Spirit Bear Dreaming

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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