Personally, I prefer engaging dreams and exploring them rather than interpreting them.  I  don’t think we even have to understand dreams.   Just by attending to them, they can help us grow and heal.  I have put together a number of questions that can aid in the exploration of dreams.

First of all, it helps to write your dream out on paper or in a dream journal.  Write it as if you are back in the dream and you are experiencing it in the present.  “I am at a stadium…”

Do you have any initial hunches and thoughts about what the dream might be about?

What are the feelings regarding the dream?  These may include what you are feeling in the dream as well as the feelings that were with you when you awoke.  There may be several feelings in the dream and each person/being may be feeling something different.  Try to note them all.

What is the dream setting, as in location?  Describe it as well as you can.

Now say, I am in a place that _____________________.  So for example, if you dream you are at a stadium you might say “I am in a place that holds lots of people who are there to witness an event.  I am waiting for it to start.”

Ask yourself if this fits with your life at all.

What is the central image?  What stands out most to you?  Describe this in as much detail as you can.

What part of the dream did you not pay much attention to?  Perhaps you didn’t even bother to write this down.  Could this be something in your life that you are also ignoring?  Could it be a blind spot?

What opposites do you notice in the dream?  (For example, dark and light, hot and cold, high and low, big and small.)  Does this polarity mean anything to you in your life?

Now close your eyes and see if you can enter into the dream again.  Don’t worry if you are making things up or adding to the dream.  Just allow yourself to experience as much of it as you can.  If there is a person in the dream or even an animal (or even an object) you could ask them it what they are doing in your dream.  Trust whatever comes.

Take a piece of paper and some crayons and colour some part of your dream.  It doesn’t have to be a literal image.  It could be just a feeling.  You might want to put it aside and come back to it later and then see what stands out to you.  You could also ask someone to tell you what stands out to them.

Go over what you have written and come up with a title for your dream.

Again, you do not have to come up with a meaning of your dream.  Sometimes it is best to live with it.  You might notice connections in your life and say, “That reminds me of my dream.”  You might notice similar themes in other dreams.  You may discover there are layers of meaning that you uncover over months or even years.

Pleasant dreams.

Last year one of my blog themes was living simply.   Going by the numbers of videos on tiny houses, some of which I posted on here, I found I was far from alone.  Today, the first of January, I came across another video which I find especially inspiring.  Here is the link to the video of a woman, Lulu, and her child who live in a shipping container.

Now I am aware of names for a way that has inspired me since I was a child.  Wabi-sabi.  Do you know it?  I am guessing we will be hearing more about wabi-sabi in the year to come.  According to Lulu, it is now fashionable in the west.  Here is what Wikipedia has to say about wabi-sabi:

“Wabi-sabi (侘寂^?) represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”. It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence, specifically impermanence, the other two being suffering and emptiness or absence of self-nature.

Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry,  asperity (roughness or irregularity), simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes.”

The child in me especially resonates with Lulu’s values and home.  I am going to try to keep wabi-sabi in mind as inspiration throughout the year ahead.

One more thing in regards to the theme on this blog about dreams:  this woman dreamed about living in a “square boat” and later recognized it after she had built her home.

As I was taking down my 2011 calendar which was entitled Rumi, Heart of the Beloved, I stopped to read the December poem/quotation I had not yet read.  Here it is:

There is

nourishment like

bread that feeds

one part of your life

and nourishment

like light for

another.

There are many

rules about

restraint with

the former,

but only one rule

for the latter.

Never be satisfied.

Eat and drink the

soul substance, as

a wick does with

the oil it soaks in.

Give light to the

company.

Yet hidden deep within the grown-up heart,

A longing for the first world, The ancient one

Rainer Maria Rilke

Happy New Year!

I’m reading my third book about dreams.  I’ve been trying to cram in as many books as I

Kalpa Sutra-Jina's mother dreams

can over the holidays, though a couple of nights ago I had a dream that suggests this might not be such a great idea.

There are so many approaches to dreams and I find many of them helpful, depending on the type of dream.  Not all dreams are created equal.  There are some that are warnings, others are prescient in other ways.  For example I knew I would be accepted into grad school as I had a dream that assured me of it before I received the letter.  Some show us our shadow, that is, aspects of ourselves that we have disowned and are needed for our wholeness – if we are brave enough to look.  Others show us a different kind of shadow, what Bregson calls our “opposition,” the part of us that is working against our wholeness.  More about this at another date.  Some dreams may be opportunities to bring opposites within us into relationship.  Some are revelatory, in that they reveal God.  “Big dreams” can show us our life purpose.  Some dreams are just what they are.  They may be visits from ancestors.  They may show us a solution to a problem.  Some might even show us a parallel life in a different dimension.  Many cultures believe our dreams take place in an environment more real and whole than the world we call reality.  I am starting to believe this.

I am cautious about technique in regards to dreams.  I think one needs to have deep respect for dreams in order to “hear” them and technique can become mechanical and distancing.  As I have mentioned before, “respect” means “to look again.”  Often we don’t bother ‘looking again’ at our dreams.  Even if we tell our dream to someone or decide upon an interpretation, we often then forget about it.  Besides respect, I think one needs to develop a feeling for dreams.  I have an image of feeling them and rubbing them between one’s fingers like clay.

To have a feeling for dreams, one needs a kind of empathy, an ability to enter into another world.  One needs to feel the feelings in the dream and sense them.  It might help to ask yourself, ‘what would I be feeling if I were this person (or this one or even myself) in the dream?  It might also be helpful to ask what would I be smelling, hearing, or tasting?  This helps us embody the dream, as well as help us enter into it, and it also brings attention to what is most significant.

I am writing this today because of the dream I mentioned above that made me think I

need to ease off on the reading.  What it suggested to me, along with the one I had the previous night, is that my own creativity has been stuck and I am suffocating my creative voice by the books I have been reading by male authors, as creative and inspired as they may be.  I have things to say about dreams too, and I might even discover more about what those things are, if I start writing about them.

I am reading about dreams, my third book in a matter of days.  I’ve been trying to cram in  as many books as I can over the holidays, though last night I had a dream that suggests this might not be such a great idea.

There are so many approaches to dreams and I think most of them are valid, depending on the type of dream.  Not all dreams are created equal.  There are some dreams that are warnings, others are prescient in other ways.  For example, I knew I would be accepted into graduate school, as I had a dream that assured me of it before I received the letter.  Some show us our shadow, that is, aspects of ourselves that we have disowned and are needed for our wholeness – if we are brave enough to look.  Others show us a different kind of shadow, what Bregman calls our “opposition,” the part of us that is working against our wholeness.  More about this at another date.  Some dream are efforts to bring opposites within us into relationship.  Some are revelatory, in that they reveal God.  “Big dreams” can show us our life purpose.  Some dreams are just what they are.  They may be visits from ancestors.  They may show us a solution to a problem.  Some might even show us a parallel life in a different dimension.  Many cultures believe our dreams take place in a more real and whole world than the life we call reality.  I think there is some truth to that.

What I want to write about here is that I am cautious about using technique in regards to dreams.  I think one needs to have deep respect for dreams in order to “hear” them and technique can become mechanical.  As I have mentioned before, “respect” means “to look again.”  Often we don’t bother ‘looking again’ at our dreams.  Even if we tell our dream to someone, we often then shrug it off and forget about it.  Besides respect, I think one needs to develop a feeling for dreams.  I have an image of feeling them and rubbing them between one’s fingers like clay.

Dreams are not to be analyzed and interpreted.  Just the opposite.  Interpretation distances.  To have a feeling for dreams, one needs a kind of empathy, an ability to enter into another world.  One needs to feel the feelings in the dream and sense them.  It might help to ask yourself, what would I be feeling if I were this person or this one or even myself in the dream?  It might also be helpful to ask what would I be smelling, hearing, or tasting?  This helps us embody the dream.

I am writing this today because of a dream I woke up with this morning.  What it suggested to me, along with the one I had the previous night, is that my own creativity has been stuck and I am suffocating my creative voice by the books I have been reading by male authors, as creative and inspired as they may be.  I have things to say about dreams too, and I might even discover more about what those things are, if I start writing about them.

It is a tradition in my family to watch the 1953 version of A Christmas Carol, the one with    Alastair Sim, some time around Christmas.  Last night, Christmas Eve, we watched it at my brother’s.  Because this year, dreams are especially on my mind, I was struck more than usual by the brilliance of Dickens’s story.

I was more aware of how Scrooge’s dreamworld overlapped into his day, which I appreciate is not just for the sake of this story.  Night dreams do travel into our day or perhaps it is the other way around.  The dreams which occur during our day, that is, the dreams that we call our every day reality, have at their base, the same ground as that of our night dreams.  In the Scrooge story it is unclear at times, if he is awake or dreaming.  Or is he somewhere in between?

I am reminded of how often, when discussing dreams with clients, I have said, “the dream reminds me of…” (something in their life) or when something occurs in their life, I say, “that reminds me of your dream.”  As tempting as it sometimes is, I try to resist interpreting dreams as if I could possibly know their one meaning.  I like to continue to tune into the dreams, aware they remain living and breathing.  I find that this approach of engaging the dream over time, supports transformation.

I am reading in The History of Last Night’s Dream about how we may not be the creators of our dreams.  Ancients believed the ones responsible for their dreams were “outside” of them, in other words the creators of dreams were the gods. “They,” usually, though not always, speak in a language less clear than in Scrooge’s dreams but if we try to engage them as we would a person, or people, who speak(s) a foreign language, we will learn from them.

Sometimes what they communicate isn’t through words or concepts.  If we hang out with them for a while, we may get a feeling for what they are about.  We get a sense of their reality and possibly their origins.  There is less separation between our world and theirs. We may not even be aware when our dreams have transformed us and we are more in their world than yesterday.

WordPress on this site has been updated, and hopefully the sp-m will be blocked so we can  receive comments on here again.

It’s Christmas Eve and not so easy to get in the Christmas spirit with all the rain but I am looking forward to getting together with family over the next few days.

My intention of focusing on alchemy over the next year has led (funny, I first of all wrote ‘lead’) me into the world of dreams.  I finished reading Moss’s book on The Secret History of Dreaming, which was fascinating and profound (he is also an engaging writer), and coincidentally enough, he has a whole chapter on the collaboration between Carl Jung and the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli.  Both explored dreams, alchemy, and the connection between the psyche and matter.  I definitely feel I am in the flow of my life and I can’t wait to see where it takes me.

Just before I started writing on here I saw a photo of Steve Jobs and the Apple logo.  I guess I am a little slow but for the first time I connected the bite out of the apple as an amazing symbol for a computer company, with its connections to the Garden of Eden and the birth of consciousness.

Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas and the very best over the holidays!

I mentioned my desire to explore alchemy more deeply this year and neglected to mention another area I am also excited to immerse myself in, that of dreams.  I am starting to get a sense of how the two come together, and part of it has to do with knowing how to attend to the “dreamtime.”

I had the experience of this myself recently.  Since I was over near Alma St. last week I decided to drop into Banyen Books, a dangerous place for me, as I rarely leave empty handed.

I had a brief look at the remainder (I think they call it publisher’s overstock) table and was about to leave when I spotted a single book with a beautiful but slightly bent cover.  It was called The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss.  I was aware of a familiar experience I have had countless times in Banyen.   It is as if for a moment there is only me and this book I am holding and I knew there was no way I would put it down again.  Book in hand I wandered over to the Jungian section to see what was new there.  On their marked down shelf another book called The History of Last Night’s Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul lit up in front of me.   Seems there was a theme…  I nestled that one in my arm and hurried to the cashier before I could get into more trouble.  (At least these were both markdowns.)

Interesting to me that not only were both about the history of dreams but they also referred to something “secret” and “hidden”, and I can’t resist a good mystery.  I am reading Moss’s book every chance I can get.

What I especially like about Moss’s book is not only the author’s vast knowledge of both ancient and modern approaches to dreams throughout the world, but he includes in his definition of dreaming, a state of being awake in which one remains connected to the wisdom of the dream realm.

This state has been referred to by all sorts of terms such as altered state of consciousness, but this term puts some people off because it reminds them of drug induced states.  Some call it a level of trance state but that has various connotations related to hypnosis, etc.  Many think of it as connection with the unconscious.  Arnold Mindell calls it awareness of the secondary process, the primary process being our ego state in which we identify with consensual reality.  Aboriginal terms include the dreamtime or dream world.  It is as if one actually enters a different space, as in place and time while remaining awake in the world.  Though few are in this state permanently, it can benefit us by learning how to maintain it as much as possible.  I think of it as allowing the waters of life to refresh the wasteland of our every day existence.

As I said, I am sensing how dreaming and alchemy are inseparable. Through remaining connected and engaging the dreamtime, by day and by night, we are able to respond to our calling and through this we participate in the process of alchemy, that of spiritual transformation.

I’m sensing something beginning to “coagulate.”

Image: A Sleeping Girl by Albert Moore

P.S. I am sorry that for now  I am unable to invite comments as I have had to turn off this feature because of being inundated by spam.  This is temporary.