Spirit Bear Dreaming

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

Fediverse users can follow at: @[email protected]