Category: Healing Dreams (Page 3 of 4)

Lying Down Dreaming: Body Language in Dreams

March 15, 2016 / kirstenbackstrom

Since we experience the dream world as actively embodied (dream figures are usually doing things), it’s likely that movement, gesture, and posture are expressing something important, just as they would be in waking life. When we consider the metaphors, storylines and themes in our dreams, let’s also consider what’s going on in the body language.

In waking life, the body language of conversation can be as significant as the words that are exchanged, so shouldn’t it be the same with dreams? Suppose the incidental gestures and postures of dream figures are as meaningful as their overt intentions, opinions, and emotions… What do our dream bodies have to say?

If you keep a dream journal, you might become aware that you are describing certain physical actions repeatedly within a single dream, or as a pattern over the course of many dreams. Perhaps you notice there’s a lot of reaching, or crouching, or stumbling, or smiling, or running, or waving. Or you might sense that there’s a trend in the way things are being done when you keep coming across certain adverbs like quickly, or carefully, or awkwardly, or angrily. These words refer to the body language of the dream. What do they tell you? Are they consistent with the dream’s other communications?

Does one character’s “crouching” have the same purpose or significance as another character’s “crouching”—? Or is one character crouching down to pet the squirrel, and another character crouching behind the couch to eavesdrop? Is one “careful” gesture the same as another—? Or is someone carefully placing the chopsticks in a row, and someone else carefully tucking the baby into bed, or carefully crossing the minefield?

In the process of sharing a recent dream with my peer dream group, I noticed that the dream-ego and other dream figures kept lying down. Each lying down seemed different, and together they expanded the range of the dream’s meanings for me. Like with dominos, each dream figure’s lying down seemed to set off the next—click, click, click… Continue reading

The Phenomenal Dream

February 2, 2016 / kirstenbackstrom

When I write or talk about dreams, I often begin by writing or talking about waking life experiences. Dreaming and waking exist on a continuum—they are not entirely separate states, only variations in the landscape of consciousness. Our lives are the roads (or footpaths or railroad tracks) that wander through this ever-changing landscape: we pass through dreaming, waking, dreaming, waking… and all the different experiences in between.

Dreams make more sense, and offer more openings, if we remember that they are lived experiences—as subjectively real as any other experiences. The essential reason for paying attention to dreams is that they are part of our lives, remembered or not—and no part of our lives deserves to be discounted. If I want to live a full life, then I want to live my dreams fully, too. Living fully involves intentional participation in our experiences, waking or dreaming, and sometimes creative reflection upon these experiences.

To illustrate what I mean by this, I’ll reflect a bit on the waking experience I’m having today. Sometime after midnight last night, I developed a migraine—and, by the time I got up this morning, I had a blinding headache, nausea and dizziness. Those are the basic facts. If this were a dream, you might say it was a pretty awful dream. But, fortunately, although I had a full day planned, I didn’t have a strict schedule, and so could let my body decide how to go about the business of getting things done. It turned out that, after taking some medication for the pain, I could do most things I would have done anyway—only very, very slowly and carefully.

Migraines affect me peculiarly: they make me zero in on one thing at a time, with exquisite appreciation, so I become absorbed in every aspect of every moment. It’s as if the pain surrounds me like a shimmering shell of light, with a soft, cool hollow at the center where something newly born is nestled.

Sipping cranberry juice and coffee, eating crispy rice cakes and plain yogurt, brushing my teeth, talking (quietly) with Holly. Then puttering through some chores, and visiting the sunny morning outside, testing my senses…

A migraine heightens my awareness. The sensation of tipping and spilling the stale water out of the birdbath so I can refill it is like tipping and spilling and refilling something inside my chest. Lowering my head as I crouch to pick a weed makes the world around me rearrange itself at a different angle, and I can feel the stringy stem between my fingertips and smell the soil as the roots let go. I have to keep looking down (resting my eyes on the soft, blunt colors of the ground) because the world is too intensely bright. Even the softest bird call (a chickadee, a goldfinch) feels painfully sharp and clean—like cool air on a toothache. Continue reading

A Place at the Table: Dreams of Scarcity & Abundance

January 6, 2015 / kirstenbackstrom

You know those dreams where you just can’t get what you want? Maybe there’s this buffet—you see all kinds of great treats when you walk by, but then when you get in line and it’s finally your turn to serve yourself, there’s nothing left…?

Variations on this dream are pretty common in general, but I suspect they’re especially likely to show up at this time of year. Why? Because, in the northern hemisphere at least, it’s the season when we start worrying about having enough to go around. The abundance of the harvest-time is well past, and spring still seems far away; humans and other animals begin to take a good look at the supplies, and wonder how long they will last. Sometimes we take a peek at others’ supplies, too, suspecting that they’ve got more than we’ve got.

To combat the dread, and subsequent hostility, that can come along with this kind of scarcity-mentality, many ancient (and modern) midwinter traditions include a celebration of abundance and generosity. It’s the “season of giving” for very good reasons. We need each other at this time of year. Stinginess can lead to disaster.

I find that whenever money gets tight and I become fearful about whether we’ll have enough, I need to literally give something away in order to remind myself that I am part of a larger whole, part of a community of living beings who can support each other through good times and hard times. Instead of noticing what I don’t have, I try to be grateful for all that I do have—and share it with those around me, without counting and comparing.

But my dreams sometimes suggest that I’m still anxious about getting enough for myself:

A Place at the Table: I arrive at the feast that I have helped to prepare, but find that there is no chair for me. Someone has taken my seat, and there are not enough chairs to go around. Then I notice that there is no plate at my place, though everyone else has theirs. Also, there is not enough food. The last helpings have gone to others, and all of the serving dishes are empty. I stand alone, and feel sorry for myself.

Dreams like this one simply seem to be commenting on a state of mind that is present. Yes, the cold and dark at this time of year do bring up feelings of fearfulness, resentment, the instinctive desire to hoard and hide what I have. What is the point of being reminded that I feel this way, when I am really trying hard to remind myself that I can also feel generous and abundant?

I think the usefulness of such dreams lies in the vividness of the imagery, and the potential of that imagery to make an impression on the psyche at a deep level. When I have dreams that just seem to be telling me unpleasant truths about myself and my situation, I look at the images that the dream chooses to express those truths. Continue reading

What Dreams Tell Me About My Health

September 2, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

Before I talk about “what dreams tell me about my health,” I need to begin with a disclaimer: Dreams are not reliable diagnostic tools. Although dreams can carry essential information about my physical health, warn me of developing illnesses, and even offer healing guidance, they do so in unpredictable ways. Getting direct medical advice from dreams is a risky business, and I don’t recommend it.

Now let me (apparently) contradict myself by telling my own story. A while ago, I began to have spasms of pain in my upper left back. The pain was completely disabling, and frightening in its intensity. It went on for a couple of days, and I could barely eat or sleep. Because of my medical history, there were reasons to be concerned about the possibility of pancreatitis (which evoked the even more awful possibility of pancreatic cancer). So I went to the doctor. After medical consultation, tests, and a scan, both pancreatitis and kidney stones were ruled out. The pain was apparently a severely strained muscle. With pain medication and a lot of rest, I got back to normal pretty quickly.

Although it was probably a good thing to put my mind at ease by getting it checked out, I might have saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d relied on my dream-instinct.

In the past, when something has been seriously wrong with me, there have always been indications in my dreams. A few times, there were actual “prodromic” dreams that pointed at specific problems (for example, dreams of rodents biting me around the neck area in the exact places where I later developed lymphoma tumors)—but such dreams were only really significant for me in retrospect, since I didn’t recognize their warnings at the time. Jeremy Taylor describes a more useful dream of this kind in one of his books—a woman dreamed there was a piece of rotting meat in her purse, and this prompted her to seek medical help and get diagnosis and treatment for cancer. That signal seems pretty obvious, but many such indicators (like my own prodromic dreams) are more ambiguous. It takes real skill (or a good guess) to recognize when an image in a dream points to a physical health problem, and when it doesn’t. 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

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.

“No Feeling Is Final”: Healing Beyond Feelings

March 11, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

The title of this post is a quote from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke—“no feeling is final.” I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about the meaning of healing lately (see “Kites in the Wind: Defining a Healing Dream”), in preparation for a workshop on healing dreams that I’ll be offering soon. At the same time, I’ve been looking at the experience of healing in my own life, and have found that my personal sense of wholeness and well-being has a lot to do with my relationship to feelings, emotions, moods.

Emotions come and go—good or bad, they are the life energy of my experiences. However, their nature (like the nature of all energy) is to be perpetually moving, flowing, changing. In a healthy system, emotions flow through without getting stuck. Personally, I’ve found that when I become too identified with a feeling, it turns into a mood—a prolonged, limited and limiting state of being—and leaves me with few options.

If I think (and repeatedly reinforce the thought) that “I am angry,” then only the choices of an angry person are available to me. But if I just notice, “I feel anger,” then I am free to feel something else in a few moments. When “no feeling is final,” all the possibilities, pleasant or unpleasant, are at least open to change.

How does this apply to dreams? I just read a reference to studies by the dream researcher Calvin Hall, which revealed a surprising paradox: When counting the pleasant or unpleasant emotions in the dreams of his research subjects, he found that a significant majority of the emotions experienced in their dreams fell into the “negative” category (anxiety, frustration, sadness, etc.); yet, when the subjects were asked to rate dream experiences as a whole, most of them described their dreams as pleasant rather than unpleasant. Continue reading

Kites in the Wind: Defining a Healing Dream

March 4, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

Healing is a hard word to define! I don’t think of healing as fixing or curing or solving, but as a process of moving toward wholeness. Healing experiences can include maturing or ripening—coming to fullness and realizing potential—but they may also include dissolution and death, which are essential to completion and new birth.

So, when I talk about healing dreams (as I have been in the last couple of posts), I don’t usually focus on those exceptional dreams that actually seem to initiate a miraculous cure to an intractable illness, or a perfect solution to an impossible dilemma. Such dreams do occur, and entire cultural/religious practices (like the ancient healing rites at temples dedicated to Asclepius) have been devoted to the incubation of dreams that will bring health, wealth, and happiness to the desperate.

There are stories of people afflicted by poverty who dream of a buried treasure in the backyard, and then find the treasure just where the dream said it would be. There are stories of people with terminal illnesses dreaming of a healing herb that ultimately cures them, or experiencing a healing within the dream itself (an infusion of light, a cleansing, or a surgical intervention) and awakening disease-free. You can find books full of these stories—and there’s little doubt that dreams can bring about healing that involves a total reversal of fortunes, a “cure.”

However, if we are looking for special “healing” dreams to solve our problems, we are likely to be disappointed. I believe the reason some rare dreams actually “fix” things is that in those particular situations true healing happens to coincide with fixing, curing, solving. Most of the time, healing is a more subtle process, and healing dreams work their “miracles” by moving toward balance within the intricate network of other factors in a dreamer’s life experience. Continue reading

Can Healing Dreams Offer Practical Help?

February 25, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

In the last post (“The Healing Experience of the Dream Itself”), I emphasized that healing dreams aren’t usually specific in their helpfulness. I wrote: Dreams don’t generally bring healing by offering immediate solutions. If I incubate a dream with a particular problem in mind, asking for an answer, I believe I will always get a response, but usually it is a response that asks me to open myself to the whole experience, rather than giving me a specific key to unlocking the problem.

But, can dreams offer any practical help? By asking me to “open myself to the whole experience” of the problem I’m facing, can they help me to find useful tools or guidance within myself and within my situation? I believe that they can. And I believe that attending to the details of my dreams is one of the best ways to become aware of unexpected options and unconventional answers that might be available to me.

It is the very fact that the possibilities presented in dreams are unexpected and unconventional that makes them useful. If I am in need of healing, I have probably already considered, and tried, every possible solution within the grasp of my conscious mind. I’ve already reacted with strong emotions, and worked my way through various approaches to the problem. By the time I remember to go to my dreams for help, I’ve usually exhausted myself with the struggle, and I’m ready to try any crazy thing the dreams might suggest. Continue reading

Category: Healing Dreams (Page 3 of 4)

Lying Down Dreaming: Body Language in Dreams

The Phenomenal Dream

A Place at the Table: Dreams of Scarcity & Abundance

What Dreams Tell Me About My Health

Seasonal Dreaming

Nature Dreams

Dreamwork Tells A Healing Story

“No Feeling Is Final”: Healing Beyond Feelings

Kites in the Wind: Defining a Healing Dream

Can Healing Dreams Offer Practical Help?

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