Dreamwork as Spiritual Practice

Tag: dreaming while awake (Page 1 of 2)

Dreaming the Change We Wish To See In the World

When I work with dreams, I’m always asking myself what kind of meaning and value this work might have for the larger world. Mahatma Gandhi said that we should “be the change we wish to see in the world”—and I believe our dreaming lives can be as important as our waking lives as we try to manifest meaningful change.

There is so much suffering everywhere—all around us and within us—and  most of us share a deep longing to make a difference, to serve and to help, to contribute to positive change and healing. How do dreams make a difference? It’s clear that our dreams can be a tremendous resource for creative ideas, and an inspiration to collective action. But it’s not only the inspiring, constructive, encouraging dreams that have something to offer. Our mundane, difficult, uncomfortable and even awful dreams may be our best hope as we grow into new possibilities for the future of our world. If we want to “be the change,” we have to bring our entire “being” and contribute through our difficulties as well as our successes; if we want to “dream the change” then we need to share our difficult dreams, and learn from them together.

Perhaps the biggest lesson that we have to learn is that we are not alone. We share this beautiful planet, and we share a magnificent world of dreaming as well. We also share suffering. When I am in physical or emotional pain, millions of other beings are familiar with that pain, and many of them are experiencing those same feelings along with me right now. When I react in anger, or withdraw, or become overwhelmed—millions are with me. Even (or especially) when I’m lonely, I am not alone—countless others are lonely, too. When I wrestle with myself in my very personal dreams, I’m struggling with experiences that are universal: these dreams have been dreamed before, and they will be dreamed long after I am gone. So, when my dreams seem uninspiring, I can still open my heart and mind, expand my point-of-view, adapt and reflect and grow… and perhaps this opening, expansive response can grow in the world. My dreams invite me to include everything, include others, because my solitary idea of myself is too small for the dreaming we need.

When my dreams are unpleasant or just “ordinary,” my tendency is to dismiss them and move on to more substantial, more appealing dream experiences. But if I want to grow, and if I want the world to change in positive ways, I can’t avoid the reality of disruption, distraction, and difficulty. While big challenges may seem more inspiring, it’s the little day-to-day problems that add up to the most significant world crises. If I can’t manage my temper with rude drivers in traffic, I can’t expect to transform the worldwide hatred and vengefulness that can lead to war and genocide. If I can’t tolerate the minimal deprivation or discomfort of a power outage or a neighbor’s barking dog, then I can’t expect entire populations to welcome refugees or forgive painful historical wrongs. If I am greedy for more than my share of local resources like water and shelter, then I can’t help persuade wealthy nations to give up their privileges to prevent drought, starvation and despair on other continents. My “ordinary” dreams often confront me with the ways that I cling to my own agenda and refuse to open myself to new experiences. But these dreams give me opportunities to notice the problems that result from this self-preoccupied behavior, and to practice exactly the kinds of responses that could lead to real change in the world.

As I reflect on these difficult dreams (the ones that tell me disagreeable truths about myself), I discover what works and what doesn’t work in my conduct toward others. I begin to catch myself perpetuating the problems of this world, and eventually I begin to take responsibiltiy for behaving differently. These dream experiences give me the chance to change myself. And when we share such dreams—without paralyzing shame, but with authentic remorse and the desire to see clearly, grow wiser, and be kinder—we can expand the process of real change exponentially.

No Nourishment for the Long Drive: Tonight, I’m leaving for the long drive “home.” I’m looking forward to the solitary drive, but I need to get a meal first, to fortify me for the journey. I go into a busy restaurant and sit at a central table with several people. I order my meal, and it arrives: an unappetizing plate full of pale orange tomato sauce with large meatball-like lumps under the sauce so I can’t really tell what they are. But it’s okay; it’s what I ordered. Briefly, I leave the table to get something (silverware? salt?) and when I return, my plate is gone. One of the women at the table has gone, too, and someone tells me that she sent back my dinner and ordered something “better” for me—something similar to her own, more special, meal. She’s a regular here and knows the menu, so she wanted to be sure I got a memorable meal. I’m annoyed that she took this liberty and now I have to wait a very long time for the new order to come.

I need to get on the road so that I won’t have to drive all night. I wait and wait, getting grumpier and grumpier. I consider just storming out and skipping dinner, but I’m really hungry and afraid I won’t handle the drive well if I haven’t eaten. Finally, the food arrives and it’s just a tiny plate with a little serving of something that looks oddly beautiful, but not satisfying. After I’ve apparently eaten it, I’m still hungry. There are some condiments and extras on a side table so diners can help themselves—at first, these look appealing and I think I can serve myself a plateful and fill up on that. But when I try to fill a plate, I find there’s not much here after all—just some overcooked vegetables in an oily sauce. I eat a few bites, but I’m still hungry and now I really need to leave on my long drive without any real sustenance.

I complain to another woman who apparently works here, grousing that the meal I got was probably more expensive than the meal I originally ordered, and I don’t feel like paying for food I didn’t order. The woman is very nice and immediately says that she (or the restaurant) will pay the difference, so I only need to pay for the meal I ordered. I’m taken aback, maybe embarrassed by her generosity, realizing how petty I was being… but I refuse her offer saying I don’t even know how much my original meal would have cost. Then I’m at the counter, to pay. An older woman rings up my meal at the register and hands me the check—it’s way too much! I notice that one of the dishes listed is actually the meal eaten by the woman who ordered my meal. Now I’m really indignant and I say that I won’t pay for her meal, especially since she inconvenienced me so much. The restaurant women recognize that I shouldn’t pay, and start to redo the math, removing the extra meal from the check. Again, I feel a little ashamed of my own crankiness. I just want to get on the road, in my quiet car, for the long drive home.

I woke from this dream feeling disappointed, isolated, and incomplete. My fantasy of a peaceful, reflective “drive home” had been spoiled by the interference of others, and by my inability to find the nourishment I needed to enjoy the experience of my private journey.

Yet I recognized that this kind of feeling is all-too-common in the small world of middle class American white people. The dream-ego imagines that her spiritual journey is a solitary one, and that her goal is to get on the road, to retreat into the quiet of her own private car. She thinks she needs to get where she’s going, so she doesn’t notice where she actually is. She knows she’s hungry, but doesn’t understand what kind of hunger needs to be satisfied before she can “get on the road.” The food she ordered (and doesn’t get to eat) looks pretty unappetizing—yet she resents being forced to eat something unfamiliar, chosen by someone else. When she tries to “serve herself” some “extras,” she feels even more unsatisfied. The shared table in the midst of the busy world of this restaurant offers opportunities that she rejects. Nothing pleases her, and she doesn’t want to pay for anyone but herself. When she’s ready to drive home at last, she is not really equipped for the journey ahead, and has left something essential behind.

It’s painful to see my own narcissism reflected here. But it’s a narcissism that would be recognizable anywhere—just about everybody wants to have their own immediate desires satisfied, wants control of their individual life journey. The first thing I need to understand as I approach this dream is that the important journey “home” has already begun when I enter that busy restaurant. I’m so busy trying to get “on the road” that I don’t notice I’m on the road right now. Our day-to-day search for personal nourishment and satisfaction, at a shared table in the midst of the world’s unpredictability and bustling activity, is just as important as the intentional spiritual path. I’m on the path already, along with everyone else in that restaurant. The dream seems to stall as I become more and more preoccupied with trivial matters. But, while my attention is on my own displeasure, while I’m feeling wronged and dissatisfied, I’m missing the gifts and opportunities that are coming my way.

If I order what I think I want and need, I get a bland, barely adequate meal. But a stranger at the table offers me an alternative: something surprising, something special—a smaller serving, but one that’s created with care. It doesn’t satisfy me because I barely notice that I’m eating it. I want more. But, really, no matter what I serve myself, it will never be enough. When I complain, I’m met with kindness. Yes, life is hard and we’re often hungry for more than we’ve been given, but we only have to pay for what we’ve ordered ourselves. This isn’t a dream about real starvation, real deprivation and suffering, it’s about the suffering and hunger we cause ourselves because we’ve refused to be nourished by the abundance that’s available.

When I share this dream with others, they commiserate with me, because it’s a pretty dreary story and it’s all I’ve got to share today. Yes, sometimes our dreams aren’t much fun—we all agree. But as the dreamwork unfolds, we pay attention to the possibilities that gleam softly in the dark corners of that dream restaurant. We recognize the dream-ego’s goals as our own, and we feel some compassion for her—but we also recognize that she isn’t going to be satisfied by the kind of food she’s been looking for, and she isn’t going to change unless she wakes up.

I know how I want to respond to this dream when I wake up. I want to go back and meet the other people who are sitting at the table with me. I want to thank the woman who ordered me a different meal, and the woman who offered to pay the difference, and the servers and cashier and cooks. I want to appreciate every bite of what I get to eat, and leave the extras for somebody else. I want to pay for my own meal, and more. Maybe, when I’m ready to get on the road again, I want to offer someone a ride—we could share the driving, so it wouldn’t be so hard to drive all night. If I dream this bigger dream, it won’t change the world tomorrow—but it will change me. And if I can change, we all can change, because there’s no such thing as a solitary spiritual journey. If we’re going to “dream the change,” we’re going to dream it together.

Easy Does It: The Path of Least Resistance, In Dreamwork and In Life

Dreamwork doesn’t have to be difficult. We don’t need to come up with a “solution” to the dream, because the dream is not a problem or a puzzle—it’s an experience, and, like any other experience, is filled with rich potential, some baffling details, and a variety of emotions and perceptions. I’m learning not to view my waking life experiences as problems to be solved, but as offerings to be appreciated. Dreams, too.

What does it look like to do dreamwork the easy way? Well, in dreamwork, as in life, following “the path of least resistance” can be a meaningful practice. When I encounter a dream—either remembering one of my own or hearing someone else’s—the first step on the path of least resistance is simply accepting the dream without judgement or analysis. I might notice that the dream images bring up feelings of confusion, anxiety, impatience, amazement, boredom, revulsion, comfort, excitement, restlessness, distress, delight… maybe one strong feeling, maybe a jumble of different feelings, maybe just a bewildered uncertainty about how to respond. I don’t work too hard to catch every detail, but let the dream present itself in its own way, and let myself be drawn into the dream’s images, events, and emotions as they come along.

After accepting and experiencing the dream uncritically, my natural curiosity leads me to ask questions that will increase my awareness and participation in the dreaming. I’ll open my senses, and wonder about everything. If some aspect of the dream seems especially incomprehensible or uncomfortable, I just notice my discomfort and let it be. Like a kid playing in a muddy stream, I take a long twig and fish up weeds and rotting leaves from the bottom, build little dams and watch the water spread behind them, float bits of bark to see which ones are fastest, look for jewelweed (the leaves turn silver underwater) and touch-me-nots (the pods burst and scatter tiny seeds). I take off my shoes and socks and wade right into the dream. This is all-absorbing, even when I encounter slimy or spiny creatures, even when I dredge up old beer bottles, even when I step in a deep spot and get wetter than I intended. I don’t need a plan: one question or experiment naturally leads to the next, and learning happens easily in the process.

Recently, I had an opportunity to take a ten-day personal retreat—staying in a little cottage alone, surrounded by rolling gardens and brambly woods. A couple of times a day, I walked over to a nearby house to feed and visit with two nice cats while their family was on vacation, otherwise I had no responsibilities. I really, really needed this time away. I’d been coping with a glut of health issues, medical appointments, work and existential crises for several months without a chance to reflect, so I was overdue for a break.

I started out thinking I might get a lot of writing done. I could set up a routine of meaningful practices—meditation, haiku, journaling, T’ai Chi, listening to sacred music, studying, exploring nearby parks, working on my book… I’d come home with a better grasp of my life situation, and a solid sense of spiritual accomplishment.

But that wasn’t what I needed, and that wasn’t what I did. Instead, I took it easy. I sat outside or inside, reading for hours on end. I watched the doe and fawn who came by almost every morning and evening to eat the garden. I listened to the birds (finches, chickadees, woodpeckers… ostriches? pterodactyls?). I dodged the yellow jackets that plagued me while I ate lunch. When I felt like moving, I walked up and down the level, quarter-mile gravel drive—up and down, up and down, up and down… walking along the magnificent row of sequoias that line the drive, past a few small pastures where there were occasionally rabbits or coyotes.

No productive planning. No long, steep, bushwhacking hikes. No writing. No schedule. No spiritual practices other than presence and participation. Nothing significant happened. I didn’t work at it, but I learned what I needed to learn from the experience itself—just as I might learn from the experience of a dream.

During this lovely, easy retreat, I couldn’t remember many dreams (and I didn’t make much of an effort to remember them), but one just came along, like the deer, to graze around in my mind:

Treasures Keep Coming My Way: I have a sense that many precious things are to be found here, so I look carefully. There are a couple of shiny quarters on the sidewalk! A homeless man claims one of them (apparently, he can’t pick up both, since his hands are full) and I pocket the other. Then, I realize he needs it more than I do, so I give it to him. He grumbles, not at all grateful, but accepts the coin—and I feel that I did the right thing. I go on, keeping my eyes open… and there are more treasures! Around a gift-shop counter where a woman is buying some fancy crystal ornaments, I see many oval glass discs scattered on the floor. Some are coin-sized, some as big as my hand; some are clear glass, some amber or pale blue. They’re incredibly beautiful, though very simple. Each disc has a tiny animal (one is a fox) etched into its center. I gather them all up, feeling rich. But then I realize they must belong to the gift-shop, so I bring them to the counter and give them to the sales clerk. She thanks me warmly, and finds my name on her customer list (she knows my name?)—telling me she’ll check the discs against their inventory, and then contact me to give them back if any do not belong to the shop. They are apparently very valuable. But I feel no sense of loss as I return them. I anticipate more and more treasures waiting for me.

 The more we give away, the more we have. Yes, of course, this is a cliché, but a very true one.

Ordinarily, I’m stingy with my energies, fearing I won’t live long enough to live fully, believing that I need to hoard my resources and my time, insisting that I must work very hard so that I don’t waste my precious life. But my retreat (and my dream) remind me that this isn’t true. Life can be easy—we can squander it, share it, give ourselves away and set ourselves free to follow an apparently random path that goes nowhere in particular… and the world will offer itself to us, willingly, again and again.

Dreamwork is easy when we drop our resistance and our itineraries and follow that plain path, appreciating whatever we find. Look at those sequoias—each one is different! Look, what a huge, scary spider (and don’t walk into that web)! Listen, I think I hear a Swainson’s thrush! Ah, let’s sit and rest for a bit… there’s no hurry. Another day, another dream, another treasure. Easy enough.

Being the Dreamer, Living the Dream

My priorities have changed significantly in the past few years, and so have my dreams. Although I’m not yet sixty, I’m starting to see the world as an elder, and my dreams have reflected this change as well. Especially in the past year, as I’ve developed symptoms of a degenerative disease that is accelerating my physical aging process (Radiation Fibrosis Syndrome), I’m truly discovering what it means to be initiated into a completely new stage in the life cycle—and it’s not what I expected. It’s much more subtle than the leap from childhood to adulthood, yet more profoundly meaningful than any of the other transformative experiences I’ve known.

So many times in my life, I’ve come to the end of one phase, experienced losses, uncertainty, and “suspended animation” during a transitional period, and then begun a new phase, with new energies, new resources, and new options. But, for some reason, when I left a job I loved five years ago and entered one of those painful, liminal transitions, the “new phase” I expected never seemed to arrive.

Instead of starting over, I found that the “suspended animation” just went on and on. Somehow, I’m not getting re-animated! Unless I reframe this experience, and change my expectations, my situation and prospects could look pretty grim. Loved ones just keep dying. I face more and more physical limitations. When I tried to go “back to school,” seeking out further education and training (which had always worked before), I encountered impossible obstacles. When I started new projects, they didn’t exactly fail, but required constant attention and drained away my energies rather than rejuvenating them. And, most disturbing, many of my familiar spiritual practices and disciplines no longer seemed life-giving.

At first, all of these discouraging experiences seemed to point to depression—so I soldiered on patiently, kept trying, hanging in there, not giving up, waiting for an opening, doing my best. I tried some big things, and lots of small things, but life just kept slipping by without any significant breakthrough.

Then, I began to notice something strange about this apparent stagnation. Underneath it all, I’m at peace in a way I’ve never been before. The harder I try, the more drained and discouraged I become; yet when I stop trying so hard, I’m filled with quiet joy. I’m not so concerned with proving myself, or even with being myself—instead, I’m just being. I’ve lost most of my ambition, but it doesn’t actually worry me (except when I think “Shouldn’t you be worried about this?”). I’m paying lots of attention to the physical pleasure of doing the things I can still do, and not dwelling much on the things I can’t do. The past makes me sad, the future can make me anxious—but I’m quite interested in the present, and the present is just fine.

Even when the world situation seems catastrophic, even when there are too many losses coming too fast, even when it looks like finances or health or politics will cause everything to fall apart—I sense and trust a kind of spaciousness, and can hold that space open for others and myself. I have no idea how I’m doing it.

What is this? The “new phase” I’ve been looking for is actually already in progress. It just doesn’t work the same way that any of my previous phases have worked. I’ve always been drawn to old people, because many of them have this funny way of not getting bothered, while still caring deeply. Could this be where I’m going? Could this be who I really am?

My dreams are different, too. Like many older adults, I’m not remembering them as well. Aside from the fairly common sleep difficulties that can disrupt dreaming as we get older, I suspect the dream-recall deficit is because the work of these dreams doesn’t urgently need to be brought to my conscious attention. I’ve accumulated enough material to work on over the past fifty-six years, and I don’t need more stuff to figure out and make sense of. What I need is simple experiences of being alive and valuing life. When I remember my dreams, they just point to what’s most important right now.

I have a lot of dreams about helping or teaching others, dreams where I’m not the “hero,” but the mentor, sidekick, or teacher. I’m trying to make it easier for someone: saving a spider from the bathtub, or bringing peppermint tea to a sick girl. In many of my dreams, I’m not the central character—and often, I’m not present at all, just a disembodied observer of someone else’s story—which, ultimately, is my story, too, of course. I have dreams of returning to familiar places, finding them changed, and adapting to those changes. And then there are the sweet dreams of just appreciating something beautiful: birdwatching from the deck of a becalmed ship as sunlight glitters on the water’s surface; or approaching a lit cabin through the woods in the dark. Continue reading

Dreaming of Homelessness, Part Two: Personal Associations

homeless 02I’ve been looking at one of my recent dreams from different angles, and writing about that process here, exploring the theme of homelessness. In the last post, I considered this dream as a literal description of the suffering involved when a homeless man must be separated from his beloved dog. Now, I’d like to take another approach, and try to understand the dream story in relation to my own life.

In the dream, a cold and ill homeless friend comes to our door, and we offer him food and shelter for the night. He is no longer capable of caring for his little papillon dog, and we must find a new home for her in spite of his unwillingness to lose her. The dream left me with many painful ethical questions about homelessness, autonomy, and responsibility, and I considered some of those questions in the last post [see “Dreaming of Homelessness, Part One”].

But the dream was especially poignant for me not only because it brought up literal concerns about other people who are homeless, but also because it evoked my own relationship to home, personal losses, and helplessness. Situations from the dream directly reflect the fact that I was far from home when I dreamed it (at the IASD conference in the Netherlands), and had just completed a difficult two-month pilgrimage, walking 500 miles on the Camino de Santiago.

During that journey I came to appreciate the intensity of the challenges that homeless people must face. At times, the relentless days and restless nights brought me to my physical and emotional limits, and exhausted my inner resources so that I felt profoundly vulnerable. When I finally came to the end of the long walk, I still felt dislocated and unclear about what I had learned, and so I dreamed of homelessness and helplessness represented by a dream figure with whom I could empathize. The painfully unresolved nature of the dream reflected many of my own unresolved feelings about my pilgrimage, and about other experiences from my past.

For me, “home” is a safe place—within myself and outside myself—where I can truly rest. It is a place where I am recognized and understood, a place where I trust my sense of self and my relationships with others. It is a place that offers physical and emotional security, and a certain amount of predictability. Archimedes said that with a long enough lever, he could move the earth—if only he had a place to stand. For me, home is a place to stand—and when I have that place to stand, I can live with strength, wisdom, kindness and courage. Without a home, I don’t know who I am or what I can do.

Actually, however, this definition of home sounds skewed. It’s certainly possible to feel insecure even in the happiest home. And how important is security anyway? What does it mean to be understood or safe?—I barely understand myself (thank goodness there’s more to me than I can rationally understand), and “safety” is conditional when we’re all mortal. Besides, needing to be understood and safe creates limitation rather than a true home. The kind of home that supports strength, wisdom, kindness, and courage actually arises more from shared acceptance of uncertainty than from having a solid place to stand.

Nevertheless, although I acknowledge the importance of vulnerability and openness, of having a home that’s more like a good pair of shoes than like a castle… well, this is my “growing edge,” which sometimes feels like the crumbling edge of a precipitous cliff. I’m not yet comfortable standing there!

“Home” is a big deal in my life. In my late teens, my family fell apart and I was homeless (in a way) for some time—never to the point of living on the streets, but dependent upon friends and strangers for temporary places to stay. I had few possessions (without a home, you can’t keep much), unstable health, little control over my circumstances, no luck getting work, constant uncertainty about finding food and shelter from one week to the next, and plenty of shame because others had to help me. So, even forty years later, it makes sense that when I undertook an extended pilgrimage in a foreign land my fears of homelessness surfaced right away—in my dreams and in my waking life. Continue reading

A Pilgrimage and A Quest

[Note from Kirsten: I’ve been away for the past two months, walking across Spain and participating in a dream conference in the Netherlands, while guest blogger Tina Tau has brought her gentle wisdom and beautiful writing to Compass Dreamwork. Now, since I still need a little time for rest and reflection before I’ll be ready to fully resume my own writing here, Holly Jarvis—my business partner, and beloved life partner—has offered a lovely article on personal transformation and communal connection…]

By Holly Jarvis, Guest Blogger

LightSong Fire mediumIt might seem that a pilgrimage or a quest would be a deeply individual, personal experience. Yet, the power of those experiences ripples out, touching the lives of family, friends, and community.

This past year brought big changes for both Kirsten and me. Kirsten lost her parents and I left my job and career. We’ve both been looking for meaning, a new perspective not easily accessed in ordinary consciousness or busy lives. And that brought each of us to commit to a transformational life challenge over the summer—for Kirsten a pilgrimage walk across Spain on the Camino de Santiago, and for me a vision quest.

As we talked about our hopes and concerns for our adventures, we discovered how similar they are. Kirsten’s pilgrimage would involve being far away from home, encountering physical hardships, and finding inner strength and spiritual renewal in unfamiliar circumstances. My vision quest will put me alone into a small area in a forest with no food, water or shelter for four days and four nights, also experiencing being away from home, encountering physical hardships, and finding the inner strength to complete the quest.

Like Kirsten, I am looking for a way to wake up, to become more lucid in my waking life by moving into a dream-like state of openness. By taking myself out of my everyday world and entering a situation that is so outside-of-the-ordinary as to be almost surreal, I hope to gain access to an experience of imagination, allowing this dream-like state to help me reassemble my perspective, understanding, and sense of life as it is happening in “real time.”

Continue reading

Impossible Things Before Breakfast

“‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”        –Lewis Carroll, from Through the Looking Glass

arborist 01Dreams give us all regular practice “believing impossible things before breakfast.” My own theory is that this particular exercise is essential to our mental health and well-being. In daily life, it’s all too easy to think we know exactly what is possible and what is impossible.

I generally walk around secure in the belief that I am a particular kind of person for whom certain ways of thinking, speaking, feeling and acting are possible, and others are not. I may adapt to circumstances, but it’s all within the range of what I consider realistic for me. Similarly, I assume that certain things are possible in the “real world” around me, and other things are impossible. And I tend to ignore things that make me question my assumptions about myself, other people, and “reality.”

arborist 03Actually, however, “impossible” things are happening within me and around me all the time, and every once in a while one of those things breaks through my shell and gets my attention—provoking laughter, wonder, indignation, anxiety, delight, or sheer wordless amazement. Continue reading

Review: “Lucid Waking”

Lucid Waking: Using Dreamwork Principles to Transform Your Everyday Life by Zoé Newman. White Egret Press. Paperback. 260 pages. $17.95.

Lucid WakingHow would our lives be different if we approached waking situations with the same openness we might bring to our dreams?

When we are reflecting on our dreams, we don’t need to apply the same expectations and judgments, take sides, or assign blame—we tend to think more in terms of exploring and experiencing, trying out different points of view, considering possibilities, and finding meaning through metaphor and creativity. These dreamwork skills can be cultivated in waking life, too, so that our relationship to the world around us can become as flexible, playful, unexpected and intuitive as our relationship to the dream world.

In past posts [such as: Haiku Dreams, Green Sloths & Synchronicities, and A Bird-Watching Dream Walk] I have written about the waking/dreaming continuum, and have suggested some ways in which dreamwork approaches could be applied to our waking lives, but Zoé Newman has gone far more deeply into this work in Lucid Waking—a book that offers both the imaginative insights and the practical tools we need to relate more openly (less habitually) with our waking lives. She writes:

“Lucid waking is seeing situations as opportunities for experimenting, for trying out new behaviors, for cultivating undeveloped qualities. It’s being in life in a playful, risk-taking, adventurous, free way… letting the world become a classroom, a laboratory, a creative canvas.”

Reading this book makes it seem perfectly natural to learn from our waking experiences as we learn from our dreams. Using examples from the lives of real people facing real challenges, Newman explores creative ways of coping with unpleasant situations (such as getting a parking ticket), working through interpersonal conflict, and expanding opportunities for spiritual growth. She draws on some essential Buddhist wisdom about relating directly to our experience, which can be useful both in the practice of lucid dreaming and in “lucid waking”:

“Buddhist mindfulness is, in essence, a practice of bringing lucidity to our waking life. Developing mindfulness, as a matter of fact, is very similar to developing dream lucidity.”

In other words, when we become lucid in a dream, we “wake up” within the dream and become aware that we are dreaming, which opens up all kinds of new options for our responses to dream events. When we become mindful (or “lucid”) in waking life, we “wake up” to our immediate experience and become aware that this present moment offers far more possibilities than we had previously conceived. Either way, lucidity means that we are not limited by our habitual expectations and opinions, so we can relate to experiences as they unfold, with open eyes, heart and mind. Continue reading

Dreaming and Journeying

drum 04In the last post (“Shamanic Dream Perspectives”), I began a series of articles that will explore shamanism as it relates to dreamwork. I mentioned briefly that a shaman’s task is “to facilitate communication and alignment with Spirit, on behalf of the larger community (and individuals)—especially where that connection has been damaged,” and “shamans journey into ‘other worlds’… where an experience of Spirit is more accessible, and they return bringing what they have learned from those experiences to be applied in concrete ways for healing and restoration.”

This week, I’ll focus on what is meant by “journeying,” and briefly consider some similarities and differences between journeying and dreaming. It’s important to understand that although shamans use journeying as a primary tool to fulfill their healing role in community, this tool—like dreamwork—can also be a meaningful spiritual practice for non-shamans. Just as a person who pays attention to dreams does not have to be a professional dreamworker, a person who journeys is not necessarily a shaman!

In fact, a shaman must develop a wide range of tools and skills, in addition to journeying—according to the unique calling of the individual shaman and the particular needs of her/his community. Each shaman may have a specific set of specialized skills (such as dreamwork, plant medicine, etc.), but journeying is an essential practice that might be considered a prerequisite to all other shamanic arts.

Journeying can be hard to define. In the broadest terms, it refers to a process of entering an altered state and traveling to “other worlds.” The “altered state” might be anything from a profound trance to a gentle shift in orientation allowing visual, auditory, or sensory experiences outside ordinary consciousness to occur.

Describing journeying as “creative imagination” or “visualization” would be controversial, since, from a shamanic perspective, the experiences one encounters in a journey are real—the “other worlds” are real—they are not “made up” by the conscious mind. However, this reality includes non-physical experiences (“non-ordinary reality”) that many non-shamanic cultures would call “imaginary,” so it could be just a question of semantics.

The “other worlds” explored in journeying, like the worlds explored in dreams, are absolutely real in the sense that they can be experienced as meaningful, and can offer insights and information not available to the conscious mind in physical reality. Continue reading

Green Sloths and Synchronicities

One morning, while trying to learn to read Russian, I was puzzling my way through a silly Russian kids’ science fiction story and ran across an expression that seemed rather odd. I was sure I recognized the word “green”—but when I looked up the unfamiliar other word, it was “sloth.” “Green sloth?” This turned out to be the correct translation, since, on the next page, there was a picture of the boy astronaut encountering a green sloth on an alien planet. Okay.

Later that same day, I was reading a completely unrelated book about Teddy Roosevelt’s travels in the Amazon, and the words “green sloth” jumped out at me again. Yes, Teddy had seen green sloths on his journey—and it was explained that they are green because of an algae that thrives in their fur.

And then (no, really)—turning on the television that evening, I caught a glimpse of a documentary… about sloths. They were, indeed, a bit green. The narrator talked about the algae on the fur, while I called Holly at work, wild with excitement, to tell her that I’d actually seen three green sloths in a single day!

This exceptional set of coincidences is really only a bit beyond what seems to be happening on a regular basis all the time, though we only occasionally notice. For obvious reasons, Holly and I now refer to such events as “green sloths.” Jung called them synchronicities.

A synchronicity is generally defined as a “meaningful coincidence.” Maybe you’re not sure why seeing three green sloths is meaningful? Well, I’m not entirely sure myself! But I think that when unlikely events coincide, they might best be understood as if they were dream images: the nature of the image (or the green sloth) may have metaphorical significance. And the more startling and unlikely it is, the more it gets our attention—which may imply that it contains something worth attending to! Continue reading

The Moment Of Openness After The Dream

I find that the moments immediately after I wake up from a dream can be as vital and meaningful as the dream itself. This is especially true for me when my dreams seem to be stuck in an unpleasant pattern. Sometimes, something opens up in that first moment of waking that didn’t seem possible in the context of the complicated dream story. That waking-up moment represents stepping back from the dream, seeing it from the outside, so the dream story may be experienced in a larger context.

The things that happen in my recurring dreams can seem frustrating, mundane, discouraging, and all-too-familiar, but I notice that the way I feel and think immediately upon awakening from such dreams can be my “growing edge”—the awkward place where I am verging on new territory. The old stuff (which is perhaps what the dream has been showing me) is fading away—I am recognizing that it is a dream—and the liminal space between sleeping and waking is pure potential for as-yet-unknown possibilities that will ultimately be realized in my waking and dreaming life. Continue reading

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