There is a yawning gap in understanding between mainstream Western psychology and neuroscience and the oldest and continuing indigenous understanding of what goes on in dreams. It is understood in every indigenous tradition I have heard about - and no doubt by all our ancestors if we go back far enough - that the dream world is a real world. Compare the view of the yogis, and you look in a mirror: for those who practice the yoga of illusory forms, waking life and dream life are equally illusory; for dreaming cultures, they are both real.
Some dreaming cultures say more. The Seneca Iroquois say that the
dream world is the real world. An Aboriginal people of the Western Desert say
that the dream world is “really real”.
If you know that the dream world is a real-life world, as opposed to a rummage sale in the basement of the personal subconscious or a chemical wash in the brain, then you know that what happens in dream time does not stay in dream time. There are consequences. You bear responsibility for what you do and do not do. You are in a field of interaction with other folks, some alive in both worlds, some dead in one. You encounter beings other- than-human.
You may walk with gods of the upper air, you may fly as a swan, you may prune rose
bushes in the garden of the home you will inhabit in your next life. You may eat a peach in an orchard of tigers, you may
find the girl with apple blossom in her hair,
you may study with a master who died on Earth millennia ago or has yet
to be seen down there.
Illustration: Fig Tree on Magic Island. RM with NightCafe
