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

Nine Keys to Understanding Your Dreams

1.  Trust Your Feelings

Always pay attention to how you feel when you wake from a dream. Your feelings and bodily sensations may be your best guide to the relative urgency and importance of a dream, and its positive or negative implications.

2.  First Associations

In keeping a dream journal, you will want to get into the habit of jotting down your first associations with the dreams you record. What floats to the surface of your consciousness in the first minutes after waking may come from layers of the dream that have eluded, or from deeper levels of dreaming 

3.  Reality Check

Compare what is going on in the dream to the rest of your life, including the life of your imagination. Always ask whether it is possible that any part of the dream will manifest, literally or symbolically, in physical reality. Though dreams are inner experiences, they often contain accurate information about external reality. In both subtle and unsubtle ways, dreams incorporate signals from the outside environments.

4.  Dream Reentry

Dreams are real experiences, and a fully remembered dream is its own interpretation. The meaning of a dream is inside the dream itself. By learning how to re-enter dreams, you will develop the ability to clarify messages about future events, resume contact with inner teachers, and resolve unfinished business.

5.  Dialogue with Dream Characters

One of the best ways to work out what your dream characters are telling you is to ask them. You can do this through dream reentry or simply by sitting down with a pad and pen, imagining that the dream figure is in front of you, and opening a conversation.

6.  Tracking Your Dream Self

Who are you in your dreams? Are you the protagonist or simply an observer? Are you younger or older? Male or female? How does the situation and behavior of our dream self compare with that of your waking self? The character who appears in all of your dreams, even if only as a witness, is you.

7.  Symbol Exploration

Although the dream source tries to communicate with us as clearly as possible, it must often speak in symbols in order to carry us beyond the limitations of the everyday mind.  Symbols take us from what we know to what we do not yet know. You'll be inspired to track your symbols far and wide, and may discover that your personal dreams embody timeless myths from many traditions. Always remember that the best encyclopedia of dream symbols is your own journal, kept over time.*

8.  "What Part of Me?"

Dreams make us whole. They show us the many aspects of ourselves and help us to bring them under one roof. This is why it is often useful to ask "what part of me" different characters and elements in a dream might represent. However,this approach is rarely sufficient since dreams are transpersonal as well as personal. If you meet a tribal shaman in a dream, that may be an aspect of yourself and an actual shaman. If you meet your departed grandmother, that is more likely to be Granma trying to communicate than merely a part of you that is like her.

9.  Dream Enactment

Dreams require action! You may take creative action, turning a dream into a story, a picture a collage.You may do some shamanic shopping, to get shoes or earrings your dream self was wearing or a sculpture of a deity you saw in a dream. You may use the dream as GPS on your life roads. You may accept dream assignments, seeking to translate that strange word or find that obscure place on a map of this world or another world. At the least, you can harvest a bumper sticker or action phrase from the dream that will help to move its energy into life. 

Adapted from Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press.

Taking on the power of a woman shaman

As a mere man, I am always delighted when something happens to bring me closer to the Divine Feminine and to put me in touch with my own feminine side. I just had an experience of both those things that leaves me feeling charged with joyous energy and profoundly grateful.

I am leading a large workshop group in which we are performing shamanic rituals for healing. A woman friend is with me; this woman is like a sister to me and has assisted me in other workshops over many years. We agreed that she will be the demonstration model for a shamanic healing ritual which we will allow to be photographed and possibly filmed. She lies on the floor and gets her body in a comfortable position on a blanket.

    I am dancing around in a long swirling garment, gathering power and power objects for the ritual. I pick up and contemplate several objects I may use, including some large crystals. I am looking for a bear fetish, but find that the crystal I select is actually carved into the image of the Buddha. It's quite beautiful, with shades of lavender, but I decide not to use this.
    Still dancing, I find another crystal, shaped like a soft L, ornamented with little jewels and fine strands of gold, glowing with rainbow lights. It's soft and feminine, yet it packs a lot of power, and I can hold it like a laser gun to fire energy exactly where it is needed. This is the tool I will use.
   With this in my hand, I dance back towards my assistant. My long garment flutters around me, and so do the strands of a veil that is hanging over my face. I realize that these are traditional garments of a woman shaman, and I become conscious that I have summoned and am now channeling immense energy of the Divine Feminine. My assistant stirs as I approach. I lay objects beside her and over her, reassuring her that it's me and all is going according to plan, even better than we planned. She mumbles agreement, seemingly quite sleepy, and shifts her body so most of it is now off the blanket, while her head remains in its original position.
    Energy surges, finding its way to where it is needed. The glow of nurturing energy expands, filling the whole space. Some people in the background start chanting Goddess names. Indeed, we feel the Goddess is with us.

I'll be curious to see what the friend who is my demonstration model in this dream remembers from the night. I dreamed this in early sleep, before midnight, so she may not yet have been in the dreamlands.
    In the meantime, plenty of others have been keeping me posted on the peregrinations of my dream doubles. In the past 24 hours, I have received reports on a Robert with a black dog who joined one dreamer for a picnic on a hill; and a Robert with a bear who introduced another dreamer to three other animals; and a Robert who magicked up a big tax refund for a third dreamer. A Robert who is savvy with tax and finances is definitely a parallel self in a parallel reality far from my ordinary circumstances! I wouldn't mind an occasional meet-up with him.

Follow-up

I shared my dream report with the woman who was assisting me in the healing ritual in the dream. She told me she seemed to spend most of her time, in dreams last night, participating in a healing ritual that involved singing a childhood ballad that is full of deeper meanings. She also informed me that she has some large crystals from a family place in the South and expects to bring back more when she visits the property in the spring. I have invited her to assist me in a depth workshop later this year.

Drawing by R.M.