What is dream travel?
How do we become dream travelers?
In ancient and indigenous understanding, dreaming is traveling. In big
dreams, we make visits and receive visitations. We travel across time and
space, and to places where the dead are alive, and to alternate realities. Once
we connect with our dreams and wake up to what is going on, we can begin to
develop the practice of lucid dream travel.
An ideal departure lounge is the half-dream state of what sleep
researchers call hypnagogia. In the middle of the night, or the early morning,
you find yourself drifting between sleep and awake. If you can train yourself to maintain a
state of relaxed attention in this in-between state, you will notice that you
may be receiving a whole menu of possibilities for lucid dream travel.
This twilight state is a good place to
become aware of your ability to travel beyond the body. I often find myself
lifting out of the body quite effortlessly in this state, without bumps and
grinds. Sometimes, when tired, I simply rest half in, half out, of my physical
form. Sometimes I float up to the ceiling. Quite often I go flying, like a
bird, over my sleeping city and to places far away.
We are talking now about one of the
royal roads to lucid dreaming. The other is the practice I call dream reentry.
You recall a dream that has some energy for you and you choose to go back into
that space and dream the dream onward. You may want to reenter a dream to
clarify what was going on, or talk to your deceased grandmother, to explore a
parallel world or scout out a possible future. You may need to reenter a dream
because there are terrors to be overcome, or a mystery to be explored, or
simply because you were having fun and adventure and would like to have more.
Your story “Dreamtakers” paints a
terrifying picture of what it means to lose our dreams. What can we do to
recover?
In contemporary society, dream drought is a widespread
affliction, almost a pandemic. This is deadly serious, because night
dreams are an essential corrective to the delusions of the day. They hold up a
mirror to our everyday actions and attitudes and put us in touch with deeper
sources of knowing than the everyday mind. If you lose your dreams, you may
lose our inner compass. If our dreams are long gone, it may be because we have
lost the part of us that is the dreamer.
Traditional Iroquois say bluntly that
if we have lost our dreams, it is because we have lost a vital part of our
soul. This may have happened early in life through what shamans call soul loss,
when our magical child went away because the world seemed to cold and cruel.
Helping the dream-bereft to recover their dreams may amount to bringing lost
souls back to the lives and bodies where they belong. In my story
“Dreamtakers”, I describe a shamanic journey to help return dream souls to
people who have lost them. This is something I teach and practice.
There are several ways we can seek
to break a dream drought any night we want to give this a try. We can set a
juicy intention for the night and be ready to record whatever is with us
whenever we wake up. We can resolve to be kind to fragments. The wispiest trace
of a dream can be exciting to play with, and as you play with it you
may find you are pulling back more of the previously forgotten dream.
If you don’t remember a dream when you
first wake up, laze in bed for a few minutes and see if something
comes back. Wiggle around in the bed. Sometimes returning to the body
posture we were in earlier in the night helps to bring back what
we were dreaming when our bodies were arranged that way.
If you still don’t have a dream, write something down
anyway: whatever is in your awareness,
including feelings and physical sensations. You are catching the
residue of a dream even if the dream itself is gone. As you do this,
you are saying to the source of your dreams, “I’m listening. Talk to
me.”
You may find that, though your dreams have flown, you have
a sense of clarity and direction that is the legacy of the night. We solve
problems in our sleep even when we don’t remember the problem-solving process
that went on in our dreaming minds.
And remember that you don’t need to go to sleep in order to
dream. The incidents of everyday life will speak to us like dream
symbols if we are willing to pay attention. Keep a lookout for the first
unusual or striking thing that enters your field of perception in the course of
the day and ask whether there could be a message there. When we make it our
game to pay attention to coincidence and symbolic pop-ups in everyday life, we
oil the dream gates so they let more through from the night.
Many of your
adventures turn on amazing coincidences and chance encounters. You invented the
word “kairomancer” to describe someone who is poised to recognize and act in
special moments of synchronicity. That sounds very intriguing. How do we become
kairomancers?
Synchronicity is when the universe gets personal. Though the
word “synchronicity” is a modern invention — Jung made it up because he noticed
that people have a hard time talking about coincidence — the phenomenon has
been recognized, and highly valued, from the most ancient times. The Greek
philosopher Heraclitus maintained that the deepest order in our experienced
universe is the effect of “a child playing with game pieces” in another
reality. As the game pieces fall, we notice the reverberations, in the play of
coincidence.
When we
pay attention, we find that we are given signs by the world around us every
day. Like a street sign, a synchronistic event may seem to say Stop or Go, Dead
End or Fast Lane. Beyond these signs, we
find ourselves moving in a field of symbolic resonance which not only reflects
back our inner themes and preoccupations, but provides confirmation or course
correction. A symbol is more than a sign: it brings together what we know with
what we do not yet know.
Through the weaving of synchronicity,
we are brought awake and alive to a hidden order of events, to the understory
of our world and our lives. You do not need to travel far to encounter
powers of the deeper world or hear oracles speak. You are at the center of the
multidimensional universe right now. The extraordinary lies in plain sight, in
the midst of the ordinary, if only you pay attention. The doors to the
Otherworld open from wherever you are, and the traffic moves both ways.
I invented the word kairomancer to
describe someone who is ready to recognize and act in special moments of
synchronicity when time works differently and opportunity strikes. It
incorporates the name of Kairos, a Greek god who personifies a kind of time
that is altogether different from tedious tick-tock time: that special moment
of jump time when more is possible than you imagined before.
To become a kairomancer, you need to
check your attitude as you walk the roads of this world, because your attitude
goes ahead of you, generating events around the next corner. You need to
develop your personal science of shivers. You want to take dreams more
literally and the events of waking life more symbolically. You need to take
care of your poetic health, reading what rhymes in a day, or a season. You want
to expect the unexpected, to make friends with surprises, and never miss that
special moment when the universe gives you an invisible wink or handshake.
Many of your stories
involve awakening to the possibility that we are living parallel lives in
parallel worlds. Tell us how we can explore this for ourselves.
In physics, the hypothesis of Many Interactive Worlds
suggests that we live, right now, in one of countless parallel universes that
impact each other. Part of the secret logic of our lives may be that our paths
constantly interweave with those of numberless parallel selves. The gifts and
failings of these alternate selves may influence us, when our paths converge,
in ways that we generally fail to recognize.
We are connected in a
multidimensional drama and this may generate events in both our lives that will
appear as “chance” to those who cannot find the trans-temporal pattern. The
hidden hand suggested by synchronistic events may be that of another personality
within our multidimensional family, reaching to us from what we normally
perceive as past or future, or from a parallel or other dimension.
When
you experience déjà vu and feel certain you have been in a certain situation
before, you may be close on the heels of a parallel self who got there before
you. Serial dreams, in which you find yourself returning to people and places
not on your current event track may also be glimpses of a continuous life your
parallel self is leading in a parallel world, in which you made different
choices. Physicist Brian Greene speculates that we all have "endless
doppelgangers" leading parallel lives in parallel universes.
When you wake up to the fact that
serial dreams may be glimpses of continuous lives you are living in other
realities, you may be ready for the good stuff: to journey as a lucid dream
traveler into a parallel life to dismiss old regrets and claim gifts and
knowledge from your selves who made different choices. This can effect a
quantum shift in your present life.
Your stories are full
of encounters with the dead, in visitations and especially in visits to places
where they are living on the Other Side. Is contact with the deceased really as
natural and easy as you suggest?
I am often among the dead in my dreams. They are always
alive. Sometimes I remember that they died on an event track we shared, other
times I don't. Sometimes they come calling. My father has come many times since
his death with helpful advisories for me and the family. Sometimes my dream
travels take me to new environments on the Other Side were the dead are
enjoying new lives. They show me around and I learn first-hand in this way
about lifestyle and real estate options available after death.
Contact with the deceased, especially
in dreams, isn’t weird or unusual or even truly supernatural. It comes about
for three reasons: the dead are still with us, or they come visiting, or we
travel to the realms where they are now living. The number one reason why
people who are not accustomed to sharing dreams decide to tell one is that they
have dreamed of a close friend or family member who died but is very much alive
in the dream.
The immense body of data on
near-death experiences (NDEs) is scientific evidence of the survival of
consciousness after the physical body has closed down. When you become a
conscious dream traveler, you confirm through your own experience that
awareness is not confined to the body and brain, and therefore is able to
survive death. You are ready to learn that healing and forgiveness are always
available across the apparent barrier of death, and to develop your personal
geography of the afterlife
One of the most interesting things I
have learned is that the living may be called upon to play guides and
counselors for the dead. “The Silent Lovers” is a just-so story – shocking to
me as it unfolded – about how I was called to play advocate for a dead man,
otherwise a stranger, going through his life review on the Other Side. Yeats
was right when he said, with poetic clarity, that the living have the ability
to assist the imaginations of the dead.
What is the Imaginal
Realm?
There is a world between time and eternity with
structures created by thought that outlast anything on Earth. This is the
Imaginal Realm. You may enter it through the gate of dreams, or the gate of
death, or on nights when you drop your body like a bathrobe. Here you will find
schools and palaces, places of adventure, healing and initiation.
The Imaginal Realm is a
fundamental ground of knowledge and experience. In this realm human imagination
meets intelligences from higher realities, and they co-construct places of
healing, instruction and initiation. Here ideas and powers beyond the grasp of
the ordinary human mind – call them archetypes, tutelary spirits, gods or
daimons – take on guises humans can begin to perceive and understand.
The great medieval Sufi
philosopher Suhrawardi insisted both on the objective reality of the Imaginal
Realm and that the way to grasp it is the way of experience: “pilgrims of the
spirit succeed in contemplating this world and they find there every object of
their desire.” To know the realm of true
imagination, you must go there yourself.
Happily for you – once you wake up to what is going on – the doors may
open to you any night in dreams, or in the fertile place between sleep and
awake, or in a special moment of synchronicity when the universe gets personal
and you know, through your shivers, that greater powers are in play.
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