Dreaming Is a Contact Sport

Many of my dreams are workaday in the sense that I am doing quotidian things: reading. writing and editing, giving lectures and workshops. Just now, in a sleep dream, that became lucid, I was selecting and posting excerpts from Chinese texts that described social interaction by dreamers traveling in their astral bodies, with distinctive terminology. I pictured bustling scenes of many soul travelers coming and going, meeting and parting in astral realities.

My first action, on getting out of bed, was to reopen relevant books from the current piles on my desk, At the top of the heap, Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China 300 BCE-800 CE by Robert Campany, a professor of Asian and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt. The book fell open at a page I had marked up heavily in pencil in a previous reading. The passage was on my oneiric theme: how people meet up and

make trouble in dreams.

"To dream is to contact or be contacted...This notion, often implicit, occasionally emerges into clear view, as in a passage in the Qiwu lun chapter of the Zhuangzi (ca. 300-150 bce):

"While it [the heart-mind, xin 心] sleeps, the cloudsouls contact [things]
When it wakes, the bodily form opens up [to sensory contact]
Whatever we come in contact with entangles it
Each day we use that heart-mind of ours for strife.

"The view of dreaming implied here is that dreaming occurs when one of our multiple souls - cloudsouls (hun 魂 ) whitesouls (po 魄 ) or simply the dreamer's spirit (shen 神 ) - wanders outside the body during sleep. But it is specifically the souls' contacts with other beings that constitute dreaming and therein lies the risk."

Campany notes that jiao, one of the verbs used for oneiric contact, means more: it implies touching with the senses of the dreambody; it may suggest "intertwine" or "intercourse". There is a note of caution here: watch who you are with when your body is sleeping. Those multiple souls get around. In the Later Han period, Daoist sages fixed the number of hun souls at three and the number of po souls at seven. We are many, and we can be in two or more places at once.

The Dream Web

 A document from a a possible future describing a the practices of a commonwealth of dreamers.

In place of a constitution, Dreamland has a charter that the founders titled 

RULES FOR HERDING CATS

            One of the rules reads as follows:

When a decision is required on a matter of community importance, the people must come together in the Big House and make a web.

In the first years of Dreamland, when the community was small, there was only one Big House, built of very simple materials around a great tree that rose through the roof like a ladder into the sky. Now Dreamland has many Big Houses, but the making of a dreaming web is essentially the same. Standing in a great circle at nightfall as they sing songs of Earth, the weavers raise the Mother’s energy into the vital centers and share it hand to hand, giving and receiving. When the energy is flowing strong between them, they each project ropelike energy cords to a common center and began to weave and shape the web. The cords flash with many colors, but as they interweave they glow sparkling white. When the chief weavers are satisfied that the web is strong enough to serve the group intention, the dreamers lie down in a cartwheel on the floor.

Lying together in the dark, with their web of dreaming glowing above and around them, the dreamers sing their group intention, over and over. As they sing, the web grows. It will grow until it has brought within it everything the dreamers need to see and know. As the energy filaments stretch, they may encompass the whole planet. All times are accessible. Years or centuries may slip by, like blown leaves, in the group perception. While the group visions together within the web, individual Dreamers move along its strands, agile as human spiders, and drop down on scenes they choose to see close-up.

At daybreak, the Dreamers share their perceptions, and the necessary decision becomes clear. They say there is no need to count heads when hearts are joined and connected to the heart of the Mother.

Text adapted from "Dreamland: Documents from a Possible Future" in Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Spider web photo from Wikipedia

 

Workaday Dreams of Other Lives

 

Last night I led an advanced training for a circle of students in a spacious room with arched windows overlooking an old European city. The room and the students were familiar to me from other dreams but not from regular life. The training was successful. We had to take special care with a woman consumed by grief; a mothering nurse in the group was very helpful. Another of the women students sought private time with me to talk about her relations with the beings she called "pixies"; she proved to be a walking folktale. I came back from the dream with the sense of virtue that comes when you have completed a challenging task before other people have started their day. I also felt a bit jet-lagged as if I had just flown back in Europe. I rested in bed for an hour before walking the dog.

Dreams are social as well as individual, transpersonal as well as personal. They may be entirely real experiences in other orders of reality. I have no doubt that I led that group in an alternate reality. I am curious to see whether some or all of it plays out in ordinary reality. If that starts to happen, I will be on the lookout for the woman in grief and the pixillated lady.

Some psychologists might call last night's dream "compensation", in the sense that in dreams we may live parts of life we have been denied or have denied ourselves in the physical world. So the ascetic (as in a famous Théophile Gautier story) is a lecherous Don Juan in his dreams, or the invalid is climbing the Himalayas. Before the pandemic, I was traveling seven months out of twelve, leading workshops all over the world map. Since March last year, I have not been to Europe or boarded a plane to any destination. So I might accept the idea that leading that in-person training in Europe is "compensation". However, my dream is "compensation" in more than the sense of fantasy. I am quite sure I was in that space, doing that work, helping students with their issues, listening deeply to their stories. It is a workaday dream. Since I love the kind of teaching I do, having to work at it as the price of a dream getaway is a price I am happy to pay.

We lead many lives in our dreams, and we miss so much if we fail to notice this vital aspect of dreaming. People are forever asking me about the "message" a dream may have for them, or the meaning of a symbol. I find myself responding, again and again, that while a dream may indeed hold a message, it is first and last an experience playing out in another reality. We want to ask questions like Who, What, Where, When? And then: Can this play out in the future in physical reality? Is it part of a continuining life I am leading somewhere else? Is it complete in itself or is there something I now need to do, perhaps to bring a gift or a lesson from another life into this one?

Photo of Prague rooftops by RM

Just-so dreams

 I always note my feelings on leaving a dream. Very often I jot down "just-so", meaning that it feels as if I have been having an entirely literal experience in a another space.That space is other than my ordinary reality in which my body has been lying dormant on the bed,but is no less real. Indeed, in our crazy shut-down time the dream space may feel more real and certainly more vibrant and mobile than the everyday world.
    Dreams are social as well as private, transpersonal as well as personal. We get out and about, far from the basement of the personal subconscious. We make visits and receive visitations. We meet people who are not merely projections or aspects of ourselves. We enter parallel worlds and alternate realities. We travel across time and space, seeing things that may play out in the future and meeting up with friends and strangers far away.
    Let me call as evidence my records from dreaming in the last two phases of sleep overnight. There is nothing extraordinary going on here and no strong feelings were aroused. I felt just-so: been there, done that. My other feelings were mild curiosity and a certain wistfulness over the fact that I can't get out and about in my regular body right now the way that I can in dreams. Nothing stronger. No sense of a call to action.No need to face a monster or call a doctor, to walk a tiger or swim to the moon, to continue a dialogue with a master teacher or bring back a book from the Total Library that has not yet been seen in this world. Had I had to rush to the airport, I might have let these little dreams go. But since March I have only been to airports in my dreams.
    I recorded six small just-so reports from my last two phases of sleep. I am glad I did so because the ordinariness of these vignettes may help to make my main point, that dreams are a field of action and interaction with others. In dreams we travel without leaving home, and can be as social as we please. Any approach to dreams that does not go beyond symbolic interpretation or rests on the narrow theory the whatever is going on in a  dream is a is part of the dreamer is going to miss the panoply of dream experience 

Here are unedited excerpts from my journal reports:

2020 August 8

dream (up at 4:00  a.m.)

New Retreat Place

I am showing a man around a retreat center where I am leading an advanced gathering. Someone comments on how the decor shifts very visibly from feminine to masculine design.  I realize that all the complex travel plans for this year must be abandoned.

I watch noisy kids go into the building in pairs from a pleasant outdoor recreation or pool area 

I lead the man to the dining room. It is very sterile, reminiscent of a diner. There are quite a lot of people there already but they are from another group. I don't recognize anyone from my group all of whose members are known to me because they have come to previous retreats. There is a second dining area. I lead the way there, hoping for a private table and more pleasant decor.

Feelings: Just-so. Mild curiosity.

Reality check: I don't recognize my male companion or this retreat center outside the dream. I could encounter them in the future. It does seem I will have to postpone all my teaching and travel plans for this year in my ordinary reality.

dreams (6:00-7:30 a.m.)

Mountain Loop

Taking a walk on a mountain path. The sun is bright but there is ice and hard packed snow. I decide to go back to the lodge but don't like the look of the ramparts of snow and ice I would need to climb. I think it will be easier to follow the trail making a big loop that will bring me to an easier access point. Walking slowly I am passed by cheerful girl hikers who are delighted by how melted snow sends little jets of water into the air. I have done this walk before but decide it is too long for me now. I turn back. If I need help climbing up I will ask for it.

Feelings: Neutral, curious.

Reality Check: This is a plausible situation. Despite my knee replacement, I have difficulty getting about on rough ground and am scared of slippery slopes. I don't recognize this locale but I could find myself there in the future. It was good to be out in the fresh mountain air. Symbolically, there are passages in life where one may need to be ready to turn back and ask for help. However, this felt like an entirely literal, just-so situation.

Dreamwork at a Table in Europe

With a friend at a big table in a restaurant in a European city. She gives me an update on her activities and we do dreamwork with several dream reports she shares.

Feelings: Glad to see my friend.

Reality Check: I think I know that restaurant. 

Action: Check whether my friend remembers a restaurant meeting from her dreams overnight. 

Deep Reading 

A man talks to me about a plan for deep reading he is following. This in involves reading or re-reading a list of books in a prescribed sequence with parallel reading encouraged at certain points. I suggest he should add Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps. 

Feelings: Cheerful

Reality check: Without much of a plan, I have lots of books on the go at any given time, skipping back and forth. I learn so much by re-reading old favorites. I loved The Lost Steps, which I first read in high school, and if I can find my copy in my forest of books I shall add it to my current reading pile. I don't recognize the man in the dream. I am willing to entertain the notion that he is an aspect of myself that approaches things with more planning than I do, but again he feels like another person altogether.

Call to an Author

I have the phone number of a famous author with an Italian surname. I decide to call him. I admire his work and would like to engage his support for a new book project. When I call, it is like listening in on a party line. His wife delivers his eulogy but in a robotic monotone. His son is lively and friendly but has a hard time speaking over the monologue. The writer seems to be taking a nap but when I ask the son to get his dad he says he'll do it without asking who I am. However the man I want has not come on the call when I leave the dream. 

Feelings: Lively curiosity

Reality: I don't recognize the name I recorded (not included here) but I guess I have been given a detective assignment I do hope to birth some new books in different genres, and will be glad of support. 

Action: Maybe I'll manage to reenter to dream and complete that phone call.

As I complete this inventory I see that the "little" dreams are maybe not so trivial after all, and that a couple contain leads I will want to follow in one reality or another. 
    Whatever exactly is going on, all these episodes are examples of "just-so" dreams, leaving the sense of been there, done that - in another room, another land or another world. " They invite exploration rather than interpretation. I often find myself asking detective questions: Who, What, When,Where...Why?
    After a night of a dozen or more of these outings, my dominant feeling may be "travel worn" or "jet-lagged"....

A brush with the Brushwood Boy

I woke early from a dream in which I needed to make up a story for eager children in an ancient or indigenous village. I told them a story of a chief's son who went through various adventures and ordeals of initiation and came back with a new name: "Brushy".
    I was excited about my storymaking assignment and curious about the name that Dream Robert gave the boy. The primary meaning of "brushy" in English is related to "brushwood", a pile of dry sticks often used for kindling.   This reminded me of a story by Rudyard Kipling titled "The Brushwood Boy" that made a big impression when I first read it many years ago. It is about two people who meet in dreams over many years before they meet in the physical world.
    Georgie Cottar dreamed stories in bed at an early age, “A child of six was telling himself stories as he lay in bed. It was a new power, and he kept it a secret… his tales faded gradually into dreamland, where adventures were so many that he could not recall the half of them. They all began in the same way, or, as Georgie explained to the shadows of the night-light, there was ‘the same starting-off place’—a pile of brushwood stacked somewhere near a beach.”    His dream adventures were interrupted by school (“ten years in a public school is not good for dreaming”). Hiss dreaming revived when he was deployed in India as a subaltern.

He would find himself sliding into dreamland by the same road—a road that ran along a beach near a pile of brushwood. To the right lay the sea, sometimes at full tide, sometimes withdrawn to the very horizon; but he knew it for the same sea. By that road he would travel over a swell of rising ground covered with short, withered grass, into valleys of wonder and unreason. Beyond the ridge, which was crowned with some sort of streetlamp, anything was possible…First, shadowy under closing eyelids, would come the outline of the brushwood-pile; next the white sand of the beach road, almost overhanging the black, changeful sea; then the turn inland and uphill to the single light.

In one of the dreams that “filled him with an incommunicable delight” “he found a small clockwork steamer (he had noticed it many nights before) lying by the sea-road, and stepped into it, whereupon it moved with surpassing swiftness over an absolutely level sea” and he is carried into trans-global adventures with the girl who reminds him of a picture in an illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland. Sometimes she is his rescuer. "Sometimes he was trapped in mines of vast depth hollowed out of the heart of the world, where men in torment chanted echoing songs; and he heard this person coming along through the galleries, and everything was made safe and delightful. They met again in low-roofed Indian railway carriages that halted in a garden surrounded by gilt and green railings."

   A stable geography develops, always anchored by the brushwood pile, a starting point, rendezvous and place of safety. There is the white beach and the black ocean, the thirty-mile ride along the coast that goes to tropical uplands, the Indian railway that goes to a garden where people sit at tables covered by roses, the purple down. Sometimes there is Policeman Day who walks him away from the City of Sleep. 

So thoroughly had he come to know the place of his dreams that even waking he accepted it as a real country, and made a rough sketch of it. He kept his own counsel, of course; but the permanence of the land puzzled him. His ordinary dreams were as formless and as fleeting as any healthy dreams could be, but once at the brushwood-pile he moved within known limits and could see where he was going. There were months at a time when nothing notable crossed his sleep. Then the dreams would come in a batch of five or six, and next morning the map that he kept in his writing-case would be written up to date, for Georgie was a most methodical person. 

The Brushwood Boy and his dream girl grow up together, in the dreamlands. She becomes a woman and kisses him under the lamp while he is sailing back to England on furlough.
    At the family’s country estate his mother tells him she has invited neighbors – the invalid Mrs Lacy and her daughter, Miriam, described as good with music (a composer) and horses – to dinner.

    He comes back from trout fishing very late and through the window he hears the girl singing her own composition, naming places from his dreams:

Over the edge of the purple down,
    Where the single lamplight gleams,
Know ye the road to the Merciful Town
    That is hard by the Sea of Dreams—

He tells himself it can’t be the girl from his dreams. But at breakfast he sees her full face He gapes, knowing her and seeing that she does not know him. Later when they go riding they share more of the geography of their dreams and realize that since childhood they have been dreaming not only of each other but with each other.

"What does it all mean? Why should you and I of the millions of people in the world have this - this thing between us? What does it mean? "

There’s a happy ending. He tells her her how they kissed under the lamp above the brushwood pile, and the dream spills fully into the world. We understand that they will marry.

I am sure that Kipling drew heavily on his own dreams in composing "The Brushwood Boy". In a letter to Richard Gilder dated September 25,1895, Kipling wrote that “I’ve drawn the map of the dream-country several times.” He added, “It grieves me much that you call my yarn a romance for what I prided myself on most was my grey and unflinching realism.” He implied he was writing about real experiences in an alternate reality, a concept that is quite familiar to other dream travelers.
    His story may encourage us to think more about shared and social dreaming - when we find ourselves together with other dreamers - and about mapping the geography of our own adventures in the dreamlands.

Top photo: Kipling in the library of the shingled house near Brattleboro, Vermont where he wrote The Brushwood Boy – and The Jungle Book .He had married a Vermonter and loved his four years in Vermont (1892-1896) writing in a room where the snow came up to his windowsill all winter. 

Bottom photo: One of Kipling's maps of the geography of The Brushwood Boy.

Social dreaming

Dreaming is social as well as individual, transpersonal as well as personal. I am still thinking about all the people - as yet unknown to me in ordinary life - I was with in several social settings in dreams over the weekend. When I am off the road, leading a very quiet and private life, I am far more social in dreams than in regular life. Yes, this could be "compensation", as Jung understood it, yet I think these are also entirely real interactions.    

Try to ask me what part of me the other characters may represent and you might get me to play the game, but without conviction, because my feelings lead me elsewhere.  So I have to figure out whether the mature brunette in the blue suit, who persuaded me to give those seminars for hip young people in some organization, figures only in a parallel reality and/or will show up in my future in this one. And whether I'll run into that journalist with the well-trimmed red beard in physical life.

This is not a dream report but simply a note on a theme. However, if you were to insist on the rules of Lightning Dreamwork and ask for my feelings after my social dreams over the weekend I would say that I was excited and full of happy anticipation.

For much more on social and shared dreaming, please see my book Active Dreaming.

Photo: Dream sharing at Mosswood Hollow by RM

Where I want to be in my dreams

I am in favor of setting intentions for dreams of the night. Sometimes I will simply say, to my dream producers, "Show me what I need to see."
   Sometimes I will set a specific intention for help or guidance. This might be general: "I open myself to the power of healing" or "I open myself to my creative source." It might be quite specific: "i would like guidance on publishing my new book" or "I would like to know how to handle the meeting next week".
    I might set the intention to go on an adventure or to rendezvous with a friend, or a group of friends, by common agreement. Dreaming is social as well as individual, and it can be wonderful fun sharing dream memories after a night when you made it your aim to meet others at a certain place. The best locales for a dream rendezvous, I find, are those that you have already discovered in the dreamlands - that magic library, that cottage with the blue door, that apple orchard, that cove where mermaids sing.
    When you set a specific intention for dream guidance, be ready to be surprised. You may find it hard, at first, to make a connection between the dream you recall and the intention you set. this may be because you have lost the best part of your dreams. It could be because the source of your dreams - which is wiser than the ordinary mind - may be unimpressed with your theme and is sending you something it considers more important for you to consider.
    However, I find it is always a helpful and creative exercise to try to make connections between the dream and the prior intention. This may require a lot of imagination and some element of detective work. The exercise may prosper faster when you draw on the imaginations of others, offering you feedback according to the "if it were my dream protocol".
    Sometimes the nature of the guide who appears in dreams is startling.
    When I was writing my first book on dreaming, I set the intention, "Show me how to bring the gifts of dreaming to many more people in our society." In my dream, I found myself under a huge circus tent. In the center was a character in a loud plaid suit, with a hat, smoking a big cigar. He performed impossibe acrobatics, leaping to the top of the tent, spinning fast in midair as he came down. Then he leaped into the bleachers and started smooching and cuddling an attractive blonde. I knew his name was "Marty", pronounced New York style.
    Now lucid in the dream, remembering my intention, I said to myself, This is my guide?
    Marty leered at me and gave me a horrible wink. Then he said, round the edge of his stogie, "It's about entertainment, kid. It's about entertainment."
     I came from this dream laughing. Marty may not have been the most evolved spiritual guide, but he was the counselor I needed. I kept his advice in mind as I completed the book that was published as Conscious Dreaming, and I have kept it in mind ever since.

Recently, in developing my practice and teaching of lucid dreaming, I have been experimenting with setting intentions in a rather different way.
    I let my body rest for the first cycle of "industrial sleep", when the body is most in need of sleep and repair . Then, when I stir from sleep in the middle of the night, I relax and compose a mental statement about where I want to be in my dream experiences.  
    If I feel in need of healing, I might say, "I am in a place of healing."
    If I want creative inspiration, I might say, "I am in a place of creativity."
    Around 3:00 this morning, in the liminal state between sleep and awake, with the soft patter of rain in the redwoods outside my window in California, I composed the following statement: I am living the life I am meant to live.
     I found myself in a thrilling  but gentle and caring adventure. I was given an assignment by higher authorities to save a woman's life. She was bent on self-destruction, and I was to play the role of the undeclared guide who would reawaken her to all the reasons she had for living.
    My assignment required me to get on a plane to Tegucigalpa. My seat had been reserved next to the woman who was bent on suicide. I would appear to be a charming stranger, meat by chance.
     I threw myself into the role with gusto. Soon the woman was coming alive again, swimming and diving in glorious blue waters, enjoying music and an excellent dinner.
     I came from the dream thinking, Yes, this is part of the life I am meant to live.
    

Drawing by RM

With the fairies

In the liminal state between sleep and awake, in the gray hour before dawn, I dress for a visit to Faerie. I give myself a splendid body, young and strong, the broad shoulders and narrow waist worthy of a Minoan bull dancer. I give myself a simple crown, a band of gold around the hairline with a glowing blue jewel suspended from it to hang over the third eye. I place a torque around the neck. I add a cape and kilt, and a wand, worn like a sword when not in use.
    Grand adventures unfold.
    When I go up to the lodge for breakfast, a woman from my workshop can't wait to tell me about something she saw in that pre-dawn hour."Robert! I saw you in a dream before dawn. You appeared in a small TV screen in the midst of my other dream. You were dressed as a fairy king, with a crown with a blue star and a wand."
     I guess the weave of dreaming between members of a community of dreamers glows brighter when you add a little fairy dust.
     This thought was confirmed in the first session of my workshop that morning. An older man new to my work returned from a group journey and reported to me, joyously, "I met a sylvan nymph! She led me on a path of adventure in Faerie realms."

Photo: Elven Oak in Kensington Gardens by RM

Dreaming in the Cave with Kelly Walden and Amamama

Sharing dreams can be wonderful fun, giving juice for the day and putting a fizz of magic into the air. I found this again in conversation with the fabulous Kelly Sullivan Walden on my radio show. Kelly is one of those who helps bring the gift of dreams to people where they live, one of the dream ambassadors who are urgently needed in our society. As soon as we started sharing dreams on the air, sparking off each other, terrific energy was generated. And very soon we were producing confirmation of something Western psychologists still struggle to understand. Dreaming is not only individual, it is social. Dreaming, we get out of the body and the brain and travel around and visit each other.
    Kelly shared a dream that led me to believe that her dream self had visited my territory in the most literal sense. She dreamed she was with a man like Robert Langdon, the iconographer of The Da Vinci Code though she thought (in the dream) that this Robert might be Robert Moss. She was a little intimidated by his superior scholarship and knowledge of arcane things, and grateful that he was sharing one of his discoveries with her.
     The scene of their encounter was a cave. One part was filled with books, tribal artifacts and sacred art. The other part contained a wine cellar. There were many African sculptures and ritual objects. A great goddess figure rose from within this scene, and people started chanting syllables that sounded like “Amamama”. A crowd gathered to attack the goddess figure, but red flames leaped around her – part of her protection – and the chanting rose higher and higher. AMAMAMA. She seemed to be invincible. Kelly awakened excited and filled with awe, knowing that she wanted and needed to claim this goddess power.
     Now: I write and work in a Cave, my name for the basement apartment in my house. It is filled with books, tribal artifacts and sacred art, including a number of African sculptures and carvings that are prominently displayed, and many goddess images. In the room behind the one where I write, visible through the open door, is my wine cellar. Though I am not a fan of The Da Vinci Code I am very interested in tracking the evolution of sacred images, and live surrounded by many of these.
    Over the years, I have made many pictures of a great goddess figure who is a kind of Mother Africa, immense, sometimes seated in state in a market full of produce, under a great tree that is sometimes a baobab. In the praise name or chant Amamama, I observed on the air, I heard the words Alma Mama, Mother Soul, another of my names for this Ancient Mother.
     Kelly and I agreed that in her dream she might have slipped into my space and had an interview with me before our interview for my show. She talked about how, at the age of 6, she learned about how people can dream together when she shared dreams with her younger sister. Sometimes her sister would tell her what was going to happen in her dream before she finished telling it, because she had dreamed the same dream.
     I noted that many ancient and indigenous peoples talk about dreams as if they are entities or spirits that come and go in the night, with subtle bodies that can slip under the door or through a keyhole like a tiny gust of wind. In classical Greek, oneiros is not only a dream we may enter, but a dream figure that may enter our space. In ancient Mesopotamia, a word for “dream” also meant “zephyr”. I joked with Kelly that perhaps her dream self sometimes flies about as a zephyr, one of those little gusts of wind that can get through the tiniest crack.

~

You can listen to my conversation with Kelly Sullivan Walden on my “Way of the Dreamer” radio show on Tuesday, February 12 from 9:00-10:00 a.m. Pacific, 12:00-1:00 p.m. Eastern, or download from the archive after the broadcast.

    You can find Kelly at her website. Her new book, It’s All in Your Dreams, will be published in May and I recommend it.

~

The drawing is one of scores I have made of an African goddess over the years. Here she is the model for the Queen of Disks in my personal tarot deck.

Dreaming is social, and PJ is getting married

I'm at a conference of dream researchers, running a bit late for dinner. I hurry through a large restaurant lounge area, looking for the friends I said I would meet. Off to my left, outside on a sunny terrace, I see women I know and like and go over to greet them.
    I kiss a woman with long dark hair on the back of a head and she turns to smile up into my eyes. She calls herself PJ, and she is getting married. I had forgotten this, or the information had never registered. She introduces me to her fiance, a tall, stocky blond man who seems suspicious of me, maybe jealous. When I recognize that his last name is Lithuanian, I try to open him up by talking about my deep connection with Lithuania. I sprinkle a few Lithuanian words into my spiel, and mention that I am thinking of writing a whole book about my adventures in the country of Žemyna and Perkunas.

I have no strong feelings on waking from this dream into morning sunlight a few hours ago. This small and very social dream feels just-so: went there, did that, talked to those people.
    Yes, I could play the "What part of me?" game and ask whether PJ is a feminine aspect of myself and whether the big Lithuanian is a strong but sometimes surly part of me, and so on. But my feelings tell me this would be a wholly misdirected exercise.
    I could play word games with the name "PJ." For many of us "PJs" are pajamas. Were these initials a prompt to me to wake up to the fact that I was dreaming, and enter a state of dream lucidity? (I did not become lucid in this dream.) Well, maybe. But then I don't wear PJs, so an allusion to "pajamas" is not the prompt for me that it might be for someone with a different dress code for bed.
    I know a woman who calls herself PJ in regular life. I don't think I know the woman in my dream, though I can see her quite distinctly - slim, deeply tanned, possibly Asian-American.
    I do sometimes go to conferences with dream researchers, and some of the other people in the dream are friends who belong to the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) where I have spoken several times. So I'll file this dream in two categories. It may be a rehearsal for a possible future event. It could be an experience in a parallel reality. Either way, I feel sure it involved transpersonal interaction with other people on a plane of reality close to the physical.
    Dreams are not only personal and subjective; they are transpersonal and may be experiences of an objective reality, in many possible times and dimensions. When we dream, we get out there. Some of us are actually much more social in dreams than in ordinary life. This is certainly true for me, in those periods in my life when I am off the road and down in my creative cave, writing and researching.

Graphic: Yes, they are wearing pajamas! The old photos show handlers of the Sultan of Oudh's hunting cheetahs. The origin of the word "pajama" is Persian; its original meaning is "leg garment."

Knights of dreaming

I am with a group of gentle but fiercely dedicated people whose cause is the Earth and the other species with which humans share life on the planet. One of them is a man who spends most of the year in the far north, monitoring changes in the oceans and the ice cap. He is troubled that the survival of a certain genus of giant whale may now be at risk. He shows me video he recorded during close-up, deep-sea encounters with two of these whales. Fascinating to watch their mating habits. Troubling that Earth changes generated by humans may be threatening their survival.

Next, I am leading a weekend workshop. I am delighted by the caliber of the participants, and by the gender balance in our group of about forty people. There are nearly as many men as women, which is rare in programs devoted to inner work. Some of the guys are keenly interested in developing practical applications for the Active Dreaming techniques, and for bringing them into social and professional networks to which they have access.

I sit with four of these men on a grassy knoll under some trees during one of our breaks. I would guess that their ages range from the late 30s to the early 50s. They are all educated, self-made men who have been successful in different fields. Some have created their own businesses. They know how to get things done, and they are excited to have a project that goes beyond any previous venture. One of the guys feels that helping people to follow their dreams is a noble cause, and tries to express this by saying, "We want to revive the original idea of the duke." This sounds a bit grandiose, though I recollect that this title of nobility derives from the Latin dux, or "leader". I gently deflect the medieval fancy, while thinking, in the same moment, This is great. These are the knights of dreaming.

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My little dog pulled me out of my dreams at this point, this morning. But I rose into the day feeling very happy and grateful that such promising connections were made, overnight. These were social dreams. I have no doubt that the encounters were real. I'll be alert to see how they can now manifest in waking life.

Social dreaming

The idea (prevalent in Western psychology, when it values dreams at all) that dreams are primarily products of the personal subconscious would puzzle dreamers in most ancient and indigenous cultures, for whom the most interesting dreams are social and transpersonal. Certainly dreams surface a great amount of material from our personal psyches, which is why it is often productive to ask the question, of any and every element in a dream, "What part of me does that represent?"

Yet our dreams often take us far beyond the boundaries of the personal unconscious. In dreams, we make journeys and we receive visitations. Some of us are far more social in our dreams than in regular life. So when we think about what happened in a dream, it may be more relevant to ask "Who was I with?" and "Where did I go last night?" than "What part of me?" was involved.

I am thinking about social dreaming - a phrase I would like to see in our vocabulary - because my friend Wanda Burch just shared a delightful example of a dream experience she shared with her husband. Their dream recall was triggered by a TV commercial that offered a potted orchid as a gift for buyers of a certain product. Wanda said to her husband Ron: "I was in a room - I don't recall where I was or how I got there - but I know I was with two people and one of them was you. I don't know where we were going but I looked to the left and there were large yellow orchids on a table and then I looked to the end of this long room -"

Looking startled Ron finished her statement "- and there was a single arching grey orchid, more stunning in its placement than the yellow ones."

"Yes," Wanda confirmed, "and it was displayed like an old Japanese painting, slightly to the right -"
"- of a chair," Ron again filled in the blank.

In almost identical speech, they both added, "with filtered light coming through the slats of some sort of dark wooden blind or window covering."

They could not identify the third person in the dream, someone who had a magic touch with orchids. But they shared the most vivid and precise recollection of a space they had entered only in dreaming.

I like this account for its everyday simplicity. I know that Wanda is no slouch at social dreaming because she has often participated in dream adventures with me, in which the locales have ranged from conference venues and vacation homes to far-flung countries and imaginal realms. Wanda was present, as an observer, in one of the most important dreams of my life, and her exact account of what took place around a certain purple fire, in a circle of ancient warrior chiefs, was vital confirmation for me of the objective reality of that experience.

In my Active Dreaming workshops, I often guide participants on adventures in social dreaming that are conscious and intentional. Last weekend, for example, we went on a group journey - powered and focused by shamanic drumming - to a fascinating location in the imaginal realm that I call the House of Time, which offers many portals for time travel, the investigation of past and future life experiences, and a library where master teachers sometimes make themselves available. I give directions for this journey in my Dream Gates CD series and also in Dreamgates the book (which contains material beyond the audio series). In the workshops we also learn to travel inside each other's dreamspace as dream trackers.

What the shared orchid dream brings home is just how natural the experience of social dreaming may be. Since in dreaming we are not confined to the body or the rules of Newtonian physics, why would it be strange for us to share experiences, according to our interests and our passions, with those who are connected with us? Of course, in dreaming we may discover that we belong to an extended family vastly greater than our regular family, whose members are not confined to one world or one time!