Spirit Bear Dreaming

Just last night I shared a dream with another dreamer on the other side of the world. I've had many shared dreams since I began actively working with dreams and working with other dreamers. When you begin to recall and record dreams and share them with others you find that this is a very common experience. However, since we don't spend a lot of our time sharing dreams and talking about dreams, we miss a lot of what is happening, and it seems rare and unusual. You don't often share dreams with other people who you don't know well in your waking life, so you never notice the sharing that is taking place.

So, my take on the question, the way it can happen is that dreams are real experiences. It is common to talk about dreams in a belittling or demeaning way, “You're dreaming!” someone might say as a put-down. But this just exposes that the speaker believes that dreams are not worth much and of no real consequence. It seems that many people subscribe to the idea that the mind is fixed in the brain, which is some kind of computer, and that dreams are just 'bad' or 'weird' output from that machine.

However, many other points of view are possible. In the ancient world there were many who saw imagination as a third aspect of mind, along with thinking and feeling. It was seen as a real dimension of mind and part of actual reality and not a part of only the thinking self, or the fuzzy 'bad' thinking as many characterize it these days.

A view of imagination as a powerful and active part of our lives persists in many native cultures and groups that have not been westernized and modernized. In this view dreams are real things, real experiences, real places. The imaginal realms and can be private or shared and also be permanent or temporary. If you read ancient texts in this light they no longer seem metaphorical, since the authors are speaking about real places.

So sharing a dream with someone, especially someone close to us, is not strange, but is a part of our common heritage. We all can feel and think, and although it is not considered a major aspect of our Self in the modern western world, we can all imagine. The more we work on feeling, the better able we are to feel. The more we work on thinking, the better able we are to think. And, like the other aspects, the more we work on imagination, the better able we are to use imagination and work in the imaginal realms.

If you want to delve into this you should look at the French scholar of the prior generation, Henry Corbin. There are decent translations of his books, and a number of websites cover his ideas about the persisting reality of the imaginal realms. And the philosopher Synesius of Cyrene, who was a student of Hypatia and eventually became a bishop in the early Christian church wrote on this. Some call him “Saint Synesios” and he wrote a book titled “On Dreams” where he delves into the reality of imagination and dreaming. In his view the imagination is the closest we can get to the divine and the sacred, and it is higher and more real in some sense.

My experience is that we share dreams with others quite often. Those we love and those who share the same goals will often find a common imaginal place to meet. In my circles of dreamers, those who are devoting effort to delve into the depths of dreaming, sharing dreams is quite common. Many of us find ourselves in dream schools in the dream world. I sent my friend, who I mentioned above and who lives in New Zealand, an email this morning telling her that I met her in a dream class. She wrote back with her experience. It was colored by her style of dreaming, and did not occur at the same hour, but was essentially the same place and the same group of people. Can I prove it to you? No, but I can tell you that this is quite common, and that you can test it yourself by paying more attention to your dreaming and working with other dreamers.

If I dreamed the same dream as my close friend or relative I would take it as a hint to pay attention to my dreams, and to look afresh at what I share with them in our lives, and the events of the shared dream. There are many adventures to be had in this kind of dreaming, but you need to record your dreams and share them with someone else who does the same.

~~fran

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Shamanic practice involves both personal and inner efforts, and a broader approach of working for and with others. The traditional role of shamanic practitioner is to act as intermediary between the community and their adjacent supernatural realms.

It is certainly possible to bootstrap yourself into shamanic techniques with some helpful books and media, but you will eventually and probably, in order to get deeper into the experience, need to make it about more than just your own experience. My path was to start on my own and eventually to travel to nearby places to study with good teachers. I eventually found a local group, seeded around a local shamanic teacher, which met regularly and worked to common purposes.

First, just a bit about the term shamanism. There is the academic study of shamanism, there is the practice of shamanism in native cultures, and there is the use of shamanic techniques by modern western people. The first is fascinating and worth study, especially so if you have the desire to become an academic. The second is worthy of respect and honor, but is not appropriate for others to push their way into that world, nor is it correct to try to wear such a mantle and propose oneself as a representative for people who have their own voices.

The third use, however, is where we can find a place for study and practice as it has been recreated from the fundamental shamanic techniques of all people. Shamanic techniques are the oldest spiritual technology we know about, and we find it at the roots of all great traditions. The spirits want us to participate in this great adventure which is accessible to most people.

A primary notion of shamanic practice is that through the use of shamanic techniques we can send part of our selves to other realms. While there we can interact with spirits to find balance, healing, and help with problems for oneself and others surrounding us in our day-to-day lives. Shamanic practice is not a replacement for day-to-day life, but is for augmenting that life and expanding one's capability and capacity for growth and development.

The basic shamanic technique is to use repetitive sound to put the mind into a state where some part of the mind, a part other than the self-focused chattering voice, seeks into the other worlds. The shamanic universe takes different forms based upon the culture, the traditions, and personal idiosyncrasies, but the basic form divides the world into three broad “worlds”.

First, the lower world, often found “below” us and commonly the source of Animal Helpers. The “above” world is often the place to find Teachers. And the “middle” world includes the day-to-day world and surrounding “planes” that shade off into other related realms. Generally a beginner should avoid the middle world and focus the lower world and perhaps the upper world if desired. Traveling to these worlds is called journeying.

There are many ways to enter a shamanic journey trance, the most popular being a frame drum played at a steady number of beats per second. After sufficient practice one can enter a light trance while playing the drum, but to go deeper, or when first learning, one needs someone else to drum. Many people use a recording of drumming with headphones. More on this later, but the recordings you need to use are explicitly NOT musical, they are always labeled something like Drumming For Journeying. Music with a non-repetitive rhythm or melody will usually engage your music-listening self, but what you actually want is something somewhat boring and loud enough to shut out the inner monologue and let your inner vision journey on. This sound is the vehicle that you will ride on. Once you are journeying the drumming shifts to the background.

Aside from a sonic vehicle, you need to focus your intent. Especially when first starting out, you need to avoid drifting and need to have something to lead you on. Think of your intent as a light that will illuminate the path to the place you need to visit. As your skill matures you may find other modes of using your awareness, but at first you need to focus and your intent should lead you to your goal.

Without a teacher to start you on specific attainable and useful goals and offer technical advice, you will have to be disciplined to stay on track. But if you study up on shamanic practice and work with your experiences you should be able to find a set of worthwhile goals to lead you forward.

If you're reading this and feeling that journeying is “just” fantasy, then you need to learn to shift your critical thinking so that it doesn't block or filter your experiences while you are having them. Beginners need good critical thinking to help them develop discernment, but the critical thinking needs to stand to the side and observe well while journeying, without interference.

The potential problem here is that the critical thinking part wants to define experience to have it conform with expectations while it is occurring. This will sometimes lead you into boring and meaningless areas, and you may miss important things as you prejudge your experience. If you tell your critical thinking part that it can comment all that it wants AFTER the journey is done and recorded, then your experience will lead you to more interesting places, and you will have more fun and learn more.

You should keep a journal of all your journeys. This is critical! I prefer something with a stiff cover to make writing easy no matter where I am, and some people use big blank page books so that they can draw important images. No matter what, you need to keep a journal and write it all down. You will eventually have too much material to recall, so you must write it down. Eventually your journals will reveal new aspects of your path that you might otherwise have overlooked. I keep one big journal with journeys and dreams and notes from my study and relevant courses I might take. It pays over and over as you go on. I cannot overstate this, write it all down!

The first journeys should be to the underworld. Very often the initial journeys for beginners will be to start with the image of a place in the natural world that can lead underground. Pick a place you feel strongly about or find beautiful or attractive. A place like a cave or opening in the earth, a waterfall, or a tree base with an entrance is common. If you think of a place or first see an inner image as you read this, then that is a good place to start. You will journey to this place and somehow enter, open, or dig into the earth. If you have no success, consider alternative places and try a new one next time. I know some practitioners who have used the same place on every journey, and others who have multiple points of entry or who have shifted their entry point over time.

You start by listening to the drumming and relaxing. You will eventually develop a routine to get you going, but what I commonly see people doing is to take some relaxing breaths until they feel calm and centered. Many people cover their eyes, some like to lie on their backs, some sit in a comfortable chair or sit on a meditation pad or blankets. I prefer to sit cross-legged on a few cushions on the floor. Sometimes I like back support, and I ofter wear a sleep mask if light is bothering me. Many people have a blanket to keep warm to compensate for lowered body temperature while you are “away”.

Some people have a little pre-flight checklist in mind and I like to check out my body then review my plans until I am sure I have them in mind. Initially, many people “dig in” to feel comfortable and then focus on the drumming while keeping their intent in mind. As you sit and just let the drumming take over, your inner “vision” will activate. You may feel your attention start to move or flow. Then, when you feel ready, you journey to your destination. Remember, use your intent to help you navigate. If you have trouble, just “ask” for help using your inner voice. You can use it to state your intent.

The first journey is often about getting acclimatized and just “looking” around. Some people see with inner sight, some hear things, some have other sensory experiences or use some inner form of knowing. You can try this journey a number of times until you feel that you have traveled into the ground or sense that you are “under” the earth.

Some people have vivid experiences right off the bat, other require a number of tries until it starts to make sense. Perhaps you will see something definite or meet someone. If so, mentally ask them who they are and what they have to tell you. Perhaps it will seem realistic, or not. It is all OK, let it be what it is. It is like learning to play the harmonica, nobody can directly show you the inside part, you have to learn how to trust and verify what you experience and work from there by doing it. Allow yourself the luxury of trying again as much as you need or like.

The underworld is definitely not the traditional religious view of hell or a place like that. It is a place, and it is “below,” and you don't need to add much more to it than that. In my personal spiritual cosmology I tend to assign it a certain place and purpose, but you should grow you own understanding through experience, study and contemplation.

Once you have a bit of experience entering the underworld you can go to the next step. This second intent is to seek out an Animal Helper. Some teachers tell you to travel around until you see the same Animal three times. Some are not so strict. Go by feeling and need and maybe by what you lack.

When you meet an Animal Helper, and it may take time so don't stress about it, understand that this is a relationship, so it might not be just sweetness and light. In my first journey I met a large and intense Animal that was confrontational and who tested me in some unpleasant ways, but who also immediately changed me in a positive way. But many of my day-to-day relationships are like this, too, they come with conflict and great energy and are sometime a bit too intense, so it is no surprise that this happened to me while journeying. Many others that I know have large and powerful helpers full of sweetness and support and power. It is impossible to predict specifics, but I think we tend to get what we need at that moment.

Some people have mythological Animal Helpers, or creatures they cannot identify or which don't seem like they should be living beings. That's quite all right, I find that the reasons become clear over time, so don't stress or try to make journeying conform to expectations. See what it brings you.

Many shamanic practitioners meet and work with many Animal Helpers over time, so don't automatically buy into the notion that you have one Animal Helper or are locked in somehow. Some folks call them Power Animals, but I prefer Helper as it is a more accurate description, in my experience. Once you have met an Animal Helper you can ask them to show you what you need to know and ask them for help any time you need it. This is important: ask for help when needed. Ask them what they need and what they can do. If you want to develop deeper skills, you have someone who can help you, so build a relationship.

Once you have an Animal Helper you can more easily explore the underworld or focus in on learning specific things you need to help you in your life. Some teachers will have you journey to the upper world to meet a Teacher or a Higher Self to ask advice. You should ask your Animal Helper to lead you to the upper world. They should be able to lead you there but might not come with you, or only come part way with you. Teachers generally offer help and advice, but my feeling is you should not bother them with trite questions. Shamanic practice should lead to improvements in other areas of your life, so don't be afraid to ask for help about jobs or mundane subjects or fixing problems. The spirits want you to succeed!

I do suggest avoiding travel in the middle world until you have experience, and you have one or more strong Helpers. It is a good policy to always be accompanied by at least one Animal Helper on every journey. They will be able to help you understand things when you are unsure and will warn you when appropriate. More than once I've had a helper jump out in front of me and become powerful when they see a problem that I missed. It is important to develop some close relationships with Helpers and to have fun and play when possible. Spend some time running or flying or swimming with them, as fits them. Relationships in the spirit realms require discernment as they do in the day-to-day world, so don't take them for granted.

Beyond these things, you are only limited by imagination and your goals. One of my favorite journeys is to revisit dreams that have given me a strong feeling and which I feel need some deeper understanding. I learned this technique from Robert Moss and have used it hundreds of time to get more information and to query a dream for more help.

I have had marked success reentering nightmares, which from my perspective are dreams that frighten you to get your attention about something important. I've also had great success journeying into tarot cards, runes, the lives of my ancestors, stories from great mythologies and travel throughout time and space. There really is no limit, and it can open you to vast areas of knowledge of which you have been unaware. And it also requires lots of study and research as a result!

If there are no teachers in your area, and you have made some journeys and feel a calling to this practice, then seek out teachers who do workshops in reachable locales. Making an effort pays off, I find. I work with a local teachers and my circle of peers now, but when I first started out I had to travel many hundreds of miles to attend the odd weekend workshop to learn more and share with other kindred souls. I've also participated in a few online groups and have even done some journeys with friends on the other side of the globe over the internet. Working with others greatly increases your learning as it gives you confirmation about what is working, and that really opens up things in a nice way.

This piece has gone on quite enough, so here are a few resources. I first learned to journey on my own as I was studying deeper into dreaming and discovered the “Dreamgates” audiobook by Robert Moss, which included a good introduction to journeying as a way to revisit dreams. I've attended a number of his workshops that mix dreaming and shamanism and have read most of his books and have learned much from Robert.

For something a bit more focused on shamanic practices, per se, I think that “Awakening To The Spirit World: The Shamanic Path Of Direct Revelation” by Sandra Ingerman and Hank Wesselman covers a lot of territory and includes a drumming CD that you can use. Both are well-known practitioners who have written a lot and are worth some attention and study, I've read many of both of their books. This book was published around 2010, so there are possibly many used copies around if price is an issue.

I've also found books by Tom Cowan to be worth reading. Michael Harner's “Way Of The Shaman” is the foundation book for a lot of the modern efforts and most serious practitioners have read it. He also has produced a series of journeying recordings of drums and of rattles that are very good. His Foundation for Shamanic Studies is worth checking out and includes links to classes and teachers all over the world.

If you just want an inexpensive drumming track to start out you can locate Frauke Rotwein's “Shamanic Journey Drumming 3” album on Amazon and download track 2, “Multiple Drumming” for 99 cents. It is 30 minutes long, which is plenty long for a beginner.

As a recording to use for journeying I prefer “Shamanic Journey Drumming: Spirit Passages” by Evelyn Rysdyk and C. Allie Knowlton, which is includes a callback that you can trigger with a button press, to skip forward, when you are journeying. A callback is a nice thing to lead you back from a journey. (I have a friend who always keeps a bit of chocolate around to nibble on while they are writing up their journey on return. Fun and grounding!)

Just these few people are a good start and will naturally lead you to others. Best of luck!

~~fran

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This is a rich and deep area of study that usually requires making some amount of effort if one expects some level of reward and achievement. Some of the oldest human writings concerns dreams and their meanings, and over the ages many approaches to dreaming have been developed.

In the modern era one only has to scratch the surface to find many methods and groups or “schools” devoted to this rich seam of human experience. Having spent decades on my personal quest in dreaming, it has been the foundation of every profitable spiritual effort I have made since beginning to focus on dreaming.

I started with the works of Patricia Garfield and Jeremy Taylor, who I see as advocates of the modern “people's” style of dreamwork. I then worked my way through the dreaming books of Jane Roberts and then to the shamanic approach of Robert Moss. I have developed some definite ideas about how one can approach dreaming and develop some basic skills that will help one navigate life in a better way.

The most basic skill is to record every dream you recall. These dream reports grow in value the longer you keep a dream journal and review it. If you don't record dream reports you're missing the bulk of their value and will never have the joy of being surprised by what you find there in the future.

The second thing is to find people with whom you can share dreams in a friendly way. Garfield and Taylor and Moss go into a lot of detail on the hows and whys of this part. Suffice it to say that friendly and non-judgemental sharing that does not try to impose some other's meaning on your dreams will help you find more value as you work on your dreams.

Thirdly, you need to act. Your Dream Source sends dreams to you to help you and if you ignore them or fail to assign the importance to them that they deserve, they will fade or become trite. I have dreams that date from my childhood that I still work with, since they continue to provide valuable insight and advice that have helped me over and over.

And finally, I want to point out that the word “meaning” doesn't do the study of dreaming justice. Just assigning meaning is, at worst, a form of categorization that lacks real value. If we approach a poem by assuming that looking up the definition of every word in the poem will reveal “the meaning of the poem” we'll be quite disappointed.

Dreams are not just like the stories one finds in a book that can be interpreted as a way to understand “the meaning” or to simply entertain. They can be that, no doubt, but when you actively engage your dreams and see them as real events that occur in a real dream space, it opens up new avenues of development and understanding in your life. I have had many important dreams for which I, and my dreamer friends, have not been able to clearly understand or assign some kind of meaning to, but which have led me into areas I would have never found using my waking mind.

Jung reportedly claimed that of the many things that interested him, only if his dreams led him that way would he devote himself to working in earnest on something. I also find this to be true, that my dreams are great signposts to the passages of life and are worth deep study and extended work. So, I want and expect more than simply meaning from dreams and I do indeed find that, and more, in dreaming.

~~fran

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I cannot claim to have meaningless dreams in any stage of life. Given “meaningless” dreams and “I don't perceive the meaning” of a dream, how do you distinguish between those two states? How can you definitely confirm there is no meaning?

If you keep a dream journal for a long time, then reading old “meaningless” dreams will sometimes reveal patterns and meanings that you didn't see at the time. Also, sharing dreams will often reveal a different aspect of the dream that is meaningful, and sometime very much more meaningful.

I think it is too easy to simply say something is meaningless, it is often something that authorities or powerful people say to put down others' point of view or experience. So, overall, I think it is better to be a bit cautious with the term “meaningless”.

I don't reject the idea that there are meaningless dreams, only that the context of dreaming is not like reading the day's weather report. Dreams can be so different from waking experience that we can't just say that any dream report was truly meaningless. Rather, dreaming can encompass great complexity and grand inner narratives that work out over months or years or decades.

Dreams can also operate in a very nuanced way and be greatly influenced by our waking lives and impulses from unexamined areas of our lives. The decisions we make about what dreams are permitted to mean will change our dreaming. If you are convinced dreams are meaningless or random, then you will likely tend to dream in ways that at least seem like that. Contrariwise, delving into dreaming in depth will likely open dreams up in unanticipated levels of meaning and new sorts of experience. And these two approaches are only two of many, many ways we might feel about dreaming. I think it likely that each individual has their own unique style of dreaming.

It is also useful to recognize that a dream itself and the waking report of dream are not the same thing. One is an experience and the other is the telling of the experience. I sometimes find myself just waking and “unraveling” a dream of parallel events or multiple points of view, which are then put into some kind of narrative order in my mind so that I can record them in linear fashion in my journal.

And I've had dreams where time and space are distorted in some way, and again, they need re-framing somehow in order to journal them, and some aspect of self has a way of doing this. Not that all dreams are like this, but it can be difficult to go back into a dream that doesn't conform to our waking notions of normal reality. And this ignores the feeling aspect of dreaming itself and the way we feel about a dream on waking.

Given the above, the question seems more interesting in terms of how dreaming changes over time. I can think of many motifs and patterns that have changed over time in my own dreaming, and ways in which my engagement with dreaming has changed my style of dreaming. The way I recall dreams from childhood are of almost cartoon-like movies. Dreams from adolescence seem to involve the adjustment to adulthood and the many physical and social changes taking place in a life. I recall that a lot of these dreams seemed to focus on problems. My early adult dreams shifted to inner experience and had a more spiritual character as I defined distinct adult roles in my own life.

Dreams from my late twenties and early thirties had a particular focus on learning things. I had many hundreds of dreams of adventures in a version of my beautiful old high school building, meeting people and learning new things and going to and from classes. This was a time when I was working on my new career and marriage. Later, becoming a parent, I was rather chaotic in both waking and dreaming life and I have not formed a specific notion of the dreams of that time, other than not getting enough sleep. Which might explain the lack of good ideas about that time's dreaming. After that I had a period of work dreams, and many, many dreams of being on a college campus, a return to the learning theme.

Right around the start of middle age I realized that my lifelong desire to go deeper into dreaming would never be fulfilled if I didn't start very soon, so I started journaling and going to dream groups and workshops. I noted that as I engaged, my dreams first went through stages of getting longer and more baroque and extravagant, then getting shorter and more pointed. As I worked deeper with dreaming I noted that I'd have themes that that would play out over time, either characters or situations would recur in a way which seemed formed to provide discovery for someone who worked with dreams. Again, I am dreaming I am in classes, but often on a mountain or a wilderness park, and with other dreamers, some that I know and share dreaming with in waking life.

At this point the dreaming seems to be working in multiple parallel directions. I now seem to have a weekly dream about career or work. I also have dreams that seem clearly pointing to my spiritual life and to my major relationships, and so on. It is now as if my Dream Source knows what's going on in my life and that, as I am trying to keep up on everything, it does commentary on my life and the things arriving and departing my life at the time.

At every point in my life I've had Big Dreams, the kind of dream that stays with you your whole life and helps determine you life choices. I don't know how common this is, but I can look at a handful of dreams from every decade of my life and see how they are like lighthouses to guide me in the open sea. I've met many other people working with dreams who say something similar, so I imagine it is common but perhaps not something most people comment on or share with others.

Finally, this seems like a fruitful area of study. I wish there were more information available on this topic. I have not read all of Patricia Garfield's books, but she was such a prolific dreamer who journaled her dreams, and had done it for so many decades, that I suspect she might have a lot of interesting things to say on the subject. I have one of her books lying unread on the shelf near my desk and this makes me want to bump it up in my to-read list.

~~fran

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Yes, dream sharing is possible. It occurs because dreams are real events that take place in different aspects of reality which some of us call the imaginal realms.

Imagination is not a wispy confusion of the rational mind lost in the edges of awareness, but an important part of the mind in its own right. Imagination deals with different facets of reality than those the rational waking mind normally inhabits.

Sometimes I like to think of the imagination as something like a set of senses that not only perceive the imaginal realms, but allow us to manipulate and operate in those realms. The philosopher Synesius of Cyrene had the view that the imagination is the part of the mind closest to the divine, and it is higher and more real in some sense.

If you look at dreaming as part of the functioning of the imagination, then it makes sense that people, especially those who have close relationships, can not only create or visit a place in the imaginal realms, but can visit that place simultaneously. In the dream circles I belong to this is a very common activity and many of us attend the same “dream classrooms” at the same time. To fit in a bit of extra learning while we are dreaming, I suppose.

My partner and I sometimes share dream vacations to fulfill our unrequited wanderlust. We were just dreaming together in some version of Greece over the weekend and I particularly enjoyed touring some ancient temple sites we found there.

If we dream together, outside the constraints of waking time and space, can we get clues about the future from these dreams? I say yes, quite often dreams show us bits of probable futures. How do we confirm this? By keeping a dream journal for a while and revisiting it you'll see that it is quite common. However, it isn't always clear what is going on, and I find that it takes a bit of work to find some utility in dreams of the future. Sometimes we get a warning about what may occur if we don't keep our attention sharp. Sometimes we get a foretaste of what is coming, perhaps to prepare us.

Most of my dreams of the future seem to be boring bits of mundane life, like driving home from work or chatting with friends. I wonder if these mundane snapshots occur as training. They are not critical, but if you keep a journal you can start to capture these dreams and develop an approach to working with them. I often wonder if the feeling of déjà vu is just that, a sudden recognition of something already experienced in a dream. I've read that déjà vu means “already seen” so it makes sense to me that the term means just that.

Dreaming of the future is a complex topic and there is too much to say in a page of text. Briefly, I think our conception of time is flawed, and we need to learn more about that. Dreams are not bound to our waking time-space framework, so the imaginal faculty can wander a bit, unconstrained by waking notions of what is right.

It is tricky to learn to deal with these kinds of dreams, so be careful not to adopt a fatalistic view that the future is fixed to what a dream initially seems to suggest. It may or may not, but as Scrooge says, why show me these things if they cannot be changed?

The dream teacher, Robert Moss, has written an excellent book on the subject of dreaming the future titled “Dreaming True”. It was published nearly two decades ago but is still in print. It is the best book on the subject that I know. Most of what I've learned comes from working with the many ideas presented in this book, and by keeping a long term dream journal and comparing dreams and reality. I think that's the best way to approach the topic.

Discover it yourself by testing the ideas!

~~fran

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We most certainly can. Since the “space” where dreaming occurs is not the same as our physical reality, and we are not limited to the kind of time and space conforming experience we have in our waking lives, we have different sorts of experience than waking life. When people talk about time they tend to make authoritative remarks as if we humans really understand time, as if the devices we build to measure time were more profound and meaningful that they actually are. Clocks are mechanical devices we've devised to measure some physical events. They do not capture any of the psyche's marvelous experience of life. And measuring the complexity of our inner lives by clocks is never satisfying or nurturing, is it?

We've all had the experience of time moving fast or slow. Consider that this might be the reality of time and that clocks totally miss it. A few times in my life I have been in situations where time seemed to nearly stop, to reach a slow motion state where I could examine things in detail as they roll on by, a second seeming like many minutes.

My point here is simply that time is not so easy to talk about, or easy to understand. We live in a post-Einstein world where classical notions of time have been destroyed, yet many of us talk about time in a blithe and mechanical manner that ignores this. Your phone uses a global GPS system, and that system's clocks are constantly being corrected to compensate for relativistic effects, or they'd get out of sync in short order, and your mapping app would be very, very wrong.

Reading deeper into the physics of time we find a lot of mind-bending oddities concerning time, not the least of which is that nobody has a great definition of time or understanding of what it is. So, I tend to be a bit critical of any descriptions of human experience being tied to such fuzzy ideas about waking physical reality. If you find them convincing and satisfying, then good, but I think the whole topic of time is much larger than we imagine, and also not well understood at all, so caution is in order.

My experience in dreaming includes many dreams where I have traveled in time, and even a few dreams where I was able to manipulate time. In one grand dream I was part of a Time Shifter team. My Time Robot sidekick and I had to beam down into a crashed spaceship that was under attack, and attempted to rescue a crew member who had been killed. We could only do this by sifting back in time.

We got there and used our time shifting powers to shift the area around the man to try to rewind it to before the lethal shot. We tried over and over, modifying our strategy each time, but each attempt had been anticipated by the enemy during the initial attack! They also had ability to modify time and also to anticipate probable outcomes to changing time. This evolved an interesting story with a lot of cool scifi ideas, but the experience of the dream was of being in a live situation where I had to manipulate time directly, and then move an area into the past and let it run forward. I had tools and a smart robot who could also manipulate time and calculate different probable outcomes of modifying the past.

It was a fun dream, and I've had a number of other time travel dreams, like traveling back to the beginning of time. But I read this dreaming as all being a part of some aspect of my self trying to make me see that time, as it is in dreams, is fluid. That my notions of time were not very useful or accurate and that I'd have to dig a bit deeper for more understanding.

So far I've concluded that time is much more flexible than we let ourselves see, that we make things conform to cultural notions of time without much notice.

My experience since these dreams has been to explore time and probabilities from a personal perspective in more depth. From here it seems that dreams allow us to construct dream time and dream space as we need them for the dreaming we are doing. So, time travel in dreams? No problem.

I wanted to note that I answered a related question, and you can read it here if you want a little more detail: Do we experience dreams in real-time?

Happy time travels!

~~fran

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Part of the problem of this sort of question is that when you try to define time itself you run into problems. We tend to describe time by using that which we created to measure time. That is, we invented clocks to measure the passage of time, so using clocks to define time seems to be a bit of circular reasoning, from my view. We all have a sense of what time is, but I've yet to hear a definition of it that does not refer to itself in some way. So, there is a lot of weirdness when you try to pin down what time actually is.

The approach I use to work with the concept of time is to picture it as something our body does to structure experience for our mind, something that comes from the way our senses work. Given that, then it seems to me that what we call time in dreams is of the same sort of thing, something that we impose on dream experience to give it order and structure.

I've often noticed that during dreaming that I am having experiences, but upon waking my mind will assemble a narrative of sorts, deciding if the sequence makes sense as it goes along. Some part of me is imposing order on the dream and making a report of the dream that my waking self can handle. These two, the experience and the report, are not necessarily the same.

I've had some unusual dreams that seem to have no-time, or run in parallel threads of time, and when I sit with the memory of them I cannot decide if the order I impose on the dream when waking was the right order. But I live in the world that we share, where we communicate in linear, time-based experience. So I seem to need to make experience into a linear sequence of time. Out of habit? Is time a requirement? I don't know, but it is useful to talk as if it is.

So, to try to flesh this out a bit more, and hopefully not to make this more confusing, let me restate things. A dream is experience, which may or may not be in time. It can feel like it is outside of time, or like it is in waking time or in strange states that match neither of those. Perhaps it can be in real-time on some occasions.

We have a memory of dreaming, and that memory may be structured by our need to impose time on the experience, in order to make it conform with the way our brain or waking mind works. Then there is a report of a dream, a narrative that fits the way we tell stories, laying them out in sequence in the convention way.

So, to answer the question, we might dream in real-time, but it is not required that we do so in order to have dream experience. My sense of it is that we have many ongoing threads of dreaming in our consciousness at all times, but that the waking, dealing-with-survival part of our awareness may or may not pay attention to those. When sleeping we may sometimes shift attention to those dreaming parts and sometimes our waking selves participate or notice those dreaming threads of consciousness.

I suppose that one aspect of dreaming is to make us aware of how our sense of time is essentially arbitrary, in that we seem to make time as a frame around experience. Perhaps other modes are possible?

~~fran

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A number of years ago Robert Moss introduced me to the fifth-century bishop and student of the amazing genius Hypatia, one Synesius of Cyrene. Around the year 405 Synesius wrote a book titled “On Dreams” where he goes into great detail on the nature of dreams. Serious students of dreaming in all of its many aspects would profit greatly by studying this gem, I think. I won't go into too many of the details provided by Synesius, but only give a rough idea of the compelling description that Synesius gives us on the nature of dreams.

In his model everything is interconnected, and thus we, being part of all, we too can be read for signs because of those connections. To Synesius we are composed of both Mind and Soul, or Matter and Spirit. The Mind contains images of what is, the Soul of what will be.

We also have a third part, the Imagination, where dreams occur or exist, a part that connects the Mind to Soul and thus provides a path to the Divine.

“The imagination has the senses available, but not the organs of perception. Thus, the imagination may be perceiving something more pure. When sleep makes a connection to the soul this brings us close to our source”

and...

“Imagination is the sense of the senses, necessary to all others; it inheres at the same time in both the soul and the body. It is through imagination that all perceptions occur and from which all faculties proceed.”

and...

“imagination is the sense which has power of acting instantaneously without intermediaries.”

As the bridge between matter and spirit, the Imagination uses both yet retains its essence. It can bypass the material aspects of reality as it reaches beyond matter. He also says...

“When the soul enters this realm it rides the imagination like a chariot. The soul either draws the imagination or is drawn by it. Do not allow the miseries of the imagination draw one into dark places as it is waste of life.”

In this view the Imagination, being the sense of the senses, it operates something like the senses of a higher part and connects us to our Souls and to the Divine. So Dreams and things like Soul Journeys take us into a different parts of our complex selves.

Dreams can be messages from other parts of the Self or Soul, or from other parts of the Universe, since we are part of the interconnected whole of it all. I take it that this means that dreams are not material in the typical sense, but operate in the Imagination, which spans the Mind, the Senses, the Soul and the Divine.

Imagination is a part that the modern world does not know or make room for, but which can be easily investigated by the small effort required to keep a dream journal and work with dreams over time. We modern people use the term Imagination in a small and sometimes belittling way, but Synesius is telling us that we have it upside-down. Imagination is the larger part of us and the part that connects us to things outside the material world.

I've worked with this idea for years and have come to see it as a much better picture of my essence. When a child I was taught that my mind is a part of my brain living in my body. My Soul was some vague aspect of me that was never clearly delineated, but I had to conform to certain rules to keep it safe as it was fragile and easily stolen.

I, like many others, find this to be an impoverished picture of the self. I much prefer the picture Synesius presents, where Body and Mind are situated in the material world, but Imagination surrounds it all and has access to the sensory information of the material side, in addition to connections to other aspects of the whole of the Universe.

The Soul and the Divine connect to the Imagination and provide routes for connections to much more diverse and complex realities and the free flow of information. With this model one can see that exercising and developing the Imagination, like by actively dreaming, is an important goal in order to reach the Divine and richer aspects of reality. It gives a much different picture of reality and gives the words from the ancient world a new resonance.

~~fran

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A dreamer asked about the meaning of dreaming of a shooting star. I've dreamt of the same or similar and wanted to dig into this a little.

The modern dreamwork movement puts the ownership of the meaning of a dream squarely in the lap of the dreamer. I think this is the essential truth of dreamwork, that we each need to determine the meanings of our own dreams or risk losing their power. So, I couldn't really say what someone else's dream means to them, but I can offer some help by telling what it might mean to me if it were my dream. The dreamer can then pick or choose or ignore what I say and make up their mind about the meaning for themselves.

I suggest we all should reserve the right to ignore other people's meaning if it does not feel right to us. And I really mean feeling. Experience tells me that if I get that shivery feeling when a certain meaning comes up, I know I am on the right track to something worthwhile.

If we were sitting down and talking about this dream I'd ask the dreamer what they want to know. If they were an artist looking for an image to work with, I might point at these images as visual inspiration. But the dreamer asks for meaning, so let me offer a few things about what I might say if this were my dream.

The first thing I would do is consider the feeling I had upon waking, which is usually an excellent clue as to the what and wherefores of the dream. When I wake feeling great after a dream of a scary or strange situation, then I take that as a sign to read it in a positive way, which might seem contrary to the dream, but experience shows that the waking feeling carries a lot of weight.

If they had just had a loved one pass, I might talk about movement in the heavens and how people have always seen that movement as a sign from beyond, and my feeling would tell me about that meaning. Since they didn't share a waking feeling we only have the images to look at for meaning.

If I dreamt of crystal water I would take that a marker for deep emotion and feeling and perhaps even calmness or purity. To me, lights arising out of water give me a sense of living things arising. The sense of water giving life, and fire being the spark of life within a living being. And since they fly off into the heavens I get the idea of migration.

In my dreaming, stars are usually living beings and somewhat different from us, often strange, but compelling, so, to me, it feels like spirits. To shoot off like fireworks and shooting stars makes me feel like there is some kind of celebration or dispersal taking place. So I might ask what vital thing am I giving birth to? What is coming from me? Where is it going? In dreams of shooting stars that I've had they felt alive and aware, and as if they were observing life on earth. Which was an odd feeling, not unsettled but with a hint of being watched from a different eye.

Again, the feeling on waking is so important. If joyful or glad, then I'd take it as a wonderful things coming from me and going off to make positive events. If I woke with a different feeling I would color my reading with that feeling.

Sometimes it is fun to look at cultural imagery to see what shows up, and I might look at the symbols of alchemy or other hermetic image systems like tarot symbols. In tarot the Star card has this mixture of water and stars, and is often the card of hope and inspiration, it can have to do with delving into higher things, and can be a marker of success and wisdom and healing and the calm after crisis.

Another tarot card that perhaps fits here is the Temperance card. It often shows an angelic being mixing some kinds of mysterious fluids while hovering over a pool, with one foot in the water, the other perhaps touching land. It is a card of blending and mixing opposites, or many different things, and maintaining balance and composure. I like these images a lot and, to me, they harmonize with the dream images.

If this were my dream I would see it as suggesting some inner peace and not being disturbed by the seeming chaos around me. It suggests victory and finding the real treasure in the end.

If we were sitting together and talking, and if the dreamer found something that spoke to them in my reading or if another thing formed a meaning, I'd ask if the dreamer thought there was something they needed to do about the dream, for dreams often demand we act on them. It can be a small thing, or something large, but acting on a dream brings some of the energy of the dream into the waking world.

Again, I emphasize that this is what I might consider if it were my dream, and a dreamer can pick or reject any of it. It is the dreamer's dream, and my take on it might be totally wrong for them. I want the dreamer to claim the benefit of the dream for themselves, and that won't happen if we try to hammer a round peg into a square hole. So it is best go with feelings and personal associations. Over time that evolves for us and brings more richness to one's dreaming.

Thanks to the dreamer for sharing this dream, it is quite compelling. I particularly love stars as they appear in dreams for their strange and un-human quality. I always find stars very engaging in my dreams and the dreams of others.

The great thing about working with dream images is the more you do it the more you learn about it. I'm not sure that there is an end to it all. Our individual Dream Source seems to have an endless library of imagery and sensations to send you and keep you going. And that is one of the joys of being a dreamer, an aspect that stays hidden until you work with dreams for a while.

~~fran

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I take this as a question about the theory that dreams are just random “brain noise” or a meaningless jumble of thinking that is a side effect of normal waking thought. This unfortunate idea is sometimes proposed as an easy explanation for dreaming, but I believe it is pure speculation by people who don't bother working with their own dreaming. Just keep a dream journal for a few months, and you easily disprove this idea to your own satisfaction, especially if you work with a group of other dreamers.

After years of studying my own dreams and dreams of others, I've come to believe that only on rare occasions are dreams the residue of waking thoughts, but that, actually, dreams are real experiences that take place in what Henry Corbin termed the “imaginal realms”, a different mode of reality to the mind. In other cultures and in the ancient world, the imagination was seen as an alternative to the thinking and feeling aspects of mind. The imagination was considered by some to be the path to the sacred and to other levels of existence and some considered it the superior part.

Over time, I've come to see that this part of the mind can be developed, and although it is most commonly encountered by most people primarily in dreaming, we can learn to utilize it from our waking state of consciousness and develop it into another useful and powerful aspect of the mind. Lately I've thought of the imagination as a “mental muscle” that needs to be strengthened to be useful, just like any other part. Perhaps those whose dreams always seem random and chaotic are using an imagination that has not been developed. Working with dreams helps us strengthen that part of the mind and will show benefits when we apply some effort.

From this perspective, dreaming is not just “thinking” as we normally define it, but a different aspect of mind. If we accept this then we have to face the fact that most of us are only aware of parts of what comprises our mind, and that there is plenty of open territory to explore. Dreaming, and developing imagination, gives us new capabilities and new modes of operating in the world and in our inner lives.

There is so much more!

~~fran

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