Social dreaming

Dreaming is social as well as individual, transpersonal as well as personal. I am still thinking about all the people - as yet unknown to me in ordinary life - I was with in several social settings in dreams over the weekend. When I am off the road, leading a very quiet and private life, I am far more social in dreams than in regular life. Yes, this could be "compensation", as Jung understood it, yet I think these are also entirely real interactions.    

Try to ask me what part of me the other characters may represent and you might get me to play the game, but without conviction, because my feelings lead me elsewhere.  So I have to figure out whether the mature brunette in the blue suit, who persuaded me to give those seminars for hip young people in some organization, figures only in a parallel reality and/or will show up in my future in this one. And whether I'll run into that journalist with the well-trimmed red beard in physical life.

This is not a dream report but simply a note on a theme. However, if you were to insist on the rules of Lightning Dreamwork and ask for my feelings after my social dreams over the weekend I would say that I was excited and full of happy anticipation.

For much more on social and shared dreaming, please see my book Active Dreaming.

Photo: Dream sharing at Mosswood Hollow by RM

Little worlds

I loved toy soldiers as a boy and still have some on my desk, and in my games they would come alive. I also remember breaking some of my favorites when I was too ill to hold them on a hospital tray; one of those injured toy soldiers has been a important link for me in reaching to a younger self to support him in a time of pain and loneliness.

This relates to my long-running dream series (going all the way back into childhood) of living dioramas. Over and over again, I find myself looking into a miniature building or landscape - and then discovering that everything in the scene is alive. I can move the "pieces" around, or shrink myself to their scale and observe or interact with them on their own stage, which often proves to be a place in another time or another country