Dream
"All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better. "
Remembered or not, we dream of the world behind the world every night of our lives. Our dreams show us where we are in alignment on our path, and where there is wobble. Dreams give us answers to the questions “What else is there?”, and “What wants to happen right now?”
Dreams can be personal or transpersonal. They can be a rich source of guidance, creative energy, and inspiration for our unfolding lives. They can reflect how we have changed, and how we are changing.
As old patterns dissolve and the pieces come together in new ways, what opens up in the body/mind shows up in the dream world. How do the threads want to create a new story? What resources are emerging that you are not aware of, or only aware of on the periphery?
There are many ways to work with (and play with) your dreams, and many cultural traditions to point the way. Recording your dreams and tracking the clues and breadcrumbs that bubble up from the dreamtime allow you to learn your own imagery, read your own signs, and add new dimensions of magic and adventure to your life.
Dreams can be personal or transpersonal. They can be a rich source of guidance, creative energy, and inspiration for our unfolding lives. They can reflect how we have changed, and how we are changing.
As old patterns dissolve and the pieces come together in new ways, what opens up in the body/mind shows up in the dream world. How do the threads want to create a new story? What resources are emerging that you are not aware of, or only aware of on the periphery?
There are many ways to work with (and play with) your dreams, and many cultural traditions to point the way. Recording your dreams and tracking the clues and breadcrumbs that bubble up from the dreamtime allow you to learn your own imagery, read your own signs, and add new dimensions of magic and adventure to your life.
Simple Practices
- Buy yourself a nice loose-leaf notebook or journal for keeping track of your dreams. Give yourself lots of space to write, sketch, draw, go back and add to what you record.
- Put out an invite to remember your dreams as you go to bed at night. For decades my mantra has been “My dreams will tell me what I need to know”.
- Dreams can be slippery things… Keep your notebook by the bed, so that when your first wake up, you can record whatever stays with you. This can be a whole narrative, or simply words, images, pictures, or even a color (or colors). Just get it down without thinking. No judgements.
- Give each dream a title.
- When an image that has power for you arrives, practice holding it in open space and see what collects around it. Make it a game. Notice where it shows up in waking life. You may start getting winks from the universe, or as Robert Moss says, a demo of how “life rhymes”.
- Do some “shamanic shopping” (thanks again Robert Moss) and look for an object you are given in a dream, or something that represents an image or the whole dreamscape.
- Take some time to get a body-based felt sense of a dream or image (see Focusing).
- Look back at your dream journal on occasion with a wider eye. Look for flow and patterns. Notice the larger arc of your dream world. Notice where things in dreams showed up in waking life. Notice recurring symbols. Notice where pieces drop into place. Notice reflections of the wholeness always present.
- Make Art.
- In hard times, give what is challenging for you to the dreamtime, and let it dissolve and resolve in those deeper layers.
Favorite Sources of Dream Inspiration
- Robert Moss is a prolific author on the subject of dreams, and leads workshops around the world on the art of Active Dreaming. This includes dream reentry to gather more information, or continue the dream to a new resolution, navigating by synchronicity (that intersection where mind and matter meet), and “dreaming the soul back home”, or dreamwork as soul retrieval. In this approach, the dreamer is the final authority on his or her dream. Much more empowering and fun than books that say “this means this”. Good books to start with are The Three Only Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination, and Active Dreaming.
- Jill Mellick is a Jungian psychotherapist and author of The Art of Dreaming: Tools for Creative Dreamwork. She provides many wonderful creative avenues for accessing the wisdom and resources of dreams. A few examples: Translate your dream into an energy painting, then take that painting into your body; view life events as dreams; move like a dream animal; turn your dream into a fairy tale; use clay to express feeling, movement and figure; make a healing mandala; contain a nightmare with a short poem. This book is readily available for cheap online.