Choosing Your Future

 

By my observation and experience, consciousness is forever scouting ahead of the physical body and returning with memories of the future. It is important to understand that any future we foresee is a possible future. We can change the odds on the manifestation of a certain coming event by learning to read and clarify the information and then by taking appropriate action.     
     Shamans believe that in dreaming, we not only scout out the future but may actively choose between possible futures that are open to us. The more conscious we become, the greater our ability to choose. Physical events are born inside the dreaming, where it is possible to change them before they are manifested.
      Dream radar gives us fairly precise readouts on the probable outcome of our present actions and behavior, and the probable consequences of choices we might make in the future. Through dream reentry, we can check our messages and make sure we are working with all the pertinent information. By taking action based on the dream, we can steer toward or away from the dreamed event in waking life. Through conscious or lucid dreaming, we position ourselves to change the outcome inside the dream itself.
     The probability that a possible future event, perceived in a dream, will be enacted depends on a number of factors. These include:

Time lapse. Generally, the shorter the interval between the dream and the probable enactment of the event foreseen, the greater the chance that the event will be played out in waking life unless you are able to take deliberate action to avert the dream fulfillment.

Personal involvement. Is the dream about you or people connected with you whom you may be able to influence? If so, you may have latitude to act to change the dream result. But if the dream is about strangers, a remote situation, or a natural disaster, there is probably little or nothing you can do – except, say, call a friend in California to warn about the next earthquake and risk being regarded as a nut or (maybe worse) as merely stating the obvious.

Your willingness to act on a dream. Are you working actively with your dream source? Do you make a habit not only to read dream messages but to do something with them? If so, you may have more room to work around dream results you don’t relish.

Life burdens. The future events you dream may be the results of disease, old age, past actions, decades of bad habits, or the culmination of a whole lifetime. It might be difficult or impossible to get out from under a big accumulation of personal karma! But even if an unwanted event, perceived in the dream, now proves to be unavoidable in waking life, the lesson brought home by the dream may prepare you for the worst and lay the ground for a fresh start.

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

Dreaming History, Past and Future

 

Dream reports from 8 years ago popped out of my journal. One of them seems closely related to the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine, and reminds me that to navigate the future, we must understand the past. This is a summary of one of several travel reports I recorded from my dream adventures on one night in 2014, a few weeks after Putin's "little green men" started the invasion of Crimea.

March 17, 2014

Kaganovich's Baby

I agree to make a trip to the north, a secret mission. I am supposed to check on a baby that is going to be delivered. The father is Kaganovich. I recognize the name. He is one of Stalin’s strongmen. A woman colleague drives. In the dream, I pull cards from a tarot-like deck to get a reading on where this is going.

The first card I draw is bronze-colored. There is a line drawing of an armored horseman. He does not look like a medieval Western knight; the style is from farther East. In scrolling script, perhaps Cyrillic, the card has a name that means Sovereign. I see it is numbered XV. So, this corresponds to the Devil card in familiar decks. Here, it seems, the Sovereign – or the pursuit of sovereignty over a land – is the Devil. The devils of history are out again. And perhaps the horsemen of the Apocalypse.

We arrive at an apartment building full of sweet young girls. I learn that Kaganovich's baby has already been born. This is not good news.

I made the following notes on the dream after writing it down:

Kaganovich makes a speech in 1938

Lazar Kaganovich, born in Ukraine, was one of Stalin’s closest henchmen. "Iron Lazar" was Stalin’s chief enforcer against Party rivals and the effective dictator of Ukraine in the 1930s. In 2010, before the supreme court in Kyiv, 250 books of documentary evidence were produced by the prosecution to support the charge that he was guilty of genocide through the deliberate starvation of more than 3 million Ukrainians in 1932-3. The horror he and Stalin inflicted on Ukraine is known as Holodomor, "Killing by Starvation".

Kaganovich was one of the few Jews to survive at the top through Stalin’s reign. Amazingly, he almost outlasted the entire Soviet era, dying in 1991 aged 97.

What is Kaganovich's baby? Kaganovich had a daughter, born in 1917.I don't think the dream is about her. Maybe his baby is his legacy as reflected in Russian actions at the time of the dream, but more especially in 2022, when killing civilians by starvation again seems to be the policy of a Russian dictator, and Putin's violent rhetoric echoes Stalin's. My dream title makes me think of "Rosemary's Baby", a horror story on film. Dreams can key us into the history we need to know, and reruns of old horror stories we want to avoid.

Photos at top: Holodomor monument, Kyiv

Choosing your future through Active Dreaming

By my observation and experience, consciousness is forever scouting ahead of the physical body and returning with memories of the future. It is important to understand that any future we foresee is a possible future. We can change the odds on the manifestation of a certain coming event by learning to read and clarify the information and then by taking appropriate action.   
     Shamans believe that in dreaming, we not only scout out the future but may actively choose between possible futures that are open to us. The more conscious we become, the greater our ability to choose. Physical events are born inside the dreaming, where it is possible to change them before they are manifested.
      Dream radar gives us fairly precise readouts on the probable outcome of our present actions and behavior, and the probable consequences of choices we might make in the future. Through dream reentry, we can check our messages and make sure we are working with all the pertinent information. By taking action based on the dream, we can steer toward or away from the dreamed event in waking life. Through conscious or lucid dreaming, we position ourselves to change the outcome inside the dream itself.
     The probability that a possible future event, perceived in a dream, will be enacted depends on a number of factors. These include:

Time lapse. Generally, the shorter the interval between the dream and the probable enactment of the event foreseen, the greater the chance that the event will be played out in waking life unless you are able to take deliberate action to avert the dream fulfillment.

Personal involvement. Is the dream about you or people connected with you whom you may be able to influence? If so, you may have latitude to act to change the dream result. But if the dream is about strangers, a remote situation, or a natural disaster, there is probably little or nothing you can do – except, say, call a friend in California to warn about the next earthquake and risk being regarded as a nut or (maybe worse) as merely stating the obvious.

Your willingness to act on a dream. Are you working actively with your dream source? Do you make a habit not only to read dream messages but to do something with them? If so, you may have more room to work around dream results you don’t relish.

Life burdens. The future events you dream may be the results of disease, old age, past actions, decades of bad habits, or the culmination of a whole lifetime. It might be difficult or impossible to get out from under a big accumulation of personal karma! But even if an unwanted event, perceived in the dream, now proves to be unavoidable in waking life, the lesson brought home by the dream may prepare you for the worst and lay the ground for a fresh start.

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

Two ways of re-making the future

I am teaching two ways of re-making the future. One involves working with what looks like a ball of string. The second way involves scooping, molding and sculpting a heap of soft material, like dough or squishy clay.

I have announced that a prize will be given for the best student in each category. The bigger prize will go to the one who sculpts from the formless mass of pliable "dough".

The students are eager to try this assignment. As they take turns to separate strings from the ball, I notice that the strings look a bit like long strips of celluloid, as were used to record and project films. A vigorous, stocky man throws himself into molding and sculpting the heap of soft matter. He's building an amazing structure and he's the clear favorite to win the prize I have announced.

I woke from this dream today, actively curious and intrigued.

In my regular life, I teach people to play with the idea that we can switch from one probable event track, running into the future, to another. This can be visualized as selecting one string of events from a ball of possibilities. I also like the idea that we can "rewind" a certain sequence - in life as in dreams - back to a certain point of decision, and then go forward with a different scenario. These ideas are evoked by the dream exercise with the "ball of string".

I also love the image of sculpting a life project out of a soft mass of unformed material. The prize is no doubt bigger here because there is more creating to be done. I think of how, in the imaginal realm, we can build cities and palaces of subtle and ideoplastic substance. It is from creation on this plane that physical structures and situations are manifested.

M.K.Čiurlionis, "Creation of the World IX"