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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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

Fediverse users can follow at: @[email protected]

Definitely! One of the reasons I started regularly recording dreams was because of an experience that showed me how practical and useful dreams are.

Years ago my partner and I decided we'd had enough with renting and decided to find a house to buy. We figured we could afford a modest house in the small, low-profile neighborhood we then lived in.

A realtor showed us house after house, probably 40 in total, but none of them fit us. He ran out of houses that fit our criteria, and showed us one final house that was above our price range. We humored him and were very amused by the house, but rejected it immediately.

A few days later I dreamt that we were living in that house, that not only were we very happy there, but we had a family and loved living there with the huge garden and great view. The dream suggested that it was a great fit that we had overlooked.

So, based on that dream we went back to take a closer look. We realized the house was actually a great house and that we had been fooled by the old-fashioned decor and rooms full of too much old furniture. We eventually bought it for just a bit above our range. We raised a family and have spent decades growing ourselves into more complete people there. I loved what that dream did for us!

My rational mind didn't see the house as acceptable at all and had already moved on to making a new plan. But my dream source had a different idea and brought that dream to alert me that I was passing up a life-changing opportunity. That ended up being a major life change and the dream came true, literally, as we had no plans to raise a family and I suspect that this dream put it in mind.

I've made many significant life changes and opened up many areas in my life via dreaming since then. I know hundreds of dreamers who have done the same. The approach to dreaming that I follow is all about utilizing what comes from dreams in waking life in order to make positive changes in every aspect of life. So, yes, this is possible, and the foundation to doing this kind of work is keeping a journal. In fact, the best way to prove this is so, is to keep a dream journal. It might take a long while for it to pay off, but all the dreamers I know swear by their journals.

A journal first provides a history of your experiences and is available for reference. If you recall a few dreams a week, after a year you will have hundreds of dreams, and after a decade, thousands. Trying to recall that many dreams, looking for a specific detail, or trying to look at recurring patterns is out for reach for most of us. So, you need to record what you can, as soon as you can, and develop it into a habit in order to gain any benefit, otherwise you may lose a lot of material.

I believe that all the modern people's dreamwork movement is based on journaling and dream sharing. This is another important aspect of journaling, you can have a coherent dream report to share with others, and a convenient place to record new information about the dream, for example, once you've shared it and gotten useful feedback from other dreamers.

There are many things that you can do with a dream journal, but I'll just mention that not only can you look for recurring patterns that were not clear on waking, but you can use your own dreams for creative purposes. I know tons of poets and storytellers who use their dreams for source material, for guidance, and for monitoring the state of their creative self.

It is much harder to do great work with dreams if you let them trickle away. Journaling is inexpensive and an easy habit to keep up once you start doing it consistently. When I first learned journaling it was through the advice from books by Jeremy Taylor, Patricia Garfield, and Robert Moss. Some web searching will show you their online writings and links to their books. I'll eventually post some specific recommendations for their books and media, and I am sure there are many other sources for how to do dream journaling.

Best of luck!

~~fran

Fediverse users can follow at: @[email protected]