Spirit Bear Dreaming

This is an excellent question to struggle with. I’ve wrestled with these “reality questions” since I young and the struggle has driven me to explore many interesting byways of the human experience that I might otherwise have overlooked. In high school I encountered Chaung Tsu’s famous story, as translated by Burton Watson:

“Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.”

This tale is at least 2500 years old, so this question has been around for a long time. I assume that it has always been asked, ever since we revealed self-awareness and started to consider our experience.

I can’t give a definitive answer, but I can say that my understanding of the question changed radically once I started studying and working with shamanic dreamers. The folks I’ve worked with have a very general shamanic cosmology that permits great latitude in interpretation and use, and the concern is not with definitive facts so much as with the truth of personal experience and how it can be used to improve life.

Once you have had enough experience traveling through dreams and other dreamlike places, you see that the butterfly question is often interpreted as a dichotomy, but it actually isn’t. There is no need for one of them to be true, and there is no need to assert that dreaming is nothing but vague imagery and wish fulfillment, or whatever the current popular notion of dreaming claims. Dreams are real experiences, dreams are real places, dreams have many qualities that can be used as the dreamer likes, and dreams are open to study and exploration.

If you work with dreams of your own, and of others who are close to you, you can map out the many kinds of realities that you find in dreaming, Once you do that you can test the qualities of dream realities. I won’t go into a long explanation of my experience, but will pick just one example that deals with an aspect of dream reality that is close to waking realty, dimensionality.

Long ago I read in a Jane Roberts book on dreaming that one aspect of dream reality is that if you observe carefully you can watch the space of the dream expand and change. So for a few days I set myself an intention before sleep to observe this phenomenon. It took a few nights for it to occur and I found myself in a familiar light industrial part of town full of twisty alleys. When turning a corner I carefully observed that the sides of the alley were quickly assembled behind the person I was primarily focused on, and that the space of the dream also expanded behind them.

Since that dream I've repeated this kind of investigation many times. In some dreams the “physical” forms are created just in time and you can see it happening if you observe in a detached way. There are a lot of oddities in scale and dimension in some dreams. I once found myself in a dream that was somewhere between 2D and 3D and I can't even explain that clearly, it is too weird for words. Likewise, the flow of time is not always like waking time. I've had dreams where time could flow in any direction and I had to learn to reverse time to get back to solving a problem. And dreams within dreams? Multiple parallel realities? This kind of stretching of reality has been common among the dreamers I know.

The point here isn't that these things are a new definition of reality that others must accept. This is only one small corner of what is possible if you choose to work with the idea that dreams are real in their own right and are real places. Your mileage may vary and I won’t tell you what you should experience, please test it yourself.

Over the last few decades I've worked with many hundreds of dreamers, working in their own grassroots way to develop skills navigating in these other realities. I can't say why any of them choose to do so, but I can say that one of my reasons is to develop greater flexibility of consiousness and to expand my notions of reality to include more and more possibilities. I feel that this has paid off greatly for my own inner understanding and growth, and that has turned dreaming into a very functional tool for dealing with those things that life throws at you.

✢

~~fran

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