When we become a dreaming society

I have a dream: that we will again become a society of dreamers. In a dreaming culture, dreams are valued and celebrated. The first business of the day, for most people, is to share dreams and seek to harvest their guidance. The community joins in manifesting the energy and insight of dreams in waking life. In a dreaming culture, nobody says, “It’s only a dream" or “In your dreams, mister.” It is understood that dreams are both wishes (“I have a dream”) and experiences of the soul.

      Dreaming traditions -- like those of Australian Aborigines, Native Americans and early European peoples -- recognize that the dreamworld is a real world, possibly more real than much of waking life, in which we often stumble about in the condition of sleepwalkers. In big dreams, we “wake up” to a larger reality. Dreaming peoples know that one of the central functions of dreaming is to keep us connected to sources of healing, creativity and spiritual insight in an order of reality that is hidden from ordinary perception. Another of the vital functions of dreaming is to rehearse us for challenges that lie ahead in ordinary life. Dreaming peoples know that we dream the future, maybe all the time.

      If dreams were honored throughout our society, our world would be different.... and magical. Let me count the ways:

1. Dream Partners. 
Personal relations will be richer, more intimate and creative. There will be less room for pretense and denial. Sharing dreams, we overcome the taboos that prevent us from expressing our real needs and feelings and open ourselves to those of others.

2. Family life and home entertainment.
“What did you dream?” is the first question asked around the table in a family of dreamers. In our dreaming culture, families everywhere will share dreams and harvest their gifts of story, mutual understanding and healing. Parents will listen to their children’s dreams and help them to confront and overcome nightmare terrors. Best of all, they will learn from their children, because kids are wonderful dreamers. This might be bad for TV ratings but it would bring back the precious arts of storytelling, helping us learn to tell our own story (a gift with almost limitless applications) and to recognize the larger story of our lives.

3. Dream Healing. 
In our dreaming culture, dream groups will be a vital part of every clinic, hospital and treatment center and doctors will begin their patient interviews by asking about dreams as well as physical symptoms. Health costs will plummet, because when we listen to our dreams, we receive keys to self-healing. Dreams often alert us to possible health problems long before physical symptoms develop; by heeding those messages, we can sometimes avoid manifesting those symptoms. Dreams give us an impeccable nightly readout on our physical, emotional and spiritual health.

4. The Care of Souls.
As a dreaming culture, we will remember that the causes of disease are spiritual as well as physical. We will use dreams to facilitate soul recovery. In dreams where we encounter a younger version of ourselves, or are drawn back to a scene from childhood, we are brought to recognize a deeper kind of energy loss, that shamans call soul loss. Through trauma or abuse, through addiction or great sadness, we can lose a part of our vital soul energy. So long as it is missing, we are not whole and the gap may be filled by sickness or addiction. Dreams show us what has become of our lost children and when it is timely to call them home.

5. Dream Incubation. 
In our dreaming culture, we will remember to “sleep on it,” asking dreams for creative guidance on school assignments, work projects, relationships and whatever challenges are looming in waking life. When we seek dream guidance, we must be ready for answers that go beyond our questions, because the dream source is infinitely deeper and wiser than what Yeats called the “daily trivial mind.”

6. Using Dream Radar.
Dreaming, we routinely fold time and space and scout far into the future. As a dreaming culture, we will work with dream precognition on a daily basis -- and develop strategies to revise the possible futures foreseen in dreams for the benefit of ourselves and others.

7. Building Communities. 
When we share dreams with others, we recognize something of ourselves in their experiences. This helps us to move beyond prejudice and build heart-centered communities. Our Lightning Dreamwork process gives us a fun, fast way to share dreams and life stories, receive helpful and non-intrusive feedback from others, and be guided to find creative and healing ways to embody energy and insight from the night in everyday life. In groups, members take turns to play guide for the process, valuable training in community leadership.

8. The Art of Dying. 
The path of the soul after death, say the Plains Indians, is the same as the path of the soul in dreams -- except that after physical death, we won’t come back to the same body. Dreamwork is a vital tool in helping the dying to prepare for the conditions of the afterlife.

9. Walking the Path of Soul. 
The greatest gift of dreaming is that it facilitates an encounter between the little self and the big Self. Active Dreaming is a vital form of soul remembering: of reclaiming knowledge that belonged to us, on the levels of soul and spirit, before we entered this life experience. So much of the harm we do to ourselves and others stems from the fact that we have forgotten who we are and what we are meant to become. Dreaming, we remember, and encounter authentic spiritual guides who will help us on our paths.

Photo by Jeanne Cameron: RM leading fire ceremony at a gathering of Active Dreamers on Gore Mountain

In praise of bricolage with old journals

Bricolage 

I've given up trying to translate this marvelous French word, sometimes rendered as "tinkering". It's about putting together bits and pieces on a whim, rather than approaching a project as a solid, stolid work of engineering. It's about following oneiric logic rather than plans and structures.

     Claude Lévi-Strauss,who made the word at home in French, found that this approach is central to the making of myths and the workings of "the savage mind". In his celebrated book La pensée sauvage he observed that the bricoleur employs "devious means". His game is "always to make do with whatever is at hand, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions."[1]

     Found objects, junk shops, storage basements, words overheard from strangers...these are materials for bricolage. So are your journals. I love to go through old journals plucking out curious and shiny things and arranging them on fresh pages. I was encouraged to learn that this was a regular practice for Thoreau, a dedicated journal keeper. He liked to forage through old journals plucking out promising bits and pieces - observations in nature, quotes from his reading, dreams and reflections. He copied excerpts and married them up as fresh drafts. It became his habit “to work back over his journals…to reengage old subjects in the light of new interests, to revise and recopy his own earlier journal work,measuring, weighing, culling and sorting his materials…taking up earlier threads, reweaving and combining them.”[1]

     For any writer, as for Thoreau, it opens treasuries of material and above all it supports the writing habit. Playing around with old notes removes the terror of the blank page. When you dip into an old journal, you are never at a loss for a theme. The simple processes of selection, arrangement and retitling will fire the imagination. Before you know it, you’ll be in the midst of writing something new. However, the practice of journaling from journals is not only for writers. It is a marvelous tool for self-observation, for life navigation, and for constructing a personal encyclopedia of symbols.  

     Ah, but what is best is the pure bricolage. I might start working through old journals with a specific agenda, using the search engine to pull up items from my digital files, arranging materials in orderly folders, setting production schedules. Then I am distracted or enchanted by a note I made after a concert:

Barber's Adagio for Strings: The sad and lovely waves of sound carried me effortlessly into vision: of an island in the mist, of the grace of swimming swans, and the loneliness of a solitary swan, of a bright winged being towering above the many-colored waters. Meeting me halfway in the crossing, the swan prince made me know what is required to be enfolded in his knowing. I remember how Aengus, dream god and love god, took the form of a swan.

or a quote that stuns me awake:

Plotinus on the personal guardian: "“Our guardian is the power immediately superior to the one we exercise, for it presides over our life without itself being active…Plato truly said that ‘we choose our guardian’, for, by the kind of life that we prefer, we choose the guardian that presides over our life.’

or a dream of any kind, calling me into fields of memory, mystery and delight:

The Thumbelina Exchange: A young woman has mastered the art of entering another universe by becoming incredibly small.This may have been intentional; she may have wished herself out of her life situation, at least for a fling. Not clear if she is able to return at will.

Soon the pleasure of simply playing with my finds as they come up and come back, takes over. I forget my agendas, and play with the pieces that catch my eye, arranging and fitting them together without expecting them to snap into prearranged place like a jigsaw puzzle. I don't count on it, I don't try to program it, but I am open to finding again that it is in these moments of dickering and tinkering and playing without thought of consequences that fresh and unexpected creation bursts through, as I once saw an apple tree rise from an abandoned core in a heap of compost.  

References

1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962)

2. Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)

Find your personal myth through Active Dreaming

Myths are collective dreams that often begin with individual visions. Our dreams give us personal myths, and connect us with the collective dreaming, with humanity's neverending stories. Consider these.

1

I sense the iron inside my body, and I know that it is the dust of an exploding star. The iron in my body connects me with the supernova that created my galaxy, and as I move and stretch I feel the whole cosmology is alive in me. 

2

Our Lady of Guadalupe is leaving us. I see her starting to rise up off the sun-parched earth where her children in Mexico have been savagely abused. I am saddened to think that the cruelty and ignorance of humans may be losing us the support of higher powers. 

3

I go to my special place in nature, by the white pines along the creek. For the first time ever,I find no solace here. I feel separate from nature, after separating myself from the hurry of people at the office. I try to imagine myself going deep inside the earth and finding refuge there, but today I can't manage that either. What has happened to divorce me from nature? Is it me, or is it all of us? 

4

I am at a train station. I encounter an old woman with her daughter. Their heads are those of ravens. The old woman turns to me and her feathers turn white. The white-capped Raven Woman says to me, "Things are all happening too fast in your world. It's time to lift off. We'll come back at the right time." With this, she flutters up into the air. I realize that from her perspective it's possible to see far across time and space, beyond our present confusion. 

5

I come to a living tree, There is the living face of a woman in the bark of the tree. The tendrils of her hair are like the serpents of Medusa. Now a great bull comes, stamping and snorting, magnificent and scary in his virile strength. As he stamps down, his hooves take root in the earth and little by little, he becomes part of the tree. I am amazed that the bull energy can be rooted and grounded like this. I want to plant this strength around me, in my life. 

6

I am on the track of a part of myself that has been long buried in the ground. I feel the presence of a being that loves me, holding me by the shoulders, gently supporting me. The name of the woman that has been buried sounds like Michelle but is actually My-Shell, the part of me that had to hide and make itself small. I will dig as long and deep as it takes to bring her back to me. 

~

These are summaries, in exact sequence, of dreams and visions that were shared by members of an Active Dreaming circle that I lead in my home neighborhood. Not only does each report have mythic power; it is possible to read the whole sequence as a single mythic narrative.
    It starts (where else?) with the creation of our world. It dramatizes the perennial danger of the Dark Times that come when human behavior forfeits the support of higher powers and estranges us from the Earth. It introduces uncanny guides and living symbols: the woman who becomes White Raven, the bull (primal power of the ancients, consort of the goddess and preferred form of the gods) who becomes a tree. It brings the story home to us in the invitation to a personal quest for soul recovery, to bring out of the Earth what has been kept safe there through a time of trouble and trauma.

Art: Tree Message by Annick Bougerolle

Make your creative genius happy

The Romans never described a person as a genius. They might say, "Apollonius has a genius" - i.e., a special relationship with a tutelary spirit. The word genius is related to gignere, which means to engender or "beget". It implies reproductive energy, the power of inseminating new life. The Romans called the marriage bed genialis lectus. As observed by Jungian analyst and classicist Marie-Louise von Franz, "this referred not only to sexual potency but also to the qualities that today we would call psychic vitality, temperament, resourcefulness and a lively imagination."
    In a well-bred Roman household, a statuette representing the personal genius of the father of the family usually stood near the hearth in the kitchen. It might be the figure of a young man, holding a horn of plenty or a phallus or a snake. The woman of the house was believe to have her own guardian spirit, or "Juno", who embodied the power of giving birth. In the Roman conception, each of us is born with a personal relationship with a spiritual patron, or genius, who is the source of creative energy.
    James Russell Lowell was close to this perception when he wrote: "Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is."
    To live and work creatively, we need to make room for this energy. The Romans were on to something. To bring something new into the world is to give birth. We see this in the pregnancy dreams that are not about physical childbirth, but about something new that is borning inside us. We can feel it in our bodies in a period of creative gestation.
    When one of my books is ready to be born, I feel pregnant. I mean that in a quite literal sense. My appetites change. I develop odd cravings at strange hours. I forget to eat or sleep for days at a time, then walk out of a dinner party to crash or feed my face with something I wouldn't normally touch. I develop morning sickness. When my new baby is ready to come out, I can't stop the contractions, even though sometimes, like a woman I once heard screaming in a maternity ward, I want to yell, "This has to stop!" There is no dope, no epidural, no C-section available to dull the experience or shortcut the labor; whatever is in me has to come out the old-fashioned way. There is an equivalent to birthing in water: the blessed gift of going into a state of flow, in which I relax into the rhythms of what is fighting its way into the world.
     To choose and act creatively, we must be able to put our commonplace selves, with their reliance on structures and schedules,on one side, and make room for the source energy of the begetter. Creative inspiration, as all artists and discoverers know, comes through spontaneous combustion between the waking mind and other levels of consciousness. "I know now," wrote Yeats, "that revelation is from the self, but from that age-old memoried self, that shares the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest; and that genius is a crisis that joins the buried self for certain moments to our daily trivial mind."
     You cannot program a creative breakthrough, but you can clear a space where it may come about. Dreamwork is a wonderful aid to the creative process, because the source of dream images and the source of creative inspiration are not separate. When you resolve to catch your dreams, you are telling your creative source, "I am available. I'm listening." When you record your dreams, you are developing the art of storytelling. You will discover your gifts as a writer, and if you are already a writer,you will find you have done your "warm-up" exercises almost effortlessly and are ready to go he distance. Best of all, through dreamwork you are constantly learning to approach challenges from new angles, in a spirit of play.
   The Romans believed that a person's genius rejoices in good living, in laughter, in healthy sex, in having fun. Forget to play, and you are not working with your genius, for whom play is the only thing in mortal affairs worth taking seriously.

Text adapted from Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press. All rights reserved.

Image: First century Roman bronze statuette of a genius wearing a toga with the top pulled over the head in the style of a priest at a religious sacrifice.

Three: Truth Caller, Green Skin, Birthday Waters

1

Truth Caller

She stands straight as a spear. Young, tall, ivory-skinned. The fall of her hair: straight and long as a horse’s tail. Her clear bright eyes reach into secret places. They make deceivers squirm. They are the eyes of a truth caller.
    I know where I want her to be. I move her like a chess piece to the edge of the concourse, where the people who come here for power and show must pass. Let them see her and tremble for the consciences they left behind. She stands straight as the spear of Athena.

2

Green Skin

I sample the fruit before I join my hosts at the table. It is green-skinned, small and round. When I try to peel it, the skin does not readily yield the flesh. The pieces drip through my fingers. The green fruit is good eating, neither sweet nor sour.
    At the table, they give me a platter of the green fruit, already sliced. I see I am meant to eat the skin. I have brought some of the green balls with me. I bite into these, enjoying the play of teeth and hands, eating skin and all, before I take a fork to what has been sliced and prepared. I am filling with green fire.

3

Birthday waters

My companions and I have agreed to meet on a remote, rocky shore in the cold dawn, to make a ceremony of renewal. Our clothes are simple, homespun or merely skins, in the style of this ancient time. This is the birthday of our cause. The waters are chill, the sky is leaden, but we will perform the act.
    My place is apart from the others: a high natural platform of rock jutting out from a sea cave, above the waters, which turn and roil here as if something vast is stirring in the deep.
    I stand back now, as observer. My mind hovers above the scene like a sea bird. I see the companions who have entered the sea from the pebbled beach. They stand waist-deep, watching the man on the high ledge. I was in him, and he in me, but now there is distance between us. I will witness his passion, not join myself to it.
    There is something of the holy man about him. And the king, and the fool.
    His garments fall away from him like tree bark. He drops into the sea with his two legs pressed together. The people on the beach shriek like gulls.
    The man from the rock is gone for a long time. The others begin to doubt that he will return. One by one, they drift away, seeking warmth and food and solace.
    Only a child will see when the drowned man returns.
    On that day, the world will change. Even the child may not remember what the world was like before, except in the dreams of an old man.
     These are birthday waters.

Sometimes all the dreamwork I feel called to do is to write (or draw) the scenes that stay with me as well as I can and let them speak for themselves, as creative acts. These three vignettes came from my dreams in the early hours of Friday morning.

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".

The soul is only partly confined to the body

One of Jung's great finds in his study of alchemy was a passage from de Sulphure, a tract by Michael Sendivogius, that Jung paraphrased as follows:

The soul is only partly confined to the body, just as God is only partly enclosed in the body of the world. [1]

In this conception the soul is "the vice-regent of God" and dwells in the life spirit of the blood. It rules the mind and this rules the body. Soul operates within the body, but the greater part of its function is outside the body. The power of the soul is that of imaginatio. Through its "imaginative faculty", the soul can operate in the deepest regions (profundissima) outside the body. It has absolute and independent power to do things beyond what the body can grasp.

When it so desires, it has the greatest power over the body, for otherwise our philosophy would be in vain. Thou cans conceive no greater, for we have opened the gate unto thee. [2]

The picture that emerges is of a lively, ever-shifting engagement between soul and the world of the body, an engagement that generates physical events from a deeper matrix. By implication, we see that individuals may be less separate than they supposed, joined in realms where soul is at home in overlapping fields of energy that may approximate group souls. It goes without saying that in this vision of reality, soul must survive the death of the body, since it exists and operates outside the body, as well as in it, during earthly life.

References

1. C.G.Jung, Psychology and Alchemy trans. R.F.C. Hull.  Collected Works volume 12 (Princeton University Press, 1968) 282
2. ibid, 279-80.

Illustration from the Splendor Solis, 16th century illuminated Hermetic text.