Waking Up to Your Dreams

Have you ever told yourself “It was only a dream” when you wanted to forget about something that troubled you during the night? Maybe you’ve said it wistfully as you surfaced from a dream in which you enjoyed beauty and pleasure that seemed unattainable. As we rush or stumble into the business of the day, it’s easy for us to leave our dreams behind. A door slams shut in the mind, and they’re gone. But it’s a poor strategy to let that happen. Here’s why . . .

Dreams are on our side — they open vistas of possibility that take us beyond our everyday self-limiting beliefs and behaviors. They also show us things we may prefer not to think about, which is why many of us slam shut that door on our dreams and try to keep it closed. These things may include future life problems, parts of ourselves that we tend to ignore or repress, or larger values and issues involved in a situation we have approached from a limited viewpoint. We may prefer to disregard such matters, but if they are in our dreams, it is because our wiser self is telling us that we need to think about them.

When our dreams show us future problems, they are also offering tools to avoid or contain those problems; we need only heed the messages and take appropriate action. When our dreams reveal aspects of ourselves that we tend to deny, they invite us to reclaim the energy we waste in denial and to integrate and work with all the aspects of our energy. When dreams reflect the bigger issues involved in a current situation, they offer us an inner compass and a corrective to decisions driven by ego or other people’s expectations.

When we see things in night dreams we don’t like, we need to pay careful attention, because we are being shown elements in our life situations that require understanding and action. The scarier the dream, the more urgent the need to receive its message — and to figure out what needs to be done.

When you know that, and act accordingly, you’ll find your dreams can help you get through the toughest things life throws at you. They can help you save your job or your relationship. They can help you avoid illness. To be alive, we need purpose. Dreams help us remember our purpose and live our larger story.

INDIGENOUS LESSONS
For many ancient and indigenous cultures, dreaming is not fundamentally about sleeping; it is about waking up — that is, awakening to a larger truth and a larger reality than are accessible to ordinary consciousness. “The dream world is the real world,” say the Seneca Iroquois. For most human cultures, across most of history, dreams are of vital importance for two key reasons: they offer a place of encounter between humans and the more-than-human, and they may be prophetic, revealing future events.

Both functions of dreaming are possible — in the understanding of our oldest psychology — because in dreams we travel outside the laws of Newtonian physics, and because in dreams we can receive visitations. This understanding is reflected in the vocabulary of cultures that place a high value on dreams.

For example, among the Makiritare, a tribal people of Venezuela, the word for dream is adekato, which means a journey of the soul. “When we dream, the spirit goes on walkabout,” says a wise woman of the Kukatja, an Aboriginal people of Australia’s Western Desert. Among the Australian Aborigines, personal dreams may be expeditions into the Dreamtime, the place of creation.

Other gifts and powers of dreaming play hide-and-seek in the vocabularies of other peoples. For the Irish, an aisling may be a dream, a vision, a poem, or all three. In Hebrew, to dream (halam) may also be to bring yourself good health. Among the Iroquois, to dream (kateraswas) is to bring yourself good luck, and a dreamer (atetshents) is also a shaman, a healer, and a physician.

THE VIEW FROM OUTSIDE TIME
As dreamers, we discover and inhabit the true nature of time as it has always been known to dream travelers and is now confirmed by modern science. Linear time, as measured by clocks and experienced in plodding sequences of one thing following another, always heading in the same direction, is an illusion of limited human awareness — at best (as Einstein said), a convenience. In dreaming, as in heightened states of consciousness, we step into a more spacious time, and we can move forward or backward at varying speeds. We can also step off a particular event track onto a parallel time track that may also be a parallel universe.

A medieval scholastic, trying to account for a dreamer’s time-tripping, might say, “She stepped into the aevum.” The aevum is an in-between realm between eternity (the divine depth beyond time) and the corrupted world where humans live in sequential time. In the aevum, duration is not determined by linear time but by movements of consciousness. This is a medieval version of what has become a very modern idea: that if we can step outside our consensual hallucinations, we’ll discover that time is actually the fourth dimension of space.

Viewed from the fourth dimension, past, present, and future are in fact simultaneous and only experienced sequentially because of our mental perception of them. In the dream state, the mind is not shackled in this way and is able to move between situations and probable events in the past and future with equal mobility. With growing awareness, we can develop greater and greater ability to choose the event track — maybe one of infinite alternative possible event tracks — that will be followed through a certain life passage or even the larger history of our world. This may be a case of the “observer effect” operating on a human scale. It is well understood that at quantum levels, deep within subatomic space, the act of observation plucks a specific phenomenon out of a bubbling cauldron of possibilities. It may be so in the cauldron of our dreaming — through the act of observation we select a certain event track that will begin to manifest in the physical world. By a fresh act of observation, or re-visioning, we can then proceed to alter that event track or switch to an entirely different one.

WHAT’S IN A DREAM MIRROR?
Have you ever dreamed that you looked at yourself in a mirror and noticed you were quite different from the way you think of yourself in waking life? While we look in a mirror in some of our dreams, the dream is also looking at us. The whole of a dream may function as a mirror in a larger sense, showing us sides of ourselves and our behavior that we may prefer not to see or that we have simply shut out in ordinary reality.

A great game to play with many dreams is to compare the behavior of our dream self with our waking self. If you are wimping out of situations in your dreams, passively following courses others set for you, or tending to remain an observer when action might be desirable, then you’ll want to ask yourself where, in your waking life, you have a tendency to behave that way. If you dream that you are forever catching a bus (a collective vehicle that runs according to other people’s schedules and makes lots of stops that have no interest for you), you may want to ask yourself how often in waking life you submit to agendas that are not of your making and which don’t allow you to give your best.

Alternatively, if you find you have strength and magical powers in your dreams that you generally do not exhibit in waking life, you’ll want to try to reach into the dreamspace and bring those powers through, to work for you in your physical life.

If what we see in the mirror of dreams sometimes seems like a carnival freak show or the work of a Hollywood special- effects crew, it’s because we’ve failed to look at something we need to see. The drama and the magnification in our dreams ensure that we pay closer attention.

Magnifying-mirror dreams often show us strong emotions moving with the power of natural forces — rage or grief may erupt like a volcano, tear up the neighborhood like a twister, or drown the whole scene like a tsunami. Working with such dreams, we want to remember that they may relate both to a literal phenomenon and to an emotional or symbolic condition. Indeed, sometimes a dream previews a literal event that will also have great symbolic resonance for the dreamer. We need to take dreams more literally and the events of waking life more symbolically.

DREAMING IS MEDICINE
Medical data easily evidences that dreaming is a kind of medicine. For example, clinical studies strongly suggest that people who suffer from symptoms of depression start to recover when dream function increases — as monitored by brain waves and/or the length of the phases of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep — and that they experience a decisive shift for the better when they increase their dream recall and their sharing of dreams. Dr. Robert Weissberg, a physician with whom I work closely, sometimes says to depressive patients, “I will be happy to prescribe medication for you, if it is needed, but I also want you to bring a dream or two to our next meeting.” He has noticed that the patients who are most successful in remembering dreams are often the ones who experience the most rapid improvement in their condition.

Let’s be clear about what dreams mean for our health.

Our dreams offer us a personal physician who can give us an impeccable diagnosis of our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual condition and can tell us what we need to stay well.

If we are ailing, the same doctor will give us the right prescription and offer us powerful images that our body can use in the direction of self-healing.

This personal physician is also a healer, therapist, and friend who works tirelessly to support our well-being.

This doctor, amazingly, is also a movie producer who stages brilliant dramatic productions that show us how to follow the natural path of our energy.

The dream doctor not only practices preventive care, but is willing to make house calls at any hour and doesn’t charge a cent. Why would we ever refuse the service and friendship of a physician like this?

Robert Moss is a world authority on dreams, a bestselling novelist, and a former foreign correspondent and professor of ancient history. His latest book is The Three Only Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination. Visit his website, mossdreams.com. See his extended biography here.

This article has been excerpted from The Three Only Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence & Imagination by Robert Moss (© 2007 by Robert Moss). Reprinted with permission of New World Library (NewWorldLibrary.com).

DREAMWORKING ONLINE

Robert Moss will be leading a virtual dream workshop for S&H readers. Moss will accept dream submissions from workshop participants and lead the group in dream games — teaching dreamers how to process their own dreams as well as those of other people.

Participants will learn

• How to remember dreams

• How to create from dreams

• How to self-diagnose from dreams

• How to use dreams to support family and community

Participants will play the Lightning Dreamwork game (see below) in a virtual community, monitored by Moss.

The workshop will commence in May 2008. To get information and to register for the eight-week S&H Dreamwork workshop with Robert Moss, go to SpiritualityHealth.com/workshops.

DREAM GAMES

You don’t want anyone telling you what your dreams mean. Dreams bring many gifts of power, and you don’t want to give that power away. Dream interpreters, however, are in high demand in many societies, and the best dream guides do something very different from verbal analysis. They make it their game to try to enter the dreamer’s situation and psychic space — and to speak from that place. Imagining yourself in someone else’s place is a game. (To play with your dreams in a community, see below.)

LIGHTNING DREAMWORK GAME

You can play this game with two or more people. We’ll call the principal players the Dreamer and the Partner. There are four moves in the Lightning Dreamwork Game.

First Move: The Dreamer tells the dream as simply and clearly as possible, as a story. Just the facts; no background or autobiography. In telling a dream this way, the Dreamer claims the power of the story. The Partner should ask the Dreamer to give the dream report a title, like a story or a movie.

Second Move: The Partner asks the Three Big Questions — (1) How did you feel? (2) Reality check: What do you recognize from this dream in the rest of your life, and could any part of this dream be played out in the future? (3) What do you want to know about this now?

The Dreamer answers all three questions.

Third Move: The Partner now shares whatever thoughts and associations the dream has triggered for him or her. The Partner begins by saying, “If it were my dream, I would think about such-and-such.” The etiquette is very important. By saying “if it were my dream,” we make it clear that we are not setting out to tell the Dreamer what his or her dream — or life — means. We are not posing as experts of any kind. The Partner is just sharing whatever strikes him or her about the dream, which may include personal memories, other dreams, or things that just pop up. (Those seemingly random pop-ups are often the best.)

Fourth Move: Following the discussion, the Partner asks the Dreamer, “What are you going to do now? What action will you take to honor this dream or work with its guidance?” If the Dreamer is clueless about what action to take, the Partner will offer his or her own suggestions, which may range from placing that phone call to someone or buying the pink shoes to doing historical or linguistic research to decode odd references. Or, the Dreamer may want to go back inside the dream (see below) to get more information or to move beyond a fear. One thing we can do with any dream is to write a personal motto — something like you’d see on a bumper sticker or a refrigerator magnet.

GOING BACK INSIDE YOUR DREAMS

The best way to get to the meaning of a dream is to go back inside the dream and reclaim more of the full experience. The dream experience should not be confused with the remembered dream, which is often blurry or fragmentary. Going back into a dream is like going back to any place you actually have visited. It is the same as imagining yourself returning to a friend’s house or to a landscape you visited on vacation.

1. Pick a Dream with Real Energy
As long as it has juice, it doesn’t matter whether the dream you want to reenter is from last night or 20 years ago. It can be a tiny fragment or a complex narrative. You can choose to work with a night dream, a vision, or a waking image. What’s important is that the dream you choose to revisit has some charge — whether it is exciting, seductive, or challenging.

2. Relax
Follow the flow of your breathing, and relax. If you are holding tension in any part of your body, tense and relax those muscle groups until you feel yourself becoming loose and comfy.

3. Focus on a Specific Scene from Your Dream
Let a specific scene become vivid on your mental screen. Let all your senses become engaged: you touch it, smell it, hear it.

4. Clarify Your Intention
Before you begin, come up with clear and simple answers to these two questions: (1) What do I want to know? (2) What do I intend to do, once I am back inside the dream? Remember these intentions as you reenter the dream.

5. Call in Guidance and Protection
As you begin, or at any time, you may choose to invoke a sacred guardian by a familiar name, or you can simply ask for help in the name of Love and Light.

6. Give Yourself Fuel for the Journey
Heartbeat shamanic drumming works well for many people and most groups. If live drumming is not possible, you may want to use my shamanic drumming CD for dream travelers, Wings for the Journey.

DREAMS TO MEND OUR DIVIDED SELVES

MOST OF US KNOW WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE MISSING A PART OF OURSELVES, to suffer “soul loss,” or to encounter someone who is “not all there.” Our dreams show us how to heal our divided selves and bring missing parts of our energy and identity back into the body. Here are some of the ways in which dreams introduce soul matters and open paths for soul energy to come home.

DREAMS ABOUT SHOES
Shoes have soles, so dreams of shoes often involve “soul” in the deeper sense. In dreams, the state of your shoes — especially if one or more is missing — may be telling you about something that has happened to your soul.

DREAMS OF THE OLD PLACE
Dreams in which we go back to a scene from our earlier lives, especially when this happens over and over, may indicate that a vital part of our energy and identity is still in that old place. We may find ourselves returning in dreams, again and again, to a childhood home or the home we shared with a former partner. These dreams may be an invitation to reach back into that place and recover one of our soul-selves that is stuck there. The “old place” may also prove to be a place of encounter with family members and loved ones who have passed on — or who need help in passing on.

DREAMS OF OUR YOUNGER SELF AS A SEPARATE INDIVIDUAL
These types of dreams may be nudging us to recognize and recover a part of ourselves that we lost at that younger age. Sometimes we do not know who that beautiful child is until we take a closer look. Sometimes we see our missing parts in that magic mirror.