When you don't know you're dreaming until the dream spills into the street

Dreams offer many clues that we are not in ordinary reality. We can fly, or breathe underwater, or find ourselves inside different bodies. We have the powers of superheroes. We can talk to animals and ride dragons. We meet people who died in the regular world but are very much alive here.

    Even humdrum dreams offer many lucidity triggers: prompts to wake up to the fact that we are dreaming. We are naked in public or engage in other anomalous behavior. The scene shifts inexplicably from one location to another, as if we have teleported. There is odd repetition; the same scene plays out several times, like the black cat walking across the room in the movie The Matrix. People we know are notably older or younger than in regular life.
    When a lucidity trigger awakens us to the fact that we are dreaming, we are sometimes so startled that we are jolted out of the whole experience, back into the dormant body on the bed. When we can stay in the dream, conscious that we are not in ordinary reality, we may be on our way to grand adventures, to romance or healing, to solving a mystery or vanquishing a fear.
     To recognize that you are dreaming is not the same as telling yourself This isn't real. Dreams are real experiences. The realities in which they unfold may be as real, less real, or more real than the physical world. In a certain kind of dream experience, the reason you may not pause to say to yourself I'm dreaming is that you are conscious, in an even deeper sense, that you are in another reality, for example a world where the dead are alive, where you will join them on a full-time basis when you leave your own body behind at physical death.
     You can fail to notice you are dreaming during sleep and then wake up to the dreamlike character of everyday life. I missed several lucidity triggers in a dream, and then found elements from my dream spilling into the street, quite literally, as I took my dog on the first walk of the day.
    In my dream:

I'm at a retreat center in California, wearing a wild tropical shirt I think looks great on me. Next I am giving directions to a group of my students on how to take a train from a London station - I specify Victoria or Euston - on certain assignments. There's an air of adventure, as if I am asking them to play detectives.
    As soon as I name the stations, I am transported to a train station. I go back and forth between a pleasant waiting room and a platform. I notice a shower head near the door, outside the waiting room, and decide to take a quick shower. The flow isn't strong, and I catch water in my cupped hands and sprinkle it over myself. I find this quite enjoyable.
    I'm still naked when I hear a station announcement that the train is coming. I look along the platform and see a bus. Can this be right? Behind it, a train or tram is coming.
    A attractive lady in a dark blue uniform - a station official - smiles at me. I tell her I probably shouldn't get on the train naked. Will she hold it for me until I get dressed?
   There's a small problem. I can't find my clothes. Eventually I discover a crisp white short-sleeved shirt on a hook and a pair of boxers. This wasn't the shirt I was wearing earlier (one with a wild tropical design) but it will serve.
    I'm barefoot and pantless and missing not only my carry-on bag but my wallet and ID. Who can I call? I think of a dear friend but I am not sure he can help. 

I felt some concern towards the end of the dream, but relaxed - and fairly soon amused - on waking.
    My little dream report contains several classic examples of lucidity triggers that I missed. 

* Instant change of scene. I am whisked from California to London, quick as thought.
* Naked in public. One of the most common dream themes, and a lucidity prompt for that reason alone.
* Anomalous behavior. I take a shower in an unlikely place, fully exposed to public view. The lady station official acts in a very non-official way.
*  Repetition and recurring dream situations. Trains and train stations often feature in my dreams and I was talking about their symbology in a recent class. Naked in public, losing ID or valuables, and quick change scenes are also recurring situations here, as in many people's dreams.
* The dead are alive. I don't call my friend but it does not occur to me that, in ordinary reality, he died several years ago.

Maybe you'll want to make a list of your own lucidity triggers, including any of the ones I missed that are relevant to you.
    The entertainment value of this little episode was enhanced by what happened when I walked the dream, along with the dog, before coffee in the morning. A couple of blocks from my house, a woman was packing her car. She called to her boyfriend, at the door of an apartment, "Hey, is my wallet in there?" He responded, "I don't know."
    There was the theme of misplaced or lost ID, spilling from the dream into the street.
    It got better (or worse) when we returned to my house. On the sidewalk, I noticed a discarded pair of men's briefs. Not the kind of underwear I had in the dream (or would choose in regular life) but there was the theme of naked in public, dropped right where I live.

1916 photo of female train conductor in London. Photographer unidentfied.

    

Dream Review One Year On: I'll Keep the Golden Robe

 

Quiet days with snow on the ground are perfect for one of my favorite pastimes: going back through old journals to see what I was dreaming and doing around this date in past years, what recurring themes pop up and what cold case files might be worth opening up again. I found three reports from one year ago that immediately seized my attention.

January 9, 2023 

dream

People Trees 

Through the window of the train, I look out at the landscape as a wild pink wind picks up, sculpting the trees into different forms. There is a wood wizard in a hood, of course, and a female figure wagging a finger. I decide to call her The Schoolteacher. As I watch it seems that I am not merely indulging my fancy. These are People Trees, capable of communicating and showing themselves in more ways than I knew. 

I would normally call them tree people. There is something different going on here that made me call them People Trees. I feel that a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses has come alive and is playing in reverse: as if people who were turned into trees, like Philemon and Baucis, are showing themselves as people again. 

Shall I get off the train and speak with them? Not right now; the train is moving fast and there are other adventures ahead. Perhaps I'll be able to meet them or their kind in a future journey.

Comment 1/9/24

Trains often feature in my dreams, though I rarely take them in ordinary life these days. I frequently make an association with training. Now, a year later, I am about to launch two new dream teacher trainings. We almost always start such programs by helping people connect or reconnect with a personal tree of vision that can become their ladder between worlds. I have learned a great deal from trees and have often found them to be wiser than humans. I have encountered and lived close to trees that also harbored human spirits, including that of a great Native American shaman. I do want to draw those trees, and that pink wind.

 January 9, 2023

lucid dream starting in hypnopompic state

My Dream Double Is in Danger in Russia

I am at the mouth of a tunnel. There are rails on the ground. I decide to go through. The walls of the tunnel are dirty and spattered with graffiti. When I come out it is at a train station somewhere deep in eastern Europe. There are crowds of men in fatigues or work clothes by a gunmetal train. Soldiers or convicts. Two big, brutal men look at me. I have given no thought to the form I am in. I am surprised they can see me. 

I feel this won’t end well if I remain visible, and ponder how to get out. I don’t think it’s safe to simply leave the scene. Some part of me is in that scene. Now observer as well as actor, I am amused by the idea of needing to arrange an extraction for one of my doubles or projections, while recognizing that this is actually a serious matter. I could try to go back through the tunnel but they might follow. Instead, I focus on lifting myself up so fast and so high I won’t be visible le any more and the men at the station will soon disbelieve what they saw. I’m out of there.

Comment 1/9/24

Here the train is a literal one, apparently a troop train for conscripts - many of them convicts - being sent by the Russians to the meat grinder at the front. Maybe in a parallel life, I am still engaged as a journalist in trying to monitor and report on such things. Or maybe I am simply being reminded of the state of the world we are in. I am also reminded that when we get around in our dreams, we are generally not just disembodied thought forms. We travel in a subtle body that can get into trouble.

 

January 10, 2023

Dream 

The Golden Robe 

When the bagpipe starts playing I know it's time for the team to get out fast. I encourage them to climb through a back window. I am in no great hurry. It's as if I have stepped into a movie - in this case an exciting spy thriller with scenes in Cyprus and Turkey - and can leave or switch roles as I please. I stay in the room when the other team come in and pull it apart, searching for something. They make a great heap of clothing and bedding in the middle of the space. I want to be sure to retrieve my beautiful gold brocade robe.

Waking, the simple image of the robe is what I want to keep from my streaming dream movies. I will picture myself putting it on and see what swathing myself in golden silky energy does for my creative output. Simple is good.

Comment 1/9/24

I am in all kinds of adventures in my spontaneous sleep dreams, and the lucid dreams I simply allow to unfold from scenes and images that arise in liminal states between sleep and awake. Come morning, I can be quite travel worn! My dreams often give me wonderful research assignments involving scholarship or detective work, and glorious material for performance and storymaking and creative art. Sometimes, however, as I noted in my original journal report it is enough to bring back just one thing, and wrap myself in its energy. 

 

Letting the world give you a dream

I woke up around 4:00 a.m. this morning, without even a wisp of a dream after four hours in bed. While I recognized that my body had been demanding some down time, pure regeneration, I was still a little frustrated that I had no clue as to what the rest of me had been doing during those night hours. This led me to write an earlier piece about how it sometimes feels, on waking, as if the door of a bank vault has swung shut, closing off the treasures and terrors and adventures of the night.
    I counseled in the earlier piece that one of the things to do, if you don't have even a wisp of a dream is to "be alert for how the logic of the dreams you missed may now be playing out in the world around you."
    This became a no-brainer for me today. As soon as I went out my door to take my dog for his first walk, a neighbor on his way to the office hailed me from across the street. We are on friendly terms, but had not spoken for weeks.
    "May I tell you a dream?" he began as soon as I had crossed the road.
     In his dream, he is on a train with his friends, who include a very warm and friendly bear. They are happy playing with the bear and giving him snacks. Then the train divides. The part of the train with food for the bear rushes away on a different track.
     The dreamer and his friends are alarmed, because they want to feed the bear the food he wants, but now all they have are things he doesn't much care for, especially green bell peppers. They keep offering peppers to the bear, who is now very hungry, and the bear consent to munch what they are giving him, but clearly this is not the diet that he's used to and he's not happy.
     Walking together on the sidewalk, we did some Lightning Dreamwork.
      Title? "Which Track Has Food for the Bear?"
      Feelings? Happy to have been with Bear. Concerned that Bear isn't getting enough to eat.
     "If it were my dream," I suggested, "I'd think about all the Bear means to me as a spiritual ally and guardian, especially as an ally in healing. For me, the Bear is the great medicine animal. I'd be quite concerned that what feeds the Bear in me is on a different track than the one I'm on. I'd think about where in life I may have gotten on to the wrong track, in terms of what the Bear in me wants and needs."
      The dreamer readily confided that he felt he might be on the wrong track in his job.
      "I would want to see if I can find out where the two train lines lead. Maybe that would give me clues to the direction I need to follow now."
       He agreed to do this.
      As our ways diverged at a street corner, I thanked him for giving me a dream this morning, just when I needed one. As he walked away, I called after him, "And I would make sure to feed the Bear, quite literally, what the Bear wants to eat. For me, that would include salmon, berries and honeys. Bears do like to eat!"
       So I will take the Lightning Dreamwork a step further than we usually do, by accepting this Bear dream as my own dream, on a morning when my night dreams were missing. I'll do what I encourage my neighbor to do. I'll think about switching-points in life where ways diverge,and the need to clarify the itinerary and destination on alternative life tracks. I'll make sure I am feeding my animal spirits, in every sense!
      I am smiling over this prompt and simple demonstration that the world will give us a dream if we'll let it.

Gund railroad bear

The trans-Siberian dream train and the boy thief

On the trans-Siberian dream train

I am traveling again, across the immensity of Russia, from the border of Mongolia via Lake Baikal to Moscow.

There is a feral boy on the train, maybe twelve years old. His hair is a clump of wet hay. I am pretty sure he is a thief, but his antics are entertaining and he proves to be a useful ally. When we are all getting hungry, and there are no supplies, he produces a hunk of cheese and gives me the first piece. The raw-milk cheese is grubby and rubbery, but sharp, and I am grateful for it. Someone remarks that the boy is of the type "who will start out by robbing you if they can, but will love you to death if you make any sign of affection."

We cross a wildly beautiful area of remote lakes. I would love to go swimming, but even in this season the water is bitterly cold.

At last we reach Moscow. There are no problems at security, though I notice that a rattle I acquired in Estonia is no longer in the pocket of my trenchcoat; I wonder whether the boy who supplied the (no doubt pilfered) cheese made off with this in exchange.

Through security, I stop at a news stand to buy English-language papers. "Zdravstvuite," I greet him. He waits patiently while I sort through a stack of small bills to find the right money. I choose two banknotes that seem to be for units of 600 each.

I now proceed to the smart offices of a company on a high floor of a building. The secretary/receptionist is a cool, elegant blonde with coiffed hair I have met before. I wait in the reception area while she chats with a security man. There is an amazing animal in an easy chair with a coat draped over one arm. I think at first that it is a bear cub, but decide it is a puppy of a breed I can't name. Its fur is oatmeal-colored, with blue patches. I pet the "dog" and it is friendly though sleepy.

I take the chance to review, in my mind, the knowledge I have gathered on this trip. It is relevant to a new theory I am developing on the origin and nature of shamanism. I have made two discoveries I consider breakthroughs, based on what I have learned in Siberia and the North. My tag for one of these discoveries is the word Sajø. The last vowel is a "slashed O" of the kind you see in Norwegian and Danish, although in my mind I set the slash at the other diagonal, starting from the upper left of the O and running to the right. This word relates to shamanism in the far North. The second discovery involves Siberia and perhaps Mongolia.

I wake excited, pleased to be on a new adventure on such an interesting "line."

I often dream of traveling in Russia, but still have no ordinary-reality plans to do this. I was recently in countries that were part of the Soviet Union until 1991 (Estonia and Lativia). I do have an Estonian rattle - beautifully woven from rushes - that I acquired in my last trip.

I don't know the word "Sajø" - with the slash ø - but will continue to track it. I would love to know more about my dream self's two "breakthrough discoveries", and about the amazing dog-bear in the office (and why I am there). I will revisit some of the cross-cultural material on shamanism, especially in the areas and traditions I am studying in my dream.

I am most intrigued by the boy thief on the train. I can think of many ways in which a 12-year-old trickster and improviser within myself could be very helpful in my new creative journeys.

I usually enjoy my dream train rides. This one has given me plenty of research and action assignments!