After a murky sequence in my dreams one night,
when I needed to avoid various dangers and distractions, I found myself lying
at the edge of the ocean in marvelous gleaming morning sunlight. With my legs
in the water, I enjoyed the waves lapping over my lower chest, and the warmth
of the early sun, turning the whitecaps of the blue sea into gold.
As I
surfaced from this dream, I thought, What a perfectly simple and lovely image
to linger in, for relaxation, cleansing and healing. So I stayed in bed,
putting myself back into that gentle feast of color and rhythm. As I drifted in
my conscious dream, a blue form separated from the blues of sea and sky. It
moved like the finest silk and seemed to extend from shoulder-height into the
sky. It seemed to me that it was some kind of pathway. I let myself join this
blue light, and soon found myself enjoying wonderful kinesthetic sensations of
flight. Soon I was winging over greenwoods, swooping low to enjoy the sights
and smells close up. I was drawn to a town I did not recognize, where no one
noticed me until a swarthy old man stared at me, his eyes fierce as a hawk. He
beckoned me to a doorway where a beautiful younger woman - his daughter? - was
waiting. Over the doorway hovered the energy form of an ankh, the Egyptian
symbol of life. A new adventure was beckoning....
This
is a simple example of how Active Dreaming works in everyday practice. You pick
an image from a dream you would like to explore, or simply stay with, and allow
a new cycle of conscious dreaming to unfold. The blue of the
energy path that appeared spontaneously and led me to the Egyptian door was
very like the distinctive "Egyptian blue" - whose blue derived from
copper oxides like malachite - that you see on scarabs, and hippo sculptures,
and fertility statues, and on the painted skins of gods and New Dynasty
pharaohs, and on the djed pillar of Osiris. And on ankhs. I have seen ankhs
that were used as water vessels painted this color. The idea was as you drank
from them - whether plain water or a potion infused with crushed petals of the
blue lotus, an oneirogen - you would take vital life force into your body.
In
their dry country, the Egyptians dreamed the whole spectrum of blues. They
prized lapis lazuli and azurite. They sought the origin of human life and
purpose in a blue star from which gods descended (in some versions of the
cosmogony) to Earth via the the Moon. In the Egyptian mind, blue (irtiu,
khesbodj) is the color of heaven, of the primeval flood, life, rebirth,
fertility and of the inundation that renews the land. A good color to dream on.
Drawing by Robert Moss
