Awakening to dreams in Portland

Portland, Oregon

Dreaming is not fundamentally about sleep, though I greatly value the sleep dreams that come spontaneously and offer us an objective view of ourselves and our place in the worlds. Dreaming is essentially about waking up to a larger reality and a secret logic of events that are often hidden from the everyday conscious mind. So it seems fitting that my Active Dreaming workshop in Portland this weekend is unfolding in a lovely center called Awakenings. The sun smiled on us all Saturday, which is already a dreamlike event in this rainy city.

I asked the dreamers who joined our circle to introduce themsleves by sharing their intention for the weekend, and the title of a dream or image, which enabled us gto taste the flavor of each other's imaginations right at the start. I noted some of the intention:

"I want to learn how to bring the energy of my dreams into 3D reality."

"I want to make closer links between my dreaming and my writing."

"I'm here to deepen my practice of dreaming."

"I want to use dreaming to integrate my inner child into my adult world."

"I'm here to acquire tools to re-vision education for children, to help them and their families bring back soul and to make them safe with their dreams."

"I'm here to move beyond getting weireded out when my dreams turn into real events in waking life."

"I'm here to find new direction for my painting, and my life."

These generous statements of intention gave us a vivid sense of expanding horisons of possibility. I demonstrated our quick, high-energy dream sharing process - Lightning Dreamwork - with three volunteers who undertook the assignment to tell us a dream as a story, and to hold the attention of the audience. One of the gifts of dream sharing is that, when we do it right, we find our voice and develop our skills as storytellers. An even greater gift, especially for newcomers, is that when we are heard with deep attention and given the right kind of feedback, we receive vital validation of our inner lives and our soul quests.

Stephani told us a dream of being back in her former home, trying to sort out old clothersm when a pirate ship appeared on a body of water at her door that doesn't exist in the regular world.

Jaya's dream took us into deep ancestral territory. She found herself riding in the back of a van by a river. She witnessed a mysterious ritual in which seven people clad in wolfskins performed a sacred dance around the bodies of dead wolves. As they danced, light rose from them, forming a cone shape that then opened out and produced the head of a wolf among the stars. The dreamer urgently wanted to stop the van and see more, but was unable to influence the driver. She woke with a profound sense of longing. She leaped at the suggestion that she might be able to reenter the dream, with the help of shamanic drumming, and get out of the van and ask the wolf people for permission to learn the nature of their ritual and of their connection with the Wolf Star.

In a dream of equal mythic power, a man stepped into a river carrying a sword. In the water, his sword became a chalice. On the far side of the river, he saw a family of bears. He became alarmed when they stared at him fiercely, and he turned away though he felt the object of his quest lay beyond the bears. "I feel the bears are gatekeepers, and that I need to face them and go beyond them." He welcomed the idea that he too, could reenter his dream, wide awake and conscious, and confront the bears and seek to discover what lay beyond them.

So here we had two excellent plans for dream reentry and group dreaming - for an exercise in what could be termed shamanic lucid dreaming. The wolf dreamer and the bear dreamer gave permission for the whole group to travel with them, back into their dreams and to explore beyond the remembered scenes and carry the action forward. In two group journeys powered by shamanic drumming, we shared extraordinarily powerful and moving adventures.


As a lunchbreak assignment, I asked everyone to be alert for anything striking or unusual that entered their field of perception as they roamed the town - to be open to receiving symbolic popups from the world. Waiting for coffee on my way back from lunch, I noticed Stephani, who had dreamed of pirates, standing in front of a corner bar, a block away from our workshop site, talking on her cell phone. The sign above her head, apparently unnoticed until now, read "The Jolly Roger". Life rhymes, and there are dresms that want to come into the surface world, some singing pirate songs.

Dream fliers of Stockholm

Stockholm and Nacka Strand

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On our way to my lecture in the thriving modern part of Stockholm called City, we follow a car whose vanity plate reads EAGLE1. One of the first dreams shared by the audience that night is titled "Eagle Man and Me". In it, a Swedish woman watches a moving speck in front of a full moon that becomes a great eagle that swoops down in front of her, in the deep woods, and becomes a man.

It seems fitting that on my first night in Sweden, I encountered Karlsson on the Roof, because the dreams I am hearing in Stockholm are full of flight. A man in my weekend workshop reports, with vigorous body movement as well as words, a night of twisting pain and discomfort in his back - until his shoulders burst open and he sprouts wings that bear him aloft. I felt I was listening to a muscular version of that passage in Phaedrus in which Plato describes what it feels like when a human soul (that gave up its wings when it descended into a body) begins to sprout wingfeathers again.

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A woman who feels oppressed in a dream that featured a dead boyfriend and lizard-like alien intruders discovers - during a dream reentry journey supported by drumming - that two ravens are available to support her and show her what needs to be done. She routs her adversaries and acquires great white wings and golden body armor, and goes soaring aloft, eyes flashing with joy.

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Dreaming is all about soul, and we are privileged to share many experiences of soul recovery. A young woman is troubled by the way three little sisters were being handled in a childcare situation in her dream. I suggest that we should turn this dream into theatre, and she readily agrees, picking members of the workshop to play all the characters, including the three little girls, who seem to be aged around 5, 7 and 9. I encourage the dreamer to dialogue with the children, and she soon realizes that they are childhood selves that separated from her at times of sadness and challenge. She is eager to bring them back into her life. She soon learns that this will not only involve promising them safety, but offering them things they would really enjoy, things that would induce them to bring their vital energy and imagination into an adult life.

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The dreamer is now engaged in deal-making with her childhood selves, and she has to go deep to find the right offers."Dress-up," she proposes to her 5-year-old self. The actor playing the youngest sister responds by wrapping bright scarves around her head and shoulders, and the dreamer claps her hands in delight. "Drawing!" she invited her 7-year-old. Out come the crayons and scrap paper. "Theatre!" she promises her 9-year-old. No problem; we are in the thick of it. It's time for the hugs. When the dreamer embraces the players who embodied her childhood selves, everyone in the room is warmed by the glow of returning soul. This is a glorious thing, and it is wonderful how easily it comes when instead of diminishing dreams to a set of analytical terms, we play actively with the energy we can release from the dreamspace.

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The continuing play of sychronicity within and around the workshop gives us the happily shiverish sensation that we are receiving secret handshakes from the universe. Before spinning the drumstick to select the first person to tell a dream to the group, I recount an episode in which a Mohawk grandmother was chosen in just this way to share a dream at a workshop I was leading years ago in upstate New York. She introduced herself as a member of the Turtle Clan, and the story centered on the use of a turtle rattle to bring through a healing song from the dreamtime. At our first break in the Swedish program, a woman in the group introduces me to a frend she has smuggled into our space: a box turtle named Ludde. This is the first time a live turtle has showed up in one of my workshops. That's the kind of coincidence you can't dismiss as "only" coincidence.

Blueberries and crack

I spent the weekend leading a playshop in a wonderful octagonal meeting house amidst blueberry gardens in Ashton, Maryland. Of course, the berries were not on the bushes in mid-January. The absence of blueberries inspired me to recount an incident that took place in high summer on the other side of the continent, when the berries were ripe and full at Mosswood Hollow, the magical retreat center where I lead some of my longer adventures in Active Dreaming.
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During our lunch break that August day, I ranged with delight from bush to bush, grazing on red huckleberries and fat juicy blackberries and salmonberries and wild raspberries, always coming back to the perfect blueberries. As I was picking and munching, a stranger's voice carried across the bushes. It was slow and sweet, dropping the syllables like honey from a pot. "I see you like the berries."

I had to stand on tiptoe and tilt my head to one side before I could see the speaker. I found a man with honey-colored hair and a soft honey-colored beard. His shirt was also the color of honey, and on it he wore the figure of a bear, hanging from a thong.

"I do like the berries, very much."

"Which ones have you had?"

I rattled off the list.

"Have you tried the salal berries?"

I had not yet tasted these, and was interested, because I had heard that salal was a staple for the first peoples of the Pacific Northwest and for early settlers.

The honey-colored man offered to show me where the salal berries were growing. He led me along a track beside the deep evergreen forest, and pointed out the purplish berries. I tried a couple and found the taste somewhat bland and woody. I turned to thank my guide and found he was gone. The moment before, he had been as near to me as my shadow. I looked between the red cedars, to see if he had gone into the woods. Surely he could not have gone more than a few paces. He had vanished out of the sunlit day as if he had never been there.

I went back to the house and described my guide to the owners of Mosswood Hollow. They disclained any knowledge of the man I had met on their land.

Reflecting on this, as I gobbled a few more blueberries, I remembered the native stories of animals that can appear as humans, and humans who turn into animals. If a bear wanted to show himself as a human, maybe it would be like this, as a honey-colored man with a great love of berries.
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Near the end of our story-swapping last weekend, an Irishman with a dry sense of humor and a poet in his soul clapped me on the shoulder and said, "Great crack."

"Are you accusing me of being a drug dealer?"
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"Not crack," he laughed. "C-R-A-I-C. It means you tell a fine story. Grand entertainment."

Craic Dealer. I see you can buy a T-shirt with that inscription in Irish pubs. I've been called worse. Craic addict is another T-shirt choice. Well, craic addiction can be no more dangerous than bibliophilia, and I'll be happy to supply the necessary even when that requires me to talk the stars out of the sky.