Page 14 of 19

Dream Composting

June 10, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

In my waking life, I am very happy in my work: I love teaching about dreams, facilitating dreamwork with individuals and groups, writing and exploring dreams in general… But a big part of my job is just the business of tracking a million details—and this can make me feel a bit crazy, even though I’m pretty good at it. I guess this sort of thing is part of most people’s lives these days: responding to e-mails, updating schedules and mailing lists, checking facts, creating new documents, planning and promoting events, social networking communication, troubleshooting website problems, etc. In the midst of the lists and reminders, it’s hard to find breathing space, and easy to lose touch with the meaning behind all this activity.

While all this is going on, I keep remembering why dreamwork is worthwhile—trying to let it help me stay grounded in my connection to the natural world, my desire to serve others, to learn and grow. Maybe I have another twenty years or so in this life, maybe less, maybe more—Am I experiencing this time fully, and giving myself to each moment? Where is this journey taking me, and how can I better participate in the unfolding process? I hope these are questions that we all take time to ask ourselves. We can also ask our dreams…

However, dreams are tricky—or perhaps “trickster-y.” They rarely give straightforward answers, and most dream-answers compound my questions with more questions. In fact, dreams respond to inquiries in the same way that waking life responds to dilemmas: through experiences that illustrate the nature and potential of the current situation. If my situation is complicated and entangled with my ideas about how things should be, then the experiences that come in response to my big questions will be similarly complicated and entangled. Continue reading

Seasonal Dreaming

June 3, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

Do your dreams reflect the seasons? I’ve talked about some concepts shared by haiku and dreams in the last couple of posts [“Haiku Dreams,” and “Nature Dreams”], and one more of these shared concepts is the way that references to a specific season somehow increase the sense of universality and timelessness in both haiku and dreams.

In haiku, the season is always included, either directly or indirectly—and this provides orientation in the natural world, as well as setting a tone and implying certain common associations understood between writer and reader. Is something similar going on in dreams?

Of course, not all dreams include seasonal references. Last night, for example, my dream fragments all seemed to be set indoors, and I can’t remember anything that would suggest what time of year it might have been. But when there are outdoor settings and a more continuous flow of dreaming, I can usually get at least some impression of a season. More often than not, it’s the same season that is currently happening around me in the waking world—but fairly frequently, there are interesting seasonal shifts or variations.

In early May, in Portland Oregon where I live, dogwoods and lilacs were in bloom, but my dream took place in New England (where I grew up) and reflected the season there at the tail end of winter:

I’m visiting my mother and look out the window to see that the trees are still bare and there’s still a lot of snow on the ground. I want to take a walk, but don’t know if I have my boots, or warm clothes with me. As I watch, it begins to rain, making the snow soggy. I open the door and take a deep breath of the fragrance of mud and melting snow—which evokes a strong sense of childhood springtime. I remember the relief of spring coming after a long, long winter.

This dream brought up associations with the grudging first glimpses of spring in my childhood—a time when I would dig down through the old snow in April just to see and touch some matted green grass. When spring finally did come, it came slowly, with many setbacks, and by the time the season hit its stride, summer was ready to take over. Continue reading

Nature Dreams

May 27, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

In the last post, I wrote about how dreams can be made up of “haiku moments”—rich images and direct experiences that speak for themselves and don’t require interpretation (“Haiku Dreams”). Another characteristic of haiku that I only mentioned briefly is the way they include the natural world; this, too, is a quality they share with dreams.

I just returned from a long walk. It’s really spring here now, and this has been an exquisite morning: warm sunshine, soft wind, smells of flowers (including the stinky Mountain Ash—not all flowers smell sweet!) and grasses, birdsong and windchimes and lawn mowers, swaying shadows and busy squirrels. As I am walking, I try not to separate myself from all this. Everything is alive, and includes me—even the things that make me uncomfortable.

At one point, going down a steep hill, my ankle rolled and I fell forward hard on one hand and knee, momentum carrying me down all the way so my shoulder and cheek hit the dirt. Ouch. Bruised and relieved not to be badly hurt (also glad no one was watching), I picked myself up. The ground is solid, and colliding with it was not pleasant, but there was an undeniable immediacy to the experience. I recognize myself as a creature with a body that’s made up of the same peculiar combination of solid stuff and pure energy as everything around me. The more waking time I spend outside in nature, the more my dreams become immersion experiences as well, with rich landscapes pervaded by the vitality of the natural world. Continue reading

Haiku Dreams

May 20, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

In haiku, a glimpse of an immediate experience becomes an opening into the spaciousness of the infinite present. Natural images evoke paradoxical emotions and sensations, conveying meaning without creating meaning. The meaning is the moment itself. There’s something dream-like about the images in haiku, and also something haiku-like in the images of dreams.

while I’m gone
my dog
takes the driver’s seat
-Christopher Herold

This haiku by Christopher Herold really says it all! As with most haiku, it’s easy to take it quite literally. Perhaps I’ve gone into the grocery store, leaving my dog in the car—while I’m gone, the dog takes the driver’s seat. I can picture this scene with delightful clarity: the dog (a setter?) sitting earnestly upright , looking straight ahead over the steering wheel, waiting. Maybe the dog considers beeping the horn (or driving off without me?), but shows restraint and patience instead. If I dreamed this scene, it would make me smile. The situation just is what it is. The nature of the relationship between dog and human being, in a nutshell (or in a small car). Continue reading

Dreamwork Tells A Healing Story

May 13, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

In many (if not all) indigenous cultures, the regular practice of storytelling is considered essential to the well-being of the community as a whole, not only because of the entertaining and teaching value of shared stories, but also because they can be literally healing. And many dreams come in the form of stories, which, when shared and explored, can have this same healing power.

In studying a variety of spiritual traditions, I find again and again that stories keep cultures alive, and serve to bring people into harmony with their environment and one another. In some cases, the healing power of storytelling is explicit. For example, healing ceremonies of the Dineh (“Navajo”) recount—and in a sense re-enact—the experiences of spirit beings in the mythic past whose stories become the healing template for addressing present day problems.

In one such story, the hero twins Monster Slayer and Born-for-Water undertake a long and difficult journey in search of their father. Upon their return, they must defend their home community from the overwhelming onslaught of some terrible monsters. Their successful battle with these monsters leaves them exhausted, at the point of death. They are healed by being told their own story from the beginning… And eventually, this story itself becomes a healing gift to all people, retold in ceremonies for those who seek to be brought back into harmony with life. (I’m drawing this interpretation of the Dineh story from Joseph Campbell—and apologize if I’m misrepresenting it in any way.)

The idea that we might be healed by being told our own story has great resonance on both a psychological and a spiritual level. We require healing when we find ourselves out-of-balance (physically or otherwise), as our sense of connection to the source, context, and meaning of our lives has been impaired, injured, or even destroyed. If this damage is significant, then healing cannot be accomplished simply by curing the illness or repairing the broken place—there’s a profound need to go back to the beginning, to see the larger patterns of our lives and how those patterns fit together with the life around us. We need to hear others tell us—and to tell ourselves—who we have been, what we have done, and where be belong. In this process, our individual stories become part of a universal story, and our lives can be of service to all life. This is harmony, wholeness, healing.

My dreams are healing because they tell and re-tell my stories in new ways—and help me to recognize that these stories are not mine alone. When we do dreamwork, we engage in a healing, storytelling practice: we discover familiar patterns, familiar images, familiar emotions, familiar relationships, familiar responsibilities and challenges, familiar gifts and blessings, and we know we are part of a larger whole: we belong. But what makes this process wonderful (and truly healing) is that all of the familiar stuff is expressed in the light of individual experience, with its own color and texture, comedy and tragedy, characters and settings, surprises and satisfactions.

Life itself is engaging because it manifests in so many forms; each individual form is perfectly unique yet recognizably interconnected with all the others. The stories and dreams that arise from our lives are meant to be shared because they open up new worlds for all of us, while restoring, sustaining and enriching the world we know.

Housekeeping Dreams

May 6, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

After a week of deep, lucid, lovely dreams—I’m now remembering only fragmentary, unpleasant and frustrating dreams. Such is the ebb and flow of dreamwork! I woke up this morning exasperated and grumpy after dreaming:

The Bed Is A Mess: I feel frazzled, anxious, impatient. There’s a charismatic yet slightly creepy spiritual leader coming to stay in my community, and I’m preparing a bed for him. According to his preference, the bed is just a bunch of blankets and old clothes strewn on the floor and covered in a contour sheet. I see that the sheets are stained, and decide to put all the bedding in the laundry and start fresh. Now, I search through a jumble of clothes and blankets, trying to find enough soft stuff to make a new bed. Others keep taking some of the best blankets for their own purposes. I put as much stuff as possible on the floor, trying to arrange it so that it will be soft, not too lumpy, and cover all the bare spots—but I can’t really see how this is going to work. How could a sheet fit over it all, and how could it possibly be comfortable? I know I’ve slept on such a bed myself, and it wasn’t too bad, but now my efforts seem ridiculous. After scrounging for more materials, I return to find that a dog has pooped on one of the bare spots. I am disgusted, and want someone else to clean it up.

Lately, I’ve been working with “bad” dreams—especially my own—and testing the belief (or hypothesis) that, as Jeremy Taylor says: “All dreams come in the service of health and wholeness” (Dream Work Tool Kit #1). Dreams like this one might strain my ability to see the wholesome qualities! (Dramatically frightening or disturbing nightmares are another story—to be considered at another time.)

I can certainly recognize that there’s metaphor and meaning in this unpleasant dream: I am encountering my own ambivalence about preparing a comfortable place for spiritual ideals that I’m not sure I trust—and also wrestling with my own need to control and “clean up” the world around me. Old clothes and blankets (maybe old roles and securities) aren’t coming together to make a new bed! And then there’s the poop (potentially, the fertilizer for that new “bed”—as in a garden bed?) that just seems like smelly waste material to me. I want to wash my hands of this whole project!

What is the use of such dreams? I already think I know what it’s trying to say, but it’s not particularly helpful. Yeah—I’m a mess—this is no big revelation. I notice that the dream-self (the “I” in the dream) feels worse and worse as the dream goes on. And it all ends on an ugly note. This seems to be telling me that there’s no hope! But, there have to be other ways of looking at it… Continue reading

Thinking, Dreaming, Thinking

April 29, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

The thing looks like a giant brain, cracked up from too much thinking…

I’ve been thinking about thinking. (And now, as I write this, I guess I’m thinking about thinking about thinking—as well as thinking about dreaming!)

A central aspect of my own spiritual practice is my effort to become aware of what brings me more into alignment with the intricate patterns of all life, and what tends to knock me out of alignment. Even though I’m in awe of the amazing powers of the thinking mind—it’s clearer and clearer the older I get that most of my thinking knocks me out of sync. My everyday habits of thought regularly waste energy, contribute to suffering (for me, and sometimes others), and can definitely prevent me from being fully present and in tune with the world around me.

Some basic planning, organizing, remembering, rehearsing, reflecting, creative cognitive processing, etc. is useful, of course. But really, an awful lot of the stuff that’s going through my head is repetitive, self-perpetuating worries or complaints. I tell myself stories that define me, so that I can keep thinking I know who I am. Maybe your thoughts are more elevated than this? More meaningful? Just listen to yourself for a while and see what you think…

The bottom line is that most (if not all) thinking—even the loftiest, most enjoyable, or most necessary thinking—takes us out of the present moment. The vast majority of thought refers to something either in the past or in the future, something not here and not now.

How does the world look, sound, feel, smell, taste—right now? What is this experience? Yes, some thought responses arise almost instantly even in the moment of experiencing… Yet, if I’m not swept away by my thoughts, not entirely persuaded by the story I’m telling myself about something that happened or didn’t happen or may happen or should happen—well, then I can be just where I am.

Personally, I know that too much thinking makes me pretty unhappy. Each thought has a very convincing argument for its own importance, but collectively they wear me down and make my world seem suffocatingly small. Continue reading

Compass Dreamwork Essentials

April 22, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

Some of the blog posts I’ve been writing can get pretty abstract. In the past couple of weeks, quite a few new subscribers have joined the Compass Dreamwork blog, and as I reviewed what I was planning to post for this week, I realized that it didn’t give enough of a sense of what “dreamwork as spiritual practice” is really about. What is the starting point for this work?

It’s time to write about the essentials, to give you an idea of how I am approaching dreams in general, and how dreamwork can be a significant spiritual practice. You can find most of this basic stuff elsewhere on the website, but here I’m going to spell it out—so if you are just discovering Compass Dreamwork, this is a good place to start.

I don’t really think there are any “experts” on dreams. Just as in my work with death and dying, I’ve found that the more I explore and the deeper I go into the world of dreams, the more mysterious it becomes. But those of us who have explored dreams in depth for many years can come to have some familiarity with the territory, and can be good guides and companions for others who want to go further into dreamwork as a spiritual practice.

Here’s some of what I’ve learned, what I’ve come to trust, about dreams. I hope you will test this for yourself, and come to your own conclusions about what is useful to you and what is not.

Dreams are experiences. Just like waking experiences, some dream experiences are pleasant and some are unpleasant. What matters, from a spiritual perspective, is not “controlling” the dreaming and waking experiences so that they are all pleasant (which is impossible), but becoming aware of how we respond and relate to those experiences. Our relationship to pleasant and unpleasant experiences ultimately determines their value for us—as all experiences offer the potential for learning, healing, and opening our hearts and minds
The spiritual practice of relating to our dream experiences (or our waking experiences) can occur both as the experience is happening, and in retrospect as we remember and reflect on that experience. The dreams we don’t remember are still valid experiences that help shape who we are, just as the waking experiences we have long since forgotten still contribute to our lives. However, the dreaming and waking experiences we do remember offer more opportunities for reflection that can affect how we respond to future experiences, and can allow us to take a more active role in our own growth and development.
Dreams offer some unique opportunities, different from the opportunities offered by waking experiences. Specifically, dreams show us that there are many ways of looking at ourselves, others, our world, and our sense of “reality.” In our waking lives, we can become stuck in self-reinforcing patterns that come to define us, limit our understanding, and determine our actions. For example, dreams call into question our absolute certainties about things like the nature of time and identity (in dreams, time can be fluid, and the experience of “self” and “other” can be malleable). Dreams can also allow us to explore moral and ethical questions without causing harm to ourselves or others—we can try out “forbidden” things and come to understand their metaphorical significance, without taking them literally.
By becoming dream explorers, we enlarge our potential for coping with paradox, change and the unknown with courage and compassion. When we reach major turning points or crossroads in our lives, when one way of life falls apart (through illness, accident, crisis, death, loss of a relationship, job or home, etc.) and something new has not yet begun—we must cope with a major shift in our conception of ourselves and our lives. In dreams, we regularly have “threshold experiences” in a context that can help us to become more creative and flexible, so that we will be better able to cope with such “threshold experiences” when they inevitably occur in our waking lives. Three aspects of such experiences are especially common in dreams: paradox (contradictory truths can coexist), change (something must end in order for something new to begin), and encountering the unknown (instead of answers, we find an open-ended questioning process). In dreams, our expectations are turned upside down again and again. This is closer to the way things “really are” than the day-to-day routines we can come to take for granted.
Some dream experiences can give us a glimpse—a direct experience rather than an abstract concept—of that which is ultimately meaningful and sacred. Such dreams have had a profound influence on the lives of individuals and communities, have guided spiritual and scientific breakthroughs, and may serve to remind us of our interdependence with the natural world. Dreams include our waking perspectives and draw upon our waking experiences, but they go beyond those perspectives and experiences as well. Dreams can include everything—what we think we know, and more than we could consciously imagine. So where do dreams come from? They are ours, and they are beyond us.

These are some of the essentials of my own dreamwork practice. They’ve emerged in the course of my explorations, and they guide me as I develop the programs and services of Compass Dreamwork. Of course, this is only the beginning! In other posts, I’ll write more about how these ideas (and others) apply to actually working with dreams. Please feel free to share your own learnings, or to raise questions that we can consider together.

Are Dreams Boring?

April 15, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

bored, bored, bored…

It’s a popular cliché that listening to (or reading about) other people’s dreams is boring. Really, really boring. Henry James said, “Tell a dream, lose a reader.” In all honesty, there’s some truth in this. Have you ever listened—or tried to listen—to a six-year-old recounting the plot of her favorite movie? When dreams are told without context, and without a sense of what the listener needs in order to follow the story… well, yes, they can be pretty monotonous.

Dreams definitely can have a “you-had-to-be-there” quality. Even the best storyteller might have difficulty conveying the indescribable experiences that occurred in a dream where sensory impressions were nuanced and intense, events seemed to overlap in timeless patterns, things kept changing into other things, and there was just a whole lot happening endlessly. As the little kid telling a movie plot (or a dream) might say: and then the man ate all the pizza … and then the dog was a horse… and then they ran over the fields… and then it was the next day… oh, and I forgot, the pizza wasn’t real, it was a big cookie kind of made of toast…

There are ways of telling dreams so that people will be engaged and even entertained. When I’m just telling a dream as an example, or to make a point, or to get a laugh (in a blog post, in a workshop, or casually with friends), I leave out everything that isn’t directly related to the topic at hand, and I try to choose a dream with images that are funny or vivid, a storyline that can be summarized simply, and scenes that are relatively easy to describe and imagine.

Nevertheless, even though I’m pretty experienced at both telling and hearing dreams, I can sometimes sound like the little kid recounting the relentless saga—especially when I’m trying to share all the significant details because I’m going to be working on the dream with others.

The bottom line is that sharing any complex experience that has profoundly affected you will be difficult. The context and background may be unfamiliar to your listeners, and lots of details are needed to convey the richness of the experience and its implications. So it’s best not to even bring it up unless everyone present is prepared to get past their own impatience, and give you and your experience—or dream—their full attention.

Okay, but here’s my heated defense of dreaming and dream-telling: Dreams are not boring at all! In themselves, they are often magnificently subtle, brilliantly “on target” with their insights, full of stunning surprises, hilarious plot twists, creative genius, rich sensuality, cunning irony, dazzling landscapes… Well, you see I’m biased in favor of dreams! It is definitely worthwhile to pay attention to them and share them, even though, as I’ve acknowledged, someone else’s dream can be very difficult to follow. Continue reading

Walking Around Wondering: The Wide-Angle Approach to Long, Detailed Dreams

April 8, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

Although it’s common to remember dreams in a fairly fragmentary way—with more impressions than exact details, and with few extended storylines—most dreamers will periodically experience long, vivid dreams with elaborate plots, a full cast of characters, and nuanced, detailed scenery. Especially for young people, or those who are going through major life changes, such dreams may come in abundance.

When I’m working with long dreams (my own and others’) that contain a wealth of images, interactions, emotions and events, it is easy to get overwhelmed. So, I’ve been considering different ways of approaching such dreams. In the last post, I described the close focus approach (“Holographic Webs”) and today I’d like to talk about the wide angle approach.

In the wide angle approach, if someone is sharing a long, complex, richly detailed dream, I listen to the whole thing with an openness to the big story, as if I were dreaming it, and really experiencing it, myself. But I don’t expect to remember every exact detail. Maybe I try to organize the whole dream into some shape that seems natural: What is the beginning, the middle, the end? Does the dream have “acts” or “scenes” like a play—and is there a progression, a “plot development”? Continue reading

Compass Dreamwork

Page 14 of 19

Dream Composting

Seasonal Dreaming

Nature Dreams

Haiku Dreams

Dreamwork Tells A Healing Story

Housekeeping Dreams

Thinking, Dreaming, Thinking

Compass Dreamwork Essentials

Walking Around Wondering: The Wide-Angle Approach to Long, Detailed Dreams

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