women may be princesses, or queens) is dreaming. She dreams of the perfect lover, who satisfies her in every way. The dream streams like silk. It smells like jasmine and honeysuckle.
   She opens her eyes and howls with pain and loss, because although her surroundings are opulent she knows no one like the man of her dreams.
   Her father sees that she is very sad and asks what is wrong. When she tells him it has something to do with a dream, the king summons his wise men to listen to the dream and tell her what it means. They gather in a council chamber, ready to give their interpretations.
    As the princess recounts her dream, a wild man rushes into the room, his hair a white storm about his shoulders. He is a rishi who lives in the woods and cares nothing for the rules of the court. He grabs a piece of paper, makes a quick sketch, and hands it to the girl.
    When she looks at the picture, the princess is stunned. The rishi has captured the very essence of her dream lover.
     Abandoning the conclave of dream interpreters, she runs after the wold man from the woods. When she catches up to him, she begs him to tell her the identity or her dream lover. "Who is he? Where can I find him?" Clearly the rishi knows the man of her dreams.
     Good teachers don't give you everything all at once. The rishi says only, "The map is in your dream." Then he takes off into the woods.
     The princess thinks about it. What does it mean, that a dream contains a map? When she thinks about it some more, she realizes that she was not with her lover among the clouds. She was in a bed in a room in a house in a city in a certain landscape. Though she recognizes none of these places, she has vivid memories of them and feels she would know them again.
     So she sets out on the quest. In an Indian village, they may take hours to tell this part. There will be tigers, of course, and bandits, and deserts and snakes and all manner of perils. There will probably be elephants.
     But let's catch up with the princess at the moment when her quest is almost over, because there on the horizon, after long travels and many ordeals, she sees the city from her dreams. And now she is rushing through those streets the house from her dream, and up the stairs to the bedroom from her dream, where she finds her lover rising from his dream of her.

 

It sounds like a fairy story, but there are no fairies in it, or any of the gods, demons and others from the rich forests of Hindu mythology. There are only humans, and what humans can do when they learn to make maps from their dreams and have the will and stamina to follow their maps.
    Through the perfume of romance, we receive a lesson in practical romanticism. Do the work in dreamwork. Recognize that dreams require action. Learn - why has it taken you so long? - that a dream is a place. Because you have been there, you can go there again. This can bring you, in this physical world, to place of your dream lover. More often, it will bring you to places in a more spacious universe where you can rejoin the beloved company of your soul, those who love you across time and space, even when you make each other crazy.
   Give a hug to someone you love on Valentine Day. Bring flowers or chocolates if you must. But don't let the day pass without sharing dreams.

Illustration: "The Sketcher of Pictures" by Robert Moss

 

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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Walking a Dream

 

Jung said that one of the things he liked to do with a dream was to “circumambulate” it, wander around it, considering it from many angles. He liked to do this while in physical motion, wandering around his house on the lake, through the garden, into the woods.

This is a grand way to get greater perspective on a dream. Walking with a dream for a while, you may find that more of the dream narrative returns to you. You are almost sure to get commentary of some kind from what you notice playing around you, wherever you happen to be going.

You may find that both inner and outer perceptions accomplish what a dreaming people of central Africa say we must do with a dream. Like other cultures that value dreaming, the Yansi of Zaire have special words for dreamwork practice. According to anthropologist Mubuy Mpier, the Yansi share dreams every morning, and the core of their approach to dream exploration is embodied in the term a bumi ndoey, which means to “turn a dream.” [1] The teaching is that we need to turn a dream carefully, as we might lift a great rock, to see what is underneath, on the side that is not initially visible.

It’s not only a matter of letting the world illuminate the dream; it’s a case of letting the dream illumine the world. “We do not always have only to sit with closed eyes, moving around in our heads, to draw closer to an image. We can put it in our pocket and carry it with us throughout days and nights,” as Mary Watkins wrote in her passionate appeal for us to let images speak to us and through us. “You not only see different things, you see things differently” when you are seized by poetic imagery, poet and scholar Kathleen Raine observed.

One of the things we want to do when we are walking a dream is to notice when it starts to play out in the world around us. There might be a considerable time gap between the dream and its unfolding in the world, so patience and a decent memory — assisted by your journal! — may be required. When a dream does begin to manifest in external reality, let an alert flash on your inner control panel. In my mind, the default version is: Dream Playing Out Now.

When the dream starts playing out, you have several options. They are not mutually exclusive. If there is no sense of danger and the original dream left you feeling happy and confident, you may be content to let the dream play again and enjoy it with all of your senses. Maybe you’ll find that a sense of “rightness” comes with this: that you have made the right choice, that you are in the right place, that at last you have found the right friend or lover or teacher. If you had a darker sense of the dream — if it involved risk or danger — you will want to be poised to change the script, solve a problem, avoid that accident or that drama at the office.

As a dream plays out in exterior reality, you may notice that its symbolism is now alive in your world. This can become a whole education on how to refresh and renew our perspectives on what is a dream and what is real. We need to take dreams more literally and waking life symbolically.

A dream may be fairly literal in the sense that it reveals something that is happening or will happen in the future in the ordinary world. Yet when the dream is enacted, we see that there is symbolism in the physical event. So a literalistic dream can point to a symbolic play in the outer world. Let’s consider an example.

A man I will call Yves dreamed that his ring finger was cut off in an accident. There was blood and pain, and he saw the splintered bone, and woke with feelings of dread and fear. When he brought the dream to me, I asked very early, as is my practice, whether it was possible that he could lose a finger in a literal accident, maybe cutting or slicing something. Did his work involve such risks? Well, yes, it did. He worked part-time pruning vines on a hillside in southern France, where he lived. He agreed that he would need to be more watchful about how he handled the secateurs.

We proceeded to discuss the symbolic levels of the dream. Hard to miss the significance of losing the ring finger in terms of a relationship. He was not married, but he had a live-in partner and felt her interest had begun to stray. This brought in the Freudian bit. Did the loss of “tall man” — the middle finger — speak of a decline in sexual performance?

Yves walked with his dream. Within the week, it began to play out when he made a false move while working in the vineyard. He only narrowly managed to avoid cutting off his own finger with the pruning shears. It was the ring finger, as in the dream. The partial fulfillment of his terrible dream led him to confront the symbolic issues. He sat down with his partner. She told him, with the sexual candor for which the French can be notable, that she was dissatisfied with his sexual performance and had already taken another lover. They agreed to separate.

[1] Mubuy Mpier, “Dreams Among the Yansi” in E.M.Jedrej and Rosalind Shaw (eds) Dreaming, Religion and Society in Africa (New York: E.J.Brill, 1992) 100-1110

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photos by RM