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 – dreams from the night, and dreams of life - 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.

     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 a 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.

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.

Photos 

Top: Dreaming at Kernave, Lithuania,at the hill of the Shaman fromthe Eagle's Nest.(See The Boy Who Died and Came Back for that story) 

Bottom: Gathering of a family of Active Dreamers in the New York Adirondack Mountains

Lightning dreamwork is enlightening

I invented a fun way to share dreams, get some non-authoritarian and non-intrusive feedback, and move toward creative action. I call this the Lightning Dreamwork Game. It’s like lightning in two senses — it’s very quick (you can do it in five minutes), and it focuses and brings through terrific energy. It’s a game you can play just about anywhere, with just about anyone – with the stranger in the line at the supermarket checkout, or with the intimate stranger who shares your bed. The rules are simple, and they open a safe space to share even the most sensitive material.

You can play this game with two or more people. We’ll call the principal players the Dreamer and the Partner. There are four moves in the Lightning Dreamwork Game.

First Move

The Dreamer tells the dream as simply and clearly as possible, as a story. Just the facts of the dream, no background or autobiography. In telling a dream this way, the Dreamer claims the power of the story. The Partner should ask the Dreamer to give the dream report a title, like a story or a movie.

Second Move

The Partner asks the Three Essential Questions. (1) How did you feel? (2) Reality check: What do you recognize from this dream in the rest of your life, and could any part of this dream be played out in the future? (3) What do you want to know about this now?

The Dreamer answers all three questions.

Third Move

The Partner now shares whatever thoughts and associations the dream has triggered for him or her. The Partner begins by saying, “If it were my dream, I would think about such-and-such.” The etiquette is very important. By saying “if it were my dream,” we make it clear that we are not setting out to tell the Dreamer what his or her dream — or life — means. We are not posing as experts of any kind. The Partner is just sharing whatever strikes him or her about the dream, which may include personal memories, other dreams, or things that just pop up. (Those seemingly random pop-ups are often the best.)

Fourth Move

Following the discussion, the Partner asks the Dreamer: What are you going to do now? What action will you take to honor this dream or work with its guidance? If the Dreamer is clueless about what action to take, the Partner will offer his or her own suggestions, which may range from calling the guy up or buying the pink shoes to doing historical or linguistic research to decode odd references. Or, the Dreamer may want to go back inside the dream to get more information or move beyond a fear. One thing we can do with any dream is to write a personal motto, like a bumper sticker or something that could go on a refrigerator magnet. 

After road-testing Lightning Dreamwork in some of my advanced groups, I introduced the process to general audiences in 2000. Since then I have noticed that 90 percent of the people who mention it in writing misspell the name, making it "Lightening".
    I used to play spelling cop, but I have tired of than, and also notice that there is something interesting that is showing through the slip. Learning to tell our stories to each other by this method does "lighten" the day, and sometimes brings enlightenment, and encourages us to lighten up. he term One of our dream teachers reminds me that the term "lightening" also refers to a stage of delivery just before birth in which the fetus descends farther down the birth canal. So Lightning or Lightening, it's all good. 

The rules of the game are adapted from the version in The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

To the Moon and Back and Other Things a Circle of Active Dreamers Can Do in Two Hours

The morning after I am still feeling the joy of sharing in an Active Dreaming circle where we all take turns to play dreamer and dream guide. There were ten of us yesterday evening in a local dream circle I have been leading for many years. In the space of two hours we made time for everyone to share a dream or life story and be guided by a different person through our Lightning Dreamwork process. This encourages us to give and receive helpful feedback in the "if it were my dream" mode and to come up with action plans to embody energy and insight from the dream worlds in regular life.
    "They tell me the gate has closed but I push through and get on the plane. And find I am in Africa, driving a Jeep with a friendly lion on the hood who knows where we are going."
    This report got us off to a lively start. Another dream carried us into the rainforest. A couple of dreams -of going back to the childhood home or the elementary school - carried not only nostalgia but the sense that there were gifts to be brought into adult life from a much younger self, gifts of energy and joy and imagination. A doctor's dream suggested an Rx for illness. A wildly funny dream of wearing lingerie to a gym and being celebrated by everyone around helped a man to recognize it is now safe to open up to his feminine side and show it to others.
    The action required by some dreams is to reenter the dream, do more inside that space and bring back gifts. Lasr evening we were able to make a group shamanic journey through the portal of a dream with the irresistible title "To the Moon". In her dream a woman found herself among lively children in a writing workshop being held on the far side of a fast-flowing river "at the bottom of the moon". The kids were assigned roles and started improvising stories by acting them out All of us were eager to join that writing group and the dreamer gave us permission to travel with her with the aid of shamanic drumming. 

    We did not know what "the bottom of the moon" meant, but all found our way, and had adventures in a marvelous creative space. I flew through a great round moon face like the entrance of Luna Park, a theme park I visited in my Australian boyhood. I rode with kids in a flotilla of boats on an underground river. Kids led the way to the other side of the water as the boats became dormant crocodiles that let us us their backs as a bridge. Enormous theatrical curtains, opening just a crack, promised now entertainments. Characters from children's books fluttered around us. I heard the buzzing propeller of Karlsson on the Roof, Astrid Lindgren's delightful character.
     Then I stepped through the curtains and the children started playing the roles promised in the original dream, acting out fresh stories. Right after the drumming sounded the recall,I urged everyone to write a couple of lines from their writing class on the moon. It was delightful to hear them all read aloud. I wrote in the voice of a girl complaining about a wild boy who was showing off the lunar horns he had sprouted:

"He's doing it again," said Emma. "He's putting up horns and he doesn't know what to do with them."

One of our dream voyagers, a gifted poet named Tammie, heard the song of the moon children and recorded it in these lyrical words: “We are the children of the moon. Listen to our words. We are the poets and storytellers of the future, helping to keep dreams alive”

As we closed our circle,I recalled that Karlsson on the Roof says in one of Astrid Lindgren's stories, "It has to go bang and it has to be fun, otherwise I won't come." We delivered that in our circle. And we finished on time, to the minute. Dreamers can get it together.

Drawings: "The Nearness of the Moon"  and "Wild Lunar Boy" by Robert Moss