Dream rehearsals

 

Before I led my first public dream workshop, I dreamed the exact number of participants and also that there would be a problem with a man who would try to record the session without asking permission. In the dream, I saw him fiddling with a micro-recorder under a dark jacket while seated next to a grand piano. In the workshop the following evening, a man in a dark jacket sat next to the piano. As soon as he reached for his recorder, I was able to stop him pressing the Play button, because my dream had rehearsed me for this.

On another occasion, when I was scheduled to speak at a college in high summer, I dreamed that the air conditioning system in the lecture room was so loud that people could not hear me; we were posed with the choice of broiling in the summer heat or having an inaudible speaker. My action was to drive to the college and check the A/C. As in my dream, the fans were incredibly noisy. I was able to save my lecture by having it moved to another auditorium. I include many personal episodes of this type of dream rehearsal in my book Conscious Dreaming,

Still on the theme of "workaday" dream rehearsals: the dream may come long before the event it previews. Thirteen months before leading a three-day residential retreat at a new venue, I dreamed that 67 people had signed up for one of my programs. Much of my long dream report was then devoted to bizarre and surreal scenes. At the time of the dream, I had never heard of the venue where I found - more than a year later - that 67 people were enrolled for my program. That match-up made me scout the full dream report to see what else in it might have been a helpful rehearsal. As the workshop unfolded, I recognized that the dreams participants were sharing closely resembled those "bizarre and surreal scenes" in my dream report, which now served me as a personal counselor, guiding me on how to handle specific individuals carrying specific challenges and imaginal histories.

How could I be poised to relate a dream rehearsal to an event thirteen months later? Because I follow the discipline of keeping a detailed journal, giving a title to each entry. How could I find a report from more than a year before? Because I also live by synchronicity, in this case using a specific and fun version of bibliomancy (divination by opening a book at random) that for now I'll call journal-mancy (since imerologiomancy seems a bit too much). I opened an old journal at random on the morning of that three-day retreat, and out fluttered a closely-typed three-page report that began "There are 67 people enrolled for my workshop."

When people who remember dreams tell me they can't recall dreaming a future event, I say: Look again. Ask of any and every dream, and especially the workaday ones, Is it remotely possible that this will play out in the future? If the answer is, Yes, then consider whether the dream is more than precognitive; it could be a rehearsal that will help you to prepare for coming events and shape then for the better.

Illustration by Robert Moss

The gift of "boring" dreams

I often hear from dreamers who complain that their night dreams are boring or mundane. They feel they are missing the movies. "I'm forever dreaming of arguing with my mother," writes one dreamer. "I'm fed up with having long-winded conversations with my boss," writes another. "I get enough of him from nine to five. Why can't I enjoy a dream romance in a tropical paradise, or go on an epic adventure?"

Of course we want the romance and adventure. But we also want to keep body and soul together on the roads of everyday life. Here's one of my personal mantras about dreamwork:

Ho-hum dreams are the most likely to offer help in navigating the future.

Why? Because much of waking life can be ho-hum too - until we start using the skills of dreaming and imagination to bring it more alive. So instead of complaining because you keep dreaming of arguments with your mother, you want to ask: how can I avoid getting into this situation again in the future? And perhaps also: how can I make peace with the part of myself that is like my mother?

Here's one of my favorite examples of the need to examine a ho-hum dream as a preview of a possible future, and harvest information from the dream in order to navigate better in a developing situation and avoid an unwanted event in waking life.

A woman friend complained to me that she had a boring and irritating dream in which she was in her cubie at the office when her boss threw a temper tantrum. "He banged his fist down on my desk, spilling my coffee over my work papers." "What happened then?" "I called him a bad name and walked out." She thought this over. "S--t. I think this may have cost me my job, in the dream."

Suddenly the ho-hum dream sounded less boring than urgent. I asked the dreamer to run a reality check. Could her boss throw a two-year old temper tantrum? "He does that all the time." Was there anything in the dream to indicate what he was mad about this time? "All I know is he wasn't mad at me. He was just taking his rage out on me."

If it were my dream, I now suggested, I would remember that next time my boss threw a hissy fit, his anger will probably not be directed at me, and I should keep my cool. The dreamer readily made this her action plan. "I'll play Miss Zen," was her one-liner.

Not long after this conversation, the dream scene started to play out in exact detail. The boss came into the dreamer's cubie and banged his fist down on her work surface, spilling her coffee. Instead of swearing at him, she played Miss Zen.He exited later in some confusion. The boss returned later to apologize. "Sorry about how I behaved. It wasn't about you." Instead of saying, "I know," the dreamer remained Miss Zen, sitiing silent with a distant tight-lipped smile.

The boss came back with flowers. "I'm really sorry." Miss Zen accepted the offering without comment, holding out a vase for the boss to fill.

At the end of the workday, the boss returned for the third time. "hey, I feel real bad. I want to invite you to come down to Cancun with the group I'm leading for the sales conference. You won't have to do any work. You can just work on your tan and drink stuff that comes with little umbrellas."

Because the dreamer did not discard a "boring" dream and worked with its information, she not only avoided an unpleasant scene and possible job loss but also collected an apology, flowers, and a free vacation.

Choosing your future through Active Dreaming

By my observation and experience, consciousness is forever scouting ahead of the physical body and returning with memories of the future. It is important to understand that any future we foresee is a possible future. We can change the odds on the manifestation of a certain coming event by learning to read and clarify the information and then by taking appropriate action.   
     Shamans believe that in dreaming, we not only scout out the future but may actively choose between possible futures that are open to us. The more conscious we become, the greater our ability to choose. Physical events are born inside the dreaming, where it is possible to change them before they are manifested.
      Dream radar gives us fairly precise readouts on the probable outcome of our present actions and behavior, and the probable consequences of choices we might make in the future. Through dream reentry, we can check our messages and make sure we are working with all the pertinent information. By taking action based on the dream, we can steer toward or away from the dreamed event in waking life. Through conscious or lucid dreaming, we position ourselves to change the outcome inside the dream itself.
     The probability that a possible future event, perceived in a dream, will be enacted depends on a number of factors. These include:

Time lapse. Generally, the shorter the interval between the dream and the probable enactment of the event foreseen, the greater the chance that the event will be played out in waking life unless you are able to take deliberate action to avert the dream fulfillment.

Personal involvement. Is the dream about you or people connected with you whom you may be able to influence? If so, you may have latitude to act to change the dream result. But if the dream is about strangers, a remote situation, or a natural disaster, there is probably little or nothing you can do – except, say, call a friend in California to warn about the next earthquake and risk being regarded as a nut or (maybe worse) as merely stating the obvious.

Your willingness to act on a dream. Are you working actively with your dream source? Do you make a habit not only to read dream messages but to do something with them? If so, you may have more room to work around dream results you don’t relish.

Life burdens. The future events you dream may be the results of disease, old age, past actions, decades of bad habits, or the culmination of a whole lifetime. It might be difficult or impossible to get out from under a big accumulation of personal karma! But even if an unwanted event, perceived in the dream, now proves to be unavoidable in waking life, the lesson brought home by the dream may prepare you for the worst and lay the ground for a fresh start.

Text adapted from Robert Moss, Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life. Published by Three Rivers Press.

Into the boggart wardrobe: My dream self organizes a journey through fear

A woman in one of my workshops is resolved to confront her worst fear. She will do this in a conscious shamanic journey, aided by my drumming, with a small group of people accompanying her as her family support. I suggest that they take all the room they need in the space beyond our main circle.
    I realize it's time for all of us to make this journey to overcome fear. I direct the rest of our people to form small groups of four, in which everything will center on one person - the one who is resolved to face his or her worst fear - in the next journey.
    While people generally sit or lie down for journeying with the drum, a man remains standing, feeling that he needs to confront his fear on his feet. The people in his group stand with him. There are a few individuals who don't partner up. It seems they are nervous and want to stay on the sidelines to see how this goes.
    The first woman has an image of her fear. It's come up again and again in recurring dream scenarios. Not everyone is quite so sure of what form their fear will take. I suggest to these others, "You can approach the journey as a Reverse Boggart. In third-year Defense Against the Dark Arts, Professor Lupin gives Harry's class the assignment of confronting a boggart. This is a nasty , shapeshifting creature that takes on the form of your worst fear. In Harry's class, the boggart comes out of a wardrobe. In our exercise, in contrast, we are going to step into the space in which we will encounter our very worst fear.
    "Remember that the charm for dealing with a boggart is a Riddikulus spell, which transforms the fear into something funny or preposterous. The most important weapon you'll need to take into the closet is your sense of humor.
     "Now picture a huge dark wardrobe rising in front of you. When the drumming begins, you will open the door and step inside. The space within may seem very cramped, or larger than you might have dreamed possible, defying any laws of proportion. The door closes behind you. For a moment, you are in the dark. Now, obscurely, a shape is starting to form. It is assuming the shape of your worst fear. Ready?"

This is an unedited dream report from my journal. I spend far more time leading workshops in my dreams than in regular life.  It seemed the boggart exercise was a big success. I described my first feelings after he dream as "charmed and satisfied." I noted my pleasure at catching another glimpse of how my dream self often seems to go ahead of me, developing techniques I have not yet invented or used.
   Why not follow his lead in coming workshops in ordinary reality? Stepping into the wardrobe to find the boggart might require more guts than simply opening the door to let it out. I would need to make sure that whoever was asked to undertake this exercise had the necessary grounding and support. As in the dream, they would want a partner or small intentional family to flank them and help them travel and return safely. Probably I would not want to introduce this test until people had met and confirmed their relationships with helping spirits, especially the power animals.
    I checked Professor Lupin's instructions to his class. "Nobody knows what a boggart looks like he he is alone, but when I let him out, he will immediately become what each of us most fears.". The boggart might turn out to be something scarier than one of those hairy, stinky, mud-loving critters in English folklore from which J.K.Rowling borrowed the word, or even a spider the size of an elephant.  Humor, I agreed with the werewolf professor and my dream self, was likely to prove the sovereign remedy. I smiled, noting that among his other distinctions, my dream self has clearly studied the magic of Harry Potter more deeply than I have.

The report of constructing a Reverse Boggart in a dream is from a 2010 journal. I chanced upon it just now. Since then, following the lead of Dream Robert, I have led a version of this exercise at a number of workshops with excellent results. Participants have been amazed to discover the true lineaments of their fears, and that humor and imagination can transform those fears as effectively as a Riddikulus spell.
    In the dreams we run away from, leaving them as broken shards of nightmare, we see forms our boggarts have assumed in the past: as spider or tsunami, as the walking dead, a dark double, a possessed elevator. Dream reentry - going back consciously into the dream space, with the clear intention of carrying the action forward to resolution - is my preferred treatment.
    Doing a Reverse Boggart requires us to take more of a leap into the dark. We must be prepared to encounter forms of our fears we may never have seen, because we kept our eyes shut tight or because the boggart is wily, trying on successive fright masks.


Image: David Thewlis plays Remus Lupin in "The Prisoner of Azkaban"

If it looks like a duck: A tiny tale of dream precognition

I love the small examples of a meet-up between a dream and a subsequent event that remind us that we want to ask, of any and all dream material: Is it possible that elements of this dream will manifest in some way in the future? Here's my example from New Year's Day, featuring my 20 pound miniature Schnauzer, Oskar.

Dream Vignette (from the early hours)

My little dog Oskar is excited by people coming and going outside the house. When the street door is opened, he rushes out. He bounds up, nearly clearing top of the ironwork gate. He is almost over, and out in the street, when I manage to grab him and pull him back.      The lady on the street reminds me of Jemima Puddleduck. She has several children with her, following along like ducklings.

Feelings: Mild amusement

Reality: Oskar does get excited by people near the house. Typically, he will rush at other dogs or squirrels. Or sometimes at ducks in the park. But ducks are unlikely on our street.

Follow-up

Three hours later, I am walking Oskar around the lake in the park. He becomes very excited by ducks at the edge of the water, at the bottom of a 10-foot drop. As he rushes towards the edge, I realize that my dream is starting to play out.
    I move faster than I may have done otherwise because of the rehearsal. He is halfway over the drop when I manage to grab him and pull him back. He would never have been able to get back up that near-vertical drop into the mud, and it would have been a long walk to a place where he could get back on the path, by which point he would have been a mud pie.

Dream rehearsals

I'm teaching another workshop. Our space is large and pleasant, two connecting rooms, one of which has large picture windows through which I can see public gardens. I have the group move back and forth between the two rooms, depending on whether we are doing performance, or shamanic journeying, or work in smaller groups.
    The group is eager for me to speak about Iroquois dreaming traditions, and I embark on this in a leisurely way, by noting that the word "Iroquois" does not exist in the language of the Six Nations of the Longhouse, who call themselves Onkwehonwe (Real People, in Mohawk) or Haudenosonee (Longhouse People, in Seneca). "Iroquois" is a word borrowed by whites from tribes that were traditionally hostile to those who are now called Iroquois. Some say it means "rattlesnake". More likely, it is a term we owe to Basque fishermen who came into contact with Algonquians around the mouth of the St. Lawrence river in the 17th century. They developed a pidgin language for trade, and in this frontier argot the Mohawk and their kin - feared enemies of the Algonquians - were called Hilokoa, the Killer People. The French who became masters of eastern Canada heard this as "Iroquois" and this version stuck. Many members of the Six Nations are content for it to be used in English or French, and I used it in the title of one of my books, Dreamways of the Iroquois.
    There is great excitement as I go on talking in informal professorial style, but I am watching the time because I want to give the circle the experience of group shamanic dream journeying. We have been seated in the inner room, which has few if any windows. I go to check the state of things in the other room, with the picture windows, and find that there is a problem. People walking in the park are curious. Some have their noses pressed to the glass. A few have even wandered into our space and are looking at items on the altar, having found a sliding door unlocked. I shoo them away and call for our coordinator to put up signs and make sure the doors are locked and our space is secure.
    Now I notice a man in the group who has been sleeping on the floor in here while the rest of us were in the other room. I quite like him, and was truck by the depth of his connection with the Western Mystery traditions. He stirs from his sleep and apologizes that he's exhausted from all his overnight studies and experiments. I gently suggest that he might need to get his head out of the old books and into the space of fresh possibilities.

I woke from the dream this morning feeling cheerful, recognizing that I have probably been coached for quite specific issues involving a future workshop. I do occasionally give workshops in spaces within parks and public gardens, and I'll watch our need to ensure that our space is private and protected under those circumstances. I'll be prepared for the sleepy esotericist, and I'll be encouraged not to hold back in sharing my research as an independent scholar, especially into Iroquoian traditions.
    It is also possible that I led a workshop, in a parallel reality, overnight. Many people report attending workshops with me in their dreams, and I'll be curious to see whether any report a situation like this.
    "Workaday" dreams of this kind (dreaming with people in interesting spaces is my everyday work, and play) are often the ones from which we can extract immediate and practical guidance on how to prepare for coming events. Before I led my first public dream workshop, I dreamed the exact number of participants and also that there would be a problem with a man who would try to record the session without asking permission. In the dream, I saw him fiddling with a micro-recorder under a dark jacked while seated next to a grand piano. In the workshop the following evening, a man in a dark jacket sat next to the piano. As soon as he reached for his recorder, I was able to stop him pressing the Play button, because my dream had rehearsed me for this.
    On another occasion, when I was scheduled to speak at a college in high summer, I dreamed that the air conditioning system in the lecture room was so loud that people could not hear me; we were posed with the choice of broiling in the summer heat or having an inaudible speaker. My action was to drive to the college and check the A/C. As in my dream, the fans were incredibly noisy. I was able to save my lecture by having it moved to another auditorium. I include many personal episodes of this type of dream rehearsal in my book Conscious Dreaming,
    Still on the theme of "workaday" dream rehearsals: the dream may come long before the event it previews. Thirteen months before leading a three-day residential retreat at a new venue, I dreamed that 67 people had signed up for one of my programs. Much of my long dream report was then devoted to bizarre and surreal scenes. At the time of the dream, I had never heard of the venue where I found - more than a year later - that 67 people were enrolled for my program. That match-up made me scout the full dream report to see what else in it might have been a helpful rehearsal. As the workshop unfolded, I recognized that the dreams participants were sharing closely resembled those "bizarre and surreal scenes" in my dream report, which now served me as a personal counselor, guiding me on how to handle specific individuals carrying specific challenges and imaginal histories.
    How could I be poised to relate a dream rehearsal to an event thirteen months later? Because I follow the discipline of keeping a detailed journal, giving a title to each entry. How could I find a report from more than a year before? Because I also live by synchronicity, in this case using a specific and fun version of bibliomancy (divination by opening a book at random) that for now I'll call journal-mancy (since imerologiomancy seems a bit too much). I opened an old journal at random on the morning of that three-day retreat, and out fluttered a closely-typed three-page report that began "There are 67 people enrolled for my workshop."
    When people who remember dreams tell me they can't recall dreaming a future event, I say: Look again. Ask of any and every dream, and especially the workaday ones, Is it remotely possible that this will play out in the future? If the answer is, Yes, then consider whether the dream is more than precognitive; it could be a rehearsal that will help you to prepare for coming events and shape then for the better.

Dress rehearsal for "The Mikado" at the Savoy theater, 1895