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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Assignment: Idun

 

Dreams set us research assignments. A note on an assignment I was given in the hypagogic zone, on the cusp of sleep, when I lay down in the early hours:

January 2, 2021

HG assignment

IDUN

The name comes through clearly the moment I close my eyes.. I know I am being given an assignment: to explore and report from the realm of the Norse goddess who keeps the apples of regeneration that keep the gods young. For a moment I am wafted into an enchanted apple orchard. I smell the apple blossom in the golden hair of a lovely young woman who seems sweet and innocent.

I let myself drift into sleep. In the final scene of my sleep dreams, I am driving far north, ever north, faster and faster with a young woman who seems to be both my daughter and my research partner. The wind rushes past us as the beating of great wings. We are excited because we have found the key to a mystery. We now need to use it and confirm the story we may bring to the world.

Feelings: excited

Clearly this sequence demanded immediate research in ordinary reality. I looked at the name, written as Iðunn in Old Norse and translated as "ever young" and "rejuvenator”. I went back to the books: to the Prose Edda for the story of Idun’s abduction and rescue (both the work of Loki), to Hilda Ellis Davidson’s treatment of Idun in Gods and Myths of the Viking Age, I looked again at the role of apples in many traditions (notably Celtic) as seeds of life and as passports to the Otherworld. I reflected on the nature of Idun’s  husband Bragi, the skaldic god of poetry, who gave his name to the cup (bragarfull) with which toasts to the mighty Viking dead were raised.

Of course I drew Idun by an apple tree with apple blossom in her hair, holding her golden apples in a basket rather than an ashwood box because that is the way I see her. This assignment has just begun. Who knows how far the road may lead?

RM jounal drawing January 2, 2021

Smelling the lilacs and other scientific research inside dreams

The most original and revealing scientific study of dreams – the only kind that is likely to bring us the big stuff – is research inside dreams, rather than research about dreams. Charting a path for future research, William C. Dement, one of the leading research scientists in the area of sleep and dreams, appealed for “trained introspectionists to give us somewhat more confident information about what goes on in the mind during sleep.”
    Research should center on recognizing that there are some individuals who seem to be “supremely good at recalling their dreams.” Perhaps they could be encouraged not only to increase their recall even further but to attain some degree of mental control inside the dreamstate “which would allow them to attend to the dream more closely with the idea of remembering it and reporting it.” Dement concluded: “Our major data about the dream world should come from those best able to describe it” – dream experiencers. [1]

    A century before Dement made his remarks, the Marquis Hervey de Saint-Denys (1822-1892), a French aristocrat and oriental scholar, made this type of research is ruling passion. He started observing his dreams closely at the age of thirteen, as a way of whiling away his time after completing lessons with his private tutors. Within a year, he noticed he was often aware while dreaming of his “true situation” - that he was dreaming – and was able to “guide their development” consciously.
    He dreamed, for example, that he was among flowering lilac trees. Aware that he was dreaming, he remembered reading that our memories of smell are “seldom correct” when we wake from dreams. “I caught hold of the branch, and first assured myself that the smell of lilac was recalled in my memory by this imaginary but voluntary act.” [2].
    Over decades, Saint-Denys became an intrepid investigator inside his dreams, producing and exploring dream images that revolved around his research interests. “During the day I reflected on the subjects most worthy of examination; at night, during the dreams in which I was aware of my situation, I sought every possible opportunity to discover and analyze.”
    There was a curious blind spot in his dream exploration. He believed that dream images all derive from our waking experiences: that whatever we see in dreams is constructed from life memories. Scientist that he was, he tested this by his experiential method.
    Perhaps the fact that he was not able – by his own account – to identify dreamscapes that were unrelated to waking life memories was a function of his own belief system. That would fit his own observation that whenever he thought about something in a conscious dream, a corresponding scene or image appeared. Dream images, he concluded, are “the representation in our mind’s eye of the objects that occupy our thoughts.”
    Today, we look to active dreamers to help us expand the frontiers of our knowledge of the deeper realities accessible to the dreaming mind. An active dreamer is not only an enthusiastic and prolific dream recaller. He or she develops the ability to enter and navigate inside the dream state at will, to maintain continuity of consciousness through success states of sleep, dream and hypnagogia - and keeps extensive logs of these experiences.
    Active dreaming, as I teach and practice it, is a discipline - a fun one, but one that requires practice, practice practice. The rewards are immense. We discover that dreams give us personal doorways to the multiverse. We confirm that, dreaming, we are time travelers. We scout out the possible future, and we can visit past times and past lives and communicate, mentally, with other personalities. We gather first-hand evidence of the reality of parallel worlds and explore how quantum effects may work on a human level. We become quite familiar with the normalcy of "supernormal" abilities like precognition and telepathy. We embark on experiments in mutual or interactive dreaming, sometimes by traveling together on group shamanic journeys powered by drumming, at other times by setting overnight assignments for our circles. And - oh! - the places we go!

References

1.      William C. Dement, “Proposals for future research” in Gabrielle C. Lairy and Pero Salzarulo (eds) The Experimental Study of Human Sleep: Methodological Problems. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1975) 442.

2.      Marquis Hervey de Saint-Denys, Dreams and How to Guide Them trans. Nicholas Fry, ed. Morton Schatzman M.D. (London: Duckworth, 1982) 56

Art: "The Bunch of Lilacs" by James Tissot (c.1875)

Reading Machiavelli on another plane

Keeping a journal, every day, is a dreamer's version of "chop wood, carry water", essential in troubled times. Then there are the research assignments that dreams give us. This one leads to a time of deceit, treachery and fear in politics that may hold up a Renaissance mirror to our current discontents - and may hint at a way to gain some more perspective.
I'm often on airplanes in my dreams. I fly a lot in ordinary reality, and notice that some of these dreams are rehearsals for coming trips. But at least as often, it becomes clear that the plane involved is another plane of reality or consciousness. It was like that last night. The cabin of the airplane was vast and I could walk through it into other spaces - to a workshop locale, to pleasant wooden outhouses in a garden setting resembling the ones behind the Big Yurt at Esalen, to a study where I curled up with a translation of Machiavelli's History of Florence. In the dream, I found unexpected guidance in Machiavelli's history on how to get some perspective on events. Go back to a certain time, he advised, and picture yourself sliding out from that time and rising up to look at everything from a higher vantage point. The translation used the word "train" to describe this process, or the vehicle of consciousness required to do it. I puzzled over this as I turned the page in my dream. Surely there were no trains in the Medici era. Perhaps the original word used by Machiavelli was carro, which could mean a vehicle of various kinds. Still pondering the word "train", I receive the vivid image of Magritte's painting "Time Transfixed", in which a train engine emerges from a fireplace and hangs in midair, blowing smoke. Still in the dream, my questioning mind comes into play. Am I looking at The History of Florence, or at the same author's Discourses on Livy?

I wake and do my everyday practice, recording my dream. In troubled times, it is especially important to cleave to a practice that keeps us grounded yet also connected to soul. Writing in my journal - starting with what is with me from the night - is my essential practice, a dreamer's version of the old Zen precept Chop wood, carry water. Why Machiavelli? It's hard not to see the relevance of his reflections on power. Notoriously, Machiavelli penned a kind of Cliff's Notes for tyrants, titled The Prince. This explains with serpentine clarity how to gain and maintain power through deceit, treachery and fear. In an era of fake news and disinformation, Machiavelli has a very contemporary ring: "The prince who would accomplish great things must have learned how to deceive.” (Discourses II, 13). Forget the pursuit of the good. To this mind, "All men are bad, and will always, when they have free field,give loose to their evil inclinations." (Discourses I,3). In politics, successful tyrants recruit friends and allies according to the following calculations: "as a ladder to climb, a door to pass through, or a tool to maintain their grasp." (Discourses II,1). By giving us insight into the mind of those who live for power and money, Machiavelli is a useful study in any age. He also offers some essential cautions. After I woke, I found this in the book my dream led me to reopen: Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please. (History of Florence, III, 2) This deserves to be etched over the door of anyone who has power to put soldiers in harm's way. When I went to bed last night, I set the general intention: Show me what I need to see. It doesn't take much thought to notice that Machiavelli's take on politics might be something we need to see in the context of current events: a Renaissance mirror for our discontents. His major books were part of my syllabus in an honors course in Renaissance history eons ago. But there is that mystery piece, about a way to step into history and then step outside it, to understand things in a different way. Is there a passage that is anything like that in Machiavelli's writings? What I read in my dream could be an instance of cryptomnesia, which is what goes on when a forgotten memory surfaces that you initially think is new and original. Research will tell. Dreams set us research assignments, and I am forever ready to undertake them. I read a few chapters in the trade paperback edition of the History of Florence I've had since my undergrad days. I am soon bored with the narrative of endless wars and intrigues between princelings, mercenaries and crooked churchmen. I dip into the Discourses. More promising; I'll spend more time here. I'll be curious to see whether I was picking up, in a thought bubble in my dream, some of Machiavelli's private reflections and practice. It's a good guess that he did not really approve of the cold-blooded, utterly amoral views of the getting and keeping of power he expressed in The Prince; that while trying to curry favor with Lorenzo de' Medici he was snickering behind his gloved hand. He had been tortured and exiled from Florence by the Medici faction. Now trying to please his way back to a paid job in the city he loved, he could not speak truth to power but he could speak truth about power. Certainly there is a disjunction between the author of The Prince and the man who - as he told it in a letter to a friend - would return to his study after a morning in the woods and an afternoon hobnobbing with common folk, drop his clothes at the door, and put on special obes to enter a space where he could commune with ancient philosophers. The next part of my action plan is easy. I'll go back to watching a pretty good Netflix series on The Medicis, Machiavelli's on-again, of-again patrons. Because I know we are all time travelers in dreams, I'll experiment with that method for going back to a certain time and slipping out of it sideways, and then rising up to get a better view and maybe a platform for action to produce a better history.

Real dream science needs to be conducted inside the dream state

The most original and revealing scientific study of dreams – the only kind that is likely to bring us the big stuff – is research inside dreams, rather than research about dreams.

       Charting a path for future research, William C. Dement, a pioneer of scientific investigation of  sleep and dreams, appealed back in the 1970s for “trained introspectionists to give us somewhat more confident information about what goes on in the mind during sleep.” Dement suggested that the most important research would require science to recognize that there are some individuals who seem to be “supremely good at recalling their dreams.” Perhaps they could be encouraged not only to increase their recall even further but to attain some degree of mental control inside the dreamstate “which would allow them to attend to the dream more closely with the idea of remembering it and reporting it.”

     Dement concluded: “Our major data about the dream world should come from those best able to describe it” – dream experiencers. [1]

Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys

A century before Dement made his remarks, the Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys (1822-1892), a French aristocrat and oriental scholar, made this type of research his ruling passion. He started observing his dreams closely at the age of thirteen, as a way of whiling away his time after completing lessons with his private tutors. Within a year, he noticed he was often aware while dreaming of his “true situation” - that he was dreaming – and was able to “guide their development” consciously. He dreamed, for example, that he was among flowering lilac trees. Aware that he was dreaming, he remembered reading that our memories of smell are “seldom correct” when we wake from dreams. “I caught hold of the branch, and first assured myself that the smell of lilac was recalled in my memory by this imaginary but voluntary act.” [2]

     Over decades, Saint-Denys became an intrepid investigator inside his dreams, producing and exploring dream images that revolved around his research interests. “During the day I reflected on the subjects most worthy of examination; at night, during the dreams in which I was aware of my situation, I sought every possible opportunity to discover and analyze.” [3]

     There was a curious blind spot in his dream exploration. He believed that dream images all derive from our waking experiences: that whatever we see in dreams is constructed from life memories. Scientist that he was, he tested this by his experiential method. Perhaps the fact that he was not able – by his own account – to identify dreamscapes that were unrelated to waking life memories was a function of his own belief system. That would fit his own observation that whenever he thought about something in a conscious dream, a corresponding scene or image appeared. Dream images, he concluded, are “the representation in our mind’s eye of the objects that occupy our thoughts.”

Our best dream scientists are likely to be assiduous dream journalists, keeping detailed logs of their own experiences in the dream worlds, and those shared with them. By collecting and pooling data of this kind, we can overwhelm the silly reductionism that dismisses one-off dream reports as "anecdotal." If we can point to 1,000 or even 100 dated and authentic dream reports suggestive of precognition, or dream diagnosis, or interactive or social dreaming, we have evidence for these phenomena that cannot be shrugged off because it failed to meet laboratory standards.
   Active dreamers following my methods and sharing results have now gone a long way in assembling a remarkable data bases of this kind. We are not only assembling evidence of the play of "supernormal" abilities like precognition, telepathy and clairvoyance in dreams, but logging serial dreams suggestive of parallel realities and shared, interactive experiences in other realities that seem to be no less "real" than the ordinary world.

    In these areas, the big game will always elude those who try to pen it in cages. The real dream scientist will seek it where it is to be found, deep in the forests of the night.
    Quantum pioneer and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli, himself a world-class dreamer, said that “We need a new science to explore the objective side of human consciousness and the subjective side of matter: a science willing to embrace both objective and subjective avenues to discovery while recognizing the legitimacy of  individual experience.” Active dreamers are on it.

References

1. William C. Dement, “Proposals for future research” in Gabrielle C. Lairy and Pero Salzarulo (eds) The Experimental Study of Human Sleep: Methodological Problems (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1975) 442.

2. Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys, Dreams and How to Guide Them trans. Nicholas Fry, ed. Morton Schatzman M.D. (London: Duckworth, 1982) 56.

3. ibid, 20.

For the role of dreaming in the history of science, please see The Secret History of Dreaming. For a leading-edge experiential adventure exploring themes discussed here, look for my next online course "Active Dreaming: The Essential Training".

Yeats' secret working mind and the importance of Edmund Dulac

I dreamed again into the secret working mind of W.B.Yeats, my favorite dead poet. Of a story he wrote, unpublished in his lifetime, from encounters with the ghost of an eight-year-old boy. Of a fierce poetic vision of a man who kept a severed head that rose up in the night with blazing eyes.
     When I sought to reenter the dream, it seemed the boy’s name began with H and may have been “Henry”.
     An inner voice spoke of the importance of Edmund Dulac.

I was thrilled. I knew there was a treasure map in this dream, and I wanted to use it immediately. I ran to my books. Dreams give us research assignments and sometimes these feel urgent. 
     I remembered that Edmund Dulac was a famous book illustrator and painter to the Faerie courts, and a friend of Yeats. I confirmed that Dulac painted the portrait of the poet's wife

Georgie that is on the cover of Becoming George, the vast (and vastly excellent) biography by Ann Saddlemyer that is in my Yeats collection.
     Dulac created images for the 1925 version of Yeats' extraordinary mystical book A Vision.These include the portrait of the fictional Giraldus – with something of Yeats’s hawk-like features – used as the frontispiece. My inner communication in the hypnompic state left me with the impression that Dulac may have been more involved in Yeats’s magic and encounters with the spirits than I had known.

Life called, and I left my research at this point, nearly four years ago, on the morning of January 9, 2012. Now that I have a little leisure to open old journals and follow their leads, I returned to the possible importance of Edmund Dulac.

    I discovered that the artist and the poet saw a great deal of each other in the dark time of the Great War. They attended a seance together in 1917 in which they tried to summon the Wise Men of the East, with the Orientalist Edward Dennison Ross on hand in case translation from Persian, Arabic or Turkish was required. [1]
    In a lecture on Art and Magic, Dulac declared in 1924 that “the greatest desire of man in all ages has been the establishment of a means of communication with the rest of the universe.” He joined Yeats in experiments in spirit communication, magical evocation and mutual visioning.
    They were both lovers of fairies and fairy story. Yeats painted the realms of Faerie with his words, Dulac with his brush.
    They worked together to bring Japanese-inspired Noh plays and mythic dramas, including "At the Hawk's Well" (which In saw in Toronto a few years ago) to stage and salon.
     Both sought a new mythology for their century that would make room for the return of Immortals from other times and dimensions. Both turned, again and again, to the legend of the Magi as a key to the confluence of spiritual traditions and the transformation of the Christian story. Yeats wrote an eerie, haunting, dream-infused story, "The Adoration of the Magi"(1897) and later a poem, "The Magi" (1914) 

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,   

In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones   

Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky   

With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,   

And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,   

And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,   

Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,   

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

Three years later, Dulac painted an extraordinary picture of "The Three Wise Men" in the style of a Persian or Mughal miniature. The costumes and the stance of the Magi evoke different traditions, Persian, African, Chinese. The placement of the Virgin's hands around the infant Jesus gives him the look of a miniature Shiva Nataraj.
    I discovered this painting only today. In storage at the Williams College Museum of Art, it appears to have been overlooked by scholars and art historians until a remarkable researcher, Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp, brought it to light in a wonderful article for Relegere. [2] I am grateful that round two of my dream-inspired research brought me to this.
    I still need to track the ghost story of H and the tale of the severed head. I may of course be required to write them, if my Yeats is willing. [3] Dreams set many kinds of assignments.

References

1. Christopher Blake (ed) “Ghosts in the Machine: Yeats and the Metallic Homunculus,
with Transcripts of Reports by W.B. Yeats and Edmund Dulac,” Yeats Annual 15 (2002).

2. Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp “’ To be an Infidel or an Unbeliever…’ Five Wise Men: Edmund Dulac, W.B.Yeats, and The Magi” in Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception 3, no.2 (2013)

3. For my dreams and visions of Yeats over many years, please see my books The Dreamer's Book of the Dead (Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 2004) chapter 8, and The Boy Who Died and Came Back (Novato CA: New World Library) chapter 37.

Pictures: (1) Edmund Dulac, "The Garden of Paradise: Fairy of the Garden"; (2) Edmund Dulac, "Mrs W.B. Yeats"; (3) Michio Ito as guardian in "At the Hawk's Well" (1916)

Beyond Lucid Dreaming on the air July 10th

My next "Way of the Dreamer" show on healthylife.net  is LIVE on Tuesday July 10th from 9:00-10:00 am Pacific time, which is 12:00-1:00 pm Eastern. This is the show where we learn to reclaim the power of dreams, coincidence and imagination as sources of energy,healing and guidance in our lives 

My guest for this show is dream researcher Ryan Hurd, who has made a special study of lucid dreaming and has published an excellent book on Sleep Paralysis distinguished by his suggestion that if you experience this phenomenon and can avoid panicking and relax and stay with it, you may find it is the portal to remarkable discoveries. I know this to be true, and commented on his approach in an earlier article.

     Ryan has recently produced a manual for lucid dreamers titled Lucid Immersion Guidebook and available for download. Ryan edits a lively blog, the Dream Studies Portal, and is contributor to TheDreamTribe.com and a board member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.   

     Themes we'll explore:

• Why you don't have to work hard to enter a state of lucid dreaming
• How to become more conscious in dreams and waking life
• Why lucid dreaming is not the same thing as dream control
• How lucid dreaming can increase emotional intelligence and heal old wounds
• the nature of sleep paralysis and how to overcome night terrors
• how ancient Asklepian practices can translate into powerful dreaming and dream healing today

You can access my radio show archive and download or listen to previous shows here.