Spirit Bear Dreaming

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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